The Amish Trip: Part 1 – Fireflies

A non-fiction short story from the collection Don’t Take My Word for It by Matthew Bennett

In May 2012 while Janelle was planning her summer around a weekly commute to IUP to take classes for her doctorate, she asked me if I would like to go on a writing trip. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with no distractions, she said. We had been talking more and more about writing, and doing less and less of it. The new house project, the new wildly unkempt yard, and the myriad other responsibilities in all of our various endeavors had been taking up so much time that neither of us were working toward our goals.

So it was decided. The first week in July, during IUP’s break between summer classes, we would go. The planning was left to me, and I knew that if we went into the middle of the woods in a cabin somewhere the distractions would be immeasurable. Spiders, bears, poison ivy, and all that the simple life entails would not free us up to write. So I went with Plan B. Amish country. Sugarcreek, Ohio. And the adventure began.

Fireflies:

Our first stop was IUP. Monday was the last day of classes, and we were booked in Millersburg, OH Tuesday through Friday. (Incidentally, the distance between Indiana, Pennsylvania and Millersburg, Ohio is 175 miles – the same distance as the Journey from Millersburg back to our house in Erie, PA. I looked up the distance again from Erie back to Indiana, in hopes that I would be able to write that our path created an equilateral triangle. Alas, you the reader will have to settle for an isosceles.) (Also incidentally, my iPhone Mapquest app was unable to find the B&B in Millersburg, to any degree of accuracy. This led to it’s deletion off my iPhone. Life if confusing enough without scrambling up my phone with apps that are useless, but neat.)

But I must continue, because this section is about fireflies.

After Janelle got out of class at 4pm, we met at the library to get a couple hours of work done before we left for Ohio. We argued a little bit, got angry, made up, and then worked. We do this all the time, although I must admit that it is difficult to accomplish in the library. We planned on working from 4-8, but at around 6, some medical students at a nearby table ordered a pizza, and the amazing smell precipitated our hasty departure to walk somewhere and get food and drink. As our typical walks go, we argued a little bit, got angry, made up, and then kept walking. It’s almost a comforting pattern. Almost.

We had rented an apartment very close to the IUP campus so that she didn’t have to drive everyday. Across from the apartment was a memorial park/cemetery.  After eating, and drinking a few beers and margaritas, we walked towards the apartment, but stopped in the park. The sun was just going down, and the park was immersed in shadow.

It is no big secret that Janelle loves fireflies. She is a highly educated woman, most likely smarter than me (though she has the grace to never compare – to me this proves that I’m right, she’s smarter), but when dusk comes in mid-summer, and the fireflies start to light up, she turns into a six-year-old girl, one burst of adrenalin shy of jumping up and down and clapping her hands.

“How do fireflies work?” she asked me, as we watched their glowing antics in the park. In and of itself, the question seemed innocent enough. However, I suspect that she looks to me for guidance, not because she thinks I have the answer, but because she knows that I will Google EVERYTHING, immediately upon being asked, if I don’t know the answer. I am a walking research tool. Plus, I found the odd phrasing adorable: of a firefly as if it were an object. Fireflies – how do they work?

So I read to her the facts of life, as they relate to photuris lucicrescens. Fireflies, it seems, glow specifically in order to mate. The male will fly around showing off his glowing butt to the females on the ground (who are unable to fly as far). When a female sees a male that she likes, she glows back in a similar pattern to that male, and he flies down, touches her antennae, and if he likes her, they go at it. (This whole scene is not at all unlike some dance clubs that I have been to, and very close to the mating rituals of humans.) One site in particular stated that an “eager female firefly” would produce a longer series of flashes, instead of just a simple flash from the ground.

Janelle and I first talked about how cool it was that the beetles could produce chemical light. Bioluminescence, it’s called. As I read about the mating habits however, our discourse transformed beyond academic. She began criticizing the tactics of some of the males, and making fun of them, and also pointing out the females, and which ones were more eager to have a mate. I began to have the feeling that we were spectators at the metaphorical dance club, and that everything we were saying was just like a couple at that club gossiping about the happenings. This was anthropomorphication on a grand scale.

It was quite enlightening for me to see that for the two of us, it wouldn’t matter if we were watching a group of people, or a group of insects, we were still the peanut gallery, the critical observers.

If you don’t care, I don’t care: The art of being.

young-woman-bored-11281332030yRqtRecently, I was at a conference and I heard a lecture. The who, what, when, where, and why don’t really matter.

What matter is the how.

