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“When I landed in Florida to work after the hurricane, I got a call from the lead manager,” said the young man, age 19. “We need you to be a supervisor for a volunteer unit of 90 people.”

His “regular” job was in Boston’s Red Cross agency, helping with their blood bank. He was coming to Florida from Houston where he had spent the last several days as a Red Cross volunteer for that flooded city. Before getting back to Boston, he spent days in Puerto Rico.

These were not his first disasters. Volunteering to deploy to the aftermath of hurricanes and floods had become a habit.

NPR caught up with him. That’s how I heard the story. He would like to be able to go to college but he doesn’t have the money yet. So he works the blood bank job to save up tuition money and goes out to trouble spots when needed.

“The hardest part,” he said, “is being with the people who have just lost everything. About all you can do is to be there to listen.”

Our newspaper profiled a man, now in his 80s, who decided a couple of decades ago to look after the needs and lives of veterans of the Korean War. He described them as veterans of the “forgotten war.” He doesn’t make any money but he makes lots new friends.

A few years ago, our Rotary Club began a relationship with Women in Need, an organization that operates houses open to women just leaving incarceration, offering a way for these women to ease back into life on the outside. Judy and a few other club members collect bottles of toiletries, toothpaste, and toothbrushes to put into bags that are given to each woman as she enters one of the residences.

A while back, Judy organized a workday for club members at one of the houses to clear space for planting a succulent garden to spruce up the front of the place. Since then, the women residents have done a good job of tending to the plants. Sometime this spring, the club will clear another space to plant, perhaps with vegetables. A couple of the women at the residence have referred to Judy as “the garden lady.”

At Christmas, Judy and her colleagues made Christmas bags for all 30 of the residents. She reminded me the day we delivered the bags that one of the staff members of WIN had told Judy that residents have said “I can’t believe that these people who don’t know us would do something nice for us like this.”

In Spring 2017, the Senior Class at Island Pacific Academy put on a real “senior” prom. They worked with the staff at the retirement community a few blocks from the school to stage a prom for the men and women who live there.

We met one of the administrators of the community sometime later. He described how delighted the women were to dress up for the prom and dance with the young men from IPA. The gents liked the dancing part as well, partnering with fellow residents as well as the young women from IPA.

The administrator also noted that he was there as a participant. He had moved to Kapolei from Boston a few years back and had divested himself of most of his Boston clothes.

“I kept my tux, though,” he said with a smile. He acknowledged that using it for a senior prom was not in his thinking when he decided to hold on to it. Here he was, at a senior prom with people older than he, put on IPA seniors younger than he.

These are some of the same kids who collected over 30,000 pounds of food for the Hawaii Food Bank in the course of their four years at IPA.

People of a Certain Age, I offer you concrete examples of the habit of helping, people helping whenever they can. Of course, it is no coincidence that “The Habit of Helping,” and “Whenever You Can Help” were phrases the kids at two schools with which we were quoted often. Sometimes, kids referred to these as the school motto. More important was their eagerness to embody the saying in their actions.

The age range for the people I have outlined above is from 4 to 80. The levels of education range from pre-school to Ph.D. Many religions, many cultural and ethnic backgrounds, widely variable life experiences are all represented in this small sample of people. There is no application or previous qualification required to be one who helps.

For any of us who think that one generation has a corner on generosity of spirit or that a younger generation is “all about me,” that assumption might be wrong.

A friend told me about a TV show detailing an experiment with a band of monkeys from a region that did not freeze over in the Ice Age. So there was plenty. Contrary to the action of another band of monkeys from where survival had been a challenge, the experimental group, when given the chance, did not grab a banana to eat without sharing, but broke up bananas and offered pieces to others.

The 19 year old from Boston would understand the impulse.

Daniel E. White

February 19, 2018

A friend loaned me a library book he described as compelling. The book was so well regarded that, when he tried to renew it to give me more time to read it, he couldn’t.

Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry is an account of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster along the east coast of Japan that killed thousands and caused a malfunction in nuclear plant reactors that endangered thousands more. The facts of the tragedy serve as background for the specific event Parry investigated (which was lost in American reporting of the disaster); 74 school children at one school died when there was ample opportunity for them to reach safety.

As I read the book, I was struck by a question the author posed over and over again, implicitly and overtly: what if? I won’t spoil the plot and findings for you, hoping that you will read the book. Parry’s account of the specifics of the story prompts one to think beyond the school and the children to consider the habits we form, the traditions we honor, the choices we make.

The same question formed in my mind after the monumental screw-up by Hawaii state officials one Saturday that caused anxious people even greater anxiety they did not need. Media made sure the world heard incessantly, for several news cycles, how panicked the population was over the message that a ballistic missile was on its way to Hawaii.

Many friends asked us how we reacted. We told them we laughed, believing the matter to be a hoax, a hack, or incompetence. No Chicken Littles at this address!

