November tends to be a celebratory time for my family. For one thing, we like to eat, and November in the United States offers a holiday focused largely around sharing a large meal (as opposed to Christmas, which centers on buying lots of stuff, though it features a large meal). For another, many of the family’s birthdays are in November. My own is early in the month, I’ve got a cousin whose birthday follows promptly, and a late uncle came into the world later on in November, many years back.

Today, however, is my father’s birthday. By the time this goes live, I will have called him and made sure his gift is where he can get it. He’s a father well worth being a dutiful son towards, and more than that, he’s a solid human being, hardworking and personable, with whom most anybody ought to count themselves privileged to interact. I’ve gotten to be around him more than most, and I’ve certainly been in a position to learn more from him than nearly anybody else, even if I haven’t always been as good a student to him as I ought to have been.

Even so, I’m glad to be his son. And I hope he continues to have a happy birthday, today and for many todays to come.

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I‘ve commented before on the events commemorated today and upon the problems attendant upon that commemoration. I do note hearing less about the matter this time around than previously, which I am not sure is a good thing–or even consistent with other issues. There are a lot of failures, setback, and evils that get repeated and propped up, and I am in favor of pointing out the problems in things. (Yes, I am great fun at parties; why do you ask?) At the same time, I am not in favor of praising those who are not praiseworthy, and I am not unmindful that the political circumstances that lead to certain acts of praise beginning are no longer in force. (Others very much are, to the collective detriment of the world and my small part of it.) So there is and remains some tension in my mind and thought, and I remain uncertain how to resolve it.

So much said, I recognize the position I occupy in that regard as one privileged. I am not burdened by the outcomes of the events in question, except that I choose to be; I could follow the example set by a great many, no few of which remain on live, and simply not give a damn about such things as the perniciously persistent inequities and erasures that are at work in the world. I could simply let things be, not digging deeper into “old shit” that “doesn’t matter,” even if it is the case that my tax dollars are paying for the maintenance of commemorations to what amounts to the beginnings of genocide. (Taking time off costs money, too, you know.) I could shut my eyes to the plight of others plain to see, seal my ears against the mourning plain to hear–and there are even justifications I might give for doing so. There are enough other problems in the world, after all, and I can actually do something about some of them, now and again; I would not be wrong to focus my attention on those problems and work to address them, rather than to give even so much attention as this to something that lies almost wholly outside my abilities.

But that “almost wholly” nags at me, one of many such things to do so.

I readily admit that there is not much I can do in this world. I am trained in the humanities in a world that does not value them and barely pretends to do so, and I labor to the extent that I am able (I am looking for work, by the way, but people have to be willing to hire for me to find it) under a load of debt that I took while believing–because I had been told as much, repeatedly across many years, by people I was supposed to be able to trust to know what they were about–that my doing so would lead to the kind of job that would allow me to repay that debt and the concomitant interest and to have a comfortable life in which I could understand myself to be doing some good for some people. Each inhibits what I can actually do. But if all I can do is to keep in mind the wrongs done in the world of which I am aware, then I am obliged to do it by my ethics and morals. (Yes, I do have them.) Thus something like this, in which I note what I see is and how I see it, though I do not know how I can make things better.

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I don’t think I’ve made a secret of my nerdiness; it’s attested here and elsewhere, not least in casual conversations I’ve had with no few people. In some ways, I’ve had to be; there’s a certain amount of nerdiness obligatory in graduate study, particularly graduate study of “that old stuff” that I studied, and there’s more involved in continuing to work with that kind of material after completing degrees and mustering out of formal academia. (Note here, here, here, and here. Note, too, that such citations, even if not necessarily formal, are themselves badges of nerdiness.) And, in the absence of a number of other ways in which people in my part of the world tend to define themselves, nerdiness does offer me some anchor for who and what I am; labels are always problematic, but they do offer sometimes-useful starting points, even to those of us who really ought to be a bit past “starting” at this point.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that I mark out strange little bits of nerdiness in my own life, often in terrible puns. Today is not dissimilar, though I’m neither eleventy-one nor thirty-three to make the kind of gross joke commemorated in one volume. No, today gets marked as Hobbit Day by many of my acquaintance and affiliation, the date in Tolkien’s Legendarium on which both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins are born. While I will not be doing much to celebrate it, having other tasks to which I must apply myself, I note its happening, and the note itself reaffirms, to me and to all who see it, that I am and remain a nerd. And since I no longer have to worry about schoolroom bullies giving me wedgies or waiting with sticks for me to ride my bike past the physical plant, there is some comfort in having a reconnection to what has long been part not only of my public persona but my private personality.

We all always perform, as scholars have noted, even if the audience is only ourselves.

Today, I have my little scene, and I’ve already recited my lines.

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A few years back, now, I reflected on what is now and will likely continue to be regarded as the second major event in the new millennium in the United States (the first being the opening of the millennium): the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It joins the fifth of November, Goliad, and the Alamo as a thing not to forget, and it is akin to 7 December 1941 in being a day that lives in infamy. Or it seems like it should, somehow, even if there seems to be less and less commemoration of, well, all such things. They’re decades gone and more, now, and there is always some new thing on which to fixate, some new wrong that deserves attention and redress (and I say so much sincerely); what has happened is crowded out by what is happening.