One of the presenters simply read her paper as a presentation. Now, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this was a last-minute thing, maybe something changed, maybe she was told to do it that way. None of that alleviated my boredom. I was restless, begging for the clock to hurry up, and hoping for some kind of distraction like the fire alarm, so that I could graciously sneak out and find another lecture that would wake me back up.

Sadly, I cared about her topic. It had meaning to me. But I don’t go to lectures to hear the paper read to me. It would be much faster to just hand everyone a printed document and send us on our way. When I hear a speaker, I want to hear passion about the subject. She could have stumbled around with her words, poorly tried to make her point, but if could hear in her voice how much this meant to her, I would have appreciated it much more, and quite possibly learned something. I was looking to be entertained.

Traditionally, when we use the word entertain, we are talking about TV, or a live show, possibly a comedian. I now use the word in a stricter sense. You can entertain a thought. When you have guests at your house whom you feed and have conversation with, you are entertaining them. You don’t have to have a song and dance prepared for the occasion – you just have to occupy their minds with something that will keep them paying attention. Every interaction is entertainment, for good or ill.

People pay attention to other people, not so much to subjects. That’s how we begin to really like TV shows. We’re hooked by an interesting subject at first, but soon we don’t really care about the subject anymore, because we “fall in love” with the characters on the show. If the Fringe crew were to somehow come back as regular police investigating everyday crime, some people may complain just to complain, but they would get the same following that they had investigating Fringe events – because we’re paying attention to the characters, and their lives, and their interactions with each other.

This works the same way in real life. If you care about your subject, I’m interested in what you have to say, whether you are talking about quantum physics, ghosts, knitting, or carpentry. If you don’t care about your subject, you could be talking about everything that I have on my “list of interests”, and I still won’t be able to pay attention very long, because if you don’t care, I just don’t care. I want to know about you. Your passions, interests, hopes, dreams, plans, goals, thoughts, and more.

But if I ask you about these, and you pull out your bio and start reading it to me, I’m leaving.

The Jotting Imperative (or The Zen of Notes)

by Matthew A Bennett

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

This is not her story.

-The introduction to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

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If you have ever had an amazing thought and said to yourself, “Wow, that should be my next Facebook or Twitter status,” you should have a handy way ready to jot that down. Immediately. I believe that every human walking this earth has insights, probably daily, that are profound and should be somehow shared with the world. I also believe that so many of these thoughts are lost in the shuffle of life. Don’t live under the mistaken impression that because it was profound, or important, or even just really cool or interesting, that you are going to remember.

Insightful Thinking

I have a hypothesis that  just the opposite is true. The thought patterns that it takes to reach a profound insight or conclusion usually come in a string, or a series of thought. There is calculation involved, so recording a theory just as you grasp it is very important. The uncomplicated thoughts like “we are out of milk” can come and go, but if you forget these thoughts there is generally only a small consequence. But complicated theories such as “if I do A, then B happens, which makes me want to C, and then I feel like D. So I have to avoid A at all costs so that I never feel like D” will come and go so quickly that you may not even remember you had an insight into the problem at all. As soon as real life hits you, they are gone.

These are the things that I want to know about you. These are the things that need to be put into the stratosphere of information that others can have access to. And even if you keep these things private, you should keep them for you. But these are also the things that run in door, say hello, grab a beer, and leave forever if you don’t invite them to stay for a while. Inviting them to stay, in this case, means writing them down.

The good news about writing down your thoughts is that you don’t really need too much of a mental boost in order to remember your thought, which means, a tiny little bit of writing will go a long way. For instance, in my A through D example above, you might just write down “A —->B —->C——->D, so don’t A.” This is all it will take for you to remember. If you are a writer, you may want to elaborate more on it later. If you just want to remind yourself not to do A anymore, then you are set, with that one little note.

Some more good news is that all of this works with memories, too.

Memories

The practice of writing down your thoughts comes in handy in so many ways. It doesn’t just work for complex thought. It is a great way to record your memories, and all it takes once again is a few words to recall the mental pictures, sounds, smells, emotions, and events surrounding the memory.

I have a note from a couple of years ago, while I was visiting my parents. My father is a mechanic, and he was in the garage fixing a customer’s lawn mower. He came inside the house with his finger cut almost halfway through. He has been a mechanic for nearly fifty years, so cut fingers are nothing new to him. However, when your finger is half off and blood is pouring forth, you would tend to think of yourself as currently “not OK”, and so it was with my father. I was standing at the kitchen table, and my mother was on the phone at the time. She has been a nurse for most of her life, not to mention the wife of a mechanic for most of her life, so this is, to her, just another little incident. She remained on the phone, while my father paced back in forth in a worried way at first, and then a panicked way. They were getting more annoyed with each other every second this went on, my mom because her phone call was being interrupted, and my dad because she was ignoring what was obviously his imminent death.