Later, we got angry, not just about the incompetence but also over the hysteria that led state officials to think that having a warning system at all was necessary. (That’s a different conversation.) People of a Certain Age remember living with a real nuclear threat, if our government was to be believed, one day in October 1962, one that would presage war and multiple exchanges of nuclear weapons with a country that had stockpiled thousands. So it is hard to get excited about the latest country trying to build a bomb to gain respect, to deter what it thinks are threats to its survival.

Once the anger subsided, that question popped up: what if? One friend declared that she would proceed to eat up all the chocolate in the house. Another said he would take a walk, preferring nuclear incineration over radiation poisoning. Still another would take a swim. No one mentioned “duck and cover,” the exercise we learned in 1962 which would have simply ordained which part of our anatomy would fry first.

What if? That can be an unsettling question. It can also land one in political trouble if you give the wrong answer. Ask Michael Dukakis who responded intelligently but seemingly without passion in the 1988 presidential campaign to a hypothetical scenario involving his wife. In its work with young men during the days of the Vietnam War draft, the American Friends Service Committee counseled against answering that question, if it was posed to you by the Selective Service Administration.

How, they would say, can anyone answer with any degree of certainty how he or she would react if faced with a particular set of circumstances?

What a shame that these two words—what if—can be so explosive or unsettling! What if they only meant that some new possibility was being considered? Hewlett Packard used the words in its advertising as a way to announce its commitment to innovation. Isn’t the question the basis of imagination and inquiry? Don’t engineers live on these words?

The way in which the question can mean such different things illustrate the power of words and the context in which they are used. When the synonym for “what if” is “if only,” seldom does anything good follow. When “what if” asks a person to speculate on possible behavior, it suggests that there is a crystal ball where an answer is about as reliable as the imagery in the ball.

When the words substitute for “imagine” or “let’s try,” human potential is unleashed.

I remain mystified by why the default position so often for we humans in so many situations is fear. A popular expression these days is “prepare for the worst, hope for the best,” and, to an extent, I understand the posture. Sometimes hurricanes threaten Hawaii; having a reasonable amount of food and water in reserve in case supplies are scarce in the days after a storm hits is good planning. Our friends displaced by the fire in Ventura planned what they needed to take in case of evacuation in advance of the need to leave their home, a prudent action.

But we do not live each day fearing that a hurricane will hit us. Our friends do not spend time asking “what if” as they work to rebuild their home, soon to be equipped with new stuff.

“If only” achieves nothing. “Let’s try” gets our imagination in gear to go forward with confidence.

What if we could replace fear as a default?

Daniel E. White

February 5, 2018

The interviewer asked a question we all wanted to know, had some idea about, but welcomed hearing it from the man himself.

“Maestro, how is it that you can come into town on Thursday to rehearse, hold two complete run-throughs of the program, and during each, tell each section of the orchestra how you want a particular passage played, and conduct outstanding performances on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon that sound like you’ve all been playing together for years?”

Okay, he didn’t use all those precise words. His question was simpler. How can you provide each separate group of instruments meaningful direction during rehearsal?

The part of the answer about which we had some idea: “I do my homework.” He elaborated. I’ve had many mentors in my career, chief among them Leonard Bernstein. He said emphatically, “you’ve got to know the score.”

Martin Luther King, Junior knew the score. His team was behind and prospects were bleak. Overt, blatant discrimination against his people was stark in the South but just as real in other states. There were laws, for example, permitting “sundown towns.” Don’t know the term? Towns around the country prohibited African-Americans from being in town after dark.

He knew that neighborhoods in cities across the country actively discouraged African-Americans from buying homes in their midst; these folk feared that housing prices would fall if the neighborhood was integrated. He knew that there were quotas at universities in every part of the country dictating how many people who had skin color like his would be enrolled. He knew about high schools like mine where the enrollment was 1/3 white, 1/3 African-American, and 1/3 Hispanic though the Advanced and Honors courses included very few students who were not white.

He knew the potential price of his raising a fuss might be a bullet in his head. He knew the score.

This Christmas season felt different. I don’t know why. We decorated our house in a manner similar to the way we have decorated for a few years now. We played Christmas CDs about as much this year as in the past. We attended concerts featuring Christmas music, just like we have done in past years. We spent time with good friends and family.

The weather provided more chill in the air than in past years although our mainland friends would not consider a low temperature of 62 particularly chilly. We have acclimated, though, so we do have flannel sheets on the bed and wear long sleeves around the house, sometimes even in daytime. There was more wind than we remember. So, maybe the comparative melancholia of the weather was a factor.

Since last Christmas, we have lost a few more friends to the afterlife. Neither of those deaths was expected this time last year. One involved a teacher not yet 60 who seemed to have found a new contentment with her life, and we, her friends, all were happy for her for that. Another involved a man with whom we had swapped homes and intertwined lives, a one-of-a-kind fellow whose company we always enjoyed. It never feels good to have yet another blessing in one’s life end.

