Cape Cod on a Summer Day and Evening

Posted on 07/15/2013 by paulefallon

0009997_Haiti_Diagram_Paul_Fallon_101103There is no place more beautiful than Cape Cod on a clear summer day, except perhaps that same crooked peninsula as day wanes and evenings jeweled light shimmers across the bay.

This weekend was my first significant cycling on Cape Cod – 115 miles out on Sunday from Cambridge to Eastham to visit my friends Mike and Jan, and then 95 miles back today.  I got lost several times going, which extended my distance there, and hopped on the T from Braintree to Harvard on the way home to avoid riding at night.

Cape Cod’s beauty, like so much of New England, is rooted in the satisfying arrangement of ordinary elements – the sea against the dune, the wind animating the grass, the elegant proportion of a 6 over 6 window on a cedar clad saltbox.  It is the perfect environment for cycling – a landscape well scaled for ten miles per hour.  I spent most of my pedaling time on Route 6A, where the perpetual quaintness of period structures, billowing tress and vibrant day lilies is occasionally blown apart by intermittent yet expansive view across a marsh to distant dunes.

My trip was triggered by my annual visit to a Cape Cod League baseball game in Orleans, though we never got there.  Dinner talk lingered and Mike offered to show me around Eastham during the hour the sun dropped into nightfall.  He is a lively tour guide, versed in the history, politics, and characters of a small town set in this precarious strip between ocean and bay.

Although Eastham includes land with roads, houses, and such, it is the water that commands attention, or rather all the ways in which the water meets the land. Bay beaches have tall bluffs, salt ponds have scruffy edges, fresh ponds offer gentle sand for youngsters, marshes appear painterly and benign until you get caught by one racing out with the tide, while the ocean is an endless stretch of serenity on a quiet summer evening.

I don’t visit the Cape often, but I go there in my head when I need images of repose.  This weekend I stocked up on year’s worth of serenity.

Fort Hill Eastham

Fort Hill Eastham, MA

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Abby Joins the Peace Corps

Posted on 07/09/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001Nearly forty years ago, as a Bachelor of Civil Engineering seeking a 180-degree break from academia before pursuing graduate school, I applied to ACTION, the 1970’s-era aggregation of government service efforts that included the Peace Corps, VISTA, and a smattering of other programs.  I received multiple prospectuses, mostly variations of building bridges in Afghanistan. I contacted my ACTION rep and apologized that I was not interested in going to another country; I wanted to serve in the United States. I didn’t tell her I was afraid to go abroad.  I didn’t tell her I feared being the Ugly American, that I worried about struggling with a foreign language and had zero confidence in my ability to actually design and build a bridge. ACTION placed me in Levelland, Texas, about as psychically far from Cambridge as a person can go and still remain in the United States. I had a remarkable, transformative year. I believe I touched a few lives and I appreciated all those who touched mine.  When graduate school beckoned, I was fresh for the call.

Today my daughter leaves for the Peace Corps.  She suffers none of the doubt I did at her age.  She has already traveled to more than twice as many countries than me, has a more nuanced view of the globe than ‘Ugly American’ can describe, is facile with languages, and when confronted with the challenge of traversing a river, no lack of confidence will keep her on the near bank.  Besides, Abby has a keen sense of surpassing her parents, and the most elementary math demonstrates that Cambodia is far beyond Texas.

Abby leaving fills me with wistful pride. My gut aches hollow when I think of my little girl 8,700 miles from home, but I fill that void with the satisfaction that she is doing what she wants, and her pursuit is grounded in so much good. All parents pray that our children will avoid harm, we worry over the dangers of violence and drugs and indifference that surround us; we are consoled when they mature into active participants in the world. But when they surpass simply doing alright and engage in such a positive way, we wallow in their reflected glow.  My pleasure in seeing Abby follow such a noble dream blunts how wretchedly I will miss her.

Joining the Peace Corps is a profound act of hope trumping reality.  The United States has over 1.4 million military troops on active duty, many of them introducing democracy to our neighbors with flack jackets, bombs, and bayonets.  A mere 8,000 Peace Corps volunteers represent our nation in 139 countries armed with nothing more than a willingness to live among others, learn their language, understand their customs, and share the seeds of our bounty with those interested in listening.  It is a Ghandian approach to changing the world; one that seems unlikely to succeed. But history shows time and again that every attempt to create lasting peace through coercion fails, so what else is really left but an attempt to understand each other at the individual level.