As I stood there surveying the scene, I thought to myself that this was really funny stuff that I could use in some future blog post, or some future comedy act, or whatever. I felt as if this needed recording. So I pulled out pen and paper, and wrote three words. “My father’s finger.” Those three words are all I need to recall this entire scene. I may lose some of the finer details, but the important stuff is all there in my head when I read this note.

Larger Works

Janelle is working on her doctorate, and as she reads all of her books she has some pretty profound thoughts. I try to encourage her to write about each thought as they come to her. Luckily for her (maybe?) she has me, and I can’t stand to let a thought a good thought get old before it’s written down. SInce you don’t have me, you may have to write this stuff down yourself.

If you are working on a large project, or want to write a book in the future, it is much easier if you start logging your thoughts now. It becomes an arduous task to try to write a book if every bit of your research is taking place during your writing. It is difficult to become inspired, and it is difficult to get things done if you are just plinking along a little bit at time. However, if you have a plan to write a book, or a dissertation, or anything in kind in the future, and you start compiling a database of this information now, you will be able to search through your thoughts. Sure, some won’t work out, but they may fit into a second or third book, so it was worth jotting it down.

If you write down every thought that you have that even remotely relates to a project, you can then store it and forget about it. Remember, your writing at this point doesn’t  have to be wonderful or beautiful, or even good, as long as the thought is projected in a way that you will remember. All of this can be worked out later, compiled in the future where you can take the time to turn it into something beautiful. For now, the important thing is the sloppy, disorganized act of getting the thoughts down. As in all of life, things go from sloppy to refined. I learned this from my piano teacher when I was eighteen years old, and it worked, and it has worked in every non-musical situation that I have applied it to in the past twenty-two years. You start out with a bunch of slop, and you begin to turn it into something exquisite. I’ve never really been a proponent of procrastination, but when it is used like this, I think it is one of the smarter things that you can do.

Your Personal Database

What we are seeking here is a huge personal database of memories and thoughts that you can use for writing ideas. They can relate to one work, or many works, they can relate any way that you want, but what you will have is a wealth of ideas that are mostly your own, and definitely ideas with your own perspective. This database is invaluable when you want to write something but you have nothing to write about, or if you are really stuck somewhere within your own work, or when you are ready to put together that amazing dissertation.

How the Heck Do I Do It?

Your guess is as good as mine. I use the Evernote application that syncs to my phone and my computer, and an online app so I can access it from anyone’s computer. But don’t do that just because I do. Everyone’s needs are different. I also have a little notebook that I carry with me because there are times that it takes longer to type into my phone than it does to just jot it down. There’s also something a little more satisfying about filling up a notebook. I have used notebook, loose leaf paper, business cards, calling my phone and leaving myself messages. It was a process I went through and that I am probably not done going through. Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, suggests index cards. It worked twenty years ago, and it is probably just as efficient today. Following the spirit of sloppiness, as long as you are doing it in some way, then you are doing it right.

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All of this is to simply say: don’t let your good ideas get lost forever just because of some terrible, stupid (regular life) catastrophe. Write it down.

Would I have been a racist in 1955?

IMAGE_4A865D73-74C1-4EEA-922A-E9A3228DF6A9
Me eating a hot pepper with some trepidation. It’s included here because i can never find just the right post to insert it.

As I wandered around Montgomery, Alabama with my map of the city in hand, I realized that I was very excited to learn more about black history. This was the beginning of a nearly spontaneous vacation that had no particular destination in mind. We were just going to drive until it was warm. We stopped in Montgomery because I wanted to visit Hank Williams Sr.’s grave site. We decided to stay for a couple days, and check out some of the historical sites in the city. This was near the end of February, the end of Black History month. I really did get a quality education in this area during my walking tour. I’ve written about this elsewhere: Here and here.

I was in awe during my tour of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, and during my visit to the Rosa Parks Museum I actually experienced chills several times, especially during the multimedia reenactment of the Rosa Parks event. I found myself rooting for Rosa as if I didn’t know how the story played out. I was more excited than I’ve ever been about the civil rights movement. And then, out of the blue, I wondered, “If I had actually been at the event, which side of the civil rights movement would I have aligned myself with? Would I have been a racist in 1955?”

