Whither The Fool?

I, like most parents, am, often concerned about the ungodly, negative messages being poured into my childrens’ heads each and every day by the worldly society in which we live. The sources of the “poison” is many, and include the mass media, the school curriculum, and even the crudity of the schoolyard and the street where a garbled version of “truth” is dispensed among their peers, the blind leading the blind.

Much is made especially of the “evil” that is dispensed as TRVTH in the public schools. I have often thought that some of the shrill rhetoric by “concerned Christians” and others reagarding the “government school conspiracy” was a bit far-fetched. This morning I came across a quote by Spencer W. Kimball that illustrates my own views far better than I could myself:

�..Some years ago we visited a country where strange ideologies were taught and �..pernicious doctrines�.. were promulgated every day in the schools and in the captive press. Every day the children listened to the doctrines, philosophies, and ideals their teachers related.

�..Someone said that �..constant dripping will wear away the hardest stone.�.. This I knew, so I asked about the children: �..Do they retain their faith? Are they not overcome by the constant pressure of their teachers? How can you be sure they will not leave the simple faith in God?�..

�..The answer amounted to saying �..We mend the damaged reservoir each night. We teach our children positive righteousness so that the false philosophies do not take hold. Our children are growing up in faith and righteousness in spite of the almost overwhelming pressures from outside.�..

�..Even cracked dams can be mended and saved, and sandbags can hold back the flood. And reiterated truth, renewed prayer, gospel teachings, expression of love, and parental interest can save the child and keep him on the right path�.�

–Spencer W. Kimball, Faith Precedes the Miracle [1972], 113�..14).

We cannot rearrange the entire world so that it is a “perfect environment” for our children’s upbringing. In fact, I don’t know that we’d want to do so, given that sooner or later our children will have to live in and cope with that world on their own. In my own experience I have noticed that those who are closely sheltered from the world are wholly unprepared to function in it with integrity when they are fully exposed to it at last, as adults free to choose their own course.

For example, many years ago as a young engineer working for a company that did fabrication of complex steel plate structures, I met a young man, a welding engineer, who was raised in a Mennonite community in the farmlands of Indiana. He was certainly “taught in the way he should go” by his parents and others of that strict Anabaptist sect, and further he was very much sheltered and cloistered away from the world in general.

When he came of age and decided to attend college, it was his first exposure to the “real world,” and it was a heady concoction. He quickly learned to drink, smoke, partake of recreational narcotics and consort with women of negotiable virtue. When I met him he was estranged from his “controlling” family, and continued to live a life of sad debauchery. He simply could not cope with The World when he was exposed to it because he was not prepared for it.

Far better, I do believe, to accept that the world is going to inflict a small amount of damage each day, and “mend the reservoir” in like manner. “That which does not kill us (spiritually, in this case) makes us stronger.”

A couple of years ago when my daughter was regularly taking trips to visit her mother out-of-state, we arrived at the checkin counter for Northwest Airlines at Houston Intercontinental Airport, only to be told that we were “late” and she could not board the plane.

In fact, “late” in that case meant about half an hour before her flight was to leave. We had trouble finding a parking space–the airport then as now was completely inundated by construction part of which closed down some of the parking deck at the terminal–and ran as fast as we could, but the “rules” by which NWA apparently operates would not allow her to board the flight “that late.”

The counter agent was absolutely immovable on that point. No amount of pleading would budge her. We ended up having to drive overnight to get her to her mother’s, all thanks to that NWA employee’s indifference to serving her customer in their time of need.

Fast forward to this morning:

I was due to fly out of Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) at 8:55 AM for the connecting flight from Minneapolis to NW Arkansas. The trip had been booked for two weeks–I was visiting a client’s facility in Pennsylvania, about two hours away from BWI–and I had already had an interesting trip out, arriving an hour and a half late from Memphis to BWI because an aircraft had stranded on the runway at BWI and we had to divert elsewhere for fuel.

So NWA apparently had no problem with the fact that they got me to my destination so late. After all, they already had my money, and “sometimes delays can’t be helped.”

So this morning, although I left my hotel three and a half hours before my flight, a combination of rush hour traffic, unfamiliar highways and a terrible lack of clearly marked signs telling where to drop off the rental car had me running late. As it happened, I got to the ticket counter to check in about half an hour before the flight. The ticket agent for NWA was very nice and very helpful. She did all she could on her end to get me on my way, but had to issue a “standby boarding pass” because the flight was “closed out” (I don’t fly NWA or any of the other big carriers that often; usually I’m flying Southwest, whose employees have NEVER told me I was “too late” for a flight until it had pushed back from the gate).

I got through security–with some delay–and made it to the gate ten minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave.

All in vain.

The gate agent had “logged out” of the system and was unwilling to reopen it. She would not hear my pleas that I needed to board the flight, that I the plane was still sitting there at the tunnel, for gosh sake!

You see, one reason I was desperate to make the flight was that I was going to have a long layover in Minneapolis where my son attends school. He and I rarely get a chance to visit, and this was going to be a great opportunity. I tried to explain this to the gate agent. Didn’t matter. “Sir, you should have thought of all this and made sure you got to the airport on time,” she blithely said, dismissing me.

“Why is it that when you people make me hours late, that’s ‘beyond your control,’ but when I try to drive through a major metropolitan area unfamiliar to me, have to deal with poorly-marked roadsigns, etc., that’s ‘my fault’?”

She had no answer, and didn’t care.

I vow from this day forward I will never fly Northwest Airlines again. Their “corporate culture” appears to include studied indifference to the needs of customers and a rigid attention to “rules” that seem always to favor them. I found out later that a change to my ticket cost me $100 as a result of being denied boarding on the flight.

