Time: Bronx Stardust: by Barie Fez-Barringten

"Bronx Stardust"
by Barie Fez-Barringten

Time

As stardust is the particles in the environment so is Bronx Stardust about the bits and pieces that are falling from bigger bodies. These are the fragments of and left overs from main issues, bodies and lives of the times. These are the crumbs from the table where you can only imagine the weight, substance and ingredients of the main dish. The real story has already been lived, the real place is already remodeled and reconfigured so all that remains is the stardust left behind and un-noticed by the the ebb and flow of social forces. If these are the crumbs we can only wonder what was the meal. If this is the stardust what was the heavenly body. As scince gathers the strdust I have gathered my recolections of the details of time, place and a space labeled the Bronx.

My mother tells the story of how when I was about three and her father visited us on Home Street that when he entered our apartment the first question I asked him was when he was leaving. She found it amusing and told this to everyone. I never saw in it any thing funny because I really wanted to know how much time I had to spend with him. It was my way of building an agenda and seeing what we could do in the allotted time. Even today, I remember it clearly. I was not trying to be rude or suggest he leave, quite the contrary, I was so glad he visited because his visits were so rare and I had so many things, questions and things going on in my little head. He was a dear man and very kind.

I also realized that then that our time on the earth was limited and we had little time to spend and with each other. I daily dreaded that my mother and father would die before me and I was very upset by this fact. I also lived in expectation of potential accidents and health problems that could end their lives. Then I would be alone and my world would end. In anomie I could not imagine a world without my parents until I got older and one of my teachers at school taught us to prepare for that event by taking our lives into our own hands by being responsible and caring. That was a change of time for me; one season ended and another began.

Bronx Stardust is about this time and is secular; it of this age. Yet it has topics which transition many ages; even the unseen and spiritual. Time’s relativity is no better demonstrated as when we grow past 20; a 20-year period seems relatively near relative with other 20-year periods than when we are less than 20 years old. Then they seem ancient or futuristic.As a boy between 1937 and 1947, until I was ten, it seemed that the roaring twenties and the depression were amongst the events of a distant past. Not the mere twenty years that had gone before. Talking movies, radio, automobile was only just invented and being developed as I grew.

The longer we live the smaller the relationship of any one event, period, age, or generation is to our overall life. So too with issues, we tend to understand things in proportion to the re overall sum of what it is we are viewing in relationship to other things. As a child My Uncle Murray told me how it is for an insect to see the time in which he lives compared to how we see the time because of its life span. His is at high speed to us and yet it is normal to him and actually in slow motion of our way of thinking being that he lives in two days what is sixty years for us and to him he sees us moving at a pace in such slow motion as to almost be inanimate. It may explain why insects getaway for m us before we can catch them. They are moving at a different time then we.

I lived before the oil industry proliferated and highways, air transport flourished. Time and space were perceived differently. Foreign trade, Travel and immigration were at a small scale compared to today. Communication lapses were part of the tempo of thinking and considering where things were located and access to them.There were fewer people and the institutions to serve and support them.

These chronicles are vignettes of the times and period God gave me to build my faith and belief in him. To prepare me for eternity and hopefully lead others to do likewise. These are not Egypt’s ancient pyramids nor Pulitzer Prize writings but merely a testament to the glory of God and his gift of life. As an infant until now I can sleep very little, always curious and ready to explore and use the little time God has gifted to live, grow and enjoy his contexts, resources and blessings. My youth was spent trying to remember and not forget faces, places, names and emotions I had. Even today, I measure most events based on worthy to remember or forget. In addition, God gives us the ability to forget as well as the blessing to recall when he wills.

History gives my identity legitimacy. After this period discovering Europe was discovering my identity. Each place I have visited and learned I found a tidbit of my self and its antecedent. I can see that I am part of a worldwide humanity. This is my cosmopolitan mind; seeing my self in the context of the world places, peoples and customs. During this period I discovered the Bronx and identified with it artifacts, environs, contexts, demographics and gestalt.

