Personal History

What Mrs. Otto Taught Me

Sam Falco1 Comment

I learned to program in BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20 my parents gave me for my fourteenth birthday. I knew I needed to learn more, so I signed up for a computer programming class at my high school for my junior year. A schedule mix-up took over a week to sort out and I transferred in late. The teacher, Mrs. Otto, told me to do the best I could on the current assignment and promised to help me get up to speed afterward. The assignment was something simple like printing a multiplication table. The instructions said it should take ten lines of code.

I wrote it in one.

On a VIC-20, every byte was precious. You only had three kilobytes (yes, kilobytes) of RAM to work with. Line numbers took up memory, so I’d learned the value of cramming as much code as possible into a single line. To complete Mrs. Otto’s assignment, I nested two FOR loops and put all the operations inside the inner and outer loops. I may have used an array variable, too. I ran the program and showed it to Mrs. Otto. She said, “I can see that it works, but I don’t understand what you’ve done.”

Courage

Imagine the courage it took to say that to a cocky sixteen-year-old.

I later found out that this was her first time teaching BASIC programming and that she was new to the language. She could have said, “The assignment was ten lines. Do it right,” and dismissed me. Instead, she showed courage by admitting that she didn’t know something. I might have mocked her or replied with arrogance and impatience. She didn’t care. She wanted to know why what I did worked more than she wanted to appear knowledgeable.

Being able to admit ignorance, especially when you’re supposed to be “the one who knows,” takes guts. Mrs. Otto’s courage demonstrated the value of humble curiosity.

Empathy

By taking the time to understand why I chose to write my code the way I did, she also demonstrated empathy. When I explained how little RAM I was used to working with, she pointed out that the machines we had at school had much more RAM. Space wasn’t as big an issue. She said that part of good programming was making code easy to understand. Someone else might have to read my code later. Shouldn’t I make it easier on them?

Then she challenged me to rewrite my program. Could I do it in five lines? I could and did. Although I didn’t learn anything new about the language, I learned something new about program design.

Humility

Once she realized that I already knew all the concepts of BASIC that she was going to teach, she might have told me to transfer out, or let me treat the class as study period. Instead, she leveraged my skill and knowledge as a teacher’s aide. Sometimes she had me teach lessons and then critiqued my style. By stepping aside and letting me shine, she helped me grow skills I didn’t know I needed or wanted. Today, I’m a damned good Scrum Trainer and she paved the way for it.

I don’t know what I expected when I walked into Mrs. Otto’s class for the first time. Did I think I’d skate through an easy class for a semester? Did I hope to go beyond what I’d already taught myself? My journal from that time is of no use because I didn’t write it down. But whatever I expected, Mrs. Otto taught me more. I didn’t learn computer programming. I learned to be a better human.

Appreciating Now

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
What skills or lessons have you learned recently?
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Lesson learned

Not quite a couple of weeks ago, I recognized that I needed to slow my pace on my novel. As soon as I did, I rediscovered how much I enjoy the creative act. How easily the words can flow when I don’t force them to come.

That first day, without the frenzied desire to churn out 1,800 words, I spent an hour in discovery. I wrote about each major character’s current knowledge and goals. That suggested the next scene. I turned to the manuscript and seven hundred plus words emerged in what felt like the space between inhale and exhale. It has been like that every day, except once when I stopped at six hundred words because I’d finished the chapter and didn’t want to start the next scene yet.

Each day after I stopped, I felt content that I’d written well. Satisfied by the experience. Proud of myself. That hadn’t been true in a couple of weeks. I’d been pushing myself relentlessly, my eyes on the goal with no concern for the means. That’s the way I’ve operated most of my life.

Last Friday, the son of a friend graduated from college. He was so excited about his accomplishment. He worked hard and now he’s enjoying the praise of his parents and extended family. He’s excited for the future but he’s enjoying this moment. Kudos to him.

I never did. After I dropped out of University of South Florida, I returned to school via community college. I barely acknowledged my AA degree. I was ashamed that I’d taken the detour. Once I returned to USF, I was on a mission: finish a bachelor’s degree as fast as I could. That’s how I came to major in History instead of English—I had three more credit hours in the former than the latter. The degree was a means to an end. I didn’t attend graduation. I didn’t even let my parents take me to dinner. I was twenty-five and still embarrassed that I was so far behind where I thought I should be. It was much the same for my MA. I attended that graduation, but only because my then-fiancée insisted I’d regret it if I didn’t. You’ll want to remember it, she said.

I remember nothing.

I was already looking forward, wondering what was next, and worrying that I was still behind in a race to a destination I couldn’t even name.