Hm. I wonder if NWA has some sort of “incentive program” to encourage their agents to deny boarding to those who are “late” (even if it is a full ten minutes before departure, and you’re standing right there are the gate!)

I wonder how much my Ms. Frazier, attending gate D-3 at BWI this morning at 8:45 AM, stood to gain from this situation?

UPDATE - FRIDAY APRIL 22, 2005 - 12:30 PM CDT

I got the standby ticket, and went and sat in the gate area. I asked the agent when they would call the names for standby and she told me “shortly.”

About TEN MINUTES BEFORE DEPARTURE, several twenty-somethings showed up all out of breath. They were allowed on the plane. I approached the podium and asked the agent “why did you allow those kids on the flight, and you all wouldn’t let me board my earlier flight when I came up at about the same time?”

She answered “well, it just depends. We hadn’t closed this one out yet. Sometimes we get finished early, and sometimes we don’t.” So she admits that it is all “arbitrary,” that the rules about “being on time” are really subject to their interpretation. In other words, had the gate agent this morning decided to do so, I could have gone on that flight. She just “didn’t feel like it,” I guess.

I sat back down and waited. She called name after name. Mine wasn’t one of them. Then she announced the flight was closed. Again I approached the podium. I asked “where was my name on the list? My name is ‘Polhemus’”.

She looked at her screen. “Oh, you’re not even on my list!”

“What!”

“Oh, wait, ‘BALMUS?’ I called your name first! You didn’t respond!”

“THAT’S BECAUSE MY NAME IS ‘PUH-LEE-MUS’ NOT ‘BAHL-MUS’!”

She shrugged. “Well, sorry, I had a lot of stand-bys and I had to get to everybody.” Just like that.

I’m finished with ‘em. I purchased a direct flight ticket home on Southwest, an airline that is hardly the most “professional appearing” bunch on the surface, but knows quite a lot about customer service. I have flown Southwest for years, and I honestly cannot think of a single time they ****ed me off, even the ONE TIME that I was delayed several hours because of mechanical trouble (and my comments earlier notwithstanding, I DO understand some things can’t be anticipated!)

DO NOT FLY NORTHWEST AIRLINES!!!

Do it (not) for the Children.

On April 14, my dear sweet wife Nancy turns the ripe old age of 4x, thus catching up with me once again (for a few months, at least).

Of late our relationship has been much on the minds of both of us, this due mostly to the fact of my continuing protracted absence from our home as I work out-of-state during the week, arriving home on Friday night for an all-too-brief respite at home (if “respite” is the right word, with one teenaged daughter and three grandchildren under the age of six in residence!)

I confess right now, I have been madly in love with this woman for nearly the entirety of our eleven-year marriage. I say “nearly” only because I did something very old-fashioned in marrying her: I married her because it was a reasonable, sensible thing to do, not because I was “madly in love” at the time I proposed.

I have been divorced twice before, something I’m not at all proud of. I have always believed in marriage, but it took me until my mid-30s to figure out what marriage was, and how it ought to work. When Nancy and I met–through an “introduction service” which is very common today via the ‘net but which wasn’t so common in the early 90s–I had been separated from my second wife for about ten months, and was still in the midst of picking up the pieces. I was really a mess. I lived in a dinky, dingy apartment with no furniture, I had just completed a period of near-unemployment of some months, and had just taken a new job (which turned out to mean, soon after we met, that I would have to transfer to another city two hours away).

I was lonely, of course, but I’d made a sort of hobby of “loneliness” for years, even during my previous marriages. My traditional notions of marriage and family were badly battered, though I grimly held onto them almost out of spite against the reality of my life thus far. Nancy was a single mother of eight years by that time, divorced from a man from another country and culture who during their ten years of marriage had never quite mastered English–as a result, Nancy speaks fluent Spanish to this day. He had quaint, Latin notions of home being the place where, when he came their drunk or otherwise intoxicated, they had to let him in. Children were the inevitable by-product of prodigious sexual relations which he considered his god-given right. Otherwise, they were his wife’s concern.

As a practicing Roman Catholic, Nancy resolutely continued in the marriage long after her illusions had been put to rest. She worked a full-time job away from home and a full-time job at home caring for her daughter and son, born a year apart. She paid the bills, did the housekeeping herself, and continued to “stand by her man,” who was in the meantime acquiring quite a drug habit. When he was finally sent to prison for distributing large amounts of the stuff, she finally threw in the towel, moved a couple of states away and tried to start afresh, this time as a bona fide single mother rather than just a single mother in fact.

Things weren’t that much easier for her after that. She continued to work, put her kids into private schools, began putting herself through college, worked two and sometimes three jobs to make all the ends meet, dealt with increasing responsibilities in her main job, began a health and fitness program, and generally exhibited the astonishing characteristics that mark great, unsung women everywhere.
Then she met me. It would be great to say that things got easier for her after that, but the fact is she added the responsibility for, and demands of, a new husband, plus a four-year-old stepdaughter. She had to deal also with my own emotional baggage–which got better over time (for the most part) but was quite piquant at the time of our marriage.

Added to that was a new religion–she converted to my own Latter-Day Saint faith, on her own volition, not in order to please me. And she has been far more faithful a “Saint” afterward than I have ever been.

Since then, we have seen our kids grow up, a couple leave the nest, the arrival of three grandchildren–and the subsequent taking up of responsibility for those grandchildren, as they have now lived with us for over a year and a half, with our taking almost all parental responsibility for them as their own, biological parents cannot and will not.

My wife is astonishing. She is not perfect, but only because human beings can’t be. If she had a better lot in life–read “a better husband”–she would shine even brighter than she does. I’m all that holds her back, of that I’m convinced.

I want her to know on her birthday, that I love her far more now than ever, and it seems only to increase with each day, each month, each passing year.