Maybe turning 70 this year has had more of an impact on me than I have thought. More and more of the obituaries that I seem to read daily, are for folks younger than me. More of my friends are experiencing more of the nettlesome declines in health or mobility. Saying “I can do most everything I used to be able to do, only more slowly,” as breezily as possible, might be masking a complaint rather than showing insouciance.

I know the score. Mom used to observe that one of the negatives in living to her age was that she was saying goodbye to the people who could remember the old days with her. And she set out to find some younger friends in her church, people older than me but younger than her.

The mortality rate over time for humans is 100%. Should I live to 95, as did Mom, I will be in the same boat, losing people who can talk with me about the way things used to be.

But, we have lost friends in other years as well. Why should this year feel any differently at Christmas? I won’t ever really know, and maybe I don’t need to.

People of a Certain Age, don’t we all try to know the score, in both senses? Don’t we hope that we are all the conductors of our own lives, the composers who fashion lives of fulfillment from whatever life presents to us? One of the contentments of advancing age comes from looking back over our time on the planet and seeing times we played well. “The older I get, the better I was” pokes fun at how our memories can edit out the bad. But most of us have enjoyed good runs that make for good memories.

We know this score because we have helped to create it.

The other score we just know. It is a reason to live well each day.

Daniel E. White

January 2018

 

“To those who have not the means within themselves of a virtuous and happy life every age is burdensome…to those who seek all good from themselves nothing can seem evil that the laws of nature inevitably impose. To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained; such is the inconsistency and perversity of Folly!”

People of a Certain Age, the lines above, and much of what follows, were written by Cicero in 44 B.C., published as De Senectude, or On Old Age, and translated by W.A. Falconer. The words offer great advice, much wisdom and caring, and some wry thoughts about sex and other pleasure of the body. The brackets are mine, and because the Roman sages tended not to write much about women in 44 B.C., everywhere it reads “men” or “him,” please mentally add the feminine.

The words also illustrate the remarkable continuity of human nature. This translation came to me from a younger friend who can read them in Latin if he chooses. I offer them, lines really about aging, on the third anniversary of my bi-weekly scribblings.

“…amid utter want old age cannot be a light thing, not even to a wise man; or to a fool, even amid utmost wealth, can it be otherwise than burdensome…the most suitable defenses of old age are the principles and practice of the virtues which, if cultivated in every period of life, bring forth wonderful fruit at the close of a long and busy career, not only because they never fail you even at the very end of life…but also because it is most delightful to have the consciousness of a life well spent and the memory of many deeds worthily performed.”

“Four reasons why old age appears to be unhappy: first, that it withdraws us from active pursuits; second, that it makes the body weaker; third, that it deprives us of almost all physical pleasures; and fourth, that it is not far removed from death.”

“[Regarding] withdraws us from active pursuits…Are there, then, no intellectual employments in which aged men [and women] may engage, even though their bodies are infirm? [This is] like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of the ship because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller…”

“It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but is even richer.”

“ I do not now feel the need of the strength of youth…any more than when a young man I felt the need of the bull or of the elephant. Such strengths as a man has he should use, and whatever he does should be done in proportion to his strength…let every man make a proper use of his strength and strive to his utmost, then assuredly he will have no regret for his (her) want of strength.”

“He who strives…to mingle youthfulness with age may grow old in body but old in spirit he will never be.”

“…the third ground for abusing old age…is that it is devoid of sensual pleasures. O glorious boon of age, if it does indeed free us from youth’s most vicious fault…if reason and wisdom did not enable us to reject pleasure, we should be very grateful to old age for taking away the desire to do what we ought not to do. For carnal pleasure hinders deliberation, is at war with reason, blindfolds the eyes of the mind, so to speak, and has no fellowship with virtue.”

“…old age, though it lacks immoderate banquet, may delight in temperate repasts.”

“Nothing can be more abounding in usefulness nor attractive in appearance than a well-tilled farm, and to its enjoyment old age not merely offers no obstacles but even entices and allures…Let others, then, have their weapons, their horses and their spears, their fencing-foils…old age can be happy without [them.]”

“…the fourth reason—one that seems especially calculated to render any time of life anxious and full of care—the nearness of death; for death, in truth, cannot be far away…clearly death is negligible, if it utterly annihilates the soul, or even desirable, if it conducts the soul to some place where it is to be forever…What shall I fear, if after death, I am destined to be either not unhappy or happy.”

“Old age is the final scene, as it were, in life’s drama, for which we ought to escape when it grows wearisome and certainly, when we have had our fill.”

“Such, my friends, are my views of old age. May you…attain it and thus be able to prove by experience the truth of what you have heard from me.”

May we all age well in the spirit of Cicero!

