I’ve been inspired by Brian’s comment from the previous thread — a lovely story about driving a tractor and learning that the John Deere 4440 has three pedals on the floor, none for the gas — to throw open this question: What’s your John Deere 4440 moment?
For our purposes, this will be defined as a discovery made via an experience that you found exciting or seminal.
An example: I was recently reading a memoir by Jen Lancaster in which she recalled going into a bookstore and seeing her book for the first time. She then went to the information desk to ask if there was anything she needed to do for her upcoming signing. She was surprised that the bookstore clerk was so calm, meeting a Real Life Author. She then realized that the experience was a first only for her; bookstore employees meet authors and hold signings on a weekly, if not daily basis*.
I’m still mulling mine and won’t be back until I get today’s quota of writing done. But go ahead, start searching for those pedals, trying to give this tractor some gas.
*Based on what I know about the writing life and writers, Lancaster had one of the briefest cases of First Author-itis on record. Most of us — note us of first-person plural — require the entire life span of the first book to get over ourselves.
My John Deere moment is also a mechanical one. That instant when I was learning to fly and discovered that you pushed the left rudder (along with right stick) to make the plane turn right. Push one way in order to go the other? I know now that’s it’s true for skiing, too, but Arizona girls don’t come by that naturally.
And I’ve been able to successfully use the same technique in other parts of mylife. I call it the Brer Rabbit Syndrome. (“PLEASE don’t throw me in that briar patch!”)
I’ve thought about this all day and I think my John Deere moment came during an interview, but I couldn’t say which one. All I know is that when I was a reporter, I thought it would be great to be on the other side of an interview. I wouldn’t have to think so much, right? I’d just have to answer questions, many of which I would have answered before.
But I’ve discovered that I find it extremely challenging, being the interviewee. And, sometimes, I just run out of gas entirely, find myself nonplussed by off-the-wall questions.
This does seem to be about control – bumping into a limit and/or tumbling outside of one’s comfort zone – for better or worse!
A year ago, I accompanied a busload of 5th and 6th graders to an overnight stay at a YMCA camp on a lake. It was 3 teachers, 2 parents (including me), and many many young folks.
Won’t bore you with the tale (I posted about it at Nancy Nall’s site back at the time), but suffice it to say that the camp directors decided to implement (what turned out to be a surprisingly intense!) “Experiential learning” exercise, regarding the Underground Railroad.
Ugh.
This was a major, major John Deere moment
i have been ruminating all day on this. i realised that i have an awful lot of highly visceral moments�is this an adjunct benefit of being italian?�but some of the memorable:
–the human body only holds about 5 quarts of blood. doesn�t seem like much�two of my sun tea pitchers�until it springs a big leak. then it seems as if our little bags of chemistry hold the red sea.
–that dog tags really can melt, if the helicopter that catches fire is hot enough, but they will fare much better than that thing that was wearing them who used to be a human being
–people need faces. it is very hard to relate to someone as a sentient being when their face is peeled up over the top of their head. thankfully, most of us put ours on every morning.
–understanding with my gut, and not just my intellect, what picasso was doing in the guitar series found in the eponymous museum in paris, and crying amidst strangers, who were now my brethren, when i got it
//k
laura,
you said: //snip//
And, sometimes, I just run out of gas entirely, find myself nonplussed by off-the-wall questions.//snip//
this gave me pause. i would have thought the tiresome questions would have been the ones you hear over and over again, the plastic parsley of interviews (like the ones about that guy you’re married to); i hadn’t even thought about the ‘why do you like coke and not pepsi?’ ‘do you think fine tip is better than medium tip?’ or whatever.
//k
At one point in my reporting career, I interviewed Fran Lebowitiz and began by apologizing for asking the “usual” questions. She said there was no need to apologize, that there were certain questions that were logical to ask her and I hadn’t asked them, so why shouldn’t I?
The questions that unnerve me are the ones that indicate someone has not done the most basic homework.
and welcome to baltimore, laura…:) are you familiar with the orioles? 1969 mets? and so on.
at least fran was gacious.
a lot of what we think we know about the luminaria is so anecdotal. i don’t remember what it was recently that i have read in about ten different places about a famous writer, basically repeated over and over, practically verbatim–and was not, in fact, true at all–yet most folks would think so, because it is what is repeated. i’ll have to think about this and see if i can come up with it. reading so many different things right now, i don’t have a clue what it was.
anyway-my point was that as a reporter, you couldn’t assume anything was true, i suppose, and had to ask for yourself. but i am sure you didn’t go there knowing only that she had a moderate knowledge of new york.