The hope of the Peace Corps is that small interventions, face to face across a table, a classroom, or a rice paddy, can produce meaningful and lasting results.  But the Peace Corps also believes in mash-ups; in throwing together people of divergent cultures, religions, and ways of thinking.  The pairing may produce friction, or incremental improvement, or the cross-culture mix might just foment disruptive change.

In a world of seven billion people, gigantic corporations, environmental destruction, and social disorder that leaks across national boundaries it is easy, almost rational, for a single person to survey the situation and turn away from the chaos.  The odds of making an impact are so small. But the Peace Corps, and Abby, teach us that the odds are still greater than zero.

As Abby flies west to the East, she bestows upon all of us left behind hope in a world that still offers the opportunity for one person to make a unique imprint.  She brings to a Cambodian community the hope that one young woman cares enough to give them two years of her energy and talent.  And she herself brims with the hope that thrives on constructive action.  Although I place good odds that Abby will effect useful change in whatever she encounters in Cambodia, I am certain that whatever benefits she gives to that country will be returned to her ten-fold. In offering so much of herself, Abby is sure to receive knowledge, understanding, and compassion beyond measure; gifts that will shape her entire life.

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The Costco Workout

Posted on 07/05/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001Being late the party, what can I say about my first trip to Costco that has not already been said?  The bargains are good, the quantities obscene, and the clientele value-driven.  It’s only been a few years since I ventured into my first Wal-Mart, and Costco does not disappoint in taking that low price shopping experience to a higher, more frantic plane.

I was lured into wholesale paradise by the need to supply a party for 100+ people to celebrate my daughter before she heads off to the Peace Corps.  She had a detailed list of how many pounds of strawberries, half gallons of salsa, towers of plastic cups, dozens of chicken wings and cartons of frozen hamburgers we would need. The experience aligned with my expectations, but greatly exceeded them.  The warehouse atmosphere was charged; the palette stacks ominous, the sample ladies pushing nibbles at intersections ubiquitous.  Still, Costco seemed to amplify my preconceptions rather than change them until I realized something I had not anticipated. Shopping at Costco is great exercise.

First, there is the walking.  Costco has over a mile of aisles and my calves got a good stretch as we explored every one.  Second are the carts; double size versions of their supermarket cousins, my shoulders pulsed like Rocky Balboa as I pushed pounds of frozen meat. Towards the end of our visit, when we left our carts in a central spot to scatter and fetch those final items we missed on our first pass, I found myself curling cartons of 24 count power bars. I got a lower back workout lifting all the items to check-out and then replacing them to our baskets on the far side of the cash. The only thing that got lighter was my wallet. We motored our goods, and our quads, to the car and chest pressed them into the trunk. When that was full, we stretched our torsos stuffing things into the back seat as well. Back home my gluts burned trudging quarts of condiments up the stairs.

Aside from the illusion that we are saving money buying more food than we possibly need to eat, Costco might just be the healthiest shopping experience in America.

images

My new gym?

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1000 Bikram Yoga Classes

Posted on 06/30/2013 by paulefallon

awkward_pose_3-001Today I hit a milestone – 1000 Bikram yoga classes.  The date corresponded with completing exactly four years of practice, an average of 250 classes per year. I wasn’t counting until one day the owner Jill told me I was on class 200; since then I have made calendar ticks to mark my progress.

I would like to say that my 1000th class was unique, but it really wasn’t; we were an easy going Sunday crowd with many familiar faces and a good balance of heat and effort.  I managed what I consider a ‘complete’ class’ in that I held every posture, though I am still short of full expression in many poses. Hitting the four digit number did not miraculously stretch my body to new depths.

In a world of seven billion people, individual achievements are constantly eclipsed.  At the nearby Andover studio, an elderly woman, Elaine Brody, recently completed 1000 classes in 1000 days! On her milestone day a new practitioner joined the class, to whom Ellen reportedly said, I wish I were you. I can understand what she meant; after 1000 classes the euphoria of the new is gone.  I still love Bikram and acknowledge its benefits, but that feeling of walking on a cloud after class, the marionette looseness of my joints, and the incredible thrill of balancing on one perfectly still leg are now an integral part of my regular being.  The exhilaration is diminished.

Fortunately, the satisfaction, health, and well-being remain.

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Rumblings of Revolution

Posted on 06/23/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001In 1977 I spent beautiful spring afternoons in an overheated classroom with a view of a trash compactor in MIT’s nondescript Building 12 snoozing through Urban Sociology, the last of my Humanities requirements and perhaps the most boring course ever conceived.  I learned only two things in that class.  First, that I dislike social science, which possesses neither the elegant rigor of pure science nor humanities’ grace.  Second, that ’revolution cannot occur in a country where 70% of the people are content’, as the professor quoted one fine day. Apparently, at least 70% of Americans in 1977 were satisfied with their lives and I must have been one of them. Secure that we would not plummet into revolution any time soon, I dozed through the remainder of the semester.