There is still not a picture needed for this.

So much is not inappropriate, of course. What went before cannot be changed, although regard for and understanding of it certainly can and almost as certainly should. (This is not to say evil should be excused, of course, though I know well that many will look at the revelation of nuance and detail as an attempt to do so. I see it happen too much with other things not to think that the same will happen again, and while I know that it is not strictly logical, I also know that reason is more than logic alone, despite the stated pretenses of far too many.) What is happening now can, at least to some degree, be changed; what is happening now can, at least to some degree and for some people, be improved. Who benefits and to what extent remain open questions, although they seem to be closing more daily, and in part because of what happened in the wake of the terrorist attacks whose twenty-second anniversary is today.

If we have grown scarred as the cliché has it, it shows us as having been injured and being able to feel less as a result of it. Touch the scars you have, who have them, and then the never-cut flesh beside it, and tell me which place is more sensate. Consider the scars that are shown, and consider, too, the deeper ones formed by wounds not seen but still inflicted, tears and cuts and punctures deep within that make the lungs breathe more raggedly, the bowels move in fits and starts, the heart lurch. We live who live; we endure who do. But we do not do either so well as we did before, though we parade where we have been wounded.

The wounds show more fully the more closely and the smaller we look, of course. How many and how grievous have been inflicted, have been endured, have been accepted? Smooth skin is not necessarily a prize, youth and inexperience not virtues in themselves because unearned (and is there not a fixation on earning to be found?), but not all injuries are deserved, and not all scars are merited.

These years later, having seen the results of fear indulged too long and often, have we yet learned the lessons offered for such high tuition as makes pennies of what a bursar will bill? Or will we need more remediation?

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I have been remarking on what today commemorates for some years, now, not only in this webspace (here, here, and here), but also in others. Having been a union man, and still being one in some ways, I know well the value of organized labor, and I note with some…vexation the repeated refusals by those who claim to want a return to the practices of decades past to align with the organizing principles that informed many of those practices. What made things great wasn’t what many want to believe. (That things weren’t great for a lot of people does not escape me, either, even if it does many–although I know that many don’t bother with pursuit.)

As I think on things this time around, I find myself somewhat caught. I suppose it’s a symptom of too much thinking that conundra emerge, and I suppose it says something about me that I encounter them as often as I do, but I recognize there is a tension at work between the potential ennobling effects of work and the fact that having to work is, in some ways, a curse. For those who value Genesis (the book, not the band or the up-jumped Hyundai), work is one of the things with which the fallen Adam is cursed (1:17-19); I am not up enough on other ideologies to remark on whether a similar burden is imposed from on high, which is my failing and not that of said ideologies. I can remark, however, that there are few in my experience or of whom I have heard report who do not, at least on occasion, complain about their work, even those who say that they love their jobs (and there are many who affirm very much the opposite). Much as I enjoy writing, there are times when the blank page taunts me, and while I meet some of those taunts bravely, there are some from which I have turned away.

I can also remark, though, that I am improved by working, and not only in terms of my bank accounts. Such work as I have done and still do–and I know there are some who will say that I do not “really” work and never have–has sharpened my mind. Used to be that it strengthened by body, too, until I had my jobs that are inside work with no heavy lifting. I’m not the only one, either; my family’s been full of such people, almost all of them better at what they do than I am at what I do, and my family is but one of many such. So there is nobility in the work that is done, even if it is otherwise than ought to be that the work has to be done.

But the work does have to be done, and I remain grateful for those who do that work. As should we all be, even as we work to ensure that those who do the labor upon which we rely are treated as they ought to be, as we would ourselves hope to be treated, did we do that work.

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It would appear to be that time again, when the United States makes a particular show of honoring those who died in its uniformed service, and I air something of a re-run or a spin-off of something I’ve shown before (here, here, and here). In truth, the situation has little changed across the few years I have been making a point of writing in this webspace, the United States and the part of it in which I live marking the day as it has done so long as I recall, and some complaining, perhaps hypocritically, about the juxtaposition.

I am among the some, of course, and doubtlessly the perhaps.

For me this year, while I’ve not been uprooted again, I have been on the road. My family and I took a short trip up through a part of the state we’ve not visited yet, despite it being only a few hours’ drive away. It has made for a decent enough weekend, and one about which I will doubtlessly have more to say in a future post. I’m given to understand that it’s a fairly common pursuit for the time of year, with people getting out of school and “summer” starting (again, the solstice is a few weeks off, and it’s already been plenty warm here); it hasn’t necessarily been so in my life, but a lot of that is because I am a crotchety curmudgeon who hates fun.

Ask my daughter. She’ll tell you.

It might not be the most fitting observance of the day, as I think I’ve noted. But I’m not going to feel ashamed that I took the time to be with my family. And I can affirm that I’ve made a point, not just here, but with that family, and particularly with my daughter, of noting why the holiday is in place. It’s not enough, of course; what can be? It is, however, a start, and that’s got to be good for something.

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