Daniel E. White

January 8, 2018

Respecting the fact that many of my friends are not Christian, I have often thought that, if Christmas did not exist in the United States, the nation would have done well to invent it.

In broad strokes, there are three Christmases (at least) wrapped into one holiday. Of course they share a common origin. But their manifestations exist quite independent of one another. I suspect, People of a Certain Age, that your experiences are similar to mine.

The first Christmas is the birth story of Jesus of Nazareth. The scenarios involved in the Biblical story still hold magic for me. Start with the fact that the person around whom a major world religion is centered began his life in a stable, surrounded by barnyard animals. His dad, a tradesman, could have afforded lodging if he had just called ahead but…And when a baby is ready to be born, it is ready to be born!

The baby drew visitors. Shepherd’s, the age’s middle class like tradesmen, and rich people, wise men from the east. Angels provided the music. One time we saw the preparations for the Nativity Pageant at the Crystal Cathedral and realized what a show can be staged from these simple facts. There were even live camels!

Our friend, Mildred Joseph, our “Jewish grandmother,” (her words) who never failed to host us at the symphony when we were in New York, exclaimed how happy she was that “that little baby boy was born because so much wonderful music has been written for him.”

For the faithful, the celebration of this Christmas connects them with the ages and encourages us to think about wondrous things.

Then there is Christmas, the holiday that encourages spending money. Have we not all, at times, grumbled about the Christmas displays in stores going up just after Halloween? A local columnist wrote about friends who asked their toddler what holiday came after Thanksgiving, and he chirped “Black Friday!”

So many businesses depend upon annual upticks in spending at Christmas in order to enable them to finish the fiscal year in the black. Black Friday is now morphing into Black November, the headline roared a few weeks ago, and on-line retailers have their day on Monday after Black Friday. “Christmas is so commercial now” has been a frequent grumble for decades.

Perhaps two observations might help to shine another light on all that buying and selling. First, as retirees, our income is, in many ways, tied directly to a healthy U.S. economy. Consumer spending, for better or worse, is the linchpin of the economy. And several of the investments we have depend upon sales for the revenue they take in, some of which comes to me as a dividend. I’ve never relished cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Secondly, for whom do people buy things? At what other point in our year do we purposefully spend money to buy things for others? And some people fret mightily over selecting just the right thing for the gift-receiver. It is worth speculating about what our world and our country would be like if we spent more time thinking about others in the way Christmas makes us do.

A local TV ad this year exhorts people to make gifts of themselves in service to others. Note: stuff still might get bought.

The third Christmas can be the most personal. The season being distinct, it often helps us remember. I’ve written before about how a specific song by Keali’i Reichel puts me in the car with Mom, Chad, Sandee, and Judy in the chill, waiting to go into Mom’s church for the Christmas Eve service one year.

Seeing the depiction of angels calls to mind a story I don’t recall due to my youth. Apparently, during the annual Christmas Pageant at the Ruth and Joe White house, my sister was dressed as an angel. She came down the stairs majestically. Her six-month-old brother (that’s me) broke into what Mom described as the first real belly laugh of my life. I would apologize if I could confirm the story…

Seeing cowboy garb reminds me of the Christmas when someone outside the family gave me Hopalong Cassidy toy guns, a banned item in the White House. I don’t recall seeing them much after I unwrapped them and apparently did not miss them.

While in graduate school in Seattle, we helped assemble toys for our friends’ boys, with the orbiting of the moon as our backdrop on television.

Certainly, not every Christmas memory for every person will be a good one. Not everyone has been blessed with growing up in the warmth of family that I enjoyed or married well. Judy’s mom died on a Christmas Day. The annual return of the holiday can prompt unwanted memories and even depression for some.

So, for those memories that enrich our lives, remind us of good times with family and friends, and cause in us moments of reflection, we have cause to be grateful.

Three Christmases. Maybe there is a unifying theme after all; thinking about people other than ourselves. That does deserve a holiday.

Daniel E. White

December 25, 2017

These old dogs picked up a new trick a while back. We started going to the symphony an hour before the performance to hear the principal soloist and the guest conductor discuss the day’s music. It’s like an advanced Music Appreciation course in twenty minutes.

One such conversation preceded a program featuring the principal harpist of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra who was be the soloist for Handel’s Concerto in B-flat for Harp, Op. 4, No. 6. She first explained her instrument.

Who knew that there were seven pedals to be manipulated on a harp for sharps and flats, and that there were more than 2000 moving parts? I thought a harp was just strings of various sizes strung to varying degrees of tautness in a frame that looked very—well—harpish. (I clearly need those Music Appreciation sessions!)

She went on to explain that the harp was not included in orchestras for much of the early period of classical music because it was not possible to be played in all keys. Through various adaptations, the harp evolved. By 1810, it was versatile enough for all keys and was incorporated into many more orchestras as a result.