I’ve been running after nothing at all. I have been so allergic to the idea of nostalgia that I not only stopped looking at the past, but also stopped noticing the everyday now. I have turned hobbies into oppressive obligations in my monomaniacal quest for The Future.

As I congratulate my young friend on his accomplishment, I envy his ability to appreciate the Now. I’m grateful that I’m starting to learn how to do it for myself.

Christmas ornaments and someone else’s nostalgia

Sam Falco3 Comments

Sweetie and I have been spending an hour each weekend on a modified form of “Swedish Death Cleaning.” Over the course of two decades in this house, we’ve let a lot of clutter accumulate. We have a large home repair and remodeling project coming up, and that has prodded us to get rid of things. After finishing with the basement recently, we turned to the big central closet. It took us two weekends to get clean it out, and the final stage was when we reached the Christmas ornaments and decor.

We stopped putting ornaments on the tree the year after PK finally became an indoor cat, because she kept knocking the tree over and breaking the ornaments. For several years after that, we had a “Cats-mas tree.” We’d put up our little, fake Christmas tree and pack its boughs with cat toys. After Chubby Huggs joined the household, the two of them beat the crap out of that tree until it was a bedraggled mess and we got rid of it. Then, a couple of years of hectic December work schedules kept us from decorating. We got out of the habit. Stuff piled up in front of those boxes, and we forgot they were there.

Once we got to them, though, I remember what was in one of them. About a dozen ornaments from my childhood, hand-made by someone on my mother’s side of the family. “Unc” made one for every child in the family, every year. I looked at the box, and I said to Carolyn, “This is going to be painful to go through.” I braced myself and opened the box.

They might as well have been museum pieces. I felt no attachment to them.

Upon reflection, I realized that I had never cared about them. Every year, I’d open a gift that I couldn’t play with, wear, eat, or read. Later that day, I’d have to write a thank-you note for it that my mother deemed sufficiently heart-felt. A week after that, I’d pack it away with the rest of the ornaments. I’d kept those ornaments because they were important to my mother, and she thought they should be important to me. I’d kept them because of the echo of someone else’s sentiment that I’d allowed to become an obligation.

There was one ornament in that box that I liked, and I kept it. But the rest are gone. Hanging on to belongings because they meant something to someone who has been gone for years is a cruel memorial. It turns the dead into tyrants. Who would want to be remembered that way?

No Pictures!

Sam Falco1 Comment

I don’t know what made me think of this incident today: Sometime in 2017, my friend Jessica was using my phone and opened my photos app. (We were good enough friends that this wasn’t an intrusion.) “You have, like, no pictures,” she complained. And while that was an exaggeration, she wasn’t far off. I don’t keep many pictures on my phone because I don’t take many pictures.

That seems weird when I remember what a shutterbug I used to be. As a child, if I got my hands on your camera, you could kiss the roll of film it contained goodbye. I can’t tell you how many times I heard my parents say, “I thought there were more shots left.” And a week later, when we picked up the developed film, “Oh, you little rapscallion.” And sometimes, “These are pretty good.”

When I was twelve, I saved money to buy one of my own: a Kodak Ektra 1. It took 110 film cartridges, had a fixed focus, and no flash. You could buy a flip-flash attachment for indoor photography, but they weren’t cheap and I had a hard enough time keeping myself in film. I stuck with outdoor photography. Until I went to college, my neighborhood might have been the most well-documented part of the planet that wasn’t a war zone.

Eventually the limitations of the Ektra got to me and I stopped taking pictures. Later, when early mass-market digital cameras came out, I took up photography again. I have some really nice pictures from my first (and only) digital camera. I abandoned it within a couple years of getting my first iPhone. Why carry a separate camera when I have one with me all the time?

But I never liked taking pictures with the iPhone. I’d take dozens of shots of the same thing and be satisfied with none of them. I think the lack of limitations was part of the problem. With the 110, I was limited to at most 36 shots per cartridge. I had to take care with my composition and consider my shots carefully. With the digital camera, the SD card size likewise constrained how many shots I could take. My phone has enough memory for thousands of shots. There’s less thought involved. Fire away and hope for the best.

Maybe what I need to do is pretend I do have an insanely low limit on how many shots I have available. What pictures would I take around my house and yard if I had that Ektra again, and a single twelve-image cartridge?

Miracle Monday

Sam Falco1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.
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I don’t remember when I fell in love with superhero comics, but I was bona-fide nuts over the genre by 1978, when Superman: The Movie was released. I wanted to see that movie so bad it was a physical longing, but I would have to wait months after it hit theaters to see it. My family rarely went to movies, and when we did, it was always at a drive-in. I don’t think I saw a movie without headrests between me and the screen until Return of the Jedi in 1983.

