Month: February 2021

Fathers and Baseball

These are the greatest of possible words, “pitchers and catchers report.”

Everyone has their own way of determining the end of the long winter. For some, the first sighting of the red-breasted robin serves as a harbinger of spring. Some rely on a Pennsylvania-based hedgehog and the likelihood of the overgrown rodent seeing his own shadow. Others, antagonistic to the idea of a farcical hibernal ritual to determine seasonal transition, use scientific data such as rising temperatures as a guide. For me, the onset of spring begins with the words, “pitchers and catchers report to spring training camp.”

The line of iambic pentameter at the top of this page is actually mine, but I’m paraphrasing the 1910 poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, written about the early Chicago Cubs’ double-play combination, “Tinker, to Evers, to Chance.” I’m celebrating the fact that on Wednesday, February 17, spring training for the major leagues officially began. Every February, even as a little kid, I would look forward to reading those words in the newspapers. For me, the phrase “pitchers and catchers report” indicated winter was drawing to a close, baseball had begun, and spring was on its way. It’s difficult to think about spring during this week of record cold, snow, and ice, but, for me, those words always conjure up images of baseball—and my dad.

My dad also loved baseball, and he encouraged my ill-fated affection for the Chicago Cubs from an early age. Later, in my more rebellious years, it was like the Daniel Stern character in the film City Slickers said, “Back when my dad and I couldn’t communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball.” In my mind, baseball and memories about my father will always be inextricably intertwined.

As far back as I can remember, I was a Cub fan. The first season I clearly recall was 1962, the year in which a 21-year-old Cub player, Kennie Hubbs, won the Rookie of the Year award. I related to Hubbs, because I, too, was a “good-field-no-hit,” middle-infielder. In fact, I hit a robust .163 for my Little League team that season. On those rare occasions when I managed to get on base, however, I was fast enough to steal my way around to third. My manager, knowing that my only realistic chance of reaching base was if I walked, would send me to the plate with the encouraging words, “Henderson, if you take that bat off your shoulder, I’ll break your arm.” The era of promoting self-esteem in children had not yet arrived in Chicago.

Nor had it affected Southern Illinois, if Kathleen’s father was any indication. When we began dating in the 1980s, we were watching her daughter Kristin’s team play a game in Carbondale. These were tiny little kids playing at a level that was not much above T-ball. If a miracle occurred, and a girl managed to hit the ball, the fielders had no idea what to do with it when they picked it up. Also sitting with us was her dad, Raymond McCormick, a former Marine who had fought at Iwo Jima. He had played baseball for years and managed championship American Legion teams. He knew the game well, and, where fundamentals were concerned, he apparently cut no slack for his grand-daughter or other ten-year-old girls. In this particular game, with a runner on first, a girl hit the ball to Kristin at shortstop. She scooped up the ball, and, wonder of wonders, threw to first in time to get the runner hustling down the line. The stands erupted in cheers, those parents never before having seen a play executed correctly. In the midst of this wild celebration, however, Raymond shook his head in disapproval and pointed toward the infield. “The play was at second,” he told me gravely, as if those girls were certain to turn the double-play had they simply thrown to the correct base. I just nodded in response.

My father was from that same generation as Raymond. They weren’t big on praising children, being more concerned that their kids would “get a big head” than boosting self-esteem. That is not to say that my dad wouldn’t stand up for us when we had been wronged. One 4th of July Little League game stands out in my mind. It was a hot day, and the game had dragged on for hours. It was a typical kids game in many respects. Our pitcher had a no-hitter going, although he had walked about 14 batters. Meanwhile, my team had racked up twenty or so runs, largely through a combination of errors and walks. Late in that 20-to-nothing game, my manager scanned the bench to see who he could send in to hit at that crucial moment. He pointed at me and told me to grab a bat. As I eagerly headed to the plate, he yelled, “Henderson! If you . . .”

