We in northern climes often view winter as a time of purging the ills of the warmer months, disease, rot, allergens etc. And so, when I woke early this morning and found snow beginning to accumulate on our lawn's grass I was delighted at the change in scene and chortled as I went from window to window to see what the different views displayed.
Claudia and I settled down to sip our coffee and watch the traffic along 21st Avenue, a snow tradition at our home, to see how the conditions were affecting the passing traffic. Not too bad. I hopped in the Traverse to drive to McDonalds for some egg sandwiches.
I'd already read a half a dozen Friday articles about our schools and they reminded me of another kind of purge – the possible purge of the noxious myths of the Red Plan that have allowed exSuperintendent, Keith Dixon's ghost, to rule the Duluth School Board for the past six years since he touchingly left Duluth – holding another $19 million bag of Red Plan doggy turds.
My ailing foot is not about to go out today to pass out more literature. Fortunately, my team has scraped up enough to reach most voters without depending on my mobility. So, I will spend the morning pointing to the various sources that strongly argue for this second purge.
Welty family reunions have most often converged on Estes Park, Colorado in a valley surrounded by foothills and the Rockies. One of my first memories was seeing Damn Yankees at a Drive in Theater when I was ten or so. Love the scene with canibals putting missionaries in a soup pot. Ten years later we saw Anne of a Thousand Days in the tiny downtown theater.
Its always been a tourist Mecca and even my cousins are astonished at its carpeting of new housing developments. The general level of material wealth is worth comparing to what I saw in China. Even if China's GNP overtakes that of the United States they won't likely match such places at Estes which has a hundred years headstart in developing creature comforts.
Much of what I've said of Estes could be said of Duluth as well at least as compared to China. Unlike the expanding Chinese Cities ours spread out into single family homes. The Chinese are expanding up as well but into apartment generic blocks.
As with our trip to China a few weeks ago national news was hard to ignore. As always Seth Meyers is a wonderful antidote. I loved this piece of his.
I also enjoyed Facebooking my weekend and appreciated my freedom to do so after being frozen out of Facebook while in China. Furthermore my reunion saw the first time that I wasn't with my wife during our anniversary. Claudia was with two very handsome boys in the Dells and our anniversary communications were all Facebooked.
I'll be heading home in a couple hours and to a birthday party for one of those boys. I'll be taking him to the path of the total eclipse on Sunday and I bought eclipse sun glasses at the Visitors Center at Rocky Mountain National Park. Its been a busy August and from reports I got while in Colorado from back home School Board politics are heating up. I'll start going door to door soon but I know that voters don't pay much attention to local elections until Labor Day.
At the end of the meeting one Board member interrupted a conversation that Mr. Frederickson, Alanna Oswald and I were having and told Spencer with dismissive authority that school's were not responsible for children's suicides.
It was good to see the Trib's Education reporter back covering yesterday's Education Committee meeting. She's back after having recently delivered a prospective new student for the Duluth Schools. The Trib's story covers the critical issue of our Reserve funds which have shrunk to a week's worth of cushion should we face financial calamity. That means we have one week's worth of spending in the bank. If we have to cover an unexpected expense or even an expected expense we will have to borrow money and pay interest to our lender. Not good!
When I was first on the School Board we had a year's worth, not a week's worth, of spending in our reserve fund. Ask yourself, as we board members will be asking ourselves, how we can address the concerns of our East High School teachers with so few resources available to alleviate their problem.
The East building stewards are following up with a Meet and Confer that took place as the school year was starting. We continue to be concerned about class size at East and encourage you to review the data.
Before school started on August 28th the Union Stewards at East hosted a Meet and Confer meeting with Superintendent Gronseth and Assistant Superintendent Starzecki regarding class size. Presently there are over 1,564 students enrolled for the 2015-2016 school year (as of 12/7/15). Throughout this process we have worked closely with our building administrator and were hopeful that additional FTE could be secured for East that would address the areas of concern. These areas are referred to as hot spots and highlight the overcrowded classes. As building stewards and classroom teachers we are advocating for smaller class sizes. Recently, math intervention courses were eliminated to use building FTE to reduce class sizes in math. The need for additional FTE to meet this need was brought up at the August meeting to avert having to cancel courses that could help reduce learning gaps. There continues to be a need for additional FTE and support at East where the enrollment is quite large.
When the levy was passed one of the key focus areas was reducing class size. Our data from the last 5 years would indicate this has not happened at East. We encourage you to review the data and ask for your support to funnel funding into the classroom.
Thank you for your time and commitment to serve as a school board member.
Larger class sizes or disrupted scheduling in reaction to overloaded classes may drive student to PSEO or may make it more difficult to retain students in the margin (increasing our drop-out rate/widening the achievement gap).
I've taken a break from regular blogging to refresh myself and to get my bearings for a soon-to-be new school board. I have explained previously that my commentary about other board members, especially my passing on their quotes or paraphrases, has led to hurt feelings and worse. I backed off from such commentary for about six months after winning my own election to the School Board in 2013 from November of that year until the following spring until I deduced that I was being treated less than fairly. I have also said that I was censured in December for my blogging and not for my premature disclosure of the Central selling price. By then my blog was a source of embarrassment for my fellow board mates.
Although the new Board has yet to be seated I can assure my eight loyal readers that my early confidence in the new school board seems to be justified. I have met with one of the newly elected board members who was sort of keeping distance from me and we found much to compare notes about. School Board personalities and politics did not rear its ugly head, however, so that remains to be tested at a later date.
There are many speed bumps ahead for the new board. I'll post two such bumps following this. I'll offer no answers because none will be easily available to us. The simple fact is that as tall as these bumps are they will be infinitely higher if we don't have a sensible board. It is my strong belief that the next school board will focus on solutions to these difficult problems far more closely than the wounded egos of each member. Keep your fingers crossed that my prediction pans out.
Better than a week ago I jotted down ten or twelve posts I wanted to write for my blog on a sheet of paper. Most of them were harmless but I'm torn between getting off to a good start with the new school board and getting things off my chest. This blog is my public diary and there is nothing I find more annoying than to go back to see that some detail of the past was not jotted down for posterity because I was on hiatus. That is particularly true of my first year fighting for a right to vote on the Red Plan and organizing Let Duluth Vote. I have only my current memories of those now distant events but I don't have my thoughts of that moment. I'm often surprised to read what I wrote when I go back to old posts and I trust their accuracy more than my memory.
I will say that I'm delighted that the two new board members I've not had a chance to meet with have generously agreed to meet with me soon. We've even set a date. I will probably not write about that meeting or what we discuss – at least not in any depth – because I meant what I told Dr. Kirby when I saw him campaigning at Chester Bowl last October. I told him that I expected that we would be "boon companions" should he be elected. I can't blame him if he was skeptical of that prediction but I meant it. Not blogging about what we talk about is my stab at building up some trust between us.
At my feet, as I type, is one of dozens of DNT clippings that I meant to blog about. Its the story from November 16th about shifting enrollments between area school districts. There are two new constants that the new school board must deal with. First, we've lost 15% of our enrollment (probably permanently) to other Districts since the Red Plan began to materialize. Second, we've dedicated roughly $10 million dollars which used to be available for the classroom from the local property tax levy to paying off building bonds. I have no objection to having the School Board shower Duluth with lots of positivity. But, I will not be a party to this positivity if we refuse to acknowledge the deep trench we dug for ourselves. If we are honest about that I will search for a good backhoe to fill the trench in.
I need to file my latest clippings in my ever growing clipping file which I've been keeping for twenty years. I'll get that and some other organizational work done today although I also have grandparenting duty. My oldest grandson came down with a fever yesterday and I will be hosting him for the day. He's sitting in my comfy new rocker in the office reading at the moment. This weekend I'll be heading down to the Twin Cities to participate in the Minnesota School Board's delegate assembly. We will be looking through a couple hundred possible resolutions that once whittled down will form our wish list for the State legislature. Art Johnston and I have a resolution which would alter the law that seemingly gives school boards the arbitrary power to undo elections in order to rid themselves of unpopular school board members. I don't think we will get our resolution passed this time around but we'll offer it up again next year.
Too bad we got so little snow yesterday. I actually have an idea for a snow sculpture. I think the children passing my home in their school buses will like it.
In case any of my other eight loyal readers were wondering my Buddy sent me this question.
Jeez, Harry. No comment for a week. Were you neutered by the recent election?
Can't a jabber mouth ever get a chance to shut up for a few days?
I'll hide behind either of them at the moment……Besides, I have lots of things to catch up on after knocking on thousands of doors for the past month.
I went out and waved lawnsigns yesterday morning. It goes against my grain to do this no matter how much of an exhibitionist I appear to others. When I saw the Stauber family doing this a few elections back I had the sinking feeling that someday this would be expected of me too.
