Lexington Green

When summoned by the horseman’s cry
from breaking fast and tending barns
The Yeoman farmers trained response
was to secure their ready arms

The nineteenth dawn that April bore
revealed a revolutionary scene
Captain Parker’s men had met
to learn the news on Lexington Green

But red clad soldiers marched all night
From landing ships on Cambridge shore
And through Lexington they’d pass
En route to capture Concord’s Store

Lieutenant William Sutherland
Called to the men across the sward
Commanding them “Disperse Ye Rebels
Ye Villains, most unruly mob.”

Outnumbered, Captain Parker’s men
were ordered to disperse once more
But chaos and uncertainty
lay beneath the fog of war

Who fired first? the tales suggest
Perhaps a sniper off the scene
but British shot and bayonets
Killed nine men on Lexington Green

Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith
Arriving with three companies
Ordered drumbeats for the march
To Concord’s Bridge and history

In Concord town the Minutemen
Had learned of Lexington’s Melee
On Punkatasset over-watched
As Redcoats made their first foray

Searching houses, barns and fields
for weapons cached and powder kegs
but long since moved and all they found
were milk and barely, ham and eggs

When searching soldiers caught the site
Of mounds fresh piled in the fields
And ready spades we turned to dig
And three great cannon were revealed

But as they searched, the Minutemen
From Acton, Bedford, and Westford
Joined the Lincoln men above
The Concord rivers northern shore

A Regiment of militiamen
descended  Punkatasset Ridge
assaulted Captain Parson’s Force
assigned to guard the Northern Bridge

The Regulars formed to volley fire
As if for warfare in the town
A warning shot rang out and then
the musket balls were raining down

They fled their post and headed south
to form with Regiments complete
and leaving off their fruitless search
the British Colonel called retreat

The local men who took the bridge
Had learned to shoot when they were Boys
Some had marched to Montreal
To fight the French and Iroquois

At Meriam’s Corner, and Brooks Hill
The local muskets took their toll
and passing through the ambuscade
at Bloody Angle Thirty  fell

At last they came back to the field
where shot had shattered dawn serene
And Parker had then his revenge
Upon the sward of Lexington Green

Hometown

One facet of returning to Boston after half my life away is dealing with the demons of High School. Not just my demons but those of my friends from my home town. Things we didn’t talk about then are now part of the conversations. The emotional irritants from 1986 have been encapsulated in enough mother of pearl to be taken out and admired in the light. As technology increases the frequency of re-acquaintance, old names and faces trip old traps. The strong and confident find themselves in tears over a snub two decades passed. Anger long since packed away in the attic is extracted, unfolded, and ignites upon exposure to fresh air.

When we were expecting our son, my wife and I read many books. One phrase that stood out is ontology recapitulates phylogeny. In simpler language, an embryo passes through all the stages of evolution before it becomes a baby. All those previous steps are incorporated into the nascent human. But evolution didn’t stop with human infancy. Dr Karp suggests we should think of toddlers as cavemen not yet ready to comprehend full language. Is the teenager then still carrying around the same set of energy and impulses as we needed when we were in the trees? As adults, we have built on what we were as children and teens. We’ve incorporated it into our adult selves. Have we grown from our pains or just grown around them? Nietzsche promised us to grow stronger from a non fatal encounters, but was that may have just been the optimistic aspiration of a man in extreme pain.

Like Robert Frosts swinger of birches, I have gone away and come back. My arc described not just a removal from earth, although I have spent a good deal of time looking down at earth from high up on a cliff side, but also a removal from the society in which I first developed. I can’t claim to any great insights to any development but, maybe, my own. It is not that I have grown beyond who I was in 1989, but that I’ve gotten a sense of how that boy fits inside the man I am now.