Why was this relevant to the piece she would play? Because Handel wrote his Concerto for Harp before the harp had evolved to its current state.

This observation prompted the day’s guest conductor to discuss a challenge inherent in playing music written long ago. On the one hand, he said, you want to understand and respect the way the composer meant the piece to be played. On the other hand, you cannot ignore the changes in the world that have happened between the time the composer wrote and today. This includes lived experience, differences in technology, advances in particular instruments, and so on.

William Shakespeare took an old theme, star-crossed lovers, and fashioned Romeo and Juliet, setting the love story in the context of a family feud. Scores of directors and actors have produced the play, with myriad settings and costumes. A couple of fellows in New York took the story, changed the Montagues and Capulets to the Sharks and the Jets, wrote some great music and staged West Side Story.

Driving home one day, I listened to NPR’s program, Exploring Music, hosted by Bill McGlaughlin. The theme McGlaughlin had chosen for the week’s shows involved the metronome and how different conductors had adopted different numbers of beats per minute for each note. The featured piece was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

The piece premiered in the USSR in 1937, the year in which Stalin’s massacre of Soviet citizens for the political purpose of spreading terror reached its peak. The pacing of the Fifth Symphony in a 1937 performance McGlauglin played was slow enough to reveal the critique of the existing political scene the composer meant it to be. McGlaughlin described the final movement as “forced joy:” you WILL celebrate because Stalin says you will.

A 1959 performance of the symphony was conducted by Leonard Bernstein in the USSR with the composer in attendance. As measured by a metronome, the tempo of the final movement in the Bernstein performance was nearly twice that of performance in 1937. As a result, the sense of celebration in the music sounds real, unforced, quite different than in 1937.

Shostakovich came up to the stage at the conclusion of the symphony and embraced Bernstein.

I think Shakespeare would have hailed West Side Story as a masterwork. I think Handel would have led the “bravas” for the performance of our harpist using an instrument that did not exist when he wrote the music.

Artists such as these know what other creators and founders and originators also know; once out in the world, if one’s work survives over time, it will be changed by the times and by the life experiences of those who appreciate the creation.

People of a Certain Age, if you had children, you know this; your child will find happiness in his or her own way, whether or not that way is yours.

There are orchestras that use only the instruments available at the time of composition and follow the written instructions of the composer. These performances are quaint and, to some degree, a mild rebuke of the composer. Don’t artists who become famous over generations want and expect their works to adapt to whatever is the current context and still be considered great works?

We can understand the contexts in which great literature was written but truly great literature transcends its contexts to retain freshness in succeeding generations. Ditto great paintings.

I have been privileged to be part of founding programs and institutions. My expectation is that people in those programs and institutions will be true to the founding values and willing to adapt to current realities. I suspect you parents harbor similar hopes about your children.

Quaint is no compliment. Like Shostakovich, I feel the urge to rush to embrace those who have taken my “creations” as theirs to adapt, to play notes I have written with their instruments, to keep the composition fresh, even if that requires speeding up the notes.

Daniel E. White

December 11, 2017

A while back, I used the first few lines of the story of the Good Samaritan to introduce a talk to our Rotary Club. I serve as Foundation chair, a grand-sounding title for the person who nags members about their gifts to the Rotary Foundation Annual Fund.

I was surprised when I checked out the story in the Gospel According to Luke. Jesus told the story in response to a question from a lawyer; who is my neighbor? When he finished telling the story, Jesus asked the man who in the story had proved himself to be “neighbor?” “The one who showed mercy,” the lawyer replied.

Many of us, we People of a Certain Age, have heard the story of the Good Samaritan many times. Certainly, the term “good Samaritan” has become part of our array of descriptors for charity, kindness, generosity, and so on. But mercy? That’s not a word we hear much in this context.

Look up the definition. In most instances, the first word used to define mercy is compassion. Then comes forbearance and similar terms that line up with ways we most often hear the word used; “have mercy on me.”

In a case of what must be synchronistic coincidence, three instances of Good Samaritan-like mercy crossed my consciousness around Thanksgiving. They became part of my list of things for which I am grateful, a list that seems to grow each year.

The first is the story of George Kaiser of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mr. Kaiser models what I hope I would be were I a billionaire, as he is. Mark Sappenfield, Editor of Christian Science Monitor, said that people like Mr. Kaiser exemplify “the radical grace of humble hearts.”

The Monitor article is titled “A Billionaire’s War on Poverty,” an intentional dig at the failure of so many governments at so many levels in so many locations to combat the root cause of much of society’s ills.

Mr. Kaiser’s net worth is $12.5 billion. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, resolved to give away most of his money. Kaiser started by funding pre-schools after reading the literature regarding brain development. Simon Montlake, the author, wrote “Kaiser’s next act will be his most audacious. Over the next decade, his foundation wants to target every poor child born in Tulsa, from birth until third grade, so that a patchwork of pubic programs—pre-natal care, parenting classes, child care—become a seamless quilt.”

