These are times of change in my life. I’m wrapping up old involvements, ending eras, seeking new directions, liquidating assets, settling accounts with God, Nature and Humankind, and devising new and far more sophisticated plans for world domination.

Included in the mix is the sale of a fine recumbent bike that I enjoyed greatly but no longer ride. You can read here about this Grasshopper HP Velotechnik (LINK) , as finely tuned an instrument of human powered locomotion as ever graced the streets of Portland. Contact me if you are interested in purchasing it.

It’s the end of my recumbent biking era, except that it really ended some time ago, but like Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense, we can’t always acknowledge that we, or something we are involved with, is already done, and is “but a ghost of its former self.” But the end of every era is the beginning of the next. So blah, blah, blah. Plus, I need the cash.

My eleven year old son is desperate beyond words for a replacement Nintendo DS Lite. The first one mysteriously disappeared, ruining his life forever, and we hear nightly imploring for this $129 game toy to be replaced. We have doubts about the wisdom of allowing him to have a new one, and if we do get one we plan to limit his use of it to a fixed amount of time every day. We have delayed, month after month, fulfilling his request.

This evening I said to him, “OK this is something you really want, but are you willing to do something for me, something that I really want?” We then had a long discussion about what he could do to “earn” this expensive toy. In the course of this discussion, I was forced to ask myself, “well, what do I really want from my son?” What do I want as desperately and as dearly as he desires this toy?

It seemed to come down to three things: practice kindness, make an effort in school, and make an effort to learn more yidishkeit (Jewish stuff.) The latter is a particular concern for me because two different Jewish school experiences have been a bust for him. He has not been engaged by them. For all the complexity and problematicity of my own relationship to things Jewish, I’d like him to have a basic familiarity with the culture and a sense of joyful engagement with it. He gets a lot of that from our home life, but from nowhere else.

Anyway, having laid out three core values that I care about and that I hope he will care about: kindness, intellectuality, and Jewish spirituality and culture, I sat back and listened. My son then proceeded to lay out his case for himself as a person who was kind to others, who tried hard in school and who wanted to learn more about Jewish life.

I asked him what he thought he could do in each of those areas beyond what he was already doing. He told me in some specificity. It wasn’t exactly what I expected, but it was all good.

In the area of Jewish life, he wrestles enormously with bacon, it turns out, which he loves, but knows that “we” don’t eat. I have many times explained that while I do not eat it, and we (our family) will not eat it at home, he is free to eat it and the decision about whether or not to do so is just one of many decisions he will have to make in life about what it means to be Jewish and how and if he will express his Jewishness in his life. So he’s working on that. But perhaps he suspects that if he tries to eat less bacon or says he will, a DS might come sooner. That of course is not the case. I’m interested in the engagement with the question, not the behavior, and I think he was talking about the bacon problem from a point of view of inward struggle, and not primarily about a way of getting a DS - even though he really wants that DS. In any case, the last thing I would want would be for him to stop eating bacon to get a DS. A successful bribe would represent a complete educational failure on my part. I’m hoping for much better and more profound reasons to keep mitzvot than a bribe.

In the area of kindness, he promised to continue to work on not teasing his sister, and had a great deal to say about how he related to his friends and to kids who were mean. This is of course the core value of life: kindness and compassion. In practice, I think he’s doing pretty well here.

In the area of academics he mentioned some goals he had at school for various projects. The main thing here is that he should know that I care about school and what he does there.

And as all this conversation unwound I realized that I didn’t want more from him in any of these areas than what he was already doing (except maybe less teasing of his sister), and that I would hate to think that he did anything simply because he had received or might receive a DS. What an educational and moral disaster that would be.

So when he asked me once more what more he could do to “earn” his DS Lite. I said, and I could only say “you are already doing everything I could hope for. I hope you continue trying hard on all the things that I really care about.”

And then he drifted off to sleep. But not before asking one more time, “so when are you going to get me a DS?!”

“Shhh. Go to sleep.”

We had two twinned, topped (and thus top heavy) fir trees in our back yard. Two days ago we had them removed. Sad for the 80 year old trees, but we needed the light in our back yard. For months and years I’ve felt bad about those trees. I didn’t like them, but I thought there was something wrong about cutting down 80 year old trees. More recently I decided that it was OK to cut them. Their very existence in the back yard was a mistake. They were probably planted when the house was built in the 1920s, and they had grown too large for the space. They shed needles and prevented much from growing beneath them. I lay awake on windy nights imagining them crashing through the roof into our attic bedroom. They were home to raccoons. We have other trees. They brought me no joy.

With the trees gone at last I now have a yard full of logs and I feel lighter. I don’t think I’ve committed a crime against nature. I have, instead, pruned my garden. Other trees and plants will grow. The world will go on in a new form.

Cutting a tree down feels like a solemn act. After 80 years even a plant earns a certain dignity and tenure. Cutting down something that tall is not something I do lightly. But it felt necessary.

(This post is corrected to reflect the fact that Ringo Starr, not Paul McCartney, was the author of Octopus’s Garden. Sorry about the mistake!)

OK, this is a pretty tired subject (The Beatles! How 35 years older than cool can you get?), but I’ve just been listening to their 2006 Love “album” and it’s pretty interesting. These songs are so deeply embedded in our brains that hearing even slightly different variants is fascinating. It tweaks the familiar ever so slightly. We are all “experts” on every nuance of these songs, more than we know, and when we experience differences it makes us feel the depth of our expertise. We can almost hear both versions simultaneously, creating a unique harmony between memory and experience. Sure, as we get older all of life is a harmony between memory and experience, but it seems particularly powerful with music so familiar.

One small revelation that I had while listening to this album involves the most insipid song ever recorded by the Beatles: Octopus’s Garden. What is there not to hate about Ringo Starr’s ridiculous, insipid, saccharine fantasy of life beneath the waves? Well, on Love, you get to hear this song in a new way. It is merged with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, flows directly out from it, and given a trippy background of voices and discordant violins. Suddenly even Octopus’s Garden, the worst song every recorded by the Beatles feels a bit like a psychedelic experience. I even experience it as ironic. The sweetness, surprisingly, appears in quotes. The contrast with Lucy … the merging with Lucy… gives it a whole other resonance. I hear John Lennon’s influence. The Octopus’s Garden becomes a sweet little refuge in an ocean of craziness, but the ocean is still there lapping at the borders, and you are left with the hope that the author doesn’t really mean to be quite this sweet.

What I imagine is that the author (Ringo Starr) wanted his little insipid piece of saccharine to escape the irony and complexity of Lennon’s vision, and so he pulled it out and made it into the horrible little turd of a song that it is on Abbey Road. Maybe the version on “Love” shows it as it might have been had the Beatles still been together when they recorded Abbey Road instead of on the verge of breaking apart.

So I imagine.

It’s a steam engine photographed in Stevenson Washington last week. The full image is available (soon) on Portlandground.com