My answer is: I don’t know. But there is always the possibility. This is almost the same question as the age old “nature vs. nurture” argument. On the side of nature, I could easily argue that if I am not now, then I wouldn’t have been then. The flipside is that I was fortunate enough to have gone to public schools (from 1979-1991) that taught me about racism, and preached against it. So maybe I am not racist because of my education, and not necessarily my nature. (I say this with a little reservation, because every single human is somewhat racist.) Perhaps if I had gone to an all-white school that preached segregation to me, I may have been on the wrong side of history. Except that there were plenty of all white segregationist schools, and I’m sure that some of the whites who worked hand in hand with the blacks during this era also went to these schools, and they turned out alright.

The question doesn’t bother me that much, but it does make me think. I’ll never know the answer to a hypothetical situation, but the truth probably lies somewhere in between. I do like who I am, I like my nature. But I am also lucky to have had the upbringing and education to not classify people based on race. There are always too many variables to know the truth in a hypothetical – you can never have the answer, it just causes more questions.

And “more questions” is always a good thing.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.-Martin Luther King, Jr.
INSIDE DEXTER AVE BAPTIST CHURCH
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I got this one” -AKA- “Another gold star” -AKA- “Holy batsh**” -AKA- “Not just for Halloween anymore”

126093089848454997zjl0le-hiI am posting this hopefully just a few short minutes before I go to bed – I’ve been awake for about 26 hours, the last 9 of which were spent searching my bedroom for the bat that was flying around my house last night. The bat that I failed to capture until a couple of minutes ago. I tried sleeping a few times, but it just didn’t work. This morning, my wife saw it in a corner of the room.

I sent everyone downstairs with instructions to open the front door in case it flew down. I opened the windows upstairs, took a broom, and tried to, kind of, um… like, sweep it off the wall and out the window. As I swept, it flew to another wall and landed. I took an old coffee container and put it on top of him, called downstairs to get some help finding a manilla folder or something to slide in as a cover. Bat in trap, I walked him into my woods. Far, far into my woods. Knowing that bats have a hard time taking flight from the ground, I put the container in a tree, pulled the folder away, and watched it crawl out onto the tree.

One life saved. You better kill a lot of mosquitos in my yard this summer, my friend.

(Thanks to http://clker.com  and the Library of Congress for the image. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to start shooting pictures.)

40th Birthday Post #2: On My Birthday and Hobbits and Birthday Advice Boxes

I love birthdays, I really do. The idea of celebrating a person once a year is great. It never had to be on a certain day, but celebrating the “change of age” is as good an excuse as any.

I really do the like way that Tolkien decided that the Hobbits would celebrate birthdays though. The way the celebrated buys gifts for the celebrators. The way they had huge parties, and the parties were about everyone. Perhaps I only like this because it would mean that I get to go to more parties, all year long, and I would get more gifts, too. But I don’t think so.

I think I would love to give gifts to the people in my life on this day next year. Tell everyone not to get me anything, just come to my party, relax, enjoy the day. We’ll play games outside, or cards inside if it’s too cold. We’ll talk about old times, and talk about recent times. We’ll look for connections between people.

Instead of birthday cards, I want an advice box. I want 200 people at my party, and I want them to take an index card and a pen, and put it in their pocket, and keep it there all day and night, and think about the best advice they could possibly give me – I want to know what they learned from life, and I want them to think about it and then write as much as they can write on an index card (I’ll buy the big ones, you know, the GIANT index cards that look kinda ridiculous after you’re used to the normal ones) – and I want them to put the card in the box before they leave.

I want it not for me, but for them. One of the greatest gifts I can give someone is to know that when they have something important that they want to share, they have an audience. When people have an audience that cares, they usually think harder and write more wisely. I think this would help everyone, at least for a little while, value themselves more.

That’s what I wanna give you for my birthday, next year.

Wanna come to my 41st B-Day Party?

Misconceptions in the Attic

cats

In April, 2012, our plywood subflooring didn’t go all the way to the walls, the attic that was being turned into a new floor of our house yet unfinished, and the insulation where the walls and floor met was showing. I was cleaning up one day, and I found some cat poop.(Since our cats are perfect, I have to assume that they thought the blow-in insulation was a new kind of kitty litter.) Janelle had just gone away to IUP to work on her PhD, so we were texting each other and I said, “One of the cat’s pooped on the floors”

“Which one?”

“How the hell am i supposed to know that?”

“Take a picture and send it to me. I can identify which cat”

This was scary, to say the least. first, that my true love seems to be a gumshoe with the ability to find clues in cat feces. Second, the disturbing fact that at the beginning of our relationship we sent cute pictures of ourselves back and forth, and I eagerly anticipated each one. You know…

But then,eight months into the relationship, I was sending her a picture of insulated cat poop, and I was eagerly anticipating her answer, fully trusting that she would not just guess, but actually be able to tell me which of the two cats was using our bedroom/music-studio-to-be as a luxury toilet.