Kaiser has started programs for adults, too, like Women in Recovery to work with incarcerated women as they transition back into society and Tulsa Art Fellows to support a growing arts community. A spinoff of this program explains how the Woodie Guthrie Center and a repository for the works of Bob Dylan ended up in Tulsa. Tourists will come to Tulsa, and the local economy benefits.

The article concludes, “Kaiser believes that he can make the lights go on in Tulsa. It might just take a generation before the children growing up today…will see the effect on their lives.”

A trip to Cambodia spurred an 8^th grader in Bellport on Long Island to action. She and three friends began “Four Girls for Families,” featured recently on PBS. The young woman said that seeing the families, especially the kids, on her family’s vacation trip not having some of the things she and her friends take for granted made her want to do something.

She has made many of the arrangements herself, interacting with people in Cambodia who could help her direct the money she intended to raise to give to people she did not know in a country not her own. She focused on clean water, and “Four Girls” have enabled the purchase of several thousand water filters for a host of communities in Cambodia. The girls have also built one school and have started a second. So far they have raised more than $300,000.

The girls on the Cross-Country team at Punahou in 2009 often ran through parks near the school for their workouts. Two girls took notice of the homeless people living in the parks and decided to do what they could to help. They found both a partner and an experienced participant in working with the homeless in the Institute for Human Services.

Thanksgiving 2009 the girls hosted the first Homeward Bound Race to End Homelessness, a 5K run at the Manoa Valley District Park. Participants pay to run. They get a T-shirt and a good feeling, more than a runner’s high. To date, the event has raised over $150,000 for IHS to use in combating homelessness.

By tradition, two senior girls are co-chairs each year. They are responsible for tapping their successors. They have also found at least seven sponsors to prime the pump with donations that are augmented by the entry fees. Their goal for 2017 was $20,000. They met it.

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavens

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest.

It blesseth him that gives, and him that gets.”

Once again, Shakespeare knew. Mercy, the radical grace of humble hearts.

Three stories, varying amounts of money, same mindset; mercy. And a quid for the quo, according to Will!

Daniel E. White

November 2017

The closing scene of the film features the German soldier, played by Richard Thomas, in a trench, alone at 10:30 a.m. November 11, 1918, thirty minutes before the armistice is to take effect at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month. The soldier, a highly sensitive young man with a talent for drawing and a love of nature, has endured four years of horrendous bloodshed all around him in conditions that must have been grossly offensive to his character and sensibilities.

He has a piece of paper and a pencil in his hands. He hears a bird singing. A bird singing on a battlefield is unique but the guns are silent so the bird is not. He stands up to search for the bird, ready to sketch this welcome re-introduction of nature into his life.

We hear a shot. There is a small, red hole in the side of the soldier’s head as he falls to the ground. The last frame in the film is a simulated telegraph being typed: “all quiet on the western front.”

Comparatively speaking, the telegram is accurate.

I used the film teaching the World War One part of my Advanced Placement U.S. History class for years. It was a compact depiction of that war in which 19^th century tactics using 20^th century weapons produced large casualty counts. It helped me make the point that the forces of colonialism and nationalism were unleashed, to be sustained through World War Two, the Vietnam War, and many other wars of “national liberation.”

For the students and for me, it is the image of the soldier being shot at a point so close to the end of the fighting that remains vivid.

The scene repeats for me every Veteran’s Day, every 11^th day of the 11^th month. I also think about the millions of soldiers over time who have engaged in actions that require them to think differently than they might in normal life, to focus on survival, killing another human being, if necessary, one on the other side who is probably very much like themselves, only dressed in a different uniform and loyal to a different country or set of ideas.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut has one of his characters complain about how he has had to learn how to do whatever it takes to survive, including killing others, and is then expected to return home to be a sensitive, caring, passionate husband and lover.

Years ago, we knew a couple whose marriage had, at that point, survived the man’s breaking his wife’s collarbone. He had been in Vietnam as a Green Beret. One day she surprised him from behind. Before he could stop himself, his training and instinct kicked in, and he whirled around to attack her.

In the movie, Frantz, the fiancé of a now-dead German solider visits his grave every day to refresh the flowers. One day, as she approaches the gravesite, she sees a strange man standing at the grave, deep in reflection. The man leaves, and the woman wonders who he is. Before long, she discovers that he is the French soldier who killed her fiancé. That dramatic tension fuels the rest of an excellent movie.

Veteran’s Day this year has had me thinking about the expectation that Vonnegut describes. The men, and now women, who have been in combat, seen comrades killed, perhaps been wounded themselves, have survived the “hell” General Sherman called war, return to civilian life to face challenges that are not visible to others.

It is significant to me that we hear frequently about veterans who have been in combat and do not want to talk about that experience in their lives. How can one make sense of hell?