//k
I grew up in Roland Park and couldn’t understand how people could bear to live in ticky-tack houses. Then during the years when I was very poor, my friend Jill took me to a fortune teller, who turned out to live in a brand-new suburb full of identical ranch houses, a suburb so new there were no trees or bushes, just scraggly new grass in the wide yards. And I was so jealous. I looked at those ranch houses, all clean and new, and wished desperately that we could live there instead of our tenement apartment, that my kids could have grass to play on instead of the hard-packed dirt full of broken glass and lead paint chips. Then I remembered those Roland Park days and had to laugh at myself.
barbara–
or anyone who knows the answer–i confess, i haven’t the vaguest idea of where or what roland park is. shed some light? and the same for ‘ticky-tack’-
thanks-
i have to say that i love the line”…very poor, my friend…took me to a fortune teller.”
a few years ago, a colleague of sorts was here from UK. complicating factor: she was the ex of the man i was then living with, but i genuinely liked her. anyway, she is a great believer in occultish/crystally/palmreaderly pursuits, at the time, unbeknownst to me. she kept saying she was “blocked” while we were at dinner. after her recent travel, i misunderstood what she meant, and sent some dulcolax over to her hotel. thankfully we got this sussed out and i was able to send her to see a fortune teller in dupont. later, she sent me a self-help book [knowing that i normally detest these kinds of things], but the title was the kicker: FROM CRAPPY TO HAPPY (yes, really). i have had untold number of smiles in the years since just thinking about it (though i confess, i never did more leaf through the actual text).
//k
That’s hilarious, Karen! I’ll never hear “blocked” again without thinking of your self-help book.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that Roland Park is a Baltimore neighborhood that is full of lovely, one-of-a-kind houses, some of them influenced by the Arts & Crafts movement. Ticky-tack houses refers to a pop song from the 1960s called “Little Boxes” satirising suburbs full of houses that all look the same. Baltimore has several such suburbs, but I won’t name any lest I offend anyone. Actually, I now think some of them (dating from the Jetsons era–futuristic cartoon series from the early 1960s) are quite cool, looking as though a fleet of flying saucers took refuge under the trees.
Tess lives in Roland Park — barely.
I lived one block outside Roland Park, in the Evergreen neighborhood. It’s one of the few things I envy Tess.
i may even have to dig that book out tonight after talking about it.
doh–sorry–did not remember that roland park was the name of the neighbourhood. it sounded familiar, but i wasn’t sure what from. i don’t know that i have adjusted to her leaving the bookstore, even though it was a long time, many major life events, and a number of books ago. when i picture tess i think of her in her office, on the water, or above the bookstore, and less at her house. dunno why.
and yes, i now feel incredibly embarrassed and stupid.
so , since i am already stepping in it, i will also reveal that in 15+ years of living in dc area, i have been to baltimore…three times, none of them in the last 12 yrs., and one of those could actually have been annapolis, and i just don;t remember. i think everything i knew about Blt. i got through jon waters, john unitas, or johns hopkins, with a smattering of poe study.
then i started reading about tess, and more recently, watching That Show, and suddenly baltimore became a real place, and not just somewhere that dc folks could point to that had a higher homicide rate or worse schools. i don’t mean to be offensive–people [not me] actually used to say those things, not that dc was anything to brag about either.
the first time i went to baltimore i remember vividly, and i had sort of a john deere moment. i had lived here for a couple of years but had a car only recently. i had to take a load of monkey skulls to hopkins, and so combined one of my first long maryland drives on the new-to-me freeways with first time to baltimore and the loveliness that was jhu environs ca. 1995 [talking about hte med school--i have no idea where they put the rest of it]. i got lost and was afraid to stop and ask anyone where the hell it was (surely the esteemed school could not be *here*). it was also a graduation day of some sort, and it was close to closing time on a sweltering june or may day. and i had a jeep full of fricking monkey brains. when i finally figured out where i had to go, i was blown away. i had so expected something to look like holyoke or harvard that i had driven near it a number of times and dismissed the area from contention. not every famous east coast campus sits aloofly on a tree-lined, verdant, expanse. my pea-like SoCal brain was looking for a postcard from sylvia plath at smith in 1952 when i should have been looking for an east coast version of USC.
