Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 579
October 27, 2011
Happy Daddy
My wife and daughter met me at the mall tonight for dinner.
As Elysha pulled into the parking lot, Clara said, "There's the mall. Daddy's inside. I love he. He cuddles me."
One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me.
October 26, 2011
Same world, different view
A police car followed me on the way to work yesterday, and as I was driving, it occurred to me how differently I perceive the world in comparison to most of the people I know.
For most people, discovering a police car in their rearview mirror can be slightly unnerving, but for me, it's an entirely different situation.
When I was 19, I was arrested and prosecuted for a crime I did not commit. I've written about the incident before, so I won't go into details here, but suffice it to say that my arrest and subsequent prosecution came as the result of a single police officer who was convinced that I had stolen money from my employer, despite the fact that my employer did not believe that I was guilty and did not press charges.
In the end, I was found not guilty, but not before my arrest and the subsequent trial cost me my job, more than $25,000 in legal fees and two years of my life. The arrest also placed me in the position to later be robbed at gunpoint and suffer more than a decade of post traumatic stress disorder.
One police officer's conviction that I was guilty changed my life forever.
As a result, I do not trust police officers.
Though I know several cops on a personal level and respect and admire the work that all police officers do, I am also keenly aware of the power that they possess and their ability to ruin an innocent person's life as a result.
When I see a police officer in my rearview mirror, my mind immediately returns to 1991.
I recall the intimidation and the humiliation that the police officers used in an attempt to coerce me into a confession.
I recall the paralyzing fear for my freedom and my future that consumed me for almost two years.
I recall the loss of my home and the long nights spent homeless, sleeping in the backseat of my car, wondering how I would survive the approaching New England winter.
I recall the nights spent crying on a cot in the pantry of a family of Jehovah's Witnesses who agreed to take me in when I had no place else to go.
I recall the two years spent working 50-60 hours a week in order to pay for my legal fees while my friends and girlfriend were off at college, preparing for their futures.
I recall the intensity and stress of the trial. The fear of the unknown. The realization that one man's decision could send me to prison for five years of my life.
These are the thoughts and images that flood my mind whenever I drive by a police officer.
I wonder if the cop is running my plates. Examining my arrest record. Thinking that I somehow got away with a crime twenty years ago. Maybe dodged prison on a technicality. Made a fellow officer look foolish in the process.
I wonder if that cop is just looking for a reason to pull me over, search my car and find a reason a lock me up.
Paranoid? Perhaps. But spend two years of your life waiting to be tried for a crime you never committed and tell me that I am paranoid.
We need police officers to keep us safe. We ask these men and women to risk their lives on a daily basis for salaries unbefitting their station in society. We trust these brave individuals to do the right thing on our behalf, and they almost always do.
But there is an inherent, unspoken danger in the existence of law enforcement as well. By conferring authority and power on these people, we run the risk of them not being perfect.
We run the risk of police officers making mistakes.
For most of us, these mistakes are hypothetical, and as a result, they are palatable and easily ignored. They do not strike fear in our hearts. For most people, the thought that they might be arrested, tried and convicted for a crime they did not commit never even occurs to them.
Until 1991, it never occurred to me.
In most people's minds, it's theoretically possible by realistically impossible.
But I know that this is not true. For a few of us, the impossible has become the possible.
For me, the possibility that I could be arrested and tried again for a crime I did not commit is always present in my mind. Not a day goes by that I do not think about it. And it is underscored every time I drive by a police officer or walk past a cop on the street.
The world looks slightly different to me. It is shrouded in a veil of uncertainty and constant anxiety.
I am jaded, but I have a good reason to be so.
500 years ago was not that appealing
You have to wonder what someone from the fourteenth or fifteenth century might say if he was to discover that people in the twenty-first century were spending their weekends at outdoor fairs designed to recreate the spirit of the Renaissance.
Sure, it was a time of enlightenment, but it was also the time of the Plague.
It was an age absent of penicillin, electricity and indoor plumbing.
