Thinking Back

When Joan was the only baby in the house we lived in an apartment in Oxon Hill Maryland. It was a new development near the Rosecroft racetrack south of the beltway (Rt. 495). The MacLeans were the only ones we ever got to know well there. They lived up one floor on the other side of the entrance. Harry, the son, Clara, the mother and the father whose name I forget. Harry was a sci-fi nut and when we moved to Canada sent us a huge box of old paperbooks of which I read every one and became addicted to some...notably Asimov.

Anyway, we took this particular apartment because I was supposed to go to language school at a nearby naval base (Anacostia)...but they changed it and I had to drive the Baltimore washington turnpike to the National Security Agencies (NSA now notorious for intercepting phone conversations) language school. I was in a class of five learning Hebrew. But the fact that I was learning Hebrew was classified. Two recently enlisted kids who were just out of the Army boot camp, I sergeant who had been in the service for about ten years.

The rest of the class were going to go on to Arabic but I was destined to the
FBI closed intercept on the Israeli embassy. The fact that I was studying Hebrew was classified because the Israelis were our allies and we did not want them to know that we were training agents to spy on them. Our instructor "Schlomo" was an Iraqi Kurd. who had run off when the BAAthist party took power in Iraq and the Kurds who hoped for their own country were the minority and oppressed.

Garbage ancient political bickerings, now renewed as political battles Sometime it seems that the world does not learn from History... and as we know if we don't learn from history we are bound to repeat it. So it is in the middle east were we are repeating all the worst of history.

I am a long way from where I started. Maybe next time I will be able to continue on a vein that is meaningful to you.

Using the Laptop

I am sitting in room 1401 of the International Hotel in Calgary Alberta trying to compose on Audrey's laptop computer. It has no mouse. It is on a table and I am sitting in an ergometrically incorrect position which is causing me a pain in tghe neck. I left in the last misspelling because I have givenb up trying to correct on this keyboard because when I do it goes bonkers on me and I get frustrated. The "DUH" factor kicks in as I try to learn a new skill, i.e. typing on the keyboard which is elevated on a table and trying to move the cursor with a pad instead of a mouse.

I begin to feel old...and old dogs don't do well on new tricks... or so they say. Now I am not a dog...and what I am trying to do is not a trick...does that mean that I can do well or is the adage applicable to adult humans as well as dogs. Am I in fact too old to learn new tricks if in fact I wish to learn a trick. Why would I want to learn tricks??? What tricks would I want to learn??? Card tricks, coin tricks or computer tricks.

If you have read this far, it is time to quit and go to the next post