That’s what the sign said above my most audacious friend.  He loves that guarantee.  He’s seen that sign at many places and loves to test the limits of its meaning, sometimes to the chagrin of his cringing kids, wife, or friends.  One time he had a ceiling fan that broke, and so he pulled it down along with two others that matched it and returned them to a well-known home improvement store.  The clerk checked the model number of the fans my friend wrestled into the service counter-line, and said it’s been seven years since we had this model.  He said, yes, he bought them about ten years before, and they were supposed to have a life-time warranty, and you claim satisfaction guaranteed!  Well do you have a receipt, he says no, he just wanted equivalent replacements.  With much grumbling and head shaking, he got his new fans for no cost!  The fans looked great and we had plenty of laughs over drinks at his score of new fans.

That was a long time ago, and now my friend is a very successful executive, but he cannot help himself, he still has to get his satisfaction.   A few days ago, he was in the process of moving his son from a four-year stay at a prestigious university when his son said we need to toss this mattress, its shot and I don’t want to bother moving it.  Well the mattress was four years old and cost about $1,000 when bought at a well-known discount-membership store.  He said, well I’m sure that came with Satisfaction Guaranteed!  So, along with his son and a friend of his son, they bundled the mattress into a mini-van and took it to the store.

Soon the mattress-team find themselves in the service-line with a mattress with stains on it, (one large stain that we haven’t heard an explanation for at this writing) and with a bow in the middle and people staring and asking them what they could be doing with this old mattress.  The boys stood waiting with obvious embarrassment, but my friend stood stoic in his certainty of guaranteed satisfaction.  One 80 some-year-old gentleman asked my friend’s son what they were doing with the mattress.  When he explained it to him, he said “look how its bowed here!”  The old guy pumped his fist forward and back, forward and back, and said ah ha, too much of this I see!  He laughed hard and wandered on into the store.   The girl at the service desk scanned the bar-code, and said you purchased this four years ago.  My audacious friend said yes, and I’m not satisfied with it.  She said I need to call a manager.  The manager came, and asked why didn’t you return this sooner if you weren’t satisfied?  He said, I wasn’t here enough to know that the mattress wasn’t performing to our satisfaction.  Besides there’s no time limit on my satisfaction is there?  He got a store credit!  A $1000 for buying a new mattress at his son’s next residence.  We had some great laughs as we celebrated this great institution of customer satisfaction… Sometimes it pays to be audacious!

I was trying to come up with something positive to say about Washington D.C.  Today we think of Washington D.C. as a political morass, or a swamp, but it truly is a remarkable city.  Few other countries have a city established precisely to be the seat of a national government.  In 1790, the Residence Act, laid the foundation for the creation of a capital district, and George Washington selected the site for the new capital.  The city of Washington, named for a truly remarkable man and patriot was established in 1791.  Today what we have is a very well laid-out city that is completely functional as the seat of a great nation.  The facilities of the executive, legislative and judicial heads of our national government are impressive, functional and deeply and appropriately symbolic.  The current occupants good and sometimes bad, are carrying forward a remarkable tradition of separation of powers, and something of cooperation within this city.

This city though, is much more than the location of the current heads of each branch and the mechanisms of national service to our nation, it is also a living, working monument to our great country and its historic democratic values.  The Washington monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Arlington National Cemetery, all resounding tributes to our history, and our values, and appropriate remembrances.  Furthermore, we are a nation of culture, of science, and of art, and that too is captured in museums that are grand and so very effective of telling the history of mankind, of our country, of science, and effective in keeping art in the forefront of our story and the telling of that story. Museums that are free to every citizen as, is our monuments to our very successful republic.

The city functions with effective transportation systems, security and the feeling of grand spaces, beauty as well as efficiency.  Yes, not everyone will agree with me, and I know most would like to see less acrimony and more collaboration among our leaders. Me too!  I would still have to opine that the debates, the checks and balances, and the peaceful transitions of power are all symbols of democratic values that remain well intact, and furthermore the function and form of the city that is our national center is remarkable.  I believe George Washington would be very proud of his city, and our nation, the greatest in the history of world!