I rolled my eyes and said, “I know: if I take the bat off my shoulder you’ll break my arm.” I stepped into the box and banged the bat against my tennis shoes as I had seen Ernie Banks do many times. My family was in the stands that day, so, despite the admonition from my manager, I was determined to swing if the pitch was anywhere near the plate. The first pitch bounced in the dirt, two feet in front of the plate. I held off. “Strike!” the umpire barked. I was confused, but I dug in again. The second pitch almost hit me in the hip, but I deftly avoided the ball with a maneuver that would have made a Spanish matador proud. “Strike two!” I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I understood the cardinal rule of baseball that says you should never argue with the ump about balls and strikes. Behind in the count, and feeling a bit like Casey from the famous poem, I grew more determined than ever. The third pitch came in, well over my head, and I coolly let it sail by. “Strike three!” the umpire called, with a little more enthusiasm than I thought the situation merited. I trudged back to the bench with tears streaming down my face. I wasn’t upset about striking out—that had happened a lot; it was because of the injustice of being called out on three pitches that were clearly out of the strike zone.

I was embarrassed about my performance as I headed back to the car to meet my family. That’s when I saw my dad. He had the umpire pinned against the cinderblock wall behind the dugout. My dad was a big guy with a long history of barroom brawls, so the umpire, with fear in his eyes, was listening attentively to what he had to say. Despite his aura of menace, my dad spoke calmly and distinctly. He said, essentially, “Sir, I understand that it was exceedingly warm behind the plate, it was a one-sided game, and you would like very much to get home to your family. But these lads are trying to learn which pitches are strikes and which are balls, and your calling every pitch a strike, regardless of its proximity to the strike zone, could prove deleterious to a young man’s fledgling batting eye.” My memory might be somewhat faulty, so his words were probably put more crudely, and perhaps punctuated by profanity and other colorful terms, but he got his point across. The umpire, apologized profusely before sprinting to his car when my dad released him.

There was one other instance in which my father intervened on our behalf in a baseball-related situation. My house in Chicago was on a barely paved street directly across from a cemetery. In the wide gap between the cemetery fence and the street was a double set of railroad tracks and a narrow strip of grass perhaps fifty feet wide that led to a small embankment on which the tracks sat. That strip of grass stretched for the entire block and served as the neighborhood playground for football, baseball, and hockey, as well as for games of “Cowboys and Indians” or “Army.” One spring, we noticed that our next-door neighbors, the Boggio family, was occupied for an entire morning, doing something to the grass across the street from their house. When they finished their task, we discovered to our horror that they had planted a flower garden smack in the middle of our multi-purpose field. They had set up neat lines of brightly colored flowers accented by a dozen or so bushes that would eventually grow into a solid hedge surrounding the garden on three sides. The problem, of course, was that it was directly behind second base of our baseball diamond. We didn’t know what to do, so we waited anxiously for my dad to get home from work. In those days, we had five kids (two more would come later), and dad had to work two jobs to feed us all. Several times a week, he returned from his factory job about 4:30, showered, shaved, and changed clothes before heading out for another eight hours of tending bar. The only opportunity we had to talk to him was the five minutes while he was shaving. My brother Dan and I saw our opening and briefed him on the critical situation:

“Dad! Mr. Boggio built a garden in our baseball field!”

“I saw it.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But, we’ll have to walk a mile to the park just to play baseball.”

He stopped shaving, turned to us, and said, in a voice that indicated the conversation was over, “Don’t worry about it.” We walked away dejected, feeling as if he had let us down.

The next day, a Saturday, we woke up to an amazing sight. Overnight, something had happened to Mr. Boggio’s garden. It looked as if King Kong had ravaged the area, leaving flowers and hedges uprooted and scattered in all directions; some greenery was even stuck high in the barbed wire atop the cemetery fence. There was nothing left of the garden but an area of black dirt where plants had once grown. Before we could ask our parents what had happened, we heard a knock on the front door. My dad answered it, and we could hear Mr. Boggio’s voice, but we couldn’t make out the words. My dad, in a voice oozing with Eddie Haskell-like sincerity, replied, “Gee, I don’t know anything about your garden.” Mr. Boggio spoke again, and my dad said, in a much louder voice, “I told you I don’t know anything!” and slammed the door. He calmly walked past us, sat down and returned to his coffee and morning newspaper. As Dan and I added two and two together, we could hear my dad chuckling behind the newspaper he held up in front of his face.

He never told us what happened, but we assumed that he returned from the bar about two in the morning, after having imbibed several cocktails in the course of the evening, saw the flowers shining in the streetlights, and took care of the problem with great energy and no small amount of flair. We aren’t certain of this, but, knowing my dad the way we do, it seems the most likely scenario. Regardless of the true story, we had our field back, and the garden never re-appeared.