Stoughton. Mention of the name of my home town now evokes a common response: Ikea. Yes, the great blue behemoth sits in the center of the woods that we dubbed Sasquatch Territory many years ago. The name came from the trees bent, like Frost’s Birches, from an ice storm, that an older brother in the neighborhood would rather have ascribe to the attentions of a descendant of some sibling branch of our phylogeny. The naming was inspired, no doubt, by the most popular of episode from the Six Million Dollar man. Those woods were our playground, our battle grounds, where we built dams and dug for old railroad spikes. The benefit of living with such great woods behind our houses came at the cost of being removed from the center of action, around the North Elementary School, where the tighter knit subdivisions lead to the forming of alliances that would play out on the school grounds and classrooms. Four of us from the edge of Stoughton had the combination of nurture and nature to succeed in Stoughton’s Academic environment. A Catholic, a Korean Buddhist, and a Unitarian, and me, the Jew, somehow survived and succeeded, at least academically.

Stoughton is proud of its blue-collar roots.  Drinking and smoking were normal part of teen culture, as was a moderate degree of drug use.  We lost a few kids to driving accidents, most notably for me one of my older sisters boyfriends.  There was social ostracism, taunting, bullying, and fights.  The latter were often started with our version of a thrown gauntlet, the phrase “meet you at the tracks”. We even have our own minstral, singing in much more evocative terms than I ever could.  My sister’s friend Lori Gerow grew up and married into the name Lori McKenna.  How a girl from a school that prized speed metal above all grew up to be a country/folk star is just the sort of irony that you might expect from a town that is caught on the edge of the Boston Metrosprawl:  not quite farm country anymore, but not quite the city.

There are many stories triggered by this reminiscence, but they don’t really address the matter at hand. My demons from this part of my life are domesticated beasts who now rarely ruin the carpet or chew my slippers. I faced them later in life, when they were the members of a larger pack that briefly overwhelmed me. That time brought deep introspection and a truce that has held.  Nec Stoughtonia Terrent. High School Ended for me in 1989. Between there and here is a long journey. But my connection with these friends, the commonality of experience ended then, too. After that, Stoughton was a place visited for a Week during Christmas or Summer in between Training and Education. After my folks sold their place on Larson Road, I didn’t have any excuse to go back, and lots of other demands on my vacation time. So to connect with people I knew back then, I refer to events of two decades hence. But what to do when the responses bring forth such vehemence? Stoughton wasn’t nearly the worst thing I’ve faced in my life. I can’t claim I would have chosen that as my upbringing, or that there are not major steps there I would have changed, but I don’t hate the place, not by any stretch.

One common theme though is a sense that we really didn’t know each other back then. Certainly the divide along gender lines was quite strict amongst us, the geeks. There might a be a strong friendships that crossed lines, but they were ones and twos. My friends were mostly guys. Girls in class were fearsome things, more likely to laugh at you then to respond kindly to an approach. My early relationships happened during transitions: summers, trips. Even crushes were reserved for girls outside my classes, girls who wouldn’t have seen the ass I made of myself by talking too much during a class I had prepared for too little. I don’t know if a 13 year old boy and girl can be just friends. Certainly it is a chemically unstable situation, too prone to slip on one side or the other into obsession or rejection. Some of the girls in the classes were caustic . Some unconscious action of mine would bring derision, a sneer of contempt and add another layer of shellac to my shell of isolation. It didn’t keep me from speaking up to the teacher, to challenging the pedagogy, but is kept my attention focused on the front of the classroom. Another girl from these days remain fixed in my mind with a perpetually startled expression, mortified of the least attention. An essay read aloud in English class would periodically cast a brief spotlight into the mind of one of these foreign entities.

There are a few things I got from Stoughton that I might not have if I had grown up elsewhere.  It was far enough from the city that there were still large tracts of woods.  Both houses I lived in backed up to stretches of woods large enough that I never fully explored them.  I loved the freedom and relative safety I had of wandering free in the woods, a freedom that my Brookline raised son will not be ableto enjoy without travel.  Stoughton was a small enough town that we knew, if not everyone, than the majority.  Rare is the member of my graduatin class whose name does not evoke some small memory.  I remember my teachers, knew the principals.  My folks and my friends parents were involved in town meeting and in social issues that affected our town.  If I was left behind by the organized sports collectives so popular amongst my peers in elementary school (Soccer, Baseball) the music department and High School Wrestling team made up for it.  The honors program challenged me enough to get me engavged, but was not so competative that it stifled anything other than the superstars.