That comforting statistic helped me to sleep soundly for over thirty years.  Then, around the time my ironic friend Larry informed me that, ‘70% of all statistics are true’, I started having doubts.  I realized that progress is not always forward.  After all, the world turned retrograde for hundreds of years during the Dark Ages, the Belle Époque ended with the most gruesome war to end all wars (until the next one), and Afghanistan circa 1950 was a progressive country while Afghanistan circa 2013 is a tragedy.  Could it be possible that despite all of our resources, wealth, and opportunity the United States could devolve into a country ripe for revolution? Could the 1980’s mantra Greed is Good subvert into the 2020 mantra that Greed destroys US?

This morning I watched Wealth Inequality in America, a six minute video that left me reeling.  Not only are less than 70% of Americans content, significantly more than 70% of Americans are loosing their race on the economic treadmill while a tiny proportion of our citizens grow wealthy beyond imagining: http://economy.money.cnn.com/2013/03/08/wealth-video/. Watching the video unspool our wealth inequality in six minutes is like watching an acorn balloon into a towering oak through time lapse photography, except that this seed could germinate revolution.

We Americans love our revolution, but the United States is not a place prone to upheaval.  In the last two hundred years Mexico has had five revolutions; Haiti has had too many to count. We staged our single battle against Mother England, won, and established a stable and relatively equitable government.  As revolutions go, ours was an outlier. Rebels are rarely wealthier than their oppressor, though eighteenth century Americans were better off than their English cousins. Revolutionaries are usually poor, but even more often revolution is triggered not by poverty per se, but discontent fomented by an inequitable economic pie.

Back in 1977, when 70% of Americans were content, revolution was unthinkable. But how low does that percentage have to drop before bellyaching turns into action, civil disobedience, and insurrection? I am not aware of a metric that maps the spiral towards revolution, but I discovered the Gini coefficient, a measure of income equity, which has a likely correlation.  Gini coefficients range from 0.00 (perfect equity) to 1.00 (total inequity). The CIA tracks every nation’s Gini coefficient because countries with high Gini’s are more prone to civil unrest, totalitarian regimes or both.  In the 2009 Gini view of the world, the map is blush in Scandinavia, where the Gini is as low as 0.25, it grows beige across Europe, Canada and India, tan across Russia, orange for the United States, Mexico, and China, where our Gini is about 0.45, red for Brazil, and Congo, maroon for Columbia, Bolivia and Haiti, and blood red for South Africa, whose Gini of 0.70 is the highest in the world.

Gini is not a measure of wealth; it is a measure of fair.  And the United States has colored itself solidly among the nations of the world whose income is distributed unfairly, the countries most prone to either iron-clad rule or revolution.

I get numb by the numbers broadcast about national debt, bailouts, and the Gross National Product.  But the simple calculation of dividing the $54 trillion United States GNP by the 315 million people who live here illustrates that each citizen’s proportionate share of our country’s wealth is $170,000.  Few of us have that much income, but because the one percenters have so much more flowing their way, the vast majority of us have less.

The United States will not have a revolution soon; it is not among our current strategies for affecting change.  But if we keep moving in the direction we are, with increasing inequality and increasing discontent, our culturally accepted methods of influencing government and economic policy will fail, and the people who experience inequality – which is virtually all of us – will turn to other means to achieve equity. I hope it does not come to that. Let’s use our democratic processes to translate the will of the people rather than the will of lobbyists or corporations, to make the United States a land of greater equality rather than a land of greater instability.  We are blessed to be so rich.  Let us use that blessing to become more just, compassionate, and fair.

GINI_retouched_legend

The Gini Index for 2009

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Same Little Boy – All Grown up

Posted on 06/16/2013 by paulefallon

vitruvian_man-001The ENR McGraw-Hill 2013 Best Global Projects Awards was well organized, like most social events orchestrated by engineers.  Dinner prompt at 6:30; alphabetically ordered project descriptions at 7:30. Winning teams paraded to the platform in business suits; there was only a smattering of women.  ENR snapped a formal photograph, followed by the random click of iPhones, general applause and on to the next winner.  Dessert served before 8:30, everything finished by 9:00 pm.