Mountain Reckoning

The mountain draws us ever close

Majestically demanding its own prose

Dramatically urging an attempting

Come, get higher, summit tempting

Always there with perspective sight

Grand vista’s reward the brave, the right

Ah, but that climb is oh so steep

The strength needed ever deep

Paths often so unclear

The top vanishingly near

Mankind, tribes, nations climb

A must to find a better place in time

Born in a valley we are drawn to heights

Struggles, growth, learning and fights

It is a life of strain, of stress of battle scars

Yet our souls seek this path to the stars

The mountain is always there beckoning

Our drive and character it’s always reckoning

Keep Her Close

Quiet, thinking, in stillness I sat

Waiting for what, one could ask

For revelations, waiting for why

Impossible in youth I cannot deny

As if pondering life-long mysteries

And challenging byzantine-like histories

Why we are who we are

How we came this far

Where we go from here

Is there nothing we should fear

Control and shaped a world to our liking

Conquered with the deftness of a Viking

Yet she too waits, planning her future wins

If we forget, go too far, commit too many sins

Keep thinking, there is harmony in sight

Secrets of life, joining with mother nature is right

Keep her close, respect her needs

Future ensured with carefully planted seeds

Listen and Learn

Words spoken for all to hear

Meaning to see it a little more clear

Listen with both your eyes and ears

See excite, love and even fears

Suspend beliefs, open closed minds

Amazing and amassing new finds

Sometimes wisdom in a whisper found

A world a way but homeward bound

Not all you see is absolute and true

Don’t believe all heard by others or you

Learning to listen, learning to discern

Wisdom from nonsense can be learned

Wisdom grows with mistakes and age

Turn and read on to the next page

But learning never is over or done

There’s a higher place, another rung

Read and listen, learn and discuss

In your developing wisdom learn to trust

Hidden Figures… What a great movie.  It’s about the black women that were NASA’s “computers” during the early space age, and later went on to become computer programmers, engineers, and helped delivered us into space and on to the moon!

I was thinking of a poem about listening and really hearing yesterday afternoon. Then I saw this movie in the evening, and thought about the lesson of these great women whose words should have mattered, but it was the unrelenting and irrefutable mathematics that made them matter, made them be heard and thus made them relevant in the end.  An end that was really the very beginning in so many ways!

In so many ways this movie brings a life lesson for all of us.  Even when you seem invisible to the world, through prejudice of age, race or other reasons you can overcome such prejudice with your actions, with your performance, with delivered results.  In America in the 1960’s, this was a tremendous fete for these women, and it’s not just worth acknowledging, it’s a must for those that respect American ingenuity, equal rights and fair play to celebrate such achievement!

My poem on listening seems trivial in the face of the voice of mathematics, and genius that must be heard because it is what wins the day!  Performance always matters!

Rounded

Remember bubbles wonderful and round

Strength and beauty in round to be found

Arch supports builders dream

Rounded by pi and so very clean

Orbits of gravity efficiency

Life modesty and sufficiency

Heavenly bodies in perfect sphere

Be in the moment, be right here

Hands mark time in a circle face

Everything is right in time and place

A well-rounded life is sure to be

The best of life for you, you’ll see

Water and You

Dew adorned grass, wet feet

Tickle our toes, as we meet

Rain, thunder and lightning

Light and dark so enlightening

Leaves, flowers and so many trees

Storing water and spring beauty please

Waves spray sweet cool, until

Goosebumps showing our chill

Refreshing, floating so lazy

Inspiring thoughts go hazy

Bubbles, jets at a hundred and four

Warming hearts and inspiring more

For making fine whiskey and wine

Cheering your health as well as mine

For life is better with you

And Life-giving water too!

It’s a musing day…

In this morning’s paper, there are three articles about Trump and truth… “Trump vs. Fiction”; “And in Time, Trump vs. Facts” and “The Scary World of Pre-truth” … wow, hold the presses we have a politician lying!  Of course, they never like to use that word… they talk about alternate-facts, fiction, pre-truth, mistaken, anything but liar.   In this case though, we have the king of lying, the king of attack politics, and conspiracy stories.  I read an article that says that 70% of people lie, but nearly 100% of people consider themselves truthful.   I guess that our president, Donald J Trump, probably considers himself a truth teller too, and has somehow found an accommodation with his view of the world and events around him.  I think the media helps him by constantly giving him enough room to move around his lies, and allowing an explanation, which becomes a broader assertion, or “this is what I heard”, or what I believe statement… ugh!   Seems like a dangerous game being played out in Washington.   Hopefully we’ll see progress despite a dearth of presidential integrity.

I read an article about being a conservative on a college campus, apparently a rare and nearly-extinct species in a land of liberal ideas.  The point of the article was made with a statement that you are twice as likely to find a Marxist than a Conservative in the ranks of a college faculty.   Well I’m not too surprised at this, I believe that young people should be more liberal in their early twenty’s, when they have time to think about the world as it should be, and at the same time begin exposure to the way it truly is.   Conservatives will lean toward testing themselves in the real world, Liberals will lean to testing themselves in the world of academia, staying in a world of thought that fits their mind.   Thus, the trend will continue… but that is good, conservatives need a little liberal exposure, and it’s important to understand and internalize the compassion that embodies liberal ideals.   Personal freedoms and social liberties are important just as fiscal conservatism is the bedrock of a capital real-world.

A movie we watched on Friday was interesting, “Passengers”.  Raising a moral question.  If you believe you can make that person’s life, and your own better by changing their life’s trajectory, should you without their understanding and collaboration that you are doing so?  I suppose we do this with our children, but this is not quite the same as an adult.  If an adult has formed a path, but that path could be altered and it would benefit them, should you do so, even if it is without their knowledge and understanding?   A conservative would say no, that personal choice matters more than the greater good, a liberal, or better said in this case, a romantic might think otherwise.   What would you do?