SEPTEMBER SENSE
High summer inches toward dog days
And low autumn
The breeze coming through the screens
Rattles the dried up leaves still clinging to the maple tree
October, a few days away
Warns, take this opportunity
To enjoy light
Laced through walnut and locust leaves
I imagine them counting down the weeks
Maybe days
'Til colder winds
Move only conifers and limbs
A different sound, indeed
Frost is next
My heated birdbath's first test
DRK
9/23/20
FOR BETTER . . . FOR WORSE . . .FOR…
Those unfortunate families without a nurse
Part of our marriage rite
The words didn’t connect 54 years ago
I was marrying this incredible, beautiful young woman for the “better”
We anticipated a long future of decades of great things
And we prophesied well
With rewarding careers
A wonderful family
But time will have its due
Good news, bad news
The longer the life, the more consequences
Today i returned home from a surgical procedure
One common to older men
Carole has had to learn more than she needed to about me
All while nursing her own injury (pickleball)
A right arm she couldn’t lift above her waist
The halt facing the lame:
Is this that “worse” part?
Sure, we raised a family
And enjoyed the ensuing grandchildren
Lots of work there, especially for Carole
But we were able-bodied at the time
And, well, that’s what you do in life
Thank goodness for our son, the nurse
He kept things from being worse
Stepping in and doing what healers do
At least those bound for sainthood
( hello, nurses)
So, we deal with today’s “worse”
And the expectation that tomorrow’s worse will be
Nursed
DRK
12/21/2022
Happy Anniversary, Carole
ON THROWING ME OUT
Part One
Do you wonder who will dispose of you?
Will you participate?
I am in the basement wrestling
What goes? Can some of this be kept a little longer?
Bagging my history
One bag, one shelf at a time
Nearly out of sorts
Nearly out of me
Here’s a book on The Sexual Life of Savages
Maybe if it had more illustrations
Out it goes
With what seems like a million more
Textbooks, Handbooks, Proceedings, Classics
Those items you can find in a good library
But I’m overdue
Sins of accumulation
Time to pay the fine
Not much remains relevant for very long
Some of these books were willed to me
By retiring colleagues,
And represented a continuation of the profession
But I fear their disappointment
Their books did link careers
And now, into a bin
Others, more basic,
Taught me critical thinking
And logical skills
The books most useful to me were time-bound
They solved problems or provided inspiration
At important points as my career evolved
From economics and sociology
Toward human ecology
They were focused on time
How poignant
Part Two: My Academic legacy: tossable?
Feel free to skip to Part Three
As a sociologist working with human ecologists
One of my early missions was to understand
The relationship between
Social and nonsocial systems
And, as it worked out,
The concept of time was central
The term we used in sociology, “interact”
Would not work with nonsocial phenomena
Our maple tree and I cannot “take the role of each other”
But I discovered “transaction”
A concept developed
In the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism
Referring to how we take the presence of things into
Account and the ensuing
Augmenting or redirecting of our behavior
In a (continuous) transactive cyclical process
Not conducive to a one-way
Cause and effect approach
Thus, the key dimension of time
I learned to see how social systems
Such as families
Continuously travel through space/time from one micro-ecosystem to another
Drawing from and returning to
The macro-ecosystem the elements needed to function
Artifacts, places, personal traits
Moving from home to automobile
To a workplace or a trout river in the woods
I developed a MODEL of how the parts
Of ecosystems function and transact through space/time
Leaving their effects on the macro-ecosystem
A second mission of mine was to understand how such transactions transform the things we use
My background in economics suggested “production and consumption,”
But there were issues with
Where production stopped and consumption began
Consider the long process of producing, marketing and eating a meal
Where does the production (incrementing of utility/usefulness) stop
And its decrementing (consumption) begin?
I found a beautiful way (to me) to interrelate
The intentionality of economics
Why we use things
In our attempts to be productive
And the sociology of consequences
How the effects of our actions are
Often unforeseen but functional
Including what ends up getting consumed
Here is my link between sociology, economics and ecology
The more we do, over time,
To transform resources into useful products
Manufacturing, transporting, trading, adapting to personal tastes
Concentrates their utility
Into increasingly narrower regions of social space
And disperses their loss of utility to a broadening range for others
Cutting trees, choosing to make pulp and not lumber
And eventually making a ream of paper that ends up in my personal office
Precludes the potential uses of the trees by others along the way
To me this provided a new (social) way to think of “waste”
What gets “consumed” in “productive” processes
Working with ecologists helped me appreciate “waste”
And our challenge to manage it
To analyze waste management,
I described similar transformations as above
But with reverse effects
By transferring waste’s disutility (nuisance value)
To fewer specialized others
Garbage haulers, for example
Gets it out of my way, and the community’s
Gradually reducing its onus and opening up potential options for broader regions of social space
A garbage dump transformed into a solar power field
Truly elegant, if you ask me
“Progress” is not monotonic, but cyclical
Production and consumption
Occur simultaneously, but for different people
In a long, continuous cyclical process
It was my attempt at developing THEORY
Of course, time was central to it
These process issues led to the desire to describe
The states of systems along the way
For example, the health of a person or family system
In the pursuit of this I was influenced by
Kurt Godel’s discussion of consistency and completeness in logical systems*
Yes. There is a practical reason to study logic.