Periods are characterized by dominant technologies, wars, crisis weather systems, etc. contexts are the settings in which we play out our lives. Taken together periods and contexts are the external, which provides the inputs and perceptions of the world around us. We tend to identify life with these two.All life has lived in one or another period and context. My life has been spent in time when one part of the world has become enabled by an overabundance and access to energy, electricity, power, credit, food, resources, transportation, communication and information. Morally, it has degenerated to accept worldwide violence and immorality. The metaphors follow accordingly and the so do contexts and period's landmarks.

My family’s contexts, my city, borough, blocks and streets. The schools and teachers. The women and the cars. The places I’ve visited and the people I’ve met. All of these form the landmarks of the period and mark the time. The music, movies and fashion give the time away. The cartoons in the newspaper such as "Archie" and "Tinker’s trolley". Wolds Fairs and wars, etc.There were times when the “underdog” came up and was held in high esteem because the underdog succeeded against all odds. He may or may not have become famous but he would be governing the chance. Today, it is scandal, shock and awe which succeeds, not accomplishment. Of course, the are still the Nobel Peace Prize, Oscars, etc.In 1938, it was the “Sea biscuit”, the long shot that made Pimlico and Santa Anita; racetracks, horses, and horse people permeated the news.Joe DiMaggio in Baseball; Joe Lewis in boxing; and Gorgeous George in Wrestling. I recall seeing him with my dad and his family at the Miami coliseum. Wow! After seeing him so many times on late night television is was so interesting to see him in person.

Time and timing is relative as my Uncle Murray once compared our undemanding of time to compare an insect’s perception to humans. To an insect we move very slow and to us they very quickly. We cannot catch a fly because the fly’s life is lived in such a short time relative to our own and they perceive us moving very slow as we might perceived a still rock or inanimate bolder. When flying out of our reach they have examined us very carefully and anticipated our every move long before we very really reach them. They perceive us in a different time. Likewise we perceive other cultures, languages, behaviors, foods, artifacts, etc. in different times and perceptions. Others perceive us likewise. When a person dies who has been an integral part of our lives we are sad. Sad because there death marks passage of time and an end to a “time”, period, and age in a life. Part of the time of an life has passed. For example when someone dies who we have not been recently involved we may not morn. Mourning seems to be connected more to our own than the dead person’s passing. Many of the people whom I knew who died I mourned whose lives were woven with my own at the time of there death. Others who I had not seen for long while or whose lives had been on different tracks I did not mourn. Yet I often remember them and there person and our lovely time together. The death of my parents was like this. They had already separated themselves from me and I mourn that for all of my life. There death did not change what has already happened a very different place.

Industrial Age/Oil age and the Age of Barie

Bronx Stardust has something that affected everyone and of which I was only a part. Bronx Stardust includes industrialization and its subset specific to this time energy. In 1937 (the year I was born) , the US government declared solar collectors as useless. Today the collector is so powerful some claim it could replace every type of fossil fuel energy product (oil, coal and natural gas). As the world’s thirst and cravings for increasing power, consumption and control so did individuals. My attitude was different from my elders as I perceived the new potential of enormous scale and magnitude of a power beyond human scale. The sense and meaning of Buckminister fuller’s “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” resonated and proclaimed soaring rockets, endless highways, space and earth travel,, anonymity and technisms, jibe talk, etc.

Oil was first found in Kuwait in 1928 after signing an agreement with Kuwait to explore for oil on December 23, 1934. Kuwait became Japan’s number one supplier of oil. In Jubail there is an office of the Arabian Oil Company which is actually the Japanese Saudi Oil Company. When I was a manager at Kuwait,Gulf Oil Company John Carpenter who was an employee of Gulf decided to stay on with Kuwait bank and Kuwait Oil when the government of Kuwait nationalized the Gulf Oil Company in Kuwait. Later Ron Brocius who worked for me in Houston also went to work for the Kuwait Oil Company.

During that period Paul Valerie visited and did survey work of the facilities and showed me pictures and his report of support facilities. I was under the impression that they facilities were very primitive and low in quality.