I had other plans for the last day before elections too, leafleting a few missed cul-de-sacs, putting up unused lawnsigns some of which I'd begged for a week in advance of election day. Some were discovered hiding two days before the election. It took me until 2 PM to work up the enthusiasm to get to them. I was already spent from a furious last month of going door to door. A rough guess is that I visited between six and eight thousand doors. Toward the end I stopped knocking and just passed out flyers for my candidates. I don't think I worked as tirelessly for myself two years ago.
We'd been hearing reports for a few days of lawnsign theft. Alanna had one fellow tell her not to bother to give him a sign because he knew where a bunch of hers had been dumped. All he had to do was just go get one of the discards for himself. I hope we pick up the rest later. Alanna could use them again if she is disposed to run for reelection in four years. So I decided the least I could do was restore and improve upon the lawnsignage I'd put up along lower Woodland and 21st Ave leading down to the I-35 exit.
Right now is a little about 7 AM on the day of the election. I will soon be heading out to make sure these signs survived the vandals last night. And no, if you were wondering. I never heard back from the police about that SUV that was stealing lawnsigns last week even though I gave them its licence plate number.
This last year has been a nightmare. I felt the way Congressional Democrats must have felt when Newt Gingrich and the GOP took it upon themselves to impeach and remove President Bill Clinton for being a lying cad. At least the fellow I was supporting though his own impeachment was honorable. I think it is this, as much as anything else, which has made me a one man campaigning machine for the past month. I crave respectful congeniality and open and honest discussions when discussing the state of the Duluth Schools. For well over a year I'd been telling Art Johnston that our only hope for a sane and sensible school board would come with today's election. As today's date has come closer I've doubled and redoubled my efforts to make congeniality come to pass.
Oh, congeniality won't solve our problems. Duluth's school board took ten million dollars from the classroom for the next twenty years to build "state of the art" (read vanity project) buildings. Cries for more teachers, more course offerings and more of everything else will not be solved by congeniality. What this Board needs is "grace under pressure" as Hemingway defined courage.
It was a poem of advice to Kipling's son who, by the way, was one of a million British boys killed in the First World War.
Congeniality will not assure anything like courage but if paired with the latter our Duluth School Board might find itself becoming part of the solution for ISD 709 instead of being so much of the problem.
Now go out and vote!
I was still smarting from having lost my first campaign for the school board in 1989 when I sculpted this out of snow. I would lose two more elections for the school board before finally winning a seat at the table.
Back then the building was called the CAB or Central Administration Building. Today its called HOCH or Historical Old Central High. The sculpture suggests that there has been an air of controversy about the Duluth Schools for a very long time. The big fellow on top of Old Central I called Phil. The little fellow joining him in raising an angry fist is my son Robb, then all of five years old. That's the same age as my grandson who stars in the preceding video. Today Robb is in this third year of a Doctoral program in Chemistry.
Robb was never very happy about the attention I brought him as Duluth's foremost snow sculptor and iconoclastic school board member. I don't think his teachers ever punished him for being the son of a School Board member even when I got national attention for my voodoo stunt. But my school board work kept him in the spotlight from 4th grade until his graduation which he pointedly skipped because I was the one designated to hand him his diploma.
I can hardly fathom that my previous record has been surpassed by recent events even if they have failed to draw national attention. The Trib's photographer, Steve Kuchera, snapped an animated me at the school board meeting when our Board decided to kick Art Johnston off.
Perhaps the singular difference between me and most school board members is that when calamity hits, say an imminent teacher's strike, or a thousand angry parents rage against school closings, or a top hockey coach is about to be fired I'm not inclined to hide in a janitor's closet. I blame my Mother who told me repeatedly when I was small not to cry when I skinned my knee because my Grandfather was shot in a war and he didn't cry.
In the meantime our students still melt away to other school districts. Our Western Schools have become the province of Free and Reduced lunches. We have overcrowded classrooms and diminished course offerings. No amount of happy talk will alter this. Replacing three people with their heads in the sand with three like-minded candidates is not what I would call a sure-fire recipe for success.
The photo of my son with Phil on Old Central comes from the web page I set up to run for the school board two years ago. I haven't looked at it until I googled "Harry Welty" last night and clicked the "images" option.
I only promised one thing in that campaign – that I would practice a simple rule of thumb. "Honesty is the best policy." I hope this blog has generally lived up to that standard.
Duluth's classrooms. There are three school board candidates I hope very much to have at my side as we go treasure hunting.
I will be passing out flyers for them door-to-door this afternoon and tomorrow. Two days ago my cell phone's pedometer told me I'd taken 32,000 steps passing out flyers. My 64-year old knees are pretty sore but as my Mom told me all those years ago – my Grandfather was shot and he didn't cry.
That's not a record but its close. My head is so full of stuff to blog about it could explode. Instead I'm going to keep my fingers busy today passing out Obije and Oswald flyers.
The thought of the School Board remaining in the hands of the crowd that gave us the last Godawful year keeps me awake at night. Eight hours of going door to door is the best narcotic know of to provide a good night's sleep. I didn't dose myself yesterday so I was up till 3AM tossing and turning. Heck, some of our possible new school board members refuse to meet with me. Two thirds of them are Rosie Loeffler-Kemp's choices.
I'd never heard of White before but I got sucked into watching the routine which ended with that pronouncement. It fit perfectly with the set up. It may very well fit with the Duluth School Board. I didn't take it personally but got a good laugh out of it. However, White's humor is not for the faint of heart so I won't go linking to it.
The board currently has a problem with transparency and isn't welcoming to the public, Martell said. Among other steps, he called for agenda sessions to be open to the public, similar to the Duluth City Council's sessions.
See https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=13D.01, which pertains to meetings of public bodies in Minnesota. Has the Board ordained that its agenda sessions are not to be open to the public?
I'll let my friend read my reply here in the blog.
For as long as I've been watching the Duluth School Board the Chair and Clerk have met with the Superintendent behind closed doors with his cabinet to set the agendas. Our policy used to guarantee that any subject that two board members wanted to discuss would automatically be placed on the agenda if they were given to the Chair about a week in advance. If agenda items were brought up at the meeting it required a unanimous vote at the meeting to be added.
The Dixon led Board changed this preventing minority members from placing anything on the agenda in advance or at the last minute.
If this is not illegal it is, as Loren Martell says, lacking in transparency.
Is such a meeting for agenda setting purposes required to be open? Again, I don't know. Any meetings of a quorum of the School Board must be open unless they involve private student data or personnel issues which are required to be kept secret. We had such a closed meeting yesterday.
As I read the statute I see a likely exception when the Superintendent and his cabinet meet with less than a quorum of the Board for whatever reason. On the other hand I remember bitterly learning that my intentional exclusion a year and a half ago from a meeting by management to consider the teacher's contract was illegal at a Minnesota School Board Association meeting.
Whether the law that my friend sent me has been violated for twenty years is uncertain. That it keeps the District's business secret from not only the public but from elected members of the school board is without question. Loren is absolutely right about that.
If you are never told what's wrong you sure as Hell won't be able to fix stupid.
I was glad to see that Art Johnston finally replied to the last news reports about his laying aside his lawsuit against the School Board. No one wants to see this old story drag out any more than Art or me. Its been an embarrassment and given everyone a black eye. I know Art had to tinker with the letter as he negotiated with the Editors until they could find no grounds to refute what Art wrote. While the editors would probably not agree with Art's thoughts in their entirety neither would the Trib have published them unless they met their journalistic standards. That assures Art's letter real credibility. For my part I fully agree with what Art has written.
The letter got a pretty good spot today on what will become a busy letters page. The opinion page will fairly burst with testimonials for the various candidates until November 3rd's election. The letter also had a headline that will assure it gets read. It addresses what I hope will soon become a moot point in School Board deliberations before the November 3rd election. Here it is title and all.
Posted on Oct 22, 2015 at 9:40 p.m.
It is important to point out the inaccurate information that was in the Sept. 22 story, "Duluth School Board saga ends with lawsuit's dismissal," and in the News Tribune's "Our View" editorial the following day, "Board, district can recommit to cooperating." Both concerned the Duluth School Board majority's abandoned attempt to remove me from the board.
Though rich in political innuendo, the effort to overturn my 2013 election failed because there were no grounds to remove me, no intimidating behaviors revealed and no conflict of interest.
Unfortunately, this legal issue cost about $250,000 and resulted in nothing but hard feelings, more angst toward our schools, and more money diverted from education.
Fortunately, three board members who spearheaded this political fiasco decided against running for re-election. None of the six School Board candidates up for election stated they would have pursued such action.
