Blog 56 Adam and the Penguins

Blog 56

Okay, okay… When the file on little blog-ideas just crying to be published reaches a thousand words… 


Your blogster has just returned from travels abroad which hatched some interesting insights. He has also just finished reading an important “intellectual” book., Part of this blog’s purpose from the beginning has been to translate hard-to-read books and other treatises into the language of ordinary human beings.  There has been some feedback that (despite the deficiencies of the cartoons) sometimes we have been successful. So, instead of retiring from the blogdom of money, let’s take another shot or two at it.

Let me start with a man I met, a remarkable man. (I’d like to think there are many more like him in his native NewZealand.) 
Call him Adam. He was a farmer’s son, brought up with a farmer’s perspective on work. Now, he lives in a city, has a hostel business, a property repair business that tackles everything from plumbing to laying artificial turf, and a sideline as a home-builder. His one slight fault perhaps is that he is a little too hard on people who have, shall we say? a weaker work ethic.

But, lest you see him as a work addict - far from it - he has time for people just because they are people - here’s a snapshot>

He asked if I would like to drive out on an errand with him . First, however, he stopped to pick up an item at a corner store - a brush, actually. We arrived at the store three minutes before it opened. While I sat in the pick-up; he engaged in three minutes of actual pick-up - of trash on the curb around two sides of the store. He didn’t know the, probably young, people who had thrown their empty coffee cups and junk out of a car window the night before. It wasn’t his trash. But he picked it up, put it in plastic bag and gave it to the clerk who opened the store to him.

I could rest my case on that episode. But that evening he invited us out to see if we could catch a sight, just as the darkness was setting in, of a local feature - mother penguins swimming in to nests concealed among the rocks of the breakwater, to feed their chicks. As the darkness fell, there were 50-or so other curious folk spread out along a stretch of road that lay about 2 or 3 metres above the water level. Adam and a fellow volunteer, in yellow jackets, explained to watchers that they must be quiet, shine no lights, and definitely not go down on the rocks near the nests, or the penguin moms would swim out to sea again. The two volunteers also kept a nightly count of sightings for the biologists who study penguins. One deceased penguin chick was discovered later. It's in Adam's freezer waitting for the biologists. Beginning to like Adam?

Now for the personal point. In our conversations over four or five days with him, I came to a bright new idea related to the basic interest of this blog.  Oh yes, even I still have things to learn! So tune in for at least one more blog.