Superman came out in December, right before Christmas break started. I knew all the kids would be talking about it when we came back to school. I didn’t want to be left out, like I had for Star Wars the year before. I had a plan. My great-aunt never failed to include five bucks with her Christmas cards. I would use that money to buy the book I’d seen with Christopher Reeve on the cover: Superman: Last Son of Krypton. I’d read it and be ready to talk about the story.

The joke was on me. The book was an entirely different story. I was, once again, the weirdo who wasn’t up on the current films. On the other hand, Last Son of Krypton was a better story than the movie. (Which I did eventually see from the back seat of my parent’s Ford Torino station wagon.) So when I saw Miracle Monday by the same author three years later, I snatched it up. I enjoyed it every bit as much as I had Last Son of Krypton.

In Miracle Monday, a time traveler from the far future comes back to the twentieth century to discover the origin of a holiday, Miracle Monday, about which nothing is known except that it’s connected to Superman. When she arrives, a demon is causing chaos and has revealed Superman’s identity to the world. The demon possesses her body and taunts Superman with the fact that the only way he can be stopped is if Superman kills the host. Superman refuses to kill, defeats the demon, and forces it to restore everything to the way it was before the demon arrived on earth. Everyone forgets the events, but a residual memory that something happened causes people to start celebrating the third Monday in May as “Miracle Monday.”

Miracle Monday is my favorite Superman story, ever. If I could create a holiday, that’s the one: a worldwide celebration of our common humanity.

Also, there would be a big meal. I like to eat.

Less of a path than a meander

Sam Falco1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?
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In high school, I thought I’d be a lawyer. That had been my grandfather’s hope for my father. It didn’t happen and somehow, the mantle was dropped on me. I liked the idea of being a crusader for justice, and I wanted to fight for the underdogs as a labor lawyer. Then I found out how hard you had to work to become a crusader for justice and how little justice you could actually bring about and decided it wasn’t for me.

I thought I’d be a professional actor for a minute. I was far too critical of my skill for it to last. It didn’t help that I was working at a job that didn’t allow the kind of flexible schedule that acting would have required.

“Be a writer” was always on my mind, but I didn’t know how to make that a paying gig. At least, not a paying gig that I enjoyed. There were some non-fiction gigs here and there. None of them paid that well and none was fulfilling. I tried fiction and kept trying but my skill lagged far behind my ambition.

After I went back to school, I thought I’d like to be a professor. History at first, then English. I taught as a graduate student, and I liked it very much. But I wasn’t that great a scholar. It didn’t help that I was dealing with a major depressive disorder that wouldn’t be diagnosed and treated until after my first marriage ended.

I got into the software industry almost by accident. I got an IT help desk job on the strength of my ability to talk people through solving their computer problems. That led to network engineering, technical writing, software quality engineering, and ultimately becoming a Scrum Master, agile consultant, and trainer.

It’s been a hell of a ride and it’s not over. I’m hoping to leverage what I’ve learned in the past several years to focus on product portfolio management and strategic leadership.

The air I breathe

Sam Falco

When I read Makenna Karas’s post today on rediscovering the joy of journaling, it triggered a memory of my own similar discovery not long ago.

I started keeping a journal when I was in ninth grade, over four decades ago. My English teacher knew that I wanted to be a writer and said keeping a journal would help. I pressed a fresh Mead spiral-bound notebook into service that night. I didn’t know what I was supposed to write about, so I filled the pages with period-by-period accounts of my day, interspersed with descriptions of the girls I had crushes on. (Basically all of them.) Those entries are tedious to read today, but they’re raw in their honesty.

I kept a journal on and off, mostly on, for the next ten years. The honesty persisted for the first three or four years. In my sophomore year in college, the content shifts. I wasn’t writing for me anymore, but for some future audience I never could define. (I’ve found a few entries where I wrote about it.) That would have been OK, I suppose, except that I very much wanted to impress that future audience, so I started framing entries toward that end. Decades before social media curation became a thing, I was curating my image for someone else to consume.

The funny thing is that when I read those entries now, I am transported back in time to the moments when I wrote them. I can feel, hear, and even smell my surroundings. More to the point, I recognize the lies and I remember the truth I was trying to hide. It can be painful. I wasn’t a nice person. Old man Sam is often ashamed of his younger self.

Shortly before my 28th birthday, a woman broke me. I loved her with everything I had. She made me want to be a better human. And then she ended it. It took the air from my lungs.

I stopped writing.

I stopped writing almost everything. I managed papers for my classes, but barely. Not a line of poetry. Not a word of fiction. Not a word in my journal, because I could not lie about what had happened to me and the truth was too excruciating to face. There is an empty chasm in 1995.