When my dad was too young to really remember, the Cubs won the National League pennant every three years, in 1929, 1932, 1935, and 1938, losing in the World Series each time. Then, when he was 17 and stationed on Guam with the Navy in 1945, they won again, so he missed the World Series (which they lost). He told us that he wrote his brother, “Oh well; I’ll catch them the next time they’re in the Series.” Of course, that “next time” never occurred in his lifetime. He died seven years before the glorious World Series of 2016 when the Cubs finally won it all for the first time since 1908. I thought about him a lot that season.

In fact, that year, I probably started thinking about him in February, when I heard the words, “pitchers and catchers report.”

Song for a Winter’s Night

When you live in Wisconsin, as we do, February is the longest month of the year, despite having only 28 days. It snows at least once a week, the white piles mount higher and higher along the streets and parking lots, and temperatures hover near zero or lower. When you mix in the Covid isolation and our self-imposed austerity (dieting, no drinking or excess spending), it’s a concoction that could be terribly depressing. The urge to get out of the house and do something to fend off cabin fever can become overwhelming, so every day, I set out for a long walk. These solitary excursions remind me that there is beauty in the winter landscape, and that life goes on beneath the gelid surface.

Yesterday, I woke up at 4:30 and checked the online weather page for River Falls. I don’t like to do this, but it’s apparently some sort of requirement in Wisconsin. The same way that other people my age check the obits every morning to see if they’re listed there, each day, people in Wisconsin check the temperature and the snow forecast. They read about the projected snowfall or plummeting temperatures and smile and nod with a strange sort of pride, saying “Ah, yeah; it’s gonna be brutal.”

I usually wait until it gets light and warms up a bit before heading out for a long walk of an hour or more. On Monday, when I woke up, it was 12-below with a wind chill factor of about 20-below. Later, I drove downtown to get some variety in my walk, and when I passed the bank on Main Street, the clock read 8:30 and 8-below zero. By the time I had walked completely around the college campus and returned to my car, though, the sun was warming things up, and the temperature was up to 6-below. The sunshine is bright, giving the illusion of warmth, and it feels great to be outside.

Everyone tells me that it’s been a mild year in terms of snowfall, but there’s well over a foot of the white stuff in the yards, and the plows have pushed it into massive piles that are taller than I am. I hated snow when I lived in Chicago, largely because it turned black and depressing within a day or two. Because of the light traffic and more-frequent snowfalls, though, that doesn’t usually happen here. In fact, this week, a quarter-inch to an inch of snow fell each night, like a fresh coat of paint on a dingy wall. It wasn’t enough to require shoveling, but just enough to make it pretty again. The snow on the streets is packed down and slick, but everywhere else, it’s beautiful and white. In fact, last month, we had a full week of an incredible phenomenon that I had never seen before. It’s called “Rime Ice,” and it’s a special situation where weather conditions create lots of fog, but at night the fog freezes into a crystalline state on everything. The result (see picture above), is a fantastic display of nature at its most beautiful, with ice shining like diamonds on the streets, on top of the snow, and on the branches of trees and bushes.

The weather is cold, but I’m better prepared for my second winter in Wisconsin. My most frequent online purchases have been from Eddie Bauer and L. L. Bean, so I now have good boots and a light-weight coat that claims it will keep me warm in temperatures down to 35-below. I don’t plan on testing that lower extreme, but it’s comforting to know that I could. The boots make it difficult to run, but I walk fast, and they don’t hinder me in that regard. I’ve grown a winter beard, which is also required by law in Wisconsin, so the only part of me that is cold is my pink cheeks above the white beard. I picture myself as a thinner version of Santa Claus as I roll through town. On the coldest days, my tears freeze on my eyelashes, and the condensation from my breath forms little balls of ice on my beard.

On my walk today, I saw one scene that reminded me of a Currier and Ives print from the 1800s. Near the downtown area, a mail-delivery girl, in sunglasses because of the bright sun, was high-stepping her way through the deep snow, trying to reach the mailbox on one particular house. In River Falls, the older sections of town still have boxes attached next to the front doors, and the mail-persons deliver it right to the door. I felt bad that the owners had not shoveled the walk leading to their mailbox, but despite the snow and her heavy load, she had a big smile and greeted me cheerfully. Another great moment occurred a few days ago when we attempted to pick up the kids for a home-school session at our house. A heavy snow and underlying ice made it difficult for Kathleen to get up Ben’s fairly steep driveway. She was stuck halfway in the driveway and halfway in the street. I was frantically trying to shovel the drive and get some salt down because a snow plow was bearing down on us from a block away. Instead of being angry at us for blocking his way, the driver stopped, got out with a big smile, and asked if he could help us. If that same situation had occurred in Chicago, we would have been buried in a shower of snow while the driver flipped us off and sped past. I love River Falls.