Using the information from a report by the department of physics at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey about energy consumption and sources of renewable energy it diagrams how in 1900 at the dawn of the industrial age there were 1.6 billion populating the earth because fossil fuels spawned electricity use in industry, transport, food, and medicine and began to allow for now habitable areas to be settled. By W.W.II and 1950, there were 2.4 billion and the introduction of nuclear power and population spread through commercial air transport. The year of my birth, on May 6, 1937 Hindenburg crashed and burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey and initiatives were begun to both change sources of fuel and further develop fossil fuel and hydrogen toward developing a hydrogen economy. In fact, the Industrial revolution had already begun in 1880, about a half-century earlier. However, this period was really cranking it up.

I was born in darkness and as I grew, the physical world got brighter and brighter. Highways proliferated and so did the automobile and although much innovation had already occurred, new technology emerged based on the abundance and demand for energy and its efficient use. There was more of everything and it all went faster and was more accessible. Things started disappearing and soon impatience developed to rid of the old and make space for the new. Cataclysme was unleashed in government, corporations and planning. Education spoke of letting educational methodologies run amuck so that they well reveal there own faults and be replaced by new methods and technology. Communism and dictators had already replaced feudal regimes and the world knew how to control atomic energy and mass destruction. The world during this period has been a potpourri of combinations and types of social, economic and governments systems and ideologies. As varied in type as in size and access to wealth and resources. Varied in capability to govern and keep their pace. In addition, varied in ethnicity, religion and tolerance for others living with and skirting their borders.

This segment of the secular energy age had to deal with new values and new concepts of what was right and agreeable to a very new demographically distributed society. Values, mores, ethics and what righteousness and agreeable were different and were to become the centerpiece of the industrialized "energetic"- technical world. No one could escape having to deal with anomie and change. Society had to face its hypocrisies and divisions. Irony of common sense became laughable as well as instructive. Energy and it bi-products such as fertilizer mad the planet’s increased population avoid the doomsday predictions of and earlier century of starvation and death due to over population. The prediction of the recreational society became true as the increased population and efficiency of productivity made labor obsolete in agriculture, industry and craft.

That the twenty first century is very likely to be shaped as much by the move away from fossil fuels as the last century was by the development of a fossil fuel economy. My period is really the post industrial revolution period called by some the Oil age with a steel age mentality, which included sub ages and mini periods. All of these depended on the Industrial Revolution, steel age and fossil fuel. The economy of the USA, western states and most of the world increasingly developed into hungry fossil fuel economies. The world after the industrial age, which we are currently experiencing, will be remarkably different:

1929-1942: Great Depression

Magnetic Tape - 1931

Atomic Bomb - 1934

Nylon - 1934

Photocopier - 1938

1939-1945: W.W.II

Loran - W.W.II

Computer -1942

1945-1989: Cold War Era

Microwave - 1946

Compact Disc - 1960s

GPS - 1978

Pacemaker - 1950

1940- Present: Information Age

VCR - 1956

The period just proceeding the age of energy was the steel age which was dominated by the robber barons and characterized by corruption, ruthlessness and predatory proclivity and nurtured the twisted ideology of an imperial warfare-welfare state. All of this ran its course until I was born and W.W.II. Today’s generation of human beings is acting as if it is the only generation of human beings – and indeed the only species – that matters. The world after the industrial age will be very different from the world of today. Today, there are “change managers.” Whose mission is to prevent the collapse of the industrial world and today’s large human population?

Highways, cities, villages because of energy, oil to power autos, and fertilizer to feed. The anomaly of these events persists today and affects my life as populations increased in size, demographics changed due to migrations, shifts of haves and have-nots globally. Music, culture and life styles based on large populations, public and less private life and customizing of cloths, culture and food. More things are international and globally compatible. Access is increased to what was formerly exotic and forbidden. The characteristics of this age affected the values and gave license and opportunity for the growth of differing values and led my parents and community to deal with these conditions as they occurred. They affected our family, our self-esteem, our orientation to our family and cultural values, and shaped our decisions for dealing economically with our work and home.

Trying times

With all of the impact of anomie, rifts in periods, ages and isms I have dealt day by day and made my way. There are times in my life when I had trials; where I had to do something and I did something noble.