When the entries start again, they’re sporadic, often with gaps of weeks between entries. What entries there are lack insight. They’re more like chronicles than a journal. When I read them, I get none of the time-shifting sensation I get reading earlier ones. There’s no emotional connection to them because there’s no emotion in them. I didn’t like writing them.

A few years ago, I decided to rebuild the discipline of journaling. I reserved time every morning for an entry. It was difficult at first, but as the streak continued, I became more invested in maintaining it until the idea of skipping a day became unbearable. Some days, I’d write two or three entries. With all that time spent in the journal, I thought that my other writing might suffer. It didn’t. Time spent on the journal translated to clearer, deeper thinking that made other writing better and easier.

Eventually, I missed a day. But I maintain the discipline in all but the most extreme circumstances. It shows in my other writing. It shows in my thinking. It shows in my well-being. My journal is the medium I move in. It is the air I breathe.

Felt it but didn’t act it

Sam Falco2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?
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When I was twenty-two, two of my friends got married. It was the first wedding I ever went to where my peers were the main attraction. Watching them exchange vows was the first time I felt it. They were adults. That mean I was an adult.

I wish I could say that moment was a life-changing epiphany, but it wasn’t. For many years after, I lived an extended adolescence. I demanded autonomy but refused to accept responsibility for the outcome of the choices I made. I may have felt like a grown up for a brief moment in 1989, but it took another ten years before I started acting like it.

I hurt a lot of people. I regret that more than I regret the wasted time. It hurts my heart to think of it.

Chasing an MA, Finding My Limits

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?
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This one’s a no-brainer: getting an MA in English.

I started graduate school planning to continue my undergraduate study of History. After two semesters, I realized I was on the wrong path. To quote my graduate advisor, “Your Latin is terrible, and your Greek is non-existent.” He wasn’t wrong. I could barely read the original sources I was supposed to rely on. And even if I’d been a whiz at both languages, the job prospects in academia for historians weren’t rosy.

I switched to English. I loved studying literature as much as I enjoyed history. I’d almost majored in English anyway, so I figured it would be a fit.

The problem this time was that I wasn’t that good a student. My undergraduate work had been adequate, but I wasn’t up to the rigors of graduate-level work. I struggled in every class. When I found out my comprehensive exam score, it came with a recommendation that I not continue on for a Ph.D. I laughed. I’d figured that out all by myself. I wrote my thesis out of sheer cussedness. I was in debt up to my eyeballs and I was determined to have something to show for it. I’m convinced that my advisors only signed off on it to get rid of me. They knew I’d keep making them read draft after draft.

It was hard going, but it was harder to admit that I wasn’t as smart as I’d believed. My self-mage was “smartest guy in the room.” But after all that, it turned out that I wasn’t that brainy. Brighter than average? Sure. But I was no intellectual. It took a long time for me to realize that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Top 5 Stuffed Toys

Sam Falco

I mentioned recently that I have an assortment of stuffed toys. These are my favorites.

A lop-eared, tan bunny; an orange seahorse with three babies in its pouch, Thunderbug in his Lighting jersey, a moose, and a grey-and-blue triceratops.

Thunderbug

We went to a Tampa Bay Lightning game with friends in 2015. Thunderbug, the Lightning mascot, came to the section next to ours and I got pretty obnoxious about trying to get him to cover over to us. In my defense, I was hammered. He never came over. The next week, when we went to our friends’ place for game night, this Thunderbug was waiting for me. I brought him to work to keep me company. Every day for two weeks, I’d come to work to find that my coworker had posed him in different scenarios.

Thunderbug posed in front of a selection of books about Scrum. He is wearing reading glasses and appears to be reading an open copy of "Agile Retrospectives."
Thunderbug, Scrum Master

Barry

Sweetie attempted to smuggle this bunny into my luggage before a business trip so I would be surprised when I got there. Except that I needed to check to see if I’d put something in my toiletry kit, so I discovered him before I left. Barry is named in honor of a Barry White’s appearance as an animated bunny in a salad dressing commercial that was airing when Sweetie and I met.

Seahorse with No Name

“The ocean is a desert with its life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love.” —America, “A Horse with No Name”

“Seahorse with No Name” is the name of the seahorse with no name, which means he does have a name. It’s very confusing. He wishes his kids would move out.

Teddy

Another gift from Sweetie, who got him on a business trip to Maine. Named after the 26th President of the United States because he, too, is a bull moose. Teddy urges you to always vote Democratic because “Giving power to Republicans is like giving kerosene and matches to an arsonist.”

Stomp

Stomp, a triceratops, is the late Cretaceous period’s hide-and-seek world champion. He didn’t realize he was playing; he is simply so much of an introvert that he didn’t notice the rest of his species going extinct. He doesn’t miss other triceratops because he says, “They were all a bunch of dicks, anyway.”