Submitted By Norm Robins
Author’s note: This essay is dedicated to Donnell Dike-Anukam. Don has reported on politics for This Is Reno and attended UNR. While plying his craft during the recent riot in downtown Reno he was set upon by barbarians.
This month, November 2020, I turned 84. That’s old in anyone’s playbook. In 1963, when I was a newly graduated civil engineer, I interviewed for a job with the Far East affiliate of what is now ExxonMobil. One interviewer, an old engineer who had been there, done that, asked me if I drank, went to church, and played bridge. I said yes, no and no. Unconcerned with the state of my soul, he said, “You had better learn to play bridge. Some of these places can be pretty lonely.”
Why did I apply for a job in the Far East? I grew up without a father, so I approached the subject of my impending manhood by reading manly authors like Ernest Hemingway, Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling’s poem Mandalay persisted in my head. It still does.
“By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
‘Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!‘”
That was heady stuff for a 16-year-old. Kipling did his tours of duty in South Asia. Then the army mustered him out and sent him back to Britain. He didn’t like it. He pined for the East. I understand that.
“I am sick o’ wasting leather on these gritty pavin’ stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones…
Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst;“
Take that, British caste system, Church of England and Women’s Christian Temperance Union! I had to go east of Suez and walk in Kipling’s shoes.
I learned early on to entertain myself and make the most of what I had. I learned not to rue what I didn’t. These are miraculous times in which we live. We have everything at our fingertips. It makes survival in the time of COVID-19 livable, even pleasurable.
In the past my wife and I, along with some friends, attended Metropolitan Opera and Bolshoi Ballet telecasts at the Riverwalk 12 theater. We and our friends don’t do that anymore, and I miss them. But the times are what they are. They will pass. There are ballets, concerts, symphonies and plays telecast on YouTube from all over the world. These include interviews and tutorials. Tutorials are important. One should never stop learning.
Books are available as free downloads. Go to www.gutenberg.org for a list of them. Do you like American literature? The Scarlet Letter is there. So are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Do you like something older? Try Homer, Seneca or Tacitus. Do you want to read authors as I did when I was a teenager? Try one of Jack London’s many books listed there. If you would like to understand the Great Game, the geopolitics of south Asia from the 19th Century to the present, get Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. He explains it all and beautifully.
Good cooking is a passion of mine and my wife’s. We love the cuisines of China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India. Everything we need is available online. Do you like Latin American food? Goya has everything you need online including recipes. So does Marketon on South Wells Street.
Would you like to try Chinese tea smoked salmon? (It’s to die for.) You can’t make that without smokey lapsong suchong tea. It is available online and at two Chinese grocery stores on South Virginia Street. For Indian spices and supplies go to the Spice Market, also on South Virginia. Immediately upon entering, your olfactors tell you in no uncertain terms that you are in an Indian grocery store.
My wife and I celebrate the end of every day with a dinner party. We have great food, a magnificent view out our window, gentle jazz and a fireplace on the television, candlelight (from battery operated candles, but they flicker) and a bottle of wine, and nuts to COVID-19.
Carl Sandburg, the poet laureate of Chicago and the prairies to its west, went looking for the definition of happiness. He asked the brilliant academics “who teach the meaning of life” and “famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.” They were no help. They thought he “was trying to fool with them.” He wrote:
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
[just north of Chicago]
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
And that, dear reader, is the picture of happiness. Enjoy the life you have. You can do it. COVID-19, like every other virus we’ve had, will pass into history.
Norm Robins is a retired entrepreneur and ex-engineer whose first love is economics and who has lived and worked all over the world. He has a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and an MBA in International Business from the University of California, Berkeley. He and his wife and one of his three children live in Reno, Nevada.
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