The life expectancy at the time was about 30 years.
If you weren't born wealthy and male and white, you had almost no say in what your future would hold.
In comparison to today, it was not a great time to be a human being.
Sure, everyone loves a good funnel cake and a nifty crossbow demonstration, but I have to think that a person who actually lived through the Renaissance would think it slightly odd, if not altogether stupid, to relive such a base time in human history.
October 25, 2011
Martin Cooper kicked Alexander Graham Bells ass
One of my favorite people in all of human history is Martin Cooper.
Ever heard of him?
Cooper was a member of the Motorola team that invented the first cellular telephone back in 1973.
And while I am immensely appreciative of the convenience and joy that my iPhone provides on a daily basis, it is not Cooper's inventiveness that I admire most.
It was the choice he made when deciding upon who to call first.
For his first public cellular phone call in human history, Cooper took to the New York City streets and called his rivals at AT&T and inform them that they had lost the race to build the first functioning cell phone.
The combination of New York's busy street sounds and Cooper's voice told the engineers at AT&T that they had been bested.
Now that is one hell of a phone call.
The perfect combination of comeuppance, spite, humor and bravado.
The inventor's version of my four favorite words:
Can you even imagine a better phone call?
Contrast this to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, whose first call was to his assistant in the other room:
"Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you."
Alexander Graham Bell might have been a great inventor, but he sucked at understanding the importance of the moment.
"Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you."
Is that the best he could do?
It makes me wish someone a little wittier, a little meaner or someone with a greater flair for the dramatic had invented the first telephone.
Someone like the great Martin Cooper.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
In searching for a story that would fit The Moth's GrandSlam topic Deal Breakers, I asked a few of my friends to suggest a possible story idea or a general direction.
One of my friends suggested this:
"…your ability to break the social contract by arguing and fighting with the general population."
This suggestion was neither helpful nor appreciated.
Eerily accurate
So I guess it wasn't so unexpected after all.
October 24, 2011
I would not have handled this situation nearly as well
For those of you not following the publishing industry closely, this is a good and amusing summary of the recent debacle involving the National Book Awards.
I must admit:
Had this happened to me, I would have acted with considerably less dignity.
Perhaps no dignity at all.
Kudos to you, Lauren Myracle.
Its 6:00 on a Saturday morning. Are you awake?
It's Saturday morning. I am sitting at my computer, writing.
It's 6:00 AM. I have awake for more than an hour. The dog has been walked. The dishwasher has been emptied. I have been pounding away on the keyboard for quite a while.
Currently, I am reading and responding to work emails that I did not have time for the day before.
A direct message arrives from my editor via Twitter. She's expressing a smidgen of excitement over recent developments related to my next book.
It's 6:14 AM on a Saturday.
Ten minutes later I receive a text message from my friend, Jeff. He is also responding to work emails and has a work-related question for me.
It's 6:25 AM on a Saturday.
The fact that all three of us are already awake and working before 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning is surprising.
Except I am not surprised.
There is a small, perhaps infinitesimal, segment of the population for whom this is the norm. When you discover one of these people, you don't soon forget who they are.
These are the people who make you feel a little more normal and a little less lonely when everyone else in your house is asleep.
What I find the most fascinating is that my editor and my friend were so certain that I would be awake that they did not have any reservations about sending me messages this early in the morning.
Messages that might have awakened me had I been sleeping.
But they knew I would be awake. In fact, Jeff has texted and called me in the wee hours of the morning on many occasion, knowing full well that he would not be waking me up.
The hours before 7:00 and even 8:00 on a weekend morning can be a productive but a lonely time for me.
It's so nice to know that I am not the only one making use of these solitary, dark hours of the day.
Not nice
My daughter has begun to demonstrate some of the defiance that is common in toddlers her age. One of the ways this manifests is in her rejection of all things, regardless of how appealing they may actually be.
Other times, however, it would appear that she is simply being herself. When we ask her what she wants to be for Halloween, she has repeatedly said, "I just want to be Clara."