This is a hopeful sign that the health and integrity of our schools once again will be talked about at School Board meetings.
The writer represents the 4th District on the Duluth School Board.
The Trib has a good summary of our Mulch Meeting last night.
This morning I read a short article in the NY Times that related to our relationship with the environment.
The first was on a peanut product made in Israel called Bamba which everybody eats and most from a very early age. Someone noticed that there are almost no peanut allergies in Israel and wondered if there was a connection. Of course, I don't recall hearing about peanut allergies when I was a kid although I remember some horror stories about milk products. Today, according to the article, one in 50 US kids suffer from peanut allergies. A study confirmed that children whose parents rigorously kept them away from peanuts as infants and toddlers were far more likely to have children with peanut allergies, sometimes deadly allergies, than parents whose children ate peanut laced products at an early age.
Of course, peanuts are not the same as PCBs (poly chlorinated biphenols) and a host of other modern chemical creations such as those that can be found in tire rubber. There is no doubt our flushing of cosmetic and medicines down our sinks produces fish that all turn into females. We have a profound influence on our environment that is, at present, far beyond our ability to fully measure.
So, I offer the following observations I made from last night's meeting.
Of hundreds of chemical compounds likely to be found in tires the dozen or so measured by a laboratory did not show anything particularly alarming.
That said rubber, like wood chips, degrades over time. In the Lester Park school playground there is mulch from the equivalent of 12,000 tires. However, its much more worrisome than that. The shreds of tires are so small that the surface area of the rubber exposed to the atmosphere is factors above what 12,000 full rubber tires would be. Imagine an entire tire reduced to pencil shavings. Every atom in these tires is mere thousandths of an inch from the air. Its no wonder our kids come in with blackened hands. Kids aren't very fussy about washing up after playing outside. Whatever is in the tires will be near our kids respiratory system for perhaps a thousand playtime hours before they go on to middle school. The bags of mulch from the manufacturer gives alarming instructions about washing up after contact with the bag's contents to prevent worrisome things from happening. That's an ironical warning on contents made for our children to play on.
It will take a couple years before some much more extensive tests on tire mulch are conducted elsewhere. Meanwhile some urban school systems have forbidden the use of rubber mulch.
Hauling off the mulch and replacing it with, oh say, wood chips is the least of our costs which might be $110,000. We might have to completely re-engineer our playgrounds by digging them deeper with new drainage systems and re-installing all the equipment or buying new playground toys.
This is just the sort of issue that requires a functional school board to deliberate on calmly. The controversy is only a month old. It could fizzle out or ignite. An unnecessary repair would be expensive but it might offer peace of mind. That peace of mind could end up being as unwarranted as the calm it affords parents who keep their children away from peanut butter in the early years of their lives………or we could discover, years from now, that we subjected our children's immune systems to substances that could cause long lasting and irreparable harm.
The Trib only mentioned one item from our school board meeting last night – the sale of a small parcel of land adjacent to the Rockridge School for one hundred thousand dollars. That will pay for three years of heating and maintenance on the empty building should we be unable to sell it.
Along with the unsold Nettleton School and Central High its one of the Red Plan's many albatrosses. We sold Lincoln School for a dollar. That was our lucky day.
Last night at the Board meeting when we discussed the many enrollment difficulties both Rosie Loeffler-Kemp and Annie Harala emphasized that it was the role of School Board members to speak positively about our schools. How they square that with the terrible public record of the School Board over the past year and a half I'm not sure but I do understand the impulse, ignored though it has been.
Annie suggested another way to bring back students. Hiring more people to promote the good things about the school district in addition to our current PR person. Perhaps had we had two such folks they could have masked the antagonisms of the School Board last year and kept us out of the public eye. We might have to list among the qualifications for the job demonstrated previous experience with sainthood.
We had a reasonably calm school board meeting tonight but it left me with many questions.
It was nice to see David Kirby at a Board meeting two weeks before the election. Its the first time I recall seeing him here. He sat with Nora Samstad who made it through her first full meeting. It was a pretty short one, only an hour and a half long.
Art made a motion to add a policy item to our agenda. He had brought it up to our Board and Chair Seliga-Punyko six weeks ago but the Chair refused to let it be discussed. This is a problem because our rules require a unanimous vote to get anything on the agenda on the day of a meeting. Not surprisingly it was two votes to five to deny Art and me a chance to explain the proposed policy's merits. It simply said that important information would be shared with the School Board in the future.
Then, at the end of the meeting, Art mentioned the recent loss of another 200 plus students. He showed a chart with all the losses and gains in students since 2005 to the present. There was a spirited discussion which was split. One side felt the discussion hurt our reputation with families. The other, minority, side felt that we needed better information to figure out how to stop the continuing loss of students.
I mentioned that I'd like to conduct exit interviews. To my astonishment one of the majority members said we'd discussed exit interviews three times in the last year. I was too dumbstruck to ask what we learned from them having no recollection of any such discussions.
I learned another fascinating imponderable today. Apparently only 40 percent of the families who appealed a decision to preventing their children from attending schools in different attendance areas got their wish. Last year it was 90 percent. I was shocked to hear this because I was appointed to serve on the Transfer Appeals Committee which makes these decisions. I was never notified of its having met all spring.
This information was shared with folks at the meeting called by Rep. Simonson to discuss the Edison schools and its impact on the ISD 709 Schools. Supt. Gronseth offered up this information much as he suggested that ISD 709 will only lose about 200 students to the new 600 student Edison High School. Maybe we should be doing some pre-exit interviews to make sure.
Annie Harala was the insider Board member who attended the meeting with the Superintendent. When the discussion of the new Edison High School came up Annie asked the Edison folks if they would put an end to the project for the good of everyone. She was informed that the project was too far along to stop. This is one time that "better late than never" doesn't apply.
Art Johnston sent the local press the worrisome news that ISD 709 has suffered another significant drop in its October attendance. He's a little surprised that no news source has mentioned this, as of yet.
The Duluth Public Schools disclosed to the School Board on Monday our enrollment figures for this fall. This showed another large, unpredicted decrease of students and raises lots of concerns.
The Duluth Public School enrollment for the start of this year is 8366 students in grades K through 12.
Today's Editorial Page had a op ed about our playground mulch. A meeting is to be held at Lester Park this Wednesday at 6:30PM to give the Board information about its chemical composition and potential threat to children playing on it.
Gary Glass gave me the name of one of his old EPA lab colleagues who did a little research on this subject a year ago after his grandson came home with black hands. I passed his name on to the parents who are concerned about this issue.
So a little more on the campaign front to keep folks interested.
I spent yesterday morning finishing up the last few homes on Park Point. It was a lovely day and I found willing takers for Loren Martell and Alanna Oswald signs all the way to the end of the Point. In the afternoon I tackled Arlington Avenue. Signs fairly few out of my car. These folks have not forgotten Central High's fate despite many calls by Red Planners to Move forward.
At one home a burly young man asked me what happened to his East High. He had been gone to the service for a decade and was astonished to discover what had happened to his old alma mater. His reaction was the same as many others. Why was the high school located in his old junior high?
At the end of the day I stopped by the candidate's forum at the School Board Room for a couple minutes. Denfeld and East students organized it with a heavy emphasis on the minority students who have fared so poorly in our schools lobbing questions at the candidates. I only stayed for one round of questions but thought Alanna's explanation about the importance of school to her must have rung true with the students present. School was her home away from home. All the cuts to our schools since her graduation make that more problematic today.
Perhaps the most notable thing about Alanna is her deep knowledge of just how things operate in the schools. She recently got the master class schedules for Duluth's two high schools and poured through them to make comparisons. She hasn't shared her study with me but at the forum she pointed out at least one of the differences to East's advantage over Denfeld. There are many more. I asked her to send me a summary of her discoveries. Much more on this in a day or two.
Here's the Trib's story on the forum. There will be another candidate forum tonight at Myers Wilkens Elementary School at 5.
Alanna Oswald was in my classroom when teacher/astronaut Christa McAuliffe lost her life shooting for the stars. The next year Oswald's mother committed suicide. Denfeld's teachers wrapped Oswald in a cocoon of caring and launched her, one of the first in her family, to college at Gustavus Adolphus. There was no way Oswald wouldn't become a teacher.
I begged Oswald to run for School Board more than a year ago before our board plunged into a year of darkness and dysfunction. Oswald had just accomplished something that outshines everything our entire board has managed to do. She did it as a mom. She got Minnesota's Department of Education to clean up Duluth's long-neglected curriculum when she discovered that her fifth-grade daughter wasn't being taught science or history the same way as children in eastern-Duluth schools. The motive was commendable. Her daughter's school was desperate to escape Minnesota's lowest state test rankings but did so by jettisoning a complete education. Oswald knows there are better ways to fight poverty.