One day, I chose the more difficult route along the foot paths that follow the Kinnickinnic River. The river and its South Branch are frozen over, with solid white portions of the surface broken up by shiny sections that look like glass. If you look closely, you can see beneath the surface where the water continues to bubble and move downstream, toward the St. Croix River, seven miles away. Similarly, I saw no animals, but tracks were visible everywhere in the fresh snow, mostly deer, rabbits, and squirrels, with the occasional large paw prints of some critter I hope to avoid. A large tree, which I had noticed weeks ago, now lies parallel to the ground, a victim of the local beavers. The trunk is over a foot in diameter, and I noticed it earlier because you could see that the felling work had begun, with busy teeth cutting a deep vee uniformly around the trunk. Those relentless efforts were eventually rewarded, and the tree came down. Smaller trees in the area have also been chewed down. I edged to the bank of the river, but could see no lodge or dam under construction. Perhaps dam-building is a springtime endeavor. The nearby Powell Dam, about which I had written earlier, is still open, and Lake Louise remains drained. The city recently said that the dam may never be repaired, as the $100,000 cost to fix a dam that they are planning to take down in a few years anyway seems senseless. I was amused by the irony of one dam being scheduled for demolition, while, a quarter-mile downstream, the beavers are preparing to build another.

I paused to contemplate the fact that, beneath the surface, there are probably many animals in hibernation for the winter. This is a fascinating annual condition for many creatures, wherein their cardiovascular systems slow down dramatically, enabling them to conserve energy during times of extreme cold and a lack of food sources. Tree frogs, the greatest hibernators of them all, actually stop breathing and pumping blood completely during the winter. As I walk along the river, I contemplate the possibility that box turtles, bats, birds, and hedgehogs, cousins of the famous Punxsutawney Phil from Pennsylvania, could be hibernating within a few feet of me. A bit more unnerving is the thought that there could be a nest of hundreds, or even thousands, of garter snakes, hibernating and curled together for warmth, in a nest beneath my feet.

I guess the theme here is that while, to all outward appearances, everything is quiet and dormant, there’s a lot going on if you take the time to look closely. Also, despite the snow, ice, and frigid temperatures, this is a beautiful place to call home.

I just read the forecast for tomorrow, and a weather advisory warns that the wind-chill factor will dip down to 50-below zero. Perhaps my new coat will be fully tested after all.

I leave you with a short video. The school at which I taught, Harpeth Hall, has a special program called Winterim in January. For three weeks, the juniors and seniors travel to Europe or other exotic locales, or they serve internships of one sort or another. Meanwhile, the freshmen and sophomores take unique, brief courses that are only taught at that time. I always enjoyed Winterim, because I could teach anything I wanted for those three weeks. Among other courses I created was one I team taught with an irrepressible colleague, Joe Croker. We called it “Songwriting for Guitar,” and we took ten novice musicians and tried to teach them how to play guitar and compose their own songs in just three weeks. In 1999, my second year of teaching that class, we had a remarkable group of freshmen. At the end of the class, we recorded some of the songs they wrote and some cover versions of other songs. I recently found that CD and, this week, I made a film to accompany a version of Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night. The four girls were all 14-year-old freshmen, most of whom had never sung in front of others or played guitar before that class. I was amazed at the sophisticated harmonies they worked out for this wonderful song. Enjoy.

Song for a Winter’s Night

A Delicate Balance

I received a question from a friend recently as a comment to a previous blog. It was a good question, and it deserved a longer answer than a simple reply in the comments section. The question was:

“I respect your insight, just wondering what you think of all these executive orders, especially the XL pipeline that cost thousands of union  jobs?  Another one that really bothers me is boys in girls sports! I know you were a coach, what are your thoughts on this?”

Political questions are always more complicated than we would like. These are not simple yes-or-no, thumbs-up-or-thumbs-down issues. Among my favorite poems is one written by Stephen Crane about 120 years ago:

When the prophet, a complacent fat man, Arrived at the mountain top, He cried, “Woe to my knowledge! I intended to see good white lands and bad black lands—But the scene is grey.”