The other day I was reading her a book that invited the reader to play the role of a fruit. I asked Clara what fruit she wanted to be. She said, "I'm not a fruit. I'm Clara."
As a result of these developments, it sometimes appears as if my daughter has developed a bit of a contrarian streak, which may or may not resemble her father's own streak of contrariness.
Either way, it's perfectly normal, regardless of what my wife may say.
A recent conversation between my wife and my daughter:
Wife: I'm going to make a cake.
Daughter: Don't make a cake!
Wife: You get your contrarian nature from your father.
Daughter: I'm sick, Mommy.
Wife: That's one way to think of it.
October 23, 2011
More subtle cruelty from my sister
I don't know what I was thinking.
When I asked my sister to write this blog with me, I didn't expect every entry to be an attempt to embarrass or humiliate me.
This entry is posted over on our brother-sister blog, but it seemed especially fitting to post it here as well, since it pertains to my life as a reader. ____________________________________________________
When Matt first started kindergarten, I thought he was the luckiest person alive. He got new clothes, he got to ride on a big bus and he was allowed to leave the house for a few hours without Mom.
Jeremy and I were so jealous. In our eyes he was a man of the world.
We would wait anxiously for him to return, watching in the picture window for the bus to pull up. He would walk up our driveway everyday, backpack strapped to his back, holding Mom's hand. When he came in, he would sit at the table and have Mom's undivided attention.
I thought he was so lucky, until this one day.
In kindergarten in Blackstone (back in 1976, at least), the first book you were given to read was called Sun Up. The beginning of the book reads:
The sun was up. Bing was up. Sandy was up. Bing and Sandy was up.
Clearly the author of the book cared more about learning to read than grammar.
Matt took the yellow and orange book out of his backpack and showed Mom. She told him to read for her. He looked at the cover of the book and read the title.
"Sun Up", he said.
Mom was so proud.
I was so jealous. He was reading words from a book. Real words. Not just making them up. He knew what the words really said.
He opened to book to the first page. He was so confident because he had just read the title with ease. The first word was the.
Matt looked at the word and said "ta-ha-eee".
Mom had to tell him the word was the.
He corrected himself and continued reading. Soon enough the word the came up again. Again Matt said "ta-ha-eeee".
I could hear the frustration in Mom's voice. The word came up several more times on those first few pages, but not once could he read the word correctly.
Finally Mom told him it was time to take a break. I think it was all she could do to keep from strangling him.
My brother, the published writer, struggled and struggled with the word the.
When it was my turn to go to kindergarten and read Sun Up, I never stumbled on the word.
I guess I have my brother to thank for that.
____________________________________________________
A few comments regarding my sister's post:
I also remember Sun Up and could have recited the first page from memory as well.I tried to find an image of the cover of Sun Up online but was unsuccessful. I did, however, locate many academic papers which reference the book as one of the more popular of the basal readers of the 1970's.I also recall the grammatical issue in the fourth sentence and have never quite understood why is was allowed to stand.
I also recall struggling to read the word the, and I struggled with it for quite a while (though in the mind of a kindergartener, that could have been a day or two). I can also distinctly remember the moment when I read it correctly for the first time.Apparently it lacked racial diversity and sucked in terms of providing children with quality reading material. It also appears to have been reprinted well into the 1980's, with the characters of Bing and Sandy replaced by Buffy and Mack.
I find it amazing that I was sent off to kindergarten unable to read a single word and was never read to as a child.A big moment in my then brief existence.
It was good to learn from my sister that my mom would meet me at the bus stop and hold my hand as we walked up driveway. I have no memories of this, and I have very few memories of these mother-son moments from my childhood.As a father, this fact becomes more incomprehensible by the day. Honestly, what the hell was my mother doing?
As we got older, the amount of parenting that we received declined sharply. These kindergarten moments with my mom may have represented a watershed for me in terms of parental involvement.
It's a happy picture that my sister has painted for me.
