The Long-Ridge Introduction

Dear Tom,

I would like to introduce myself to you. My forty-seventh year is just beginning. A colleague at work said I must be very wise by this time; I wanted to somehow tell him that I now have the idea that we were born as wise as we'll ever be, and the only hope is that as we age we are afforded more opportunities to practice any wisdom we happen to possess.

The thoughts I had as a young man to study literature and to write are only now turning to action. There was once the fear that I could not do well enough to support my son doing what I wanted; that's now replaced with the fear that my brain has deteriorated and my ideals have been eroded. But I can now afford it. There is the saying (obviously not by the young) that youth is wasted on the young, but I counter that with "money is wasted on the old."

I now keep a journal of events and thoughts of the day. I occasionally write long letters to people who have moved away and to people I've moved away from. When my wife was working away for four months last year, I wrote her a two-page letter every day. As a teacher at the high school level for three years and at the university level for a dozen years, I wrote many assignments, letters and reports. Lately I have been taking notes for a book of memoirs for my son, family, or whomever. While none of these were a struggle, I would have liked them to be better. I have two goals with respect to writing, one is to make my writing for work more interesting for those who have to read it, the second is to see my name in print sometime. I recently joined Toastmasters as a way to improve my presentation. I tried several books on writing, but they never really addressed anything I didn't already know, and they couldn't look at my work and critique it. I actually forget where I saw Long Ridge mentioned, but I thought correspondence study might fit my schedule well enough that I would be able to continue through a course of study and pick up some pointers.

My degrees are in mathematics and computer science. I taught these subjects for many years, and I have also worked in industry as a software engineer, consultant and manager. After high school I spent four years in the Air Force as an electronic technician, then a year or two on the street. This was in the late 60's and my experiences from then are not dissimilar to what the media has never gotten straight. I used the GI Bill and work in electronics and carpentry to get through school (East Los Angeles College, University of California at Irvine), a marriage, and the birth of a son. The marriage ended with me in custody of a tyke, and after graduation we moved to Arizona, where I had grown up and where I then taught high school in small towns for three years. Then I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona and ended up teaching computer science there for a dozen years. This was in Tucson, a pleasant community surrounded by a gorgeous desert.

The Tucson part of my life consisted of a few relationships, a little moonlighting and summer jobs, hassling my son into adult­hood, and maybe spinning my wheels. About 8 years ago a Chinese woman appeared in one of my classes; she was a graduate student in engineering, a good cook from Beijing, and an innocent about American men. I was cruel enough to convince her I was the best thing which could ever happen to her (it was really the other way around), and we are still married. After my son got through high school and a few hellish years of torturing himself and me with the pain of looking around this world, my wife and I left him on his own in Tucson. He could continue his studies at the Univer­sity there and I could continue my life elsewhere. We now live in the Washington DC area where the two of us work as managers in the computer field (she in health care, I in languages).

My interest in math stemmed from two points. One was that I felt I could submit work in math classes and it would be evaluated objectively (I felt that evaluation in literature and writing classes was much more subjective, subject to opinions, lack of scientific basis, and so forth). The second was that I believed that mathematics underpinned all other sciences and held the secret to the mysteries of life. While I still feel I am correct about these two points, I am now willing to listen to others' opinions, and I never found the secret to our existence (but then I don't think anyone else has either).

My current major interests range from cars, to languages, to animal rights and vegetarianism. I have always maintained my own cars and would not have minded going into to mechanical engineer­ing and being involved with a high-tech race-car effort. In fact, when I went exploring graduate schools, I tried for mechan­ical engineering, but I would have had to take too many undergrad courses to qualify; my math background made admission to computer science easy. My son took an interest in linguistics while in high school, and that has rubbed off on me. The small company where I now work consists of six PhD-level linguists out of 12 people total. I do volunteer teaching and tutoring for local English as a Second Language programs for new immigrants. As a person who has not eaten meat for nearly 20 years and who raised his son and converted his wife to vegetarianism, this has become something like a religion to me. Much of this comes from a refusal to accept the mass killing of animals when I know we can survive without it (I guess it is a religion). I try not to preach it or even to reveal it much, though it is a little diffi­cult when you have ritual eatings (business lunches and dinners) to attend. I do some volunteer work like envelope stuffing for PETA, a rather tame but vociferous national animal-protection agency.

My travels have taken me mostly to Mexico. I have enough knowl­edge of Spanish and Mexico to get me pretty much wherever I would want. My son's mother was from there, and I wanted him to appreciate at least some of his heritage, and that explains that. I have traveled a little around the US, to China, and to Europe. My current job will involve quite a bit of travel soon. The agenda for the rest of this calendar year includes Guatemala, Mexico, Ireland, and Canada; maybe others I don't yet know.

My reading background is not what I would like it to be. It mostly consists of science fiction and contemporary fiction like Edward Abbey, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut. Of course I have read much more than these, but without a real focus. Cur­rently we subscribe to the New Yorker, China Today, Vegetarian Times, Prevention, AutoWeek, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. I have seen a majority of the classic or well-known US and foreign films of real value. We don't get to watch much TV except for That's My Dog, Smithsonian's Invention, and what little gymnastics, ice-skating and ice-dancing and auto racing there is.