//k
brian–i’ll have to get back to you about the ‘intrinsically more dangerous’ thing later. boy, did i learn a lot moving here…
re: names–well, i am particularly partial to mr. dickens and that guy from stratford in this arena. i had to goog elmyra –no idea who was being discussed. that whole living on neptune thing has royally screwed my cultural references.
and relating to the post the other day re: the snarky (and downright insipid) things folks say on blawgs, today i read an article about obama’s choice not to wear a tie to the theatre (does he not have a handler to help him out on cultural no-nos?); the comments immediately went racial and political and just plain scary–and while i didn’t wade through all of them, the first page had almost not a damn thing to do with the actual piece itself. when i read these nastygrams, i really have to ask myself: who the hell *are* these people, writing such hateful things? are these my neighbours and colleagues, passing for normal on the outside, but filled with poison on the inside? or some entire demographic whose world only collides with mine on the internet? do they go to church on sunday, and write this crap on monday [actually, wednesday, but...]? i find it extremely unsettling. i try not to read comments anymore as a result, but i foolishly though in this case people would talk about the actual topic.
i know it is off-topic, but i am curious what other people think.
on politics daily: http://bit.ly/dfQIJ
laura, or other baltimore folk-
does baltimore have the same issue as dc with a constant supply of chicken bones in the street? i was joking with a neighbour about this recently, also a dog parent, and what a problem it is. never seen anything like it until i moved into the city [forget the feeding of rats--i am worried about gluttonous goldies]. i am sure there is a correlation between the number of take-away joints and the amount of chicken bones, but it is definitely a city thang. just not sure if it is special for us or relatively common.
//k
We’re more of a lake trout town.
Which is neither trout, nor from a lake — but what Barbara said. Although Baltimoreans do love a good chicken box. But the pigeons grab those bones pretty fast. Once, I was walking down the street and a pigeon dropped a bone on my head.
We are also a plastic-bags-in-the-trees kind of town.
“I had to take a load of monkey skulls to Hopkins” — somehow, this reminds me of the beginning of an Elmore Leonard novel, possibly FREAKY DEAKY. Just change the first personal pronoun to one of Leonard’s impeccable character names (“The first time he went to Baltimore, Elmore Leonard* had to take a load of monkey skulls to Hopkins . . .”)
Fair warning guys: One day, I am going to go through here, pluck out these amazing lines and come back to you all and demand you write these stories in full.
*Elmore Leonard is a great Elmore Leonard name, no?
Meanwhile: We’re number 1! Baltimore has the highest per-capita homicide rate in cities with populations above 500,000.
But, to be fair, St. Louis and New Orleans beat us when you throw in the smaller cities.
The character name that seared itself into my memory (If I Remember It Correctly!) is Elmyra Gulch;
Don’t know if L Frank Baum invented that, or Hollywood did – but nonetheless – what a perfectly wicked name.
Re Baltimore #1: one imagines that no small number of folks that contributed to that tally (that is to say, the killers) are from elsewhere – and indeed, southwestern places like San Diego might learn that eastern cities aren’t intrinsically more dangerous
Brian,
Not to brag, but our mayhem is largely homegrown. There’s a locavore joke in there somewhere.
One of the more impressive things I’ve seen was at Walt Disney World, of all places! We were deeply into the Magic Kingdom, and a woman was emerging from an eatery holding a large hotdog (or maybe it was a bratwurst) on a bun.
In one deft motion, a seagull swooped down and snatched the weiner (or brat) from the bun, and sped from the scene – just like that. The woman stopped in her tracks and was just beginning to react, when one of WDW’s “cast members” approached her, and took her back in to get another.
That bird had it goin’ on!
laughing about the plastic bags. i guess that is the wind power and recycling program combined.
we’re also a pothole and manhole-cover-blowing-skyward-for-no-apparent-reason town.
“Little Boxes” was written by Malvina Reynolds, a song writer (mostly folksongs), who was born in 1900 and died in 1978.
She wrote it about Daly City, California, where “the houses were made of ticky-tacky and they all looked just the same. There’s a green one and a blue one and a pink one and a yellow one and they’re all made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.”
It was sung and popularized by Pete Seeger. My sister and I heard this and sang it for years, as we heard Pete Seeger records constantly.
Reynolds, apparently, wrote others songs that became hits, such as, “What Have They Done to the Rain”?
Remember seeing her on tv; she was quite a character.
I don’t know about John Deere moments. I feel like I have them all of the them with technological gadgets.
Interesting learning to fly, Louise, which is how you could describe it so well in one of your books.