I believe I smiled direct at the camera for the main photo but somehow I could not maintain that attention, so what appeared on Len Gengel’s iPhone was this peculiar image of me right angling into space.  Back at our table, we all had a good laugh at my clueless expression, but I realized it was not something new. The photo captures the very same person gaping away from the view finder – wondering what in tarnation I am supposed to be doing – that inhabits the earliest photo of me at age 22 months. The more things change, the more the stay the same.

PBJ

Paul E. Fallon, looking away at ENR McGraw-Hill Awards, 2013

Scan Fallon

Paul E. Fallon, looking away at Christmas, 1956

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Fifty Years On – Can We Recapture the Spirit of Peace?

Posted on 06/10/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001Fifty years ago today President John F. Kennedy gave the commencement address at AmericanUniversity that announced steps towards peace with the Soviet Union. Although the speech lacks a singular punch line such as ‘Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do for your country’, it is hailed as a great speech and was remarkably effective, since it led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty less than six months later.

What is remarkable to me in reading the speech today (full text at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html) is the tone of conciliation, the humility, the realization that what we share with our enemies is much greater than what divides us.  The speech acknowledges our differences, but reaches past them to search for a peace based on our commonalities.  Below are selected quotes from the speech that I cannot imagine any current politician uttering.  How have we become simultaneously so weak we cannot acknowledge any virtue in our enemies yet so self-absorbed that we cannot look in a mirror and ask hard questions?

“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.”

“So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

“Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude towards peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives.”

For the sake of our country, and the world, I hope that we can rediscover the sense of hope, shared responsibility, and respect that is the foundation of John F. Kennedy’s transformational speech.

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Be Like Brit Dines Among the Big Boys

Posted on 06/07/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001Last night Be Like Brit orphanage in Haiti won the McGraw-Hill / Engineering News Record 2013 Best Global Project Award for Residential / Hospitality projects.  We were honored along with two other community-based efforts in the developing world: the El Rodeo suspension bridge in Nicaragua by Bridges to Prosperity from Denver, and the elegantly simple Schoolhouse South Africa in Johannesburg by Cornell University Sustainable Design.

This is the inaugural year for ENR to honor projects from a global perspective.  The judges were particularly interested in projects that demonstrated creative construction techniques, cultural sensitivity, and sustainability, all of which are evidenced in Be Like Brit, which one judge called an “excellent design that considers the art of the possible in Haiti after the earthquake.”

Five of us, John Thompson and Brian Twomey, our structural engineers from Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Len Gengel and his sister Chris, and me; enjoyed the festivities and the view from the 50th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in mid-town Manhattan. But as the ENR editors announced our fellow award winners, which included Rem Koolhaas / ARUP for Beijing’s China Central Television Building, Michael Arad / Handel Architects’ National September 11 Memorial in New York, and Renzo Piano’s The Shard in London, we realized that Brit’s memory was being commemorated among the best design and construction that this world has to offer.

BLB entry evening

Be Like Brit – 2013 ENR Best Global Project Award – Residential / Hospitality

elrodeo suspension bridge

El Rodeo Suspension Bridge – 2013 ENR Best Global Project Award – Bridges / Tunnels

CUSD

Schoolhouse South Africa – 2013 ENR Best Global Small Project

China Central TV

China Central Television Building – 2013 ENR Best Global Project Award – Office

911 mem

National September 11 Memorial – 2013 ENR Merit Global Project Award – Cultural

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shard

The Shard – 2013 ENR Best Global Large Project

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The Queen of Versailles

Posted on 06/02/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001My definition of a good movie is – do I wake up thinking about it the next morning?  According to this criterion, Queen of Versailles is one of the best movies ever made because I can’t get it out of my mind.

 

Jackie Siegel is a very nice woman.  True, she is a leggy blonde of questionable blondness, the mother of seven children who admits its fun to have them as long as there are nannies.  True, she wants to trade up her 26,000 square foot house on its own gated island in Orlando for a 90,000 square foot version of Versailles complete with spa, bowling alley, and whatever whim pops into her head.

David Siegel is a very nice man.  True, he is an aging entrepreneur of questionable ethics who claims to be the hand behind George W. Bush’s 2000 victory in Florida.  True, his cultural compass points in a retro direction; the highlight of his year is having all 50 Miss America contestants grace the main stair of his mansion while he flirts with the current title holder in front of his wife.

When we meet this pair and their hoard of children, dozens of dogs and nineteen personal staff, it is 2007 and George’s time share condo empire is expanding faster than Rocky Balboa’s chest sprinting up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  We are dumbstruck by their house, their cars, their two story closets; only to learn that they are moving up when we visit Versailles with its three story stained glass dome, twin grand stairs, five million dollars of marble floor and a warehouse where Jackie hoards every Louse XIV artifact she can get here hands on before move-in day. Money is so abundant it is irrelevant in their frantic accumulation of stuff.