That’s what we have to understand; there are no black-and-white answers to these issues. We may not like it, but the solutions are often grey. This stark reality might make us uncomfortable, but we have to accept the fact that this complex, modern world requires solutions that satisfy no one completely, but are the product of compromises that seek the middle ground.

Okay. Simply put, Executive Orders (EO) are directives by the President that help manage the federal government. This basic description has received a wide range of interpretations by different leaders over the years, leading to a diverse variety of these directives, some of them controversial. There have been over 13,000 of these since the days of George Washington, and every president except William Henry Harrison (who died a short time after his inauguration) has signed at least one. The most famous EO is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which freed the slaves held by rebellious states. Some of these directives have been challenged in court and overturned by the Supreme Court. In fact, Lincoln was so doubtful about the constitutionality of his Proclamation, that he immediately started the ball rolling on an amendment to the Constitution that would permanently outlaw slavery. This, of course, became the 13th Amendment in 1865. FDR signed the highest number of these things, but that makes sense, as he was elected four times and dealt with crises such as the Great Depression and World War II that required immediate action, without congressional delays. Many EOs, especially when the presidency changed hands, have been used to reverse the EOs of previous presidents from the opposition party. Thus, the flurry of Executive Orders we have seen in recent days, is slightly unusual, but not dramatically so. As of today, President Biden has signed 42 of these orders, about half of which deal with the Coronavirus and the economic fallout that resulted. This health disaster is worse than any situation inherited by an incoming president since FDR, and thus qualifies as a legitimate crisis. Another handful of the new orders reversed policies established by Trump, who, in turn, used EOs to reverse policies established by Obama. In the immortal words of Sonny Bono, “and the beat goes on.”

The Keystone XL Pipeline is a complex issue that has been the subject of political wrangling, protests, lawsuits, and heated debate since at least 2008. Without going into excruciating detail, the 1200-mile pipeline would carry crude oil from Canada, where it is pumped from the ground, to Nebraska, where it would join another pipeline that would take the crude oil to the refineries near the Gulf of Mexico. A Canadian company, Trans-Canada Energy, would be the main beneficiary from this project, but British, Dutch, and American oil corporations would also share in the profits. Right wing tweeters, such as that intellectual giant Ted Nugent, have claimed that as many as 28,000 to 83,000 jobs will be lost. The truth is, that 1,000 jobs will be lost now, and a potential 10,000 more temporary jobs building the pipeline will be lost down the road. These are good, well-paying jobs, but they are temporary, lasting only until the pipeline is completed.

On the other hand, the pipeline presents a genuine threat to the environment on a huge scale. This is not just a matter of a small leak killing a few birds or animals, as it is often portrayed. At issue is an underground reservoir called the Ogallala Aquafer, over which the pipeline would run. This is a massive water table that stretches under eight states from South Dakota to Texas. I happen to be reading a novel right now that is set in the Texas Panhandle (That Old Ace in the Hole, by Annie Proulx), so I have only recently become aware of this water source and its importance to people of the Great Plains. Over 2.3 million people depend on this supply for all of their water needs. More important, each year, $20 Billion worth of agriculture, livestock, and ranching products are dependent on the water that is pumped from the Ogallala. Experts believe that a pipeline leak that contaminated the aquafer is a question of “when” rather than “if.” Many leaks of such pipelines involve millions of gallons of crude oil. Even a small leak could make that entire body of water unusable for human or agricultural needs. If that arid region was deprived of water, the livelihoods of those 2.3 million people would be put at risk, and the economy of the entire nation would be negatively affected by the loss of that $20 Billion. Thus, the loss of from 1 to 11 thousand jobs must be weighed against the potential impact on the whole country. Further, the land through which the pipe would run must be confiscated from private owners through the law of eminent domain; the government would compensate the owners, but often for less than it is actually worth. If you have seen the Kevin Costner series Yellowstone, you understand how rugged individuals such as John Dutton view the loss of their land to eminent domain laws. That is why farmers and ranchers have often led the opposition to XL.