How things change…

I look good on paper, but…

photoIn the last two days, I have twice heard people comment that they look good on paper, but they feel as if there is a disconnect between that and how they feel in reality. These individuals have amazing credentials, but aren’t experiencing what they would would expect that someone with these credentials would be experiencing.

They are searching for something that doesn’t exist.

We expect to emotionally feel similar to the way that we look on paper, because deep down when we see how others look -on paper- we assume that they feel that way. The disconnect isn’t between how we appear and how we feel, the disconnect takes place due to our particular notions of certain people. If we look at someone we greatly admire, most of the time we expect that that person emotionally experiences what we are experiencing as we admire them. We have to keep in mind that they are not. They are living their own personal feelings completely disconnected from our expectations.

This is because the whole of a person is so much greater than the sum of everything that they can put forth in their image. I said in my “Creating Your Life’s Composition” post that a person’s life can’t really be categorized well, and never completely. In general, people who are successful or admired decide to put only the best stuff “out there for the world to see” (best stuff according to their standards), and hiding everything else, keeping it as private as possible. I want to emphasize that I use “best stuff” very, very loosely. Someone’s best stuff may possibly be publicly working out some of their “worst stuff”, and that can make them successful or admired. I suppose it would be better to use a phrase like “most interesting stuff”.

When we see how good we look on paper, any paper, but we don’t feel like that amazing person that we’re reading about, and there is a good reason – The paper isn’t complete. It isn’t the whole story, and we know the WHOLE story:

On paper, I’m a working musician, magician, and writer with a handful of books, albums, public appearances, lots of big and little kudos to throw out there for the world to see. I have a beautiful wife, a great family, a house, my own woods, ideas for making my homestead sustainable, a new car, a pickup truck, and the list goes on…If that was the whole of my existence, I would either be ignorant and exceptionally happy, or analytical and extremely bored. What is not on paper are all my personal issues, health problems, relationship issues, insecurities, and other baggage that I want to keep private or are simply not fit for public consumption. I want to list some of these things in detail, but I would do so at the risk of dominating this essay and obscuring the meaning. My point is that all that great stuff is not the sum of who I am.

Life would be much simpler if we decided to not expect to feel a certain way. Just live whatever you feel without setting yourself up for disappointment by unrealistic emotional expectations. Be proud of yourself on paper and everywhere else. And when you consider any other person, know that they don’t feel like they look on paper either. Because life is huge.

(not quite) Midnight in Montgomery

By Matthew Bennett IMG_6711

Growing up, I heard more Johnny Cash and Gaither Trio songs than Hank Williams songs, but Hank was a part of my music listening experience from an early age, and I often consider Hank’s life, amazing story, and tragic ending. Perhaps this is why I ended up a country musician even though I it is not my favorite type of music. I will say that it is definitely my favorite type of music to play live.

Neither Hank WIlliams nor The Oakwood Annex Cemetery were running through my mind at all as we drove Interstate 85 into Montgomery, Alabama on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Also absent were any thoughts of Civil Rights, the Civil War, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., segregation, the Confederacy, or any other aspects and events that are part of the eye-opening history of Montgomery. I knew about these events, and even where they took place, but there was a disconnect in my mind between the history and the actual place.

Fortunately, what was running through my mind was Alan Jackson’s song “Midnight in Montgomery”. I was singing the song, and I remembered what it was about. Alan Jackson, in his bus, the Silver Eagle, visiting Hank’s gravesite in Montgomery. I’m not commonly prone to the middle school reaction of OMG!, but that is the moment, on I85, that my mind made the connect. OMG – Hank Williams is buried here! We decided to go visit the site the next day, hopefully get some good pictures, and then figure out what else we could learn about Montgomery as a whole.

I learned how little I knew about what happened with Rosa Parks, and even watched a re-enactment in the Rosa Parks Museum. Now when I hear about the incident, I feel like I was there – understanding the event itself much better, as well as the events leading up to, and where history turned immediately after the incident. All of this was only a tiny portion of the things we did and saw walking the streets of this historic city.

I learned so much, all because of one little spark of history that came to me as a song running through my head. So for these random thoughts that come to me that change my life forever in surprising ways, I have to thank my parents for playing the music, Alan Jackson for writing about the MAN, and last but never least, Hank Williams, for writing the songs that made me want to visit you when I was close.