Literacy Versus Accuracy

If knowledge is power, what are the facts?

The ability to store and retrieve knowledge becomes more valuable than the knowledge itself. In future children may not learn times tables by rote (in much the same way spelling and cursive writing skills are de-emphasized today). The cognitive growth plates earned by knowing multiplication will be bridged by infant exposure to Mozart. After all, you can type any question into Google and get an immediate answer, often more than one.

Hemingway broaches the advantage of illiterate knowledge. The character Anselmo in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS is able to listen to and retain instruction better because he has no capacity of record keeping to fall back on and therefore must remember and know what Robert Jordan tells him immediately as he tells him.

My folklore professor did not allow notes in his class. He said if you couldn’t remember it, then it’s not worth knowing, although that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be on the test.

Books have screwed up absorption along with photographs, and now that fertile information delta where text and image are more integrated than kanji: the Internet! With the Internet conveniently hand held, there’s no reason any of us should know anything! That’s what makes gossip so exciting. Knowledge is passé, but passing it is power.

The Water Is Thin

It’s 90 miles Key West to Cuba, and people make it on all manner of watercraft, albeit some more successfully than others. The English Channel is only 21 miles across at the Strait of Dover. People SWIM that. The Iberian Peninsula is 10 miles off the coast of Africa.

The Iberian Peninsula is Spain and Portugal fused together in one finger of land that tips down off the southwest corner of Europe. The southern edge of the peninsula borders the Strait of Gibraltar, which is the waterway leading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The Strait of Gibraltar is less than 10 miles across at its narrowest point, making Europe and Africa the two closest continental neighbors with the exception of the Asia – Europe border, scrunched over the Urals.

We’re not even supposed to have diplomatic relations with Cuba, and yet we have an undeniable geographic relationship. The same is true of Spain and Africa. To assume that Spain did not have a social link with Africa prior to Columbus is absolute folly. It’s a locational no-brainer to realize that people were crossing that narrow strait.

The first introduction of Africans to North America was not through slavery. Africans sailed aboard Spanish ships as free citizens on expeditions to the New World. They established the footprint for freedom in the United States, a footprint for us all to walk in.

The Master's

I dedicated seven years to golf. In the end, I came out with a master’s, not with the green jacket, but with a cap and gown and hood. Truly, it was no more surprising than Cabrera’s win.

No one thought I would ever graduate. One professor told me the worst thing I could do for a graduate degree was to get married, and the second worst was to have kids. I did both. A three year program stretched into an eleven year span, and a forty page thesis went to 134 pages including eleven tables and thirty-nine figures! By the time I submitted my thesis, my social security number had expired.

In the meantime, I took a job at a golf course, which led to another job at another golf course, and then another. It was a good, clean industry, with most people polite and well-dressed. I worked business hours in the offices, behind the scenes where club pros humorously fowl computer software, chefs serve dessert samples, and course maintenance folks leave flowers on one’s desk from time to time. It wasn’t always the Shangri-La of Caddy Shack, but Augusta’s recent tournament has reminded me of many good times. And the UNBELIEVABLE VICTORY OF HANGING IN THERE FOR A MASTER’S!

Despite clubhouse access during numerous professional events, I never met Angel Cabrera. Still, I’d like to share with him a poem I wrote for my graduation, appropriate for a fellow Master.


COMMENCEMENT POEM

Today they are not judging me
I am free as a birdsong in mid-flight
I can rest my hands upon my knees
And gloat into the night.

I Hate Crayons

I love felt-tip markers because you can throw them away. Come across a single marker, separated from the herd of its eight-pack, and you can assume it’s dried up—chuck it. Any marker of ambiguous age you simply toss without question. CRAYONS ARE FOREVER. I hate crayons. They never die, and they never get used up! Crayon marks are near impossible to remove from upholstery and walls, and mildly challenging on window glass and auto paint. I have enough crayons to start childcare for a small country. Anybody want to color?

Writer's Digest

I’d like to say that I’m learning to let things build up inside me. Truth is, the switch is on, open throttle. I have no power to stop it or know what turns it off; I only know sometimes I’m not as articulate and I am less happy there.

Yogi Bhajan says, “The greatest art is to sit and wait, let it come.” Certainly you can’t dry fire the imagination, so I couldn’t agree more; however, I found this quote on a box of herbal tea, specially blended naturally to aid digestion—“…sit and wait, let it come…”—it works there too. And I can think of one other place, but that depends on your partner.



For those of you concerned about my health, I give you this: I drink ginger tea for my throat. I find the ginger comfortably burns its way down my throat with a healing wake, a little more stringent than saltwater on a wound. I sometimes suffer from Streptococcus and other milder maladies of the extreme upper esophagus. I lose my voice for days at a time, which is probably why I write. The digestive benefits are a lovely by-product.