Learning from Family and Others

I returned home on Friday March 12 after 20 days traveling, promoting three of my books, consulting and visiting family. My trip was a four-state, 3500-mile venture, with the first night in Winnemucca NV and the last in Medford OR. Though many things, humorous and serious, stand out about the trip, one of the most gratifying to me is the way that I take others' knowledge and incorporate it into the fabric of my life. Five brief examples, taken from the last four days of the trip, will illustrate this.

1. While visiting my mother in Palo Alto, CA, I spent the evening with her and a friend watching their TV selections. No NBA games; no law & order shows. Rather, they had taped two History Channel shows: "Pawn Stars" and, a new knockoff of "Antique Roadshow," "American Pickers." The first portrays the life of three generations of a Las Vegas pawn shop family, focusing on the art of making successful pawn shop purchases. I think the thing that fascinated my mother, a Depression-era child, is that junk could be "fixed up" and sold at a considerable profit. But, you didn't have to roll up your sleeves to refurbish the old coke machine--experts did it and then explained exactly what they did. Less successful, I believe, is "American Pickers," where two Iowa-based guys travel America searching people's junkyards and basements for the "jewels" that we all know reside right under the surface of all the crap that we have accumulated for decades, or longer. Both programs give heavy dosages of feel-good fuzzies, where people "connect" around junk or a "deal," but I think "American Pickers" tries a little too hard to try to convince everyone that junk is more than just plain junk. Both programs also provide brief historical vignettes that tell us when Blunderbusses were made, for example, or when Coca-cola made its first coin-taking soda machines. Yet, I find myself strangely enriched by knowing that such shows exist, even though I am sure that I have watched my last episode of both.

2. A different kind of TV/movie experience greeted me with one of my brothers who lives in the SF Bay Area. We decided to spend a morning watching reruns of old "Maverick" TV shows. I had never watched them as a kid (the first run was from 1957-62) because my rather Puritan-oriented mother, who now watches junk shows, felt that Westerns were a little bit "below" our social class. Little did mom know that two of her accomplished sons couldn't find anything better to do on a day when both should be working than critically and appreciatively watch "Maverick." We did muse, however, on why the "Western craze" gripped our society in the late 1950s--was it that the parents of the-then producers, who were the last living link to the old "Wild West era," were dying off, and their producer-sons wanted to romanticize and memorialize that period, which flourished about 80 years previously? You wonder what the next period of nostalgic reminiscence will be. One of the episodes we watched was from the 1958-59 season, entitled "Two Beggars on Horseback." Heavy moralistic themes and lots of fake fighting pervaded the whole, but here we have a bit of an anti-hero motif, the only scene in the entire series where the good guys wear black hats for a spell. One down, about 115 episodes to go.

Then, as if this wasn't enough, we decided to watch Robert Altmann's 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon, based on the 1930 novel by the famous San Franciscan Dashiell Hammett. Bogey plays the tough-guy investigator Sam Spade who not only is searching for the missing Falcon, but also has to discover the reason for his colleague's untimely death. Lots of memorable lines pepper this classic, and I felt completely at home, since I would eat dinner that night in San Francisco, just a few blocks from where Spade's colleague Miles Archer, tumbled down the hill after being shot.

3. A different kind of knowledge was imparted by an old friend, whom I really haven't talked to much in the past 30 years, when I stopped in to see him in Menlo Park CA. He was a doctoral student in philosophy in the early 1970s before realizing that philosophy Ph. D.s usually ended up driving cabs, and so he went into the family business. But he has never lost his love for figuring out knotty problems and fearlessly tracing leads wherever they take him. We were talking about China in WWII and its gradual growth as a world power, and he mentioned to me the compelling and moving testimony before a congressional committee of George Ashcroft Fitch (1884-1979), a Presbyterian missionary and former director of the YMCA in Nanking, about the "Rape of Nanking" in 1937-38. A little study on Fitch led me to Iris Chang's 1997 study on the Rape of Nanking, most of which was driven by her parents' chilling stories they heard from their homeland and from the 2,000 pages of meticulously kept records of John Rabe, a German Nazi who actually helped set up a safe zone to protect the Chinese. Fascinating stuff, and all of which I really didn't know...

4. Well, I went from one friend to the next, and he told me that he had just read a book on the creativity of Leonardo da Vinci and was impressed by it (we had been talking about the nature of our minds and how "creative" we might be). I found the book; it is entitled How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, by Michael J. Gelb. Hm, I thought. This might be an interesting read. So, I dashed home to check out Mr. Gelb, watch a video he made on the book and then read a few reviews. The "bottom line?" I found his presentation a bit too filled with "cliches" to be much of an "act" of genius or even helpfully get at the notion of "genius." But, I was heartened as I saw the video: "I could not only do this; I could do these things much better...," I thought. But, enriched I was.

5. Then, on the way home, I stopped in at the University of Oregon to eat lunch with a friend who invited me to speak a couple of times on campus. We had talked about my "stuff" the previous times I was there, and so I decided to probe his interests. He had completed his Ph. D. at the U of O in 2003 on the subject of the Basque population and conflicts in SE Oregon in the late 19th-early 20th century. Some might see in this an exercise in extreme arcane work and, I admit, it probably will not make the list of the "top ten books" anyone will ever read. But as we talked, I brought my knowledge of that culture and history to bear and was rewarded by my friend's detailed distinctions among the various Basque peoples, the nature of the "producer" quarrels that existed in Basque country in Oregon, the living history preserved by that people, the food, restaurants and other cultural remnants of the people and many other things.

Conclusion

I am almost positive that I will never write a book on any of the five subjects described above. "Pawn Stars" or Maverick episodes may entertain and give knowledge, but they aren't my focus. Though the history of China in the 1930s is fascinating, that also won't be my forte. If I ever write a book on creativity, it will not be on that subject, but it will be breathing creativity through every sentence. Thus, no need for that, either. Then, I think there is a far greater possibility that I will spend another night in Winnemucca NV during Basque festival than to write anything significant on this most interesting group from the Pyrenees.

These are just a sample of the special things learned on the trip through paying attention to what people say. What are some of the sources of your new knowledge in life?

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