In 1987, I wrote in Oswald's yearbook that she was a lot smarter than me. She still is. We need her, I need her, on our School Board.
The writer is an At Large member of the Duluth School Board.


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Welcome to the January 18, 2019 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
Please note: In observance of the U.S. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday, TechNews will not be published on Monday, Jan. 21. Publication will resume on Wednesday, Jan. 23.
How Do You Fight an Algorithm You Cannot See?
Security concerns have prompted Oxford University in the U.K. to sever ties with Huawei and indefinitely suspend acceptance of the Chinese tech company's gifts and research sponsorships. An email sent to computer science doctoral students at the university said the Committee to Review Donations will reconsider this decision in three to six months. According to one source, the decision was spurred by a Telegraph story in December citing lawmakers on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee as urging U.K. universities to exercise "extreme caution" over their connections to Huawei. The company has faced criticism from intelligence agencies around the world over its links to China's government, despite denials that its technology could be used for espionage. Huawei-supported academic projects in the U.K. have included research into mobile phone networks and audio tech, and funding for a Cambridge University computer laboratory and a 5G Innovation Center at the University of Surrey.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has listed large-scale cyberattacks and massive data breaches among the five most probable risks facing the world today. WEF cited cyberattacks for their potential to hobble critical infrastructure, ranking them fifth most likely to occur this year, while data breaches ranked fourth. Moreover, 82% of individuals polled by WEF see an elevated risk of cyberattacks leading to the theft of money and data, and 80% said the risk of cyberattacks causing operational disruptions is higher. WEF ranks the combination of cyberattacks and the breakdown of critical information infrastructure second in likelihood to occur only to extreme weather and failed climate change mitigation. WEF said Internet of Things devices and connected objects embedded within industrial environments could potentially offer attackers an easy way to infiltrate infrastructure and orchestrate cyberattacks with "devastating spill-over effects," damaging critical services and causing billions of dollars in destruction.
Walgreens is partnering with Microsoft to develop new healthcare delivery models, technology, and retail innovations to advance and improve the future of healthcare. The companies plan to combine the reach of Walgreens' more than 8,000 U.S. stores and retail locations worldwide with the power of Microsoft's Azure platform. As part of the partnership, Walgreens plans to roll out a dozen pilot "digital health corners" in 2019 that are aimed at the merchandising and sale of select healthcare-related hardware and devices. The companies said the partnership will help Walgreens gain personalized data about their customers' health, which will result in improved nutrition and wellness solutions for customers. The partnership appears to be a move by the companies to counter Amazon's growing influence in healthcare. Said Don Townswick of insurance investment management solutions provider Conning, "Tech companies can either sit back and wait to see if Amazon messes up in health care or they can get involved now."
Researchers from seven U.S. colleges are collaborating on the design of a new cryptocurrency that aims to reach unheard-of speeds while still supporting a decentralized framework. The Unit-e virtual currency is the first project from the Distributed Technology Research (DTR) nonprofit, which hopes to process as many as 10,000 transactions a second with Unit-e, after the currency is launched in the second half of this year. To realize this, DTR deconstructed blockchain technology to understand its performance limits and design solutions that operate as close to these limits as possible. The researchers have created new mechanisms for reaching consensus, boosting speed via new ways of sharding (in which each node maintains only one blockchain segment) and new payment channel networks. Said Pramod Viswanath of at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bitcoin "was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives, but that won't happen unless the technology can be scaled up."
North Carolina State University (NC State) and University of South Florida (USF) researchers found significant flaws in forensic software designed to calculate the age of individuals based on skeletal remains. They used DXAGE software to analyze the bone mineral density data from 470 women, and compared the resulting estimated age with each woman's true age; the software's estimates were usually off by 14.25 years. USF's Jonathan Bethard said, "We think this inaccuracy is primarily due to the small sample size used in developing DXAGE. It may also be due, in part, to DXAGE relying on remains from cemeteries, where they may have been buried for decades." NC State's Ann Ross cited DXAGE's use of a "black box" neural networking program as another possible limitation, since it offers little clarity on how the software functions.
Venture capitalists are warning the Trump administration against limiting exports on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, arguing it would stifle overseas sales for U.S. startups. National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) CEO Bobby Franklin said his organization only supports constraints on the export of tech specific to defense. Tight government control on AI exports, especially to China, could conflict with Silicon Valley's business interests. Defense officials see the U.S. competing with China in an AI arms race, while investors and industry executives are keen to gain footholds in the Chinese market. NVCA's Jeff Farrah said the evolution of AI and quantum computing is outpacing industry efforts to arrive at a universal definition of the technologies, and his organization has little faith the government can meet this challenge in a fair and balanced manner.
Activists in Germany have facilitated a method to assess the accountability of proprietary algorithms via a crowdsourcing platform. They designed the OpenSchufa platform for the purpose of detailing how potential borrowers' credit scores are algorithmically generated by Germany's Schufa credit bureau. Since the platform's rollout, several thousand people have donated their financial scores, and the activists determined the Schufa algorithm is significantly error-prone, creating relatively negative scores without any negative proof. OpenSchufa is just one of a number of movements by theorists pushing for accountability of "black box" algorithms, to ensure their decisions can be explained. Software engineers can test algorithms to determine if their output matches the expectations of a test set, but they currently lack insight into how the algorithms reach their final decisions.
University of California, Santa Barbara researchers have designed an app to help dissidents in authoritarian countries maintain their anonymity while supporting trustworthy identities in their communications. SecurePost guards group members' anonymity and confirms the reliability of their posts; it runs on the Android operating system, letting communities create secure groups on Twitter and Facebook to sustain a consistent, visible presence on social media and accrue trust with their readership over time. The app allows groups to operate without any list of individual members, and checks posts for any content lacking appropriate credentials. This ensures each member remains anonymous even if the group is infiltrated or hacked, all while communications from the community itself are verified as trustworthy. SecurePost users can invite new members to join by exchanging secure quick response codes visually or over a trusted link, using a pair of visible, public keys and a second pair of concealed, private keys to send and receive encrypted information.
Research by Couragion (which helps match students to STEM careers) that was funded by Oracle Academy suggests U.S. computer science (CS) students may be overemphasizing skills rather than career paths, with implications for a possible restructuring of K-12 CS education. CS courses offered in K-12 schools concentrate mainly on robotics, coding, and popular programming languages. However, most learners, particularly girls and minorities, still shun CS. The Couragion-Oracle Academy study determined the software developer careers that existing CS education practices prepare students for are least aligned to student preferences. This implies the need for a different learning path focused on appealing to students' desire for meaningful careers, friendly work environments, and fulfillment of wanted goals.
University of California, Los Angeles researchers have developed a device that can detect the presence of small parasites in blood or other bodily fluids. The tool illuminates a sample with laser light and records a video of its holographic patterns, which features a time-varying image pattern originating from a parasite's locomotion. This movement generates a signal that is analyzed by a three-dimensional-motion analysis algorithm and machine learning to ascertain the number of parasites present in the sample. Deep learning is employed to analyze these "hot spots" and determine whether a parasite is present in a specific area. The researchers think the device could aid research to better understand parasites' motion mechanics, and to develop new disease treatment methods.


text:
Q: Example of field extension with specific galois group So I want to find examples of $K/L$ field extensions with $G(K/L)=\mathbb{Z}/n$ and $A_n$.
For the first case I just take $\mathbb{F}_{p^n}$ over $\mathbb{F}_p$. I am just looking for an example for the $A_n$ case, I will prove that indeed the provided example works.

A: A generic example is $K(t_1,\ldots,t_n) / K(s_1, \ldots, s_n, \sqrt{\Delta})$ where $K$ is a field with $\text{char}(K) \neq 2$; $\{t_1, \ldots, t_n\}$ is an algebraically independent set over $K$; $s_1, \ldots, s_n$ are the elementary symmetric polynomials in the indeterminates $t_1, \ldots, t_n$ (ie, such that $f = (X-t_1) \ldots (X-t_n) = X^n + \sum_{j=1}^{n-1} (-1)^j s_j X^{n-j}$); and $\displaystyle \Delta = \prod_{1 \leq i < j \leq n} (t_i - t_j)^2$. ($\Delta$ is called the discrimiminant of the polynomial $f$.)
For concrete examples where $L = \mathbb{Q}$ and $K$ is the splitting field of a polynomial $f \in \mathbb{Z}[X]$ of degree $n$, see the examples here.

A: This is explained shortly in wikipedia for the inverse Galois problem. A book detailing such topics as Hilbert's Irreducibility Theorem is Serre's "Topics in Galois Theory", freely available at Darmon's webpage.