There were movies that dealt with time:

• ¨ The Time Machine
• ¨ The Day The Earth Stood Still
• ¨ The Shape Of Things To Come
• ¨ The Times Of Our Life: Jimmy Stewart
• ¨ The Man Who Could Work Miracles
• ¨ Fred Mc Murray going back in time
• ¨ Wild West

Einstein’s Special theory and theory of time and space and the speed of light being the maximum velocity has given some to call this peed Einstein’s speed. Christina concludes that it humans could reach this speed and we are at the speed of light then we will know God and at one with every ting that He has created because in that speed is life. Einstein explains that humans are essentially the same but living in an illusion, that each is different and distinguished when the reality is that we are all in the same structure and organizing principle. Our mind, perceptions and understandings tell us differently. We spend our lifetimes trying to realize our sameness. Many of the consequences of the Special Theory of Relativity are counter-intuitive and violate common sense. Einstein correctly defined common sense as those prejudices that we acquire at an early age. If life is light and light is the fastest velocity then there are no differences between one and another life I learned to focus on time as I made tapes for radio and demos for disc jockey work. I learned to time my speeches by seconds and to beat my own time to meet electronic connections.

Bronx Generations and Life:{4,317}

I was not the incorrigible child adults and peers complained. I was simply precocious and always aware that I am living in only a segment of a continuum that had other parts in the past and will have other parts in the future. Any moment in my life was a part of a much larger whole and I was only stopping over in front of them. What they saw and experienced was out of context and bazaar. What I saw was a person out of context and part of a transitional moment and circumstance. I was there but aware I would be somewhere else and with others at some other time. I was both one of many in a link and an out of context. I sometime wondered if my parents were really mine or had I been adopted. My parents themselves often seemed unrelated to me. They seemed so different in taste and interests. Hence, my interest in history and science fiction. I was also aware of the connections that a person of similar genes, education and background could go through that could be learned by observing elders and those ahead of me in there career and life’s work. I saw my self in a generation and those older in the another generation. There generation had its characteristics and impressions while mine yet another. However, I saw a lot of similarities between one and another generation. I was manifesting unusually early development or maturity, especially in mental aptitude. I developed more than is natural or usual at a given age; exceeding what is to be expected of one's years; too froward; -- mentally forward; as, a precocious child with precocious talents. I was too much for my parents in both style and substance. My teachers and fellow students hated me and found me predictably a pain in the backside!

rel="tag">time, change of time, cosmopolitan, globalized, gulf oil company, home, industrialization, industrial age,

Rightly or wrongly I can name the generations of American modern history as:

1. the times when our country was discovered

2. the times when it was settled

3. life in new Amsterdam

4. immigration from Europe in mid nineteenth century

5. winning the west

6. the times of the plantations and slavery

7. the civil war

8. the depression of the 1800 hundreds

9. the Victorian period

10. world war two

11. the roaring twenties

12. the depression

13. world war two

14. the late forties

15. the early fifties

16. the mid fifties: The beat generation

17. the late fifties: Rock and Roll

18. the early sixties: flower children

19. the seventies and environmentalism and peaceniks

20. muddling through the eighties and the “ME” generation.

21. Hot nineties and the information age

22. Globalization and terrorism

And then there was Stardust Time

This was the time when the stardust was visible and you could take the time to see the stardust. So what is Stardust and what does it have to do with the Bronx? Is it the dust from stars and are we alluding to some thing cosmic from outer space? Is it so small that only aerogell can contain it? Is it like the movie written and directed by Woody Allen called ”Stardust Memories” In the mid-twentieth century many had a dreamlike, romantic, or uncritical sense of well-being and were uncritically or unrealistically optimistic.

I liken stardust and its many allusions to the “blue smoke” of the movie theater era where smoking was permitted and exercised in mass in most movie theaters. Where if you looked at a certain angle at the light ray from the projector you could see a dense cone of smoke which obliterated other objects and it self became a shape and form. While stardust is the country outdoor version where on a clear and well lit sky you could see the dust not from the stars but from the earth hanging in the air and lit by the light of stars a visible presence surrounding everything in sight.