Only in our lifetimes, People of a Certain Age, has medical science identified and treated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Really? Haven’t generations of returning soldiers had to cope with PTSD without anyone recognizing its real effects on people or any significant treatment?

Our national response to the service of veterans over time has been variously supportive. Until the idea of PTSD came along, there was a history of referring to some veterans as having been “shell-shocked,” and that was not always said in a sympathetic manner. There have been numerous Marches on Washington by veterans groups seeking, at first, any pension, and then pensions at reasonable levels. We have only recently come to grips with the challenges faced by the Veterans Administration operating hospitals. A sizeable number of homeless people in our community are veterans.

Americans tended not to welcome Vietnam veterans home with celebratory parades. It was as though folks blamed the soldiers for the war.

Even the entertainment industry has needed to adjust. Remember the war movies of the 1950s and 60s? Contrast those myths about heroic deeds with the war movies of the Vietnam era (“The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home”), and the current scene. There seems to be a greater understanding of the fact that General Sherman was right.

Casualty counts, dollars spent, territories defended and won or lost; these are among the obvious costs of war. This 11^th day of the 11^th month I was grateful to the veterans of combat for their bearing the unseen costs.

Daniel E. White

November 13, 2017

I’m not sure what prompted the early morning parade. Perhaps it was my conversation with the teacher/students in the EdD program the day before. Or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS helping two more people find their roots. Gates reminds us of Mr. Payne, our Senior Honors English teacher at San Diego High School.

The parade began with the unlucky Miss Reddington, my third grade teacher in Seattle on whom I threw up trying to ask her to go to the bathroom so I could throw up. I compounded my embarrassment by putting the apology card I was supposed to hand to her personally in the mailbox without a stamp. So she never knew how sorry I really was.

In San Diego, Mrs. Remington played the piano for our fifth grade music period which we all loved though I have not sung “O Columbia the Gem of the Ocean “ since. Didn’t every grade school teacher play the upright piano that was in every classroom? And I remember Mr. Hennings in sixth grade ignoring my protestations that I really did spell “business” correctly, even though the “I” resembled a “y.”

Mr. Heim took me into Boys Chorus in 7^th grade and guided me through my transition from a decent soprano to a wobbly tenor. Miss Ludlow helped me take three years of math in two so I could join the rest of the honors sophomores in Geometry once I reached high school. For Miss Preston, I became skilled at diagramming sentences but more, I learned much about how parts of speech could be fitted together to make interesting, even rhythmic prose.

Both “Misses” seemed older than my grandparents; perhaps they were. Miss Preston seemed kinder than Miss Ludlow back then but Miss Ludlow did me a great favor spending extra time to help me make a big jump. Miss Preston would never know that her picture would be pinned to Judy’s bulletin board in her IPA office where the measure of a message being suitably written to distribute to the public was whether or not Miss Preston would approve. Under the photo, Judy inserted a caption, “Miss Preston is watching.”

Mr. Hill taught Social Studies. He caught me trying to cheat. “Danny, you are better than that” stung more than any discipline involving grades.

At San Diego High School, Mr. Hover introduced me to the Greeks and Romans, Mrs. Batchelder to a speed-reading machine, and Mr. Weiss to Spanish as a vehicle for having fun with words. From Mr. Anderson, I learned about Pythagorus, Euclid, and other Greek guys, and about Zeno who proved that if you only go half way each time, you never get to where you are going. I suppose the lesson was that if you wanted to get somewhere, you had to go more than halfway.

I met Max then, too, the choir and Madrigal conductor who rolled out opportunities for me to show my new classmates that I wasn’t just a nerd, even though we hadn’t invented that word yet.

Imagine, a sophomore who was really a freshman by age becoming the narrator for all choir and Madrigal performances, all those juniors and seniors being introduced by me. Max must have seen something in me.

Judy and I will never forget Mr. Carey in junior English. A little corpulent, balding with black-rimmed glasses and bulging eyes, his temper was legendary. What set him off most, coloring his whole head red, was any of us, supposedly the best and the brightest in our grade level, giving anything less than our best effort. I wrote what he must have thought was a decent paper about Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Heavy stuff, though when I re-read the book years later, I recognized how little I knew at age 15 about guilt, life, and 19^th century Russia.

It was for Mr. Carey that Judy and I were going to sell programs for the football game as our first date so, of course, we remember John Carey.

Mrs. Miller made U.S. History lively. In her class one day at 9:00 a.m. we sat and wondered if and when missiles from a USSR angry over the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba would land on North Island Naval Air Station, visible from our classroom windows. She found less scary ways to keep the stories of U.S. history dramatic. She had salt and pepper hair at a young age, like Judy. Judy used to say that I married our history teacher.

The tall and very Nordic Mr. Lundgren had to teach us the “new math” with this distributive property and that associative one, all forgettable and forgotten. Our texts were stapled trial versions of a new initiative marked SMSG. Some Math, Some Garbage he would chuckle.