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text:
Great Lakes Towing Company boosts Green Marine U.S. Great Lakes membership
Cleveland, October 19, 2017 – The Great Lakes Towing Company, the largest U.S.-flagged tugboat fleet operating on the Great Lakes, is the newest ship owner to join the most important voluntary environmental program for North America's maritime industry. The Towing Company, as it is commonly known, has also enrolled its shipyard facility as a Green Marine participant – making it the first U.S. shipyard to join the program.
»We continuously strive to improve the quality and safety of our products and services," Joe Starck, Great Lakes Towing's president, said upon the company joining Green Marine. "As leaders in the industry, we believe we have an obligation to do what we can to make certain our commercial activities are as sustainable as possible – both in our tug operations and at our shipyard facility. »
Based in Cleveland, The Great Lakes Towing Company is a significant operational link on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence Seaway marine transportation system. The Towing Company's commitment to building 10 new tugboats at its Cleveland shipyard over the next five years is yet another example of its commitment to sustainability. The introduction of each new tug's more efficient design, propulsion and automated equipment will significantly reduce air emissions and permit the company to retire two older tugs from service.
Green Marine is delighted to further expand its U.S. membership by welcoming The Great Lakes Towing Company into the environmental certification program. "By including its fleet of more than 35 tugs and its major shipyard in our program, Great Lakes Towing is reflecting its strong commitment to continually improving the sustainability of all of its operations," David Bolduc, Green Marine's executive director, said. "Great Lakes Towing's addition to Green Marine also helps us to achieve our goal of advancing environmental excellence throughout North America's maritime industry."
The Green Marine environmental certification program addresses key environmental issues through 12 performance indicators that include greenhouse gases, air emissions, spill prevention, waste management, environmental leadership, and community impacts – some applicable to shipping activities, others to landside operations. The certification process is rigorous and transparent with results independently verified every two years and each company's individual performance made public annually.
About The Great Lakes Towing Company
The Great Lakes Towing Company, an industry leader since 1899, provides essential, commercial tugboat services including ship assist and harbor towing, icebreaking and cargo transportation, and emergency services in 40 U.S. ports, and in all eight U.S. Great Lakes' states. The company operates the largest and most experienced U.S.-flag tugboat fleet and is a significant marine operations link in North America's U.S. Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence Seaway marine transportation network –the fourth seacoast of the United States. Learn more at www.thegreatlakestowingcompany.com
About Great Lakes Shipyard
Great Lakes Shipyard, a division of The Great Lakes Towing Company, is a full-service shipyard for new vessel construction including new workboats and barges, truckable products, custom fabrication, ship maintenance and repairs, in a world-class facility that includes state-of-the-art equipment such as a 770-ton mobile Travelift and a 300-ton floating drydock. GLS facilities are located at the Company's headquarters on the Old River Channel of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio. GLT's shipyard expertise includes designing, building and maintaining its own fleet, as well as an extensive list of commercial and government tugboats, supply boats, ferries, barges, cruise boats, large yachts, and many other types of vessels, including larger domestic and foreign cargo vessels. The shipyard is a major contractor for the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, EPA, and many other federal, state and local governments, attesting to its high-quality workmanship, on-time performance, and competitive pricing. Learn more at www.greatlakesshipyard.com
Green Marine overview
Green Marine is celebrating its 10th year! The North American environmental certification program is the maritime industry's voluntary effort to surpass regulatory requirements. It helps participants – ship owners, port authorities, terminal operators and shipyards – to reduce their environmental footprint by fostering a culture of continual improvement and by outlining the precise steps they can take to achieve higher levels of sustainability. There are currently more than 110 companies from coast to coast in Canada and the United States participating in the program. The Green Marine program's unique character derives from the support being earned from more than 60 environmental organizations and government agencies. These supporters contribute to shaping and revising the program. Learn more at www.green-marine.org
View the PDF version of this news release.


Ageing in place at home is giving way to ageing in place anywhere, thanks to the emergence of a new wave of assistive technology and so-called mobile health, says a top expert in the field.
Professor Greg Tegart, a leading scientist and advocate for smart assistive technologies for the aged and disabled, said that the traditional barriers to greater uptake of the technologies were changing as large atypical healthcare players such as Google and Apple came into the market.
These barriers included a lack of integration among technologies and devices, insufficient funding for large-scale trials to provide evidence-based proposals, and a lack of business plans to attract investors into the installation of major systems.
These players, which also include Telstra Health, Philips, HCF and even some retailers, are prepared to provide products and strong service, he said.
"This is coupled with the dramatic increase in mobile health as mobile smart phones become ubiquitous, to the extent that many experts are predicting the demise of home-based devices for measuring vital parameters," Professor Tegart told Australian Ageing Agenda.
"This can be done unobtrusively with wearable devices and data transmitted from mobiles," he said.
Mr Tegart, who was awarded ACT Senior Australian of the Year in 2015 in recognition of his work in assistive technology, spoke to AAA ahead of his appearance at the upcoming ITAC conference.
Discussing the technologies that had the greatest potential to impact the care of older people, Professor Tegart pointed to wearable diagnostics, robotics and social media.
"Wearable diagnostics are clearly a significant disruptive technology. A wide variety of these are under development such as wireless skin sensors which fix to the skin like a tattoo and measure heart rate muscle activity and temperature; other sensors can monitor glucose levels and deliver insulin on demand," he said.
Other movement sensors could be built into jewellery or fabrics, and powered by flexible woven fabrics generating electricity, he said.
"The development of suitable and reliable apps for smart phones supports innovation in wearables," he added.
Robotics were another major disruptive technology in a number of ways, he said.
"One is to provide companionship and safety through humanoid or animal robots. This becomes important as the ratio of carers to patients decreases as the numbers of older people increase, which impacts on both home and hospital care," Professor Tegart said.
Similarly, Professor Tegart said that autonomous vehicles could significantly change the quality of life for older people.
Elsewhere, social media would continue to be a major driver of change, through the sharing of information on areas including healthcare, the performance of institutions in dealing with older people, new products and new approaches.
"This links to the empowerment of the patient and a drive to use new assistive technologies," he said.
Asked what role government had in nurturing greater ICT adoption, Professor Tegart said that as a major provider of funds for healthcare, the government needed to be aware of where economies and increased efficiency could be achieved in a changed healthcare system.
"Clearly the technologies and their applications all stem from innovation. They are driven by different sources – companies looking to improve existing business or looking to new opportunities, academic researchers seeking new knowledge or seeing new applications and entrepreneurs with new ideas," he said.
This is technology driven by soothsayers who are besotted by their own insights. Implants are the only way forward?
When I get to 65 do I get issued with implants and a mobile phone so someone can monitor my sugar levels? Get real!
There is a real world where people live normally but fall over and wander off as they get older. The problem is the delay of the onset of frailty and getting people to keep up to speed looking after their bodies and minds with activity . The issue is keeping people out of hospital and bed locking. Down to earth monitoring and watching out for telling symptoms of potential frailty.
Fine if you have a clinical issue you need to monitor and assuming the elder has a mobile phone to hand then all good.
Unfortunately, wearables for general purposes don't get worn or don't get charged. That's a physical/personal issue and nothing to do with implants.
Lets understand there are horses for courses and no one size fits all. Care technology is not the wearable solution, it's a base for many varieties of technology support.
Skin implants are new, specialised and exciting but lets not distracted from the multiple outcomes that technology can provide.
Yep, those vital-call pendants are really useful; unless you forget to put it on…or you're unconscious.
24 hr heart rate monitors, robotic seals and continuous social media feeds, just what an inactive neurotic population needs.
But if we can enable people to better monitor and be aware of themselves, then surely this is a good thing.Wearables and connected health devices provide better information to the patient and carer through apps – as opposed to devices where information needs to be written down.


The AMS owner mining ventures start with the evaluation and securing of concessions that are legal, valid, and accurately represented. Our experience in navigating the complexities of DRC's mining concession ownership regulations is a key differentiator to our full scope of mining services.
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text:
Q: How can existing ASP.NET core middleware be extended? I would like to inherit from StaticFileMiddleware (the "standard" way of serving static files, initialized with app.UseStaticFiles() in Startup.cs). The code compiles, but when I try to run it, I get an InvalidOperationException ("InvalidOperationException: Multiple public 'Invoke' or 'InvokeAsync' methods are available.").
These are the essential parts of the code:
public class MyStaticFileMiddleware : StaticFileMiddleware
{
    ...
    public new async Task Invoke(HttpContext context)
    {
        ...
        await base.Invoke(context);
        ...
    }
    ...