The Bronx was the galaxy of context like the star dust which we knew was ever present and visible to the discerning eye. By the time the early sixties came about my generation came of age and rebelled. We were between 24 and 30 when the nest generation behind us took there cloths off, screamed, sat down and stopped traffic and brought cities and industry to a halt. That was not my generation but the one after us. They were our children between 14 and 18 and we encouraged them by our permissiveness and our lack of direction and vision. Their vision was what was going on had to stop and we agreed. They became the flower children and we there support.

Compared to the previous generation, ours was powerless and impotent. It would take several generations for other generations to come of age to cause needed changes. Our generation witnessed and facilitated the Information age and revolutionized Science, Medicine, and communications. If the generation before us energized and transported thus shrinking the physical world, ours, further reduce the planets population differences by communications and globalization. The Soviet Union and communism has become an anathema while capitalism and democracy a powerhouse. That was happening under my generation.

My generation can only advocate abolishing tobacco, fossil fuel and the automobile and the return to an urban and civic sanity. Until the grip on power of the previous generation relaxes and eases, my generation can only work within the limitations and parameters established by the “greatest generation”. With every year that passes there are less and less of them, and their legacy becomes even more precious and important. Sixty million people died in world war two, including nearly a half a million American soldiers. So many returned home with limbs and handicapped for there rest of their life. They entered in the world to change the world and stop one thing a start another. They put their lives at risk and many made the ultimate sacrifice. They gave meaning to intellectual freedom by what they sacrificed and became the boilerplate for righteousness and character. Not revolution but for the greater good of not one but all. The world war was a world war because it globalized righteousness and was about world class issues and globalized America's ideals. The purian in heart looks upon the was for its selfish and mean aims, whereas it benefited all of the world in a positive and productive fashion. There have been few wars and global efforts that have ever accomplished this.

This current generation confronted with terrorism is yet another generation challenged with another serious challenge to what it wants the world to be like in the future. It is massive and global in nature and scope. It challenges intellect and might. It confronts political and spiritual will and rallies the world’s best and strongest. It brings the optimum to the surface and waylays obscure and unrefined nonsense. It separates the wheat from the chaff and makes our world better.

This recent generation will be celebrated as the past heroes in the future. Every generation is self-conscious and willfully secular. It boasts of its own time and place. The bible urges to care of the Spirit and the moment for the future will have its own problems and concerns. So each generation as each day has its themes, priority and engagements which sit on initiatives established in the past while launching initiatives which may continue and see results in the future. A future in which the current generation may participate or be the legacy of future generations. The issues of my generations seem to propagate throw away and disposables rather than the permanence of the past.

The coming generation will be defined on the way they defended what their predecessors accomplished and how they defined themselves by the way they identified and met the challanges of their own time.

Secularism: (2,476 words)

This age of Bronx Stardust is lived in the age of secularism where all things are drawn to keep our soul and mind on the things of this time and not of the future or eternity. A world advocating, persuading and metaphorically non-spiritual where it is culturally and socially right to be materialistic, worldly and non-spiritual. But we are conscious of both. The Orientals aptly identify dualism with “tension” between the ying and the yang and teach us to find equipoise in tension between opposing forces. To them there is no such thing as balance of two but a triad of dominant, sub dominant and tertiary forces. In other words our consciousness of secular and eternity is not 50/50 but in varying degrees and oppositions. In the age of secularism I have had to find the “peace that passes all understanding” and its difference from equipoise and world peace. Equipoise being physical state of rest while peace our place in God’s will. My metaphors are established in the eternal and not of this age so I have learned to live by the spirit while in the secular flesh of the man made created and operated world. My metaphors are of value to me.

The Bronx and the times were reeking of the residue of commerce. Residents of the Bronx were the consumers and not the operators of opinion makers that were shaping the Bronx mind. It was like living in a submarine under the water where the world was only what was under the water where the sky and universe did not exist. The one sided metaphor was inherently bigoted and nurtured discrimination and tensions.