Godel concluded that
Systems cannot be both consistent and complete at the same time
For Godel it was about self-reference in logic
But, for me, it suggested that
The novelty needed for systems to adapt and grow
Clashes with the need
To maintain the consistency to function as a unit
The challenge of life, if you will
And this seemed pretty basic and useful
To resolve the decision challenges
(Consistency? Completeness?)
I was helped by Alan Turing’s work on what he called “Decidability” in computing systems*
To evaluate system outputs and make decisions one requires external referents
Systems cannot evaluate their own products
He described writing a computer program that would stop when encountering an error
And the issue of it’s continuing to run . . . for how long?
The system cannot decide on its own.
This seemed to me to be an essential part of how
Human ecological systems make decisions over a lifespan
And the challenge of, e.g. evaluating our children
We rely on neighbors, teachers, coaches, and employers
A whole new SYSTEM OF CATEGORIES
Completeness, Consistency and Decidability
To describe system states and
To challenge us with some realistic but uncomfortable competing tasks
Which, also, interestingly, can be thought of as the source of the tension needed
To keep a system moving, …, through space/time
Thank you for letting me refresh my thoughts
But, for me, this is part of what I will leave behind
At least for those interested in
Conceptual frameworks, i.e.,
Systems of categories (naming the things that are important to us),
Models (how to understand how they fit and function together)
And theories (how we explain, predict
And attempt to control our systems)
I credit Fred Bates and others for this
Three-way approach to conceptual systems
I credit colleagues in a family health research project*
For the opportunity to develop some of these ideas
A reference below* includes citations to all the references used here
Part Three: Getting back to the question at hand
What is being left behind?
What to do with all the books that supported me
If I don’t do the tossing, someone who doesn’t know these books must
There is some satisfaction
In personally being in control of the toss
Of course, at some point, someone else must take charge
Of throwing the rest of me out
One role at a time
Those who can, do
Those of us with declining abilities, must accede
Maybe help others to appreciate and learn what we see as important
I have not read all of these books
So, part of what I am throwing out are unmet aspirations
Something sobering to accept
And, guess what. I discovered that a lot of my old books smell pretty bad
Getting them out of the basement and into some fresh air makes that apparent
And my aromas?
Now or eventually
Who will air me out?
It takes energy to follow through with this sort
Bending over at age 86
Filling sacks
Carrying them, and me, up from the basement to the car
Take a break
Refresh that old cup of coffee
Or is it martini time?
Write a few more of these lines
Then head back downstairs
Give the sort another shot
Give someone else another shot
What Phoenix will arise from recycling me?
New opportunities
Will you assume the role of the “the oldest member?”
Will you develop memories?
Will you turn from care giver to care sharer?
I have been blessed with both
DRK
7/21/23
2/12/24
*Keefe, Dennis R. 2017 Revised Edition. Time in Human Ecological Conceptual Systems: Transactions, Transformations and Tension. Author Publication.
THE HAWK FEEDER
Morning glides by
Sipping coffee
At the bay
Window
Looking through
To a nervous world
Of bird squalls
Twitching
'Tween bush and feeder
Squabble, jockey
Grab and go
Can’t chat
Eyes wide elsewhere
Raptor shadow
Scatter
Huddled safety
Of a tangled vine
Inside
Facing this backyard pandemonium
I glance back at Goldie
Gliding, circling his aquarium
And wonder what he thinks
Of twitchy me
Dennis R. Keefe
March 19, 2020
HOLIDAY TRAVELS
We primped and prepped
For holiday events
That came
Rocked and rolled
Then left so fast –
to the last tree needle swept
I decided to examine where they went
The white Christmas which arrived on cue
Took five when warm winds and rains
Sent snowmen, in a panic, running
To
the
city’s
drains,
Their graveyard of arm litter
u
Sticking p
In the little snow that remained
Our out-of-town revelers traveled
Once the holidays died
Back home, the phone verified
Their colds, flu and holiday blues
Had hitch-hiked to make new friends
Holiday foods, once so proud
Are now huddled in the cold
Their trip to the disposal
Delayed a day or two
And those festive wrappings and bows?
In the basement, stowed
Or led to the curb, awaiting years
Of breaking down barriers
with new landfill neighbors
The tree, undressed
Was let free, free to be
A green recyclee
But there the trails...begin to fade
Interpretations made
About Christmas,
Hidden in memories diverse,
Left when our visitors Dispersed
And somewhere, misplaced,
Is my taste
For outrageous
Holiday decor
Dennis R. Keefe
February 26, 2009
WE MADE IT