}

Background: I want to introduce meaningful file names for certain static files without changing the actual file names in the file system (like "tree-in-a-meadow.jpg" for an existing file "123.jpg"). So MyStaticFileMiddleware should check the validity of the speaking file name and - if valid - simply execute the existing code of StaticFileMiddleware to serve the file. I would welcome this procedure so that I would not have to reprogram essential parts of StaticFileMiddleware (SRP/KISS).
I have two questions:

*

*Since StaticFileMiddleware.Invoke() was not marked as "virtual", I assume that this procedure is not really intended. But still I don't understand why - purely technically - this procedure doesn't work. Since I use the "new" modifier to explicitly hide the Invoke() method of the base class (StaticFileMiddleware), shouldn't there only one but not "Multiple public 'Invoke' or 'InvokeAsync' methods"?

*What is the "intended" way to extend existing middleware accordingly? Should I simply "new StaticFileMiddleware" in my code? How could I inject StaticFileMiddleware into MyStaticFileMiddleware to benefit from Dependency Injection in that case?
Thanks very much for your help!

A: As i understand middleware visiting your extensions to include additional behaviour in pipeline. To implement different behaviour you should implement it on your own, so extension should hide implementation details. about pipeline
StaticFileMiddleware itself is a wrapper for StaticFileContext, so maybe you need make a new one in same manner StaticFileMiddleware sources


text:
PodCastle 640: Mist Songs of Delhi
Author : Sid Jain
Narrator : Amal Singh
Host : Setsu Uzume
Audio Producer : Peter Behravesh
PodCastle 640: Mist Songs of Delhi is a PodCastle original.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/podcastle/PC640_MistSongsOfDelhi.mp3
Rated PG-13.
Mist Songs of Delhi
By Sid Jain
Rajaji had listened to three songs of the deceased that morning. He couldn't help himself. Whenever he walked past a flickering portrait floating in the air — static, sanguine, and phosphorescent — the urge to reach out and touch the cloud with his fingers was more than he could resist. The cloud portrait would unspool itself into the departed's soul song and fill the air around Rajaji with the lilting music of their lives.
The last of those three songs had left Rajaji in a heavy stupor. The voice of the departed sang but three lines in Urdu. The translation into Hindi seized some beauty as tax, but the words thundered in Rajaji's heart in all the seven languages he knew:
I tolerated his passing as he had taken Hindustan as his second wife,
But my hummingbird had not yet learnt to fly when you clipped her wings.
O Tyrant, what sin did I commit that you saved me for last?
They rarely told the life's story of the subject as if they were epic poems. No, most soulsongs captured a sliver of the lives, a representative snippet that encapsulated the life and times of those lucky enough to be turned into song by the Goddesses of Raagas.
And they were lucky. Seekers made pilgrimage from around the world to the temples of music in Delhi and Ajanta and even the little one in Calcutta. Germanic Persians, Frankish Egyptians, and some even traveling over ocean and continent from the Americas, hoping — praying — that they reach the temples still alive and with stories remarkable enough to be granted the gift of eternal music.
The Goddesses did not require rigid devotion, did not demand purity of belief and did not spurn those who bowed to other divinities — or no divinity at all. She only required a full life.
Which made it all the more frustrating when Rajaji's own mother — now on the wrong side of seventy years strong — refused to accept the golden opportunity of musical enspooling that Rajaji had worked so hard to achieve. For today was the day he had become the junior caretaker of the Temple of Bhairavi, the arbiter of whose applications were processed to be enspooled by the Goddess.
Sighing, he pulled up the folds of his dhoti at his feet and walked through the windswept streets of Old Delhi to the bus stop.
He could never get the dust and soot of Delhi's air off his exposed arms. He'd given up trying long ago. By the time he reached his mother's house in Hauz-e-Khas, after taking the rickety coach bus from the narrow shopping streets of Chandni Chowk, he was ready for his second bath of the day.
He found Ma in the verandah, creaking noisily on the swinging chair and solving a word puzzle in the newspaper with a half-chewed pencil on her lips.
She regarded him with spectacle-covered eyes, sparkling like the sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows in front of her. "Hungry, Raja beta?"
Rajaji sidestepped her swing's pendulum arc and reached down to plant a kiss on her forehead. "Always."
Ma nodded and put away her newspaper. "I'm glad you don't rely on the alms to subsist."
Rajaji smiled indulgently. Catching Mother while solving her word puzzles meant she'd use words like subsist in ordinary conversation. "The temple gives us enough, Ma."
"Hmm." She walked slowly, with deliberate, soft steps across the speckled stone floor.
Rajaji followed in the wake of her billowing sari, given wings by the furnace gale coming from behind him. A fly buzzed near his ear and he tried to swat it away, unsuccessfully. He slid the wire mesh screen door closed behind him as they went inside; doing little about the wind but enough about the flies.
Mother bent down to open the valve for the gas cylinder, oohing and hmming with a hand pressing on her aching spine. Rajaji cut in front of her, saying, "Let me do that, you worry about rolling the rotis," and gently pushed her aside.
Gas stove lighted, he heated the pan up while his mother supplied freshly flattened bread. Pillowy soft rotis swiftly followed, served with pickled mangoes and the morning's leftover cumin-spiced potatoes.
He savored the potatoes, each bite a lifetime. It was a delicacy twice-over: cumin worth more exported by the Sultanate to the Inca Nation, and Incan potatoes—rarely found in the markets of Delhi. A gift from a fawning patron, perhaps.
With the last bite swallowed, Rajaji delicately began the process of broaching the topic he had come here for. "Guess who the new caretaker of Bhairavi Mandir is."
Ma's shoulders tensed, loosening into a sigh. "Your father was here again," she said while brewing the decoction of her post-meal coffee. "Want a tumbler?"
"Yes, please." He winced, knowing the shape of the conversation to come. "And? Did you listen?"
She tapped her sugar spoon on the stone countertop and chastised, "Of course I listened! What kind of question is that? Hmm? Just because your father keeps appearing here in his stupid little puff of smoke every other week?"
Rajaji smiled and shook his head as he paraphrased Bhairavi-ma's scriptures, "It's not like he's up there choosing where to materialize, Ma." He didn't have to tell her, again, that the songclouds appear wherever the deceased loved most.
Mother looked like she'd just smelled sour curd. She disliked being lectured. "Then why doesn't he go to Bavaria and enchant those Persian mountain women with his damn flute?"
"Mother!" he admonished, face flushed. Ma never got this upset when she spoke about Pa's song.
She poured a glass full of the milk-swirled coffee and placed it in front of him. She hovered next to him while he took his first hesitant sip of the hot drink and said, "How many times have you heard it?"
"Every time he appeared in front of me," he promptly answered.
"How many."
Rajaji stared, perplexed. "About a dozen times in the past two years."
Mother nodded, as if he were her schoolboy again, learning arithmetic. "I have seen — and hence heard — him two hundred and fifty-eight times." It wasn't hyperbole; she had kept count.
She took two long sips of her coffee and studied a portrait of Father on the wall, looking away at the end. "He keeps coming back to me, Raja, and I keep touching his face, listening to his song, every time getting more and more exasperated by the music."
How can anyone get irritated by a life's song? It was the most divine way to pass! People died on their journeys from around the world for the honor. Moreover, Rajaji loved listening to others' songs and could do so all day. His friends often teased him by saying how he would be stealing opportunities for others to enjoy the music by hoarding them for himself. But of course, he always replied by telling them that the clouds would reappear elsewhere by the whims of their soul's yearning, always ready for another listener . . . so it wasn't really hoarding, was it?
"Mother, why are you so enraged by the thought of enspoolment?"
Mother set aside the cup and clasped her hands as she did when she was about to expound on some great life truths to her children. "Where do we start? I was already skeptical of the practice — heavens, you knew that when you told me you had decided to become an attendant to a statue."
"A caretaker of the entire shrine, from today," he corrected softly, omitting the 'actually.' Scripture taught him that it was a show of superiority and shows of superiority were not pious. He still struggled to remove it from thought, though, but he was rightly annoyed by now.
She ignored him. "But after seeing your father turned into this pest-like cloud of flutes and violas I want no part of this. I'm enough of a nuisance in life — you know very well. I don't want to inflict myself on the world for all eternity."
Here, Rajaji smiled, comfortable in his overlapping positions as the proxy to the divine, advisor to the living, and a son. "Ma, I love listening to the music of our souls, everyone does. Your music . . . your life was so full! So wonderful, your song will be a symphony ten minutes long! It won't be a nuisance, trust me." So many awards, so many illustrious students taught, a building named Saroj Khanjhaji Hall, after her—
She narrowed her eyes, "Was? So eager to off me, are you, son?"
Rajaji's smile faltered, but mother continued with a dismissive wave, "And what is this about everyone liking music-filled sacs floating in the air? Did you go and ask everyone? Did you take a survey with a representative sample?"