Today Stoughton is more memory to me than reality.  I cheered to hear that we won the football game on Thaksgiving against tradition rival of Canton, but didn’t go to watch the game.  Few of the teachers that taught me are still employed in the system, far more have retired.  My friends no longer live there:  those that stayed in the area have migrated to surrounding towns, or, like me, have been drawn in to the city.  Periodic epsidoes involving Ikea aside, the greatest draw of Stoughton remains the staple of our diet from adolescence:  Town Spa Pizza.

Even more musings

  • Being able to function with little sleep is an essential skill for an Army Officer.
  • You are never more aware of the style or quality of the pavement as when you are on Rollerblades.
  • It rarely saves time to go a longer route when trying to avoid traffic, but it makes you feel like you are making more progress since you keep moving.
  • It’s not that I wasn’t as big a geek as I thought I was, it is that fewer people knew it than I realized.
  • SQLWCHAR != wchar_t
  • The last exchange between Fezzik and Inigo (“Fezzik, you did something right for once.”  “I won’t let it go to my head.”  Should have been a rhyme.)
  • I’m way too aware of the chord changes when I listen to music.
  • Listen to Leo!
  • Hire smart people and then make them do menial tasks is the basis for too many companies.
  • Cygwin makes working on Windows merely distasteful.
  • Just because we elected a Black man President does not mean that racism is defeated in America.
  • You would have to go back before sliced bread to find an invention greater than the Thera Cane.
  • I here-by dub anger derived from problems while developing software “Code Rage”
  • Kind of Blue. The best Jazz starter drug I know.
  • Power putty is liquid, it just flows really slowly.
  • If you haven’t used your waffle iron to make grilled cheese sandwiches you are wasting its potential.
  • I have embraced my inner geek, since my outer geek is getting all of the attention and my inner geek was feeling neglected.
  • I swear I will learn how to type someday.
  • Looks like the answer wasn’t 42…it was 44.
  • When the build system takes too long, avoid the build system.
  • Puff the Magic Dragon still makes me tear up at the line “A Dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”  If you have a kid, you’ll understand.
  • Few things are more fun to argue about than fascism in Starship Troopers.

Echos of Erudition

Mr. Homer, My Ninth grade English teacher once made a point of describing the joy he felt on that day in Spring when you first notice the buds on the trees.  I’d long forgotten  that description until moving back to Massachusetts.

In California, there are always some trees that have leaves.  The winter months there mean rain and a return to lushness from the brown of Summer.

New England is defined by the transition of colors:  orange, gray,  white, gray, green.
Biking to work these past few days has required a quicker set of reflexes to avoid the reemergence of the joggers.  Many exposed legs and arms iterating above the root-knarled path along the Charles.  They wear t-shirts that don’t quite hide the thin layer of Winter insulation that motivates their activity.

The buds are on the trees, and I only noticed yesterday.  Thanks, Mr. Homer

Musings

Don’t hit publish on the blog when you just want to save a draft.

Big Builds are Bad. Software should be developed and distributed in small packages. Linux is successful due to things like apt, yum, and yast.

Interface Specifications need to be more specific.  Just saying that something is a string is not really helpful if that something needs to conform to a pattern.

Programming and blogging requires sugar in the brain.

Interviews are tricky…on both sides of the table. Career fairs are worse.

C++ Has a lot of magic in it. Can we make type level programming more transparent?

Microsoft purchasing Yahoo would be good for Google, but bad for just about everyone else.

Being a Dad is really cool. Even when it sucks, it is great. Sometimes kids refuse to go to sleep. This leads to sleep deprivation, but also leads to really wonderful moments in rocking chair in the middle of the night.

Pool is a great Geek game. Lower left-hand English is neat.

Snowshoes are good off the trail. Not so good on the trail. If your going on the trail, take the cross country skis. Snowmobiles smell funny.

New Hampshire winter weather is still as brutal today as it was when I left the area in the early ’90s.

It is hard to sing a Jazzy version of Old MacDonald had a Farm.  It is harder to do after the tenth repetition while trying to get a child to fall asleep.
If you listen to Children’s CDs long enough, you will develop favorite children’s songs. I like the hippo song.