Summerset Maughn said:” It’s funny about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it”. Get what? The very worst! Anathemas. (Doomed offering and accursed thing). Of course the world is the created reality and is in constantly deteriorating and changing. It is ultimately bound to loose its value. How many of us will not be taken hostage by the world and its agents in order to stay on course? I did! I rather have neither friends nor beloved family than be blighted by distracters, scorners, and malefactors. People who thrive on derision and scorn of others. That is what surrounded me in the context from which I cocooned. The world is beset and deceived by Satan and evil despite their willful and well meaning efforts I knew I had to rely upon god and not people. Parts of my life have been swept away by circumstances and totally overwhelmed by the world. During theses times my life was not my own. I did not have a life. My life was non-existent. It is the stuff that urges people to vacate to another time and place so as to regain there life. It emphasizes that most of one’s life is a non-life but a current of unconsciousness and irrelevance.

Most of my experiences were relative and perceived in relationship to the limits and boundaries of what I know and could bear in time, place, and context. New York was significant and valued because I knew no other; Europe because it seemed far away , exotic and the “roaring twenties” because I was so young and they seemed so long ago. My parents because I was so young, other neighborhoods because I could imagine them as similar to my own and they were seamlessly access able where as “travel” meant going outside of the context and beyond the “Seam” to other contexts, states and cities “too” far to imagine. Life has included travel, experience, time, perception, knowledge, reading, movies, radio, and songs, work emotional experiences making my life its peculiar and special whole. It is a life I could not, nor would I want to exchange for any other. It is one I posses and has all of the familiar and exciting attributes that delight and electrify my imagination and passion for continuance and edification. The more I live the more I want to live. As a child other judged me in relationship to my father who I resembled more than my mother. . My role models for behavior were the entertainers and performers especially singers to whom I listened. They filled my life and were my role models so I could copy and successfully speak and conceptualize ideas and communicate to develop [relations and a place in society.

Intellect in the course of life

Somewhere in the midst of the chaos of my childhood I awoke to the ability to learn and reason with the capacity for knowledge and understanding. For every question, statement and comment I heard I replied with an idea and reference to something I’d seen and heard. My conversations were about relating and understanding the persona and the new information. I could see that I had the ability to think abstractly and sometime, profoundly. My piers and family would let me know that it was profound by laughing, jeering and generally expressing disdain at the irrelevance and peculiarity of my thought or its expression. I learned through trial and error that profound thinking was situated at, extending to, or coming from a great depth; deep. My mother would often kid or complain about my dissertations. Coming as if from the depths of my being and being profound

But my thoughts were thoroughgoing; far-reaching: and about profound social changes. My thoughts were penetrating beyond what is superficial or obvious: often a profound insight. Many of my thoughts were unqualified and absolute. She found them difficult and challenging and both of my parents did not know what to do or say to me. I do believe that is these phenomena more than any thing else that led to our estrangement. We had irreconcilable differences not based on judgments but on the way we thought and reasoned. There was just so much of my talk they could take and not be bored or perturbed. My probes and statements would irk even my father . Neither had much capacity for controversy nor challenge of thought and position. They had neither the patience nor the vocabulary to negotiate what concerned me. "Occasionally, someone would comment that I had a keen intellect" and the capacity for rational thought, inference, or discrimination. I realized that genius is the faculty of the human soul by which it knows, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; sometimes, the capacity for higher forms of knowledge as distinguished from the power to perceive objects in their relations; the power to judge and comprehend; the thinking faculty and to understand knowledge and intellectual ability.

In general I was told that I was endowed with reason and capable of distinguishing good from evil. I recall being condemned by acquaintances as a person who uses the mind creatively with creativity being the work of evil and the lesser classes of people in society. I realized I was in a minority and could not coexist with the masses of the world’s population by always exposing what I wanted to say. I needed to learn to use these gifts in moderation and with great care; and in the appropriate circumstances. By the time I was 21 I noticed that structured thinking is a possible mode whose consequences differ from other forms of thinking. I attributed the Bronx and Bronx culture with everything that was wrong with me and the world; Bronx Stardust had its dark side.