He knew Ma wasn't the biggest fan of the practice, but the intensity of her response stunned him.
"Truth is, son, that you live in your own little cloud. You assume everyone likes to see dead people floating along sidewalks, at monuments, in their own homes. Even though the Goddesses only turn a few people into song every year, the numbers will only add up, and eventually we would not see past our own hands. I don't want to form a part of this pollution." A scholar mother, a scientist mother — she had always made sure to impart as much knowledge to Rajaji as she could. So why now did she feel like withholding this from him? Wasn't music just knowledge set to a meter?
He tried appealing to her rational side: "But think of all the knowledge trapped within the songs. Instruments that we have forgotten to play, emotions and stories trapped in the amber of divinity. There's culture, useful historical information trapped in those capsules for future generations."
His pleasure at his rational argument was lovingly punctured by the mathematician. "Oh for heaven's sakes, you don't need divine intervention to record music in today's world, Raja. Do you see that?" She pointed to a clunky wooden chest in the drawing-room. "We have phonographs for that now. No, given the visual pollution and unnecessity of this procedure in today's world, I refuse to allow myself to be entombed by it. I'd rather give my body to science when I die."
And like that, the lamplight shone at the dark corner of his mother's argument and revealed the crux of the matter. "You don't want to die. Or rather — you don't want to choose when you want to die, prematurely."
Mother's lips tightened to a wispy line and she took a quick sip of her coffee.
Rajaji reached across the table to hold her hand. "I would never ask while there was still life in you, Ma, but if a time ever came where we were certain it was the end—"
"My arguments still stand." Mother stared intently at her glass, swirling the remnants of the coffee. "Waste of time and energy, bad for the environment. Forget me, I don't even think others should participate in this ritual anymore. We're past this charlatanry."
Enough. Rajaji had had enough of his mother's taunts about his Goddess. He let go of her hand and stood, patting down the folds of his dhoti. "I wish you knew how much it hurts when you belittle my faith like that. It hurts almost as much as knowing that you care so little of how much I love you and want to remember you," his voice broke, "when you're gone — in any way I can." That's all I ask.
Rajaji left through the screen door, carefully closing it on his way out so that the flies could not get in. He never brought the topic up again.
The Arab merchant continued to fidget with his gold chain while Rajaji examined the case folder. In the folder was the application for enspoolment by Mother Bhairavi for the merchant's late wife. An application accepted and executed last year, one of Rajaji's first enspoolments as a freshly promoted junior caretaker. He remembered this one vividly; he'd performed the rites the day Ma refused to be enspooled.
Rajaji closed the file and steepled his fingers. "Sheikh Mahreb, I must confess, it appears as if everything was in order and the enspoolment was a success. You claim yourself that you saw your late wife's portrait once and that you heard her soulsong. I'm afraid there isn't much else we can do if she hasn't reappeared."
The merchant was unmoved, clearly assuming this novice had made a mistake. He protested with splayed hands, "Are you suggesting that my wife has a place that was dearer to her than my side?"
Rajaji could see that it was sheer strength of pride that held up the distraught merchant's shoulders. He rummaged around his learnings to find a suitable anecdote, a viable aphorism that would help the poor man and his resuscitated bereavement.
He wanted to bring the man to his mother and show her Rajaji — See? Would you have preferred this? The pain of not knowing if your partner considered you the most prized anchor on Earth?
But the thought of his mother did elicit a suitable salve for the merchant. "Sheikh Sahib, do you remember your wife's song? The cadence of its rhythm, the scales of its melody?"
The broken man closed his eyes and with a voice of the deepest longing replied, "She was a beautiful soul, you know? She gave to everyone around her, she would've given away all of my wealth to those in need. Her music was like that. The chords strummed on the guitar — and it was a deep mahogany body that guitar, I swear. The chords strummed so slowly, like she was fanning out her hands, furnishing gifts for everyone. The tinkle of a harpsichord, an ancient sound of an ancient soul."
He had the twinkle in his eyes, glistening with the memory of the music that he was surely playing inside his head. "Hers was an ancient soul, I'm sure. Allah sent her back, again and again, to enrich the world the way only she could. And she would have, she–" He wiped his eyes and continued, "She would have changed so many lives, if only the disease had let her."
Rajaji quietly closed the file and walked over to hold Mahreb's shoulders. "She made the right decision to be enspooled, Sheikh Sahib. Her melody is out there – changing the world one symphony at a time, I am sure of it. Her life's story in the notes of that song is inspiring others as we speak."
Mahreb collapsed against Rajaji's torso, choking back tears. Rajaji held the man as only a priest could and whispered, growing confident of his sermon. "Your wife was a gentle soul. She spread love wherever she went; might it be that in death she does the same? She had unfinished business, unsaved lives that needed charity. She might be there, with them. Changing the world, a song at a time. That is why she hasn't come to you again. Yet."
At that the man unleashed a wail and clutched at Rajaji's white rough-spun cotton, dampening it.
Rajaji continued, "Which is not to say she will not come back to you. When she has had her fill of philanthropy, she will return to you." A thought, and Rajaji added, "Have you any children?"
Mahreb let go of Rajaji's dhoti and wiped away his tears with a kerchief. "Yes, seven. From five to twenty-five years old."
"Did you check with them, if any of them have seen her? You do travel a fair bit."
"They would have told me if they had, but alas she has not appeared to the younger ones yet."
His sobs grew still and Rajaji knew when to be quiet and let the words fall. "I haven't spoken to my eldest since she died. We never got along, me and him. He liked her more, far more than he liked me. Her death was the last snip in the frayed thread of our connection."
"Maybe she visited him." And with that, Rajaji began the gentle process of giving the man enough leads to feel — if not satisfied — then at the very least less unsure about the unjustness of the divine.
As he got ready to leave, the merchant turned to Rajaji once and said, "She had her doubts about the whole thing, you know."
Rajaji looked up from his perusal of the next case file. "Doubt is the birthright of death."
Death was the greatest uncertainty, but enspoolment removed so much of the mystery of the afterlife. When you can be song, why be nothing, at best, and something unknown, at worst?
That year, Rajaji accepted ten applications for enspoolment, from which five families returned with the same complaint as the sheikh. He consoled them in much the same way he had the sheikh, and they left, doubtful yet placated.
Although successfully handled, the number of complaints gnawed at Rajaji; an unfinished puzzle missing a letter or two. He approached the chief caretaker, all the way in Benares on the Ganga, for guidance.
The chief caretaker, a portly man, shorter than the wispy Rajaji, laughed at Rajaji's query, his choti — the thin ponytail on his bald head — swinging with his bobbing chin. "Ah, young Raja, you have fallen prey to the most common mistake of junior caretakers. You chose your supplicants poorly."
"Sir?" Rajaji's voice quivered.
The chief bade him sit on the straw mat beneath the slow fan of the temple verandah. "What kind of life do we seek to make into song?"
"Sir, we seek full lives, lives with achievement, with piety and—"
The chief waved him quiet. "Not full." He tapped the straw mat. "Complete."
Rajaji tilted his head in question.
"We seek complete lives. People who leave with no regrets and no unfulfilled tasks. We scour their lives for loose threads and either bid the supplicants complete them first, or we turn them away. Moksha can only be achieved if you depart this Earth with no regrets, no unfinished business. If you leave anything unfinished, the songs will not take hold and the soul returns to the mortal world."
Rajaji thought of the sheikh's wife, taken from this world before her time. He thought of Father, a great man who never stopped having a good time and spreading cheer, provided well to his family, and departed having lived a long and fulfilling life. If anyone had any unfinished business, their soul returned, reincarnated.
"Understand?" The chief had a raised eyebrow. "Only take complete lives, or you'll be fending off irate families forever."
The year Rajaji's wife swelled with their first child, his mother broke her hip while reaching for a book off the top shelf of her home library.
Rajaji sat next to his mother and recited hymns and parables of death and forgiveness. Mother pretended to rest to get him to stop.
In deference, he took up solving the word puzzles with her, him acting like her hand while she provided the brain. He prayed when she slept. She stroked his hair when his head drooped and rested by her side.
While recovering from the fracture in the hospital, she contracted an infection and fell ruinously ill. Over her comatose body, he recited powerful supplications to the Gods on her behalf, judiciously rubbing his prayer beads with trembling fingers.
One day, she awoke, sweaty and delirious. Rajaji, napping next to her on a wooden chair, leapt up to hold her hand.
"Raja," she said, faintly.
"I'm here, mother."
"Enspool me."
"No, it's not what you wanted." Rajaji never told her what he had learned, the secrets of who lives on as song, and who did not. It would only enrage her, realizing that the temple caretakers knowingly released only those souls as songs that persisted in the mortal world.
