Saturday, October 26, 2013

A Tragedy's Second Anniversary Without Press Coverage

Exactly two years and a few days ago there was a shooting in a house 2 doors down from us.

I remember it being fairly early in the evening, schoolkids were still up and the air was cool.  We neighbors came out to see what was going on.  Was it a shot we heard?  A voice yelling?  The police arriving as they do, driving the wrong way on our one-way block?  At first we knew little, but when you see EMT's strolling instead of trotting, you know for whoever it is, it is too late.  Many, many years ago that section of the house was a candy store, when this was part of a close-knit Italian and Jewish neighborhood.  That evening it became a crime scene, a tear in the fabric of a city becoming known more for its young male homicide rate than its universities.

The dead one was a 13 year old boy.   He was shot in the head.  By a friend.  In a house that seemed to be connected like adjoining hotel rooms.  There is not much more that I know as fact:  his killer was 18 years old at the time and ran away, leaving behind the other witness, a young man who lived there.  The killer turned himself in and as could be expected, lied to the police (and probably himself).  The newspapers and TV stations lost interest after all the salaciousness was squeezed out of the story -- the boys' ages, the quiet street, the speculation about where and how a gun wound up in the room, the entreaties for money to bury a child.  After a few days there was only a tiny TV reporter in a cheap pantsuit standing alongside the antennaed van, shivering in the late October sun waiting for someone who wanted to be the center of attention at all costs to come outside so she could make her bones.

I'd written here previously about what happened last October.  Since then the family that was living in the house moved out -- traumatized, a little heartbroken, ashamed.  The original charge of murder was revised to manslaughter, and 2 years to the day that it happened the boy's mother and family and still very young friends gathered outside the house to remember him.  Where else can they go?  It is the one place on the planet that they are certain he was at, because this is where he died.  So, a small group gathered to light candles and tie balloons around a street sign, and not say much at all.  As each person left she thanked them for coming.  Then more kids would arrive to pay their respects, walking that cool night across Legion and Frontage from The Hill.  No cops, no press, no curious neighbors.  Just a woman enduring the longest night of her life, her remaining children and family including a couple of toddlers too young to remember, and a handful of teenagers crying.

Each night someone has been lighting the memorial candles.  And then that will end and the balloons will wither in the cold air.  And then that boy's mother will count the days until she must come back.  I plan to be there with her again.

Saturday Poetry: Noon



I was reading
on the teaching of poetry
and it galvanized me into
being consonant, too.

I believe in the word
and I love it as I do her.
Breaking the morning’s regimen
I stop reading and start writing these poems.

It has to be done:
Commemorate
life’s entropic beauty.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Saturday Poetry: Where the Title References Itself and Is Longer Than the Verse


Dear Lord,
Have mercy on this poor soul.
I am studying math and
the more I learn the less I know.
Selah.

I feel like one of Beckett's hapless creatures.  Wandering the campus muttering, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."  Seriously, folks.  This course is Killing Me™.    My weekend Times pile up.  The days shorten and the leaves fall.  I don't return phone calls.  Anniversaries come and go.  I see nothing; I know even less.

I'm getting desperate here, people.  Might start a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a boob job.  (I have my scruples -- maybe I'll just have one done.)  I used to sneer at people who complained about The Hawk in Chicago.  Then I spent an October long ago working there.  As far as I'm concerned, the wind off of Lake Michigan violates human rights.  And there were my parents' friends, the doctoral students, complaining about Statistics.  They have my full sympathy now.

That is all. 

Friday, October 11, 2013

Going To the Motherland This Weekend

No, silly.  I'm not going to Africa (which, ehem, is not a country) but to New York which is why I'm writing today because I will not be sitting in some Wi-Fi'd cafe cracking out words tomorrow.  And I haven't written for a couple of weeks because when one is having one of many Mathematics-Dark-Night-of-the-Soul™ moments, there is nothing to say that doesn't begin and end with:  {Shit.  Shit.  Shit.}  Math joke, so close your eyes:  The aforementioned set is a vector space under the standard operations.

I realize now that acquisition of knowledge is elastic.  Mathematics is vast, worlds-within-worlds and all that, and one of my seminal problems is knowing what to learn and knowing what I should be able to know at this level of training.  Also, many of us who do math got our start as computers and calculators:  We are good at arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and gasp, even calculus.  And we pride ourselves on cranking through numbers and equations and deriving The Answer.  But the skills that got us that far are less important with higher level math.  It is about conceptualization:  One has to think.  To be able to "embrace" realities that one cannot see or physically produce, e.g., R4, a vector space.  And then perform operations on it as if it were in front of you.  That, as you can imagine, can take some doing.

Yesterday's impending exam, with me being 2 quizzes behind and completely mystified, forced me to look at the work differently.  I listened to what the professor deemed important, and it was to know the theorems and lemmas that make the foundation for the study of vector spaces, linear independences, bases, representations of bases, and so on.  If, he seemed to infer, you understand the principles, then you'll see how they need to be applied to the problems.  I followed his lead and approached each problem (those I could solve and those I couldn't) with the question:  what is it that we are suppose to determine?   And also told myself that, hey, whatever I know by Thursday, I know.  I can't speed up this process.

Those 2 things seemed to have opened the door for me.  I finished studying Wednesday evening before 9 pm, and spent the next day doing paperwork, housework, cooking.  Anything but math.  The object was to relax and to hoard my energy to focus on the evening's exam.  I showered, dressed and went to campus 2 hours early.  Ours, unlike Yale's, is not a beautiful campus.  It has some beautiful buildings, but everything else about it is as imaginative as a new suburb.  Nevertheless, I hung out in the Adanti Center, with it's vast windows and simply let my mind wander while watching 19 and 20 year olds and cars go by.  Eating pasta with pesto, chillin'.  As I told Cuthbert this morning the one place I didn't want to spend a lot of time in was the landing a few feet from our classroom where we students wait for the professor to unlock the door.  The tension, the anxiety is palpable.  So, I arrived there a few minutes early, closed my eyes and just meditated.  And I took the exam, using almost every minute he gave us, enjoyed the hell out of it and call myself ready to climb the next mountain.

That's enough of that.  Going to see my friends' work:  Magdalena Goméz's, Dancing In My Cockroach Killers, and Fred Ho's, The Sweet Science Suite.  Hot.  Diggity.  Ciao.

 


Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Obamacare or Nobody Gets Out of This One Alive

Remember this day all you Chicken Littles.

The World As We Know It™ is coming to an end.  At least according to those who think broad-based mandatory health insurance coverage is an awful thing.

Two things I do know:

1.  Nobody, no body stays young and healthy forever.  And I don't care how much echinacea you quaff.
2.  In theory not having insurance seems like an wonderful idea until either you have a major medical calamity or illness.  (cf.  Doctor, Will I Be Able to Play the Thumb Piano Ever Again?)

Like abortion, you can be against it if you want.  And then you find yourself pregnant for all the wrong reasons.

Now back to Give Me Linear Independence or Give me Death!