2008 rolls around, banks teeter, the Feds bail them out, but the banks ratchet credit down, the time share business tanks and with it go Jackie and David.  They lay off 7,000 employees.  Jackie opens a personal goodwill store where former employees can buy her excess stock at deep discounts. She downsizes. Instead of shopping the antique markets of Europe she wheels through Wal-Mart, but she still has two nannies in tow to navigate her five shopping carts. When Jackie presents her son a new bicycle; he shrugs and tosses it on the pile of other new, untouched, bicycles. These people have been gilded so long, nothing is precious.

Everything about this couple should be despicable, yet they are also rich in redemptive qualities.  Jackie is an ordinary girl from Binghamton, NY, a go getter with an engineering degree who escaped an IBM cubicle job when she realized it deadened her, moved to New York City and redirected her energy to becoming a model, a beauty queen and the wife of a tycoon.  We believe she loves this man thirty years her senior, she demonstrates it in every frame of the film.  She is eternally cheerful, patient with children, and loving towards her husband even as the financial crisis makes him ever more despondent.

Toward the end of the film, when the largest time share in Las Vegas has gone belly up, Versailles is for sale, but they still have their private island mansion, David refers to his wife as another child. We can’t help thinking his biggest mistake is not financial miscalculation so much as a personal one; Jackie is more than a pretty woman with an amazing chest, she is his greatest ally and should be his closet confidante.  But he has no concept how to include this woman into his grinding business life. He flails alone.

For her part, Jackie exits the movie outside her mansion, reiterating her faith in her husband, and vowing to stay together no matter that the future might bring.  “We could live in a $300,000 four bedroom house; we could get bunk beds.”  Are we supposed to laugh at the prospect of this family moving into a house no bigger than her current closet, or are we supposed to laugh because the minimum life she can envision is still far beyond what most Americans can afford?

Of course in the end no one is laughing. The Queen of Versailles is a tragedy, as much as tragedy as the film’s namesake. Doesn’t Jackie know that Marie Antoinette’s excess ended her up at the guillotine?

The last few years have brought a revisionist perspective for the original Queen of Versailles.  Sophia Coppola made a redemptive biopic of the French Queen; the ART staged a play that portrays Marie as a victim.  Jackie and David Siegel are clueless, narcissistic people who live a powerful yet shallow dream, and they demonstrate in this film how unsatisfying the pursuit of material goods can be.  Their self-absorbed, unsustainable way of life is disgusting.  After spending an evening with them I feel sorry for them.  But I do not dislike them.  I believe they are victims of their culture exactly as Marie Antoinette was a victim of hers; blinded by the delusion that consumption conveys meaning.  Marie had her head cut off, while the Siegels survive, for now. In 2013 they still live on their island, they never sold Versailles, they are back at building it once again.  Even in the wake of the financial crisis, they reflect so much of America; still pursuing an easy, corrupt dream rather than doing the hard work of imagining a more satisfying one.

Queen of Versailles, Jackie Siegel

Jackie and David Siegel

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Tough Yoga

Posted on 05/30/2013 by paulefallon

awkward_pose_3-001The line between success and failure can be fine, but once we trip over it, we cannot always raise ourselves to the other side.  I knew an evening class would be grueling, but I thought it doable.  I had been away for the weekend, driving up the East Coast on a workday Monday was stressful, but we pulled into the driveway at 5:40 pm and if I hustled I could make the 6:00 pm in Harvard Square.  I know the Bikram yoga class times like others know train schedules. I raced into the studio with two minutes to spare, changed into my yoga shorts and took a spot toward the back.

For the next ninety minutes everything went wrong.  I was too full from lunch, the room was too hot, too humid; I could not focus my mind.  I stretched though half moon and awkward pose, but got dizzy on eagle.  I fell out of standing head to knee, twice, and by the time we got to dancer pose I was standing in a shallow pool of my own sweat. Each pose got feebler until I took a knee at triangle. I tried to navigate head to knee but by the first sabasana I was finished.  Midway through the spine series I left the room – a Bikram failure.

I am suffering yoga block.  In the past month I’ve sat out more poses than I have in over 900 classes; twice I’ve had to leave the room. Some days the humidity feels like a choke hold around my neck.  I still have great days when I leave class limber and energized, but a weariness plagues me.  I am committed to completing my 1000 class mark, but I wonder if perhaps I need a breather, something lighter, some cooler air in my quest for fitness and mental clarity.

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