The Elevator is Broken

I'm reading a new book by Bill Bradley. That Bill Bradley. Its title is "We Can All Do Better." It's not a wonderful read. Bradley writes in an earnest honest style that is probably what guaranteed he would never survive primary season to be a candidate for President. The book suggests simple practical things that could have been done to keep us from the morass we are in and, alas, in my opinion, not likely to get out of.

Bradley writes with what seems to be an aim to speak to both sides of the political divide and to show us what could be possible if we actually worked together to solve problems in practical ways rather than cling to our ideological mantras. I haven't finished it yet. The book is a bit like homework. But I do like how it is going so far. He's even-handed with his assignment of causes of our dilemma. He is critical of the conservatives' bête noirs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He asserts that Dodd-Frank actually does more to preserve the "too big to fail" institutions that gambled with all of our money than it does to regulate or control them. He also points to Glass Steagall repeal, done by a Republican Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, as a kind of linchpin that enabled the whole debacle that became The Great Recession. Few of us were around for it, but Glass Steagall was the act the separated investment and commercial banking after the start of The Great Depression. It seems the money boys can't help but play with our futures unless the law prevents them.

A telling critique is for President Obama. Despite promises that his administration would be different, Obama was quickly captured by the Washington insiders that surround every President these days and was told that no he could not tackle campaign finance reform first because it wasn't in the polls as on the public radar. I guess 300 million Americans can't be wrong. Of course without getting the corporate money out of politics there wasn't a hope in hell of really doing anything meaningful about anything else. Even his signature health care reform fell well short of what it might have been so that the insurance companies could hang on to the whole pie and not even have a viable public option that would allow us to hold them up to scrutiny. [Personally, I was fascinated by the whole "death panels" baloney, since if there ever were such, they existed inside the insurance companies denying coverage.]

And now that the Roberts Court has enshrined the corporate ownership of the other two branches of government we are well and truly screwed. Bradley proposes an amendment to allow local, state, and federal governments to limit campaign spending; and barring that legislation, as strong as can be made within the SCOTUS restriction that compliance must be voluntary, to encourage public funding of campaigns. The opening would still allow individuals to use their own money--one reason we have so many millionaires in Congress is that the first qualification in the vetting of a candidate is whether they can fund their own run.

To describe what our America, "land of opportunity," has become, Gentleman Bill (how I think of him) uses an analogy put forth by economist Lawrence Katz. In it Katz describes the American economy as a large apartment building, once "the object of envy" around the world, but in the last generation it has changed. The penthouse on the top keeps getting larger, the apartments in the middle floors more and more squeezed, the basement flooded, and "to round it off, the elevator is no longer working. The broken elevator is what gets people down the most."

It struck me as truly apt. My father got a job in the thirties from the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the things Franklin Roosevelt did to put America to work again. My father was from an upper middle class family, and his generation did much to erode the advantages that gave him thanks to drink and other profligate habits. My mother was probably lower middle class. Her father had been a small businessman but died young, leaving his family of five children in some tough straights. They made it largely by helping each other. Three of them got college degrees, two on the GI