Is there really a difference between the Ethernet and SCSI protocols? I don’t know, but it would be fun to find out.

The compiler is your friend. Let it check your work for you.

Why write code on a white board if you have a computer available? Especially if you have an overhead projector?

Where do the local peregrine falcons sleep? Where would they be sleeping if we hadn’t built up the whole area?

If I could have a redo on which language to take as a Sophomore, I would probably would have liked to take Chinese. Russian and Arabic would also do. German was not a good choice for me.

If Bush Senior had insisted on pushing to Baghdad, it would have been my generation in this mess as opposed to the current set of junior officers. Instead of Haiti, I would have gone to Basra or something.

There are too many interesting topics in the world to pursue them all, or even a small fraction of them.

Every philosopher I’ve read, especially the ones I disagree with, ave said something that is valuable and true.

No matter how old you are, when you get together with your parents, you revert to teenager status.

This list should never see the light of day.

Spotted on the North Bank of the Charles

Yeah, the snow today was gorgeous. I walked to work this morning. As I crossed the BU Bridge I noticed a flock of ducks in the water in the lee of the railroad bridge. On the north side of the bridge is a small clearing where the ducks and geese congregate in the warmer weather. I noticed the snow was well beaten down there, and wondered if that was from people or waterfowl. As I continued to walk and look, I noticed a large, brown bird overlooking the same clearing. I recognized the Brown feather with black horizontal lines of my favorite raptor: The Peregrine Falcon. I had seen one in this area earlier in the year, while on a bike ride with my family. As I stopped and watched it, I noticed it’s white underbelly with brown spots that you would see it the bird were in flight. I stopped a bunch of people on the bridge and pointed it out. Seeing a peregrine falcon in the snow while crossing the Charles River is truly a special experience.

Climbing at Quincy Quarries

One reason we moved to Boston was to be closer to the things we like to do. Yes, the Sierras are great, but at a minimum of 3 hours driving time from the SF Bay Area multiplied by the screaming infant factor, they were just too far away for regular visits.

This weekend was our only our second where we all stayed in the Boston area since we moved here in July. I made plans with some I met via meetup.com’s Boston Rock climbing meetup to climb at quincy quarries on Saturday morning. I had heard about the quarries back before I left the area (I left in 1989) but was not in to climbing then, so I had never made the effort to go. The stories back then were of car break-ins, falling rocks, and kids drownding in the water left in the old quarry holes. website offline I had been assured that the current scene was much more positive. I was pleased to find out that it was so. back link check . After some debate, my wife and I decided that it would be a decent attempt for a family outing, so we packed up the car and drove the 15 minutes south to Quncy.  We met up with Roger, my partner for the day, out on the street.  We both were running a little late, which made for a perfect connection.  The climbing was a one minute walk in on a paved trail.
While there is climbing that close to SF (Glen Park comes to mind) the quarries are a great site. The main area is a large grassy field with cliffs surrounding it.  One portion is quite overhung and makes a decent place to, say, put a stroller containing a sleeping toddler.  The cliffs are short, the tallest in this area was 50 feet.  But then again, that is still taller than even the highest point at most climbing gyms.  Add to that the fact that it is real rock and it makes for an enjoyable climbing experience.

We spent the day at  K wall.  I opened by leading outside corner, a 5.8 with great gear placements all the way up (Although I did clip a fixed piton). Once the rope was up, we pretty much shared ropes with the parties next to us on this climb and the 5.9 next to it.  At the end of the day, we move the rope over one more anchor and beat on what we thougt was a 5.9.  It was, except for the final move which was probably low 11s.  More than I was ready for at that point, even on TR.

The climbers were a great bunch.  Lots of people just getting into the sport that were experienceing “outside” for the first time, mixed with a few old school climbers that showed up solo and just got a ride on the existing topropes. One such old-school climber (Paul) showed a level of gracfulness in his layback approach to the crux move on outside corner, that we had all dyno-ed our way through.   I followed his example on my next attempt.

I managed to abrade the back of my hand on  a hand jam, so I call it a successful day.