The question of the XL Pipeline gets at the crux of all issues that pit environmentalists versus corporations and economic concerns. Even the issue of climate change, in many ways can be reduced to this equation. On the left extreme, you have the tree huggers that want to save every tree and every earthworm. On the right extreme, you have those who view things in a very short-sighted way based on one question: “Can I make more money today?” and to hell with the future. In most of these issues, there is a huge middle ground that is often ignored. What we have to do is find ways to use the environment and its resources in responsible ways that don’t destroy the planet. Think of logging contracts that require lumber companies to plant several trees for each one they cut down. Most political issues have lots of room in the middle and we need to get back to reasonable, moderate politicians who will negotiate to find that centrist position. More than that, our leaders have to look at the long-term effects, as well as considering what will help us in the immediate future.

This question reminds me of a folk song by a Chicago guy, Tom Dundee. It says, “It’s all such a delicate balance; takes away just as much as it gives.” The fact is that most political questions are complicated and multi-sided. As I used to tell my students, any time you hear a politician tell you that an issue is “very simple,” and he or she reduces it to a cut-and-dried solution, as Hitler (and now Trump) did, they are either lying, or they’re not intelligent enough to understand the question. Often, they are just telling people what they want to hear, rather than the truth.

This whole issue of gender or gender identity, has been around for a long time, but has gained more attention in recent years due to the availability of more information and the increasing willingness of people to speak up about it. There are an incredible number of gender terms out there, many of which overlap, and even more definitions that seem to shift over time. Something like 1% of all people are born with chromosomes from both genders to greater or lesser degrees, they have excessive hormones from the opposite gender, or they identify as one sex when they have been assigned the other at birth. To a non-science guy like myself, it is far too complicated to understand. I am completely ill-equipped to deal with this question, but I can give a few insights from track and field.

This question has been a track issue since at least the 1930s, when the International Olympic Committee instituted the “sex test” to determine an athlete’s gender. A Polish athlete, Stella Walsh, won the gold medal in the women’s 100 meters in 1932. When she died in Cleveland years later, an autopsy revealed the she had no uterus and an undeveloped penis. She was labeled “hermaphrodidic,” as a person who was born with sex organs and characteristics of both genders. Today, she might be called “intersex.” Intersex people are individuals born with any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, hormones, or genitals that do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies. More recently, South African runner Caster Semenya made waves by winning several major competitions while appearing to be more male than female. One source explained, “Semenya is an intersex woman, assigned female at birth, with XY chromosomes and naturally elevated testosterone levels.” Does that make her a male or a female? She had a natural, albeit unusual, condition, and unlike the Russians and East Germans during the Cold War Years, she did nothing to alter the cards that God or nature dealt her. Sports competitions have been legislating gender for nearly a century, but as our understanding of gender and sexual identity evolves, it has become more difficult for sports to exist within a neat, gender division.

Nature seems to have a sense of humor in this regard that messes with our normal expectations for human life. I guess the big thing to remember here is that these people did not choose to be different or unusual. Some wrestle with this issue for their entire lives. I think of Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn. I was in a track meet against him when we were both in college, and he was an impressive athlete even before his Olympic fame. He was married three times and had six children. Then came his bombshell announcement in 2015 that he identified as a woman and planned to undergo a sex-change operation. Apparently, the question of gender identity tormented her for her entire life. I taught several girls/boys over the years in an all-female school who struggled with this problem, and they were usually miserable, not sure of who they were or where they belonged. I have painful memories of one particular student in tears in my empty classroom, crying because she felt completely out of place with the other students. I later discovered that she identified as a male, but she didn’t fit in with either gender group. These people are not seeking advantages, although some will probably game the system for that purpose. Most, however, simply want to be treated equally, without discrimination, and that is what Biden’s EO addresses.

Am I comfortable with all of this ambiguity? Of course not, but I’m trying to understand it. At times, I find myself relating to Archie Bunker, who, at the start of each episode of All in the Family, sang about the good ol’ days, saying “And you knew where you were then; girls were girls and men were men.” But nature isn’t perfect and there are all sorts of permutations of the conventional idea of binary genders.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have any answers, only more questions. For me, these issues are just more reminders that the modern world is incredibly complicated and there are no simple solutions to the multi-faceted problems we face. We may not like it, but we have to become more comfortable with the ambiguity and the lack of easy, clear-cut solutions. When I was a kid, I saw things in terms of black-and-white. The world was simple and easy to understand. As I grew older, though, read more, moved around the country, and experienced a lot of different things, I began to realize that the world was much more complex than I imagined.

I had climbed the mountain, but, like Stephen Crane’s “complacent fat man,” I had discovered that “the scene is grey.”