"I don't want to die," she whispered, shivering from the fever.
"I don't want you to die, either."
"But . . . you want the song."
Rajaji kissed Ma's forehead, taking care to not let his quivering voice scare her. "Rest now. Dream of a puzzle for me to solve."
The night air of Delhi was heavy that evening, cooled by the monsoon rains of the afternoon. Petrichor greeted him rising from the wet ground and mingled with the greasy spices of the evening pop-up food carts on the streets of Chandni Chowk. Rajaji dragged himself through the market with his wife, passing songclouds without touching them, weighed down by his own pain to take on anyone else's.
Clusters of eye-level cloud-portraits huddled in front of their favorite restaurants, or well-visited shops, or their family's favored temples. Once, he saw a cook blow a paper fan over his large frying pan, and Rajaji assumed it was to cool the freshly fried bread, but instead he found the cook blowing songclouds away from his stall — fanning them away without listening to them as if they were flies spoiling his food.
Rajaji welled up with tears. His life's work rendered pestilence, he fell to the muddy earth and let go. Mother was right, she had always been right. And now she was right again: his guilty heart wanted her song. He had to hear it, by the Goddesses, no matter the cost to the world.
His wife bent down and heaved him to his feet. Like the best of wives, Rajaji did not need to tell her: the arc of his tumult was writ clear on his tear-streaked face. "Should we go get her, then, Raja? Have you decided so?"
He nodded feebly and retreated into his safe place, with her arm locked in his and his hand gripping the fabric of her salwar. Just holding on.
Rajaji filled out the paperwork for her discharge from the hospital and submitted her supplication into enspoolment. A selfish act. One he could neither forgive himself for doing, nor undoing. When guilt is certain, he consoled himself, let there at least be music.
With the help of his sister, Sunehri, and their cousins, they placed the palanquin with mother at the center of the temple's main hall, clutching at life as she did her pencil when writing equations.
One by one, the children, family, and well-wishers permitted inside the sacred space said their goodbyes and took their place along the gallery. Rajaji's wife, in her eighth month of pregnancy stood with tears in her eyes and a protective hand on her belly as if to say I will never let you die, my little one.
In the end, Rajaji went to mother to say his last words. "You were right. You were always right. I've found a way." He kissed her forehead. "You won't become a nuisance."
The last thing she told him was, "I'm afraid."
Rajaji, with his heart splintering, broke away from their last embrace and lowered the gold-dusted palanquin. Had she heard his admission? It wouldn't matter now.
His mother was a dark silhouette behind the pink silk curtains but soon, he reminded himself, she would be a shining, ethereal wisp encasing the momentous melody of her life. It was sure to be a grand symphony, an aria of mathematical exactitude with virtuoso musicianship, Rajaji was sure of it. None of the simple, lilting melodies of the others. Hers would resound and thunder with the multiplicity of a dynamic mind.
The priests of the Temple of Bhairavi encircled the palanquin, each with a clay oil lamp lit with the oil from his mother's kitchen and the wick made from her prized cotton sheets.
Rajaji's vision blurred. He almost screamed to the priests to stop, please stop. He wanted another moment, another day, however long she had left. The only thing that seized his lips was the ardent voice of his doctrine blocking every other thought and saying: What is one moment of a fading voice to an eternity of soaring melody?
But it wouldn't be an eternity, would it? His mother was in the middle of writing two books. Rajaji had so much to learn from her still, and Ma still hadn't made the trip to Mexica-Tenochitlan to see Sunehri's college.
It would be how she'd wanted it, a single instance and then — poof. It broke his heart.
He would get just one song. Sunehri would get just one song.
He refused to pay attention to the ritual he had presided over more than a thousand times in the past eleven years. He did not follow, but he knew the words of the chants; the way the light of the oil lamps increased in girth and length; how they were carried by the polyphony of the priests' guttural voices into arcing over the palanquin until they formed an umbrella of fiery immolation.
When the sounds of the monks began to recede, the flames descended onto the palanquin, setting it alight. When the divine flame burned out, when the sounds of stifled tears ceased around him, Rajaji knew that nothing remained — save for a hovering, shimmering cloud with his mother's face. The face which she saw herself as. Her face — not her face at death, not when she was young, but the face that her mind constructed of her when she dreamed of herself in sleep.
When the chanting stopped, Rajaji looked up to see his mother's face once again. A beautiful visage, his dear mother in a golden lion's mane of eternal song.
He took his sister's hand and walked to the cloud. Both of them reached up together and pressed their fingertips to the wool.
In the beginning, there was a violin playing a descending arpeggio of four notes, joined by more strings with every repetition. Then, a tabla played a polyrhythmic beat that could've been a representation of one of her theorems. The swell of the classical scat choir giving an emotional, rhythmic counterpoint to the table broke Sunehri. She fell into the folds of her white sari, burying her face within her shawl. Rajaji held on till the lone santoor twanged a haunting, hopeful melody, bringing him to his knees. The wry remark at the end of a lecture, said with Ma's impish smile.
After the first time, he heard his mother's song — every bit as lush as he always told her it'd be — her cloud did not reappear again.
Rajaji had expected as much. Nevertheless, he hoped he was wrong, so he stalked her favorite haunts: the clubhouse she spent her afternoons with other mathematicians and wordsmiths; the deer park where she sat and watched the foals stumbling and learning to walk; the library of Delhi University and the other libraries and dusty book shops of Old Delhi where she wrote and puzzled out trigonometric theorems.
Could she have decided to visit foreign lands in death that she had not in life?
He sent letters to his sister in Mexica-Tenochitlan monthly, hoping to hear that mother had finally made the transcontinental trip she had promised Sunehri for years.
Nothing — nothing at all. Rajaji and Sunehri had heard their mother's song once — and that was it. Ma's wish was fulfilled.
Months turned into years, and Rajaji allowed his hope to — not exactly wither away — but be shelved and forgotten like a childhood toy. It would still reappear, as nostalgia was wont to do, but he would not linger on the thought any more than he lingered over the faded Ebru water portrait that his mother had made of herself. When he thought of her, Rajaji headed to his daughter's room.
Little five-year-old Bulbul ran up to him and gripped his legs until he pried her off and foisted her into his arms.
"Papa! I taught myself the abacus today!"
Rajaji consoled himself that in those brown-black eyes and bushy lashes his mother's soul resided.
One day, Rajiji sat at his desk endorsing new incoming requests for enspoolment when he came across a name he hadn't seen in sixteen years. He quickly signed off on the request and a month later, the Arab merchant Sheikh Mahreb Mustafa sat in front of Rajaji once again — in a different office, two changed men.
The sheikh looked worn down, like leather of a saddle that had been ridden across many thousands of miles. Folds of skin wrinkled under his eyes and lines creased his forehead like latitudes on a mercantile map.
"I am ready to join my wife, wherever she is."
For the past twenty years, Rajaji had sought the incomplete lives, the songs who would play once. He had done his part to reduce the pollution. He had fought families who returned with complaint, preached the gospel of unfinished business. He did what Ma would've wanted. He did the exact opposite of what he proposed to do for the man in front of him.
The sheikh had lived a full and complete life, save one easily remedied deed. Rajaji shouldn't do it if he were to honor Ma's memory. He really shouldn't, but . . .
"Sheikh Mahreb, I can only accept your application after you do this one thing."
Rajaji stood beside a marble pillar in the sanctum santorum of the Temple of Bhairavi and mawkishly listened to the priests chant the final words of the enspoolment prayer for Sheikh Mahreb Mustafa of Turkistan.
The man's oldest son, a grown man who had brought his entire family to attend the greatest ceremony of his father's life, had collapsed into sobs when the arcs of oil-fire had descended upon the emerald-gold palanquin in the center of the hall. The sheikh finally met his son's family and the son made tearful amends for the decades apart.
The palanquin turned to dust and ash, yet the son remained on the ground, moistening and condensing the flotsam in the air with his tears.
Mahreb's three children walked to their father's shimmering portrait together. Rajaji closed his eyes and gave the grieving children their moment alone with their father.
When he reopened them, the sheikh's visage hung in the air before him, reformed and ready for another listener. Rajiji reached out and touched the cloud.
Categories: Podcasts, Rated PG-13
Sid Jain
Sid is a biotech engineer and writer. He has composed music for short films and as soundtracks for his stories. When not making medicine or writing, he's build-testing recipes for a five-course vegetarian dinner and listening to progressive rock. He attended Viable Paradise in 2019 and lives with his wife, Marisa, and their treeing walker hound, Edith, in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.
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Amal Singh
Amal Singh is a screenwriter and an author from Mumbai, India. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Truancy, Mithila Review, among others.
Find more by Amal Singh