In 12^th grade, Mr. Payne reigned supreme. He was a class advisor for seniors as well. A short, African-American (he would have said Negro) man who fussed over his moustache, he comforted us on November 22, 1963 when a student shouted into our classroom, “Kennedy has been killed.” I think Mr. Payne was devastated. In that hour, he modeled courage under fire, a stiff upper lip, being responsible for his kids.

People of a Certain Age, you have your own parade like mine. For me, these men and women shaped my instructional DNA. Out of my experience of them came, at least in part, how I was as a teacher.

Next week is Dia de Los Muertos. The souls in my parade will dance once more, some newer to the party than others. I imagine Mr. Weiss leading the party, in Spanish, of course. Mr. Heim and Max will take turns conducting the spirits in songs of joy and revelry.

If I land in someone else’s parade some day, my instructional DNA will be there, too, and those dancing souls will live on.

Daniel E. White

October 28, 2017

One of the great wonders of life is how words or ideas first heard early in one’s years can come back with amazing force later on. This happened recently and got me thinking.

At our wedding in 1967, somebody read 1 Corinthians 13, known as the “love chapter.” Lots of church weddings have favored this scripture, for obvious reasons. It is the same chapter that contains the promise I hold dear; “Now we see in a mirror dimly; then face to face.”

Tucked away in the second part of a long verse two are these words: “…and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” There’s a smackdown for zealots of any religion. Believe what you will but if you do not love others, you are nothing.

An obituary set me to thinking about faith and re-discovering these words in Corinthians. The obit ran in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser the same day as an op-ed piece about the impact of the man. His name was Michael Cromartie. His mission was to “insure that American political journalism [would be] imbued with religious tolerance, biblical literacy, historical insight, and an ecumenical spirit.”

The op-ed writer confirmed that her journalism had been improved by what Cromartie taught.

A key part of the obituary noted that Cromartie “never minimized his personal faith” which was evangelical; he was a reformed Anglican. However, in working with scores of journalists as he pursued his mission, he was “neither doctrinaire nor defensive.” And, added the writer, he never took himself too seriously.

He held the position of Vice President and Director of Evangelicals in Civic Life at the Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. He welcomed journalists of all religions and no religions to his seminars, the point of which was to insure fair and informed reportage about religion.

By all accounts, Michael Cromartie was a person of strong faith. In reading that he was “neither doctrinaire nor defensive,” “didn’t take himself too seriously,” and “upheld the spirit of ecumenism,” I concluded that Cromartie’s life was filled with love for humanity and the myriad ways humankind have expressed belief in something beyond themselves, a definition of faith.

A few weeks later, the Star-Advertiser wrote about a former colleague who continues in her role as the head of school in a Catholic school. The story was replete with accounts of her many successes in guiding her school through tough times and seeing it emerge again as healthy and sustainable. The reporter asked about the religious composition of the student body, and the head noted that there were many religions represented. She went on to say that, what mattered to her was that one be a good member of his or her religious community: “if you are Mormon, be a good Mormon.”

She added later, “faith is not knowing.” That got me thinking even more…

People of a Certain Age, the fanatical fundamentalism of far too many people around the world in far too many religions stems from confusing faith and knowing. Mix in the absence of love and therein lies how supposedly pious people can hate those who are different and despise to the point of killing alleged infidels.

I know that the tree outside my window is called, in English, a palm tree. I have faith that there is some kind of existence beyond physical death, the exact nature of which is unclear to me. I know that I am sending you what is called an attachment to an e-mail. I have faith that the teachings I follow are a path to clearer understanding of what comes after death after I die.

I know that others believe differently than do I. I have faith that a life lived grounded in love by anyone of any religion will count for something beyond the grave.

I know that the world could use more people like Michael Cromartie, firm in one’s faith but neither doctrinaire nor defensive, not taking themselves too seriously, committed to religious tolerance.

Faith can come with many faces. I count myself fortunate to have been raised by two people who carried an abiding faith in the teachings of Jesus as Mom and Dad understood them. Their approaches to faith seemed to be different. About my mom, my dad once said that she had a “child-like” faith: not childish, but free from much doubt. He might have been surprised about the doubt part had he known her in her 80s and 90s but he meant what he said as a compliment.

Dad’s faith might best be characterized as a lifelong wrestling match with angels. For him, doubt was an integral part of his faith. He wanted to know more and spent a lifetime seeking answers. He understood that faith was not knowing but that did not stop him from trying to know.

It is a part of my faith that Dad now knows, that he sees face-to-face.

It is also my hope that humanity will one day discover that the discouraging record of the human race in distinguishing between faith and knowing and in punishing those who believe differently could give way to the Michael Cromarties of the world.

Faith without love is nothing.

Daniel E. White

October 9, 2017