Kathy D.
re: internet vitriol–i only started to read these comments, and the blawgs themselves, for the most part during the long run of the election cycle. it is possible that the election and the tensions involved along with some of the scenarios (first viable female, first viable black, etc.) created a perfect storm for some wildly unpleasant commentary. i dunno, since i didn;t read it before. but a lot of what i saw and read i found truly appalling (and some of the worst comments about women, whether about palin or clinton, mrs. obama, or john edwards’ wife) were often [ostensibly] written by *women*– which surprised me. maybe it shouldn’t have. and i can appreciate the distinction between free speech and actually being heard. but i think that a lot of what i read did not need to be said, or heard–it was just truly crazy ranting which made me seriously question how anyone could doubt whether the educational systems are failing us. but–give them a pulpit, and they will come.
so, unless i need a dose of sicko, i try not to read that stuff anymore.
brian, i don’t know if i would use my full name or not in some of those fora. given how easy it is to find people now using the internet, especially if one has a less common name, i don;t think i would want to help anyone out in that regard. but i can appreciate having to ‘own’ your comments by giving them your name.
//karen
kathy d.–
thanks for that info re:” ‘ticky tacky’–
//k
To return to Karen’s question — why are people so hateful in the comment sections of various Internet sites. (I saw something on AOL the other day that left me breathless in its misogyny, as the poster, presumably a man, contemplated which older women were worth his protein, and which were not, and I think the former group was actually the more maligned.)
I think the vast majority of people, myself included, have antisocial, even cruel thoughts, every day. Let me recast that: I know that I have antisocial thoughts every day. I don’t know if this is my “writer’s brain” or if I have taken an unpleasant characteristic and channeled it in a relatively productive way. But I’m very clear that there is stuff that goes through my head that should NEVER be expressed, not even within the anonymous forum of the Internet.
I think one tension that the Internet stripped bare is that there were a lot of people who felt they weren’t being heard. Most of these people wouldn’t even take the time to write a letter-to-the-editor of a newspaper or magazine, and some of them would not have passed muster even if they did. (As a reporter, I was on the receiving end of these horrible, anti-Semitic, homophobic ramblings from an anonymous correspondent; they looked like ransom notes, with passages cut from magazines and pornographic drawings.)
So then the Internet comes along and it becomes a great leveler, in that everyone gets to express themselves. You don’t have to be anointed by the local newspaper or Newsweek. You don’t even have to be proficient at grammar or spelling. Have your say!
The first amendment right to speech is often confused with the non-existent right to be heard and heeded. People who feel that their ideas are not getting their due don’t stop to consider that their ideas might be loathsome or out of step with the times. So they flock to the Internet and repeat themselves, over and over, as if they can win through sheer volume.
If I was going to claim to have one dogma in the internet comments fight, it would be that comments should be under a person’s name.
Back in the late ’90′s, I began commenting (at a site about open-wheel racing! Those people were out of control!!) and – out of ignornace as much as anything – I always posted under my first and last name. By default (as much as anything), that habit stuck….and it slows me down on hitting “submit” when someone makes me mad.
In more recent years, I got pulled into a politics folder (on a boardgame site!), and was taken aback at the occasional blasts of spiteful ignorance. The dynamic on contentious sites seems to be bipolar; you’re on Team A or Team B, and then subject to personal attack (whatever you say) from the “other” team.
By way of saying – when what you write is beneath your name, restraint becomes an imperative. And ‘restraint’ equals civilization, I think
So, to add to the (truly) no-fail advice of Jim Rome:
Have a take
Don’t suck.
Own it.
(By the way, it’s easy to mock Rome, but “Have a take/don’t suck” is essentially the creative credo of this household, although one of us would modify it to “TRY NOT TO suck.” One of us being the modest/undermined child of Protestants, and therefore largely lacking in any confidence whatsoever.)
I get horrified sometimes upon reading blogs on the Internet at the terrible hostility to women, people of color and gay people.
When I read blogs about the woman who shall be nameless who gave birth to 7 plus babies, the worst misogyny was written, violent threats to her, death threats, horror. It was men venting hostility.
I just don’t get it. Why can’t someone just disagree and leave it at that?
There’s deep-seated hostility here and some people vent it online instead of getting psychological help.
I don’t think that I have cruel thoughts every day.
But I think there should be limits on the Internet.
Having one’s ideas and thoughts seen and heard is one thing, but using the Internet to vent so much rage and bigotry is really frightening and awful.
Kathy D.