The Parable of the Red Bowl

As a child I found my Grandmother B's house enchanting. It was so full of stuff. Stuff made with quality materials. In the house where I grew up, things were made of plastic and cardboard. The ostensibly fanciest piece of furniture we had, our china cabinet? Medium density fiberboard, with a rich-looking veneer glued on it. My parents spoke of it as if it was a gift from the Emperor of China. I revered it as an heirloom piece, too, until one day my mother was carrying a box that nicked against the corner of the cabinet, peeling off a strip of the veneer to reveal the sawdust and paste underneath. It was like pulling back the curtain to find the Wizard of Oz is just a man moving levers.

In Grandma B's house almost nothing was made of plastic or cardboard or MDF. Instead it was full of things made of various woods, such as beech and mahogany. And real stone such as marble and slate. I sat on a leather sofa for the first time at Grandma's house. My parents literally screamed at me about how I needed to be careful because it was over 30 years old, but that 30+ year old sofa was still in better condition than the 10 year old piece-of-crap sofa my parents owned.

All these wondrous things in my grandma's house had stories. You see, while my grandparents were affluent, they were not idly rich. They bought nice things carefully. Each beautiful thing that filled their house over the course of many years was chosen deliberately, with a sense that money is real and doesn't grow on trees, so everything had a story behind it: where it came from, why it was selected, what it meant, even down to— for big items like furniture the piano— how they got it into the house. Thus it was equally enchanting to learn what all these beautiful things were made of as to hear the story behind them.

As you might imagine in a house furnished carefully and with intention, things largely matched a motif. The furniture in the large living room wasn't all upholstered with the same pattern, but the wood trim and legs all matched. The table, chairs, and cabinets in the formal dining room all matched. Bedrooms had different motifs, but within each room the items matched a particular look or style. Except there was one item in the house that stood out as different from everything else: a red bowl.



The red crystal bowl sat in one of the display cabinets in the dining room. Unlike everything else in the room which all matched, this bowl matched nothing. It was conspicuous in its difference.

"What this bowl made of?" I asked my grandmother.

"It's crystal," she began, and then she explained the story behind it.

It was red, the color of ruby, because ruby is the traditional gift for a 40th anniversary. It was sent as a gift by friends ahead of gradma and grandpa's 40th anniversary. The friends were leaving on an extended trip overseas, so they send the gift months early.

But why is nothing else in the house ruby? Ah, because grandpa died just before their 40th anniversary. There was no 40th anniversary to celebrate, so there were no other 40th anniversary gifts; just this one, given months ahead of time, when grandpa was still alive.

It took me years to distill the lesson from this lone red crystal bowl, and years longer to understand how I needed to put it into practice.

Don't put off seeing your friends and relatives until the indefinite "later". Especially as they age, there won't always be a later.

Election Night Results

It's late evening on Tuesday, Election Day here in California as I write. It's too early to call a winner in the presidential race but it looks like it's going to be Trump. He's leading in most of the swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada. Not all the votes are counted— so the outcome could still flip— but the margins are big enough in several of these states and the numbers of votes remaining to be counted small enough that a "red mirage"/"blue wave" reversal seems unlikely.

Meanwhile the Republicans have taken the Senate and are on track to keep their small majority in the House. Assuming Trump does win the White House he'll have complete control over the federal government. Both houses of Congress will be his willing lapdogs to enact boldly reactionary policies fueled by hatred and the grudges he's amassed and nursed for the past 4 years. He won't be slowed down by his ineptitude at understanding the levers of power; his political supporters have written a plan (Project 2025, one of its aspects) for how to fill the ranks of government with loyalist yes-men instead of the various "adults in the room" who curbed his worst impulses last time. And the 6 seat arch-conservative majority on the Supreme Court will not check him.

This is a terrifying time to be a US citizen. I'm afraid in a year or two I won't recognize my own country.