I also noticed that it could be used to build thoughts and ideas well beyond those of random passing thoughts and can be the substance of decisions affecting my life and the lives of others. Some beleive that genius is in every one and that it is only a matter of education and experience. All agree that it is an exceptional attribute and when exercised excels above most other thoughts. Philosophy, mathematics, etc. are studies which are focused upon the intellect and its abilities and not on the mundane and applied. It is hoped that a mind so developed can apply itself by synapse to the works of society, government ,and the natural and applied sciences to benefit individuals and society.

The moments in my life when intellect was used and applied have been few and far between. It was noticeable in the decisions I made to change contexts, careers, jobs and encounter difficulties and problems in those places. It has often been applied when challenged by circumstances and in classrooms to sort things out. It has been useful to clients and students who sought my advice and counsel. It very well manifests when I am in the process of various creative crafts and endeavors. My life had several divisions and separations from one to another time based on my attitude about what was happening and, in fact what was happening.

I recall becoming sick and tired of striving to become someone else. Defending and justifying myself became “old” and useless. I was over being ashamed of who I actually was and where I came from. I was tire of being belittled by others for what I had not accomplished and realized that god wanted me to accomplish myself in His will and not the worlds. It became apparent that I was on a different path than others and that I had to shut out their judgments and advice; criticisms and valuations; and others idea of what determined success and completion. I was living a different life and one which god had ordained especially for me. It was neither altogether righteous , nor was it altogether pious and sanctimonious. I was neither “churchy” nor was I the boisterous vulgar businessman I may have appeared.

In the Bronx, life included walking the streets at nights to find strangers and souls that would reveal themselves and their secrets. Taking risks and chances with new peoples and circumstances. We are not always creatures of institutions, governments and organizations but god’s created creatures very free to experience and roam his planet and experience His natural and man made creations. We do this in a random and potentially destructive and awkward manner. Many times we fail and get hurt, stumble and fall feel pain and despair. But we live, get sick, recover and make ready for the next encounter in a reprieve of peace and some times pleasure. If any thing concerns me as I age is the loss of this unpredictability in my self and the planet. Over population, bigger government and hopeless poverty and unemployment has turned society into dependent and standardized clones of manageable hordes whose only thrills are immorality and nasty media. Sensual beauty and intellectual stimulation are becoming unknown. My life in the Bronx was filled with Love; I have always had a loved one by my side.

1. God
2. Jesus
3. Parents
4. Brother
5. Arlene
6. Christina
   

My Life’s divisions:

• I observe daily how precious and short are our lives.
• I watched the ones I loved and each day thought of this:
• I anticipated and regretted they’re leaving long before they left;
• I would worry and mourn the death of my father and Grandmother.
• I always think of life as being short and very sweet.
• Prayer
  

As a child I believed all things were possible to build and manufacture. Television, computers, Internet, Hand held satellite telephones and location devises were completely unknown and not considered in our normal conversation. Science fiction writers brought these thoughts of the “possible” of our mind. I could imagine what a ”walkie- talkie" could do because I could buy and use one. I was limited by the technology of my environment, Hollywood, some books, and my imagination. I invented a van driven by pulleys and cables by a person on a bicycle. My teacher thought I copied it and then realized how extraordinary the invention really was.

While my mother was an idealist, my father was a pragmatist. I believe I have both of these attributes. I can see the many decision I make being made under either banner. Certainly being born again and following Christ is ideal but working through financial, job, and employment situations is pragmatic. Surrendering flesh and blood goals and aspirations in favor of caring for my wife has been my ideal side, while the method to do so has been pragmatic. I love doing the right thing! I prefer it to the more pragmatic “reaping life’s rewards”

In this connection, I notice my mother’s intransigence and immobility compared to my fathers’ I contrast my mobility with them both, and can see the difference in a life that lived and spent a whole life in one place as opposed to the variety of contexts and venues in which we lived and worked. Leo and Mollies family and friends of lifetime spent in one place is such a good example, Whereas, God has similarly blessed us with a different kind of family and friends but in all parts of the planet and contexts.

time, change of time, cosmopolitan, globalized, gulf oil company, home, industrialization, industrial age

rel="tag">time, change of time, cosmopolitan, globalized, gulf oil company, home, industrialization, industrial age,