Patterns that Please

reflections on my grandpa

I sit at my computer scanning lines of data. The data was imported into an Oracle database and I’m viewing it with the Discoverer tool. The woman down the hall figured out the query technicalities: How many kids were discharged from institutions? Of those kids, who went on to use other services in our system? It’s new data that I’ve never seen from this angle.

The small attic office grows warm and, with my shoe, I hit the “Low” button of the fan under my desk. Its whirring muffles the political argument in the next office.

Most of the children scroll by as single lines: enter the institution, stay a few months, disappear. But there: institution, followed by foster home. That means the kid used another of our services as a step-down from group care.

And there: institution followed by day services – another step-down pattern. But this one: institution followed by detention… kid busted out, got his ass hauled to Family Court… don’t like that one.

I hit the print button and roll up my sleeves. I have to look at these by hand, make some pencil notes, apply some yellow highlights.

Finding the patterns makes me forget that I was going downstairs to fill my water bottle. Another quick hit of coffee from the leaky Starbucks cup will do.

 

When I was 13 and oblivious to concepts like data analysis, my cousin Kathie and I sat on the porch with my grandfather watching cars approach the 4-way intersection in front of his apartment building. It was summer, when there were hours of daylight to kill after supper and it was too warm to sit indoors. So while my grandmother fussed in the kitchen, we sat on the porch and watched cars as they rumbled up to the lights.

Grandpa created a task for us. We had to find a pattern in the parade of cars: red, white, and blue. Spot a red car. Is the next one white? Is the next one BLUE?! It wasn’t a game or a contest. There was no winner or anything to win. We didn’t keep score, just celebrated the pattern when it emerged from the randomness of traffic.

I was going to say we experienced the joy of separating signal from noise, like monitoring for intelligent radio waves from outer space. But where is the meaning in a chance sequence of red, white, and blue? Maybe it was more like visual music, picking up a thrilling drum roll among so much banging of pots and pans. The pattern delighted my carpenter grandfather and so it delighted us.

 

I gaze at my lines of data, running a yellow streak through clusters that please me, dropping in a red asterisk here and there. I make pencil notes at the top, count my yellow streaks and red asterisks with hash marks. Have I really discovered meaning in the chaos or only visual music? I gather up the pages, make sure they’re in order, square up the edges, staple them together. And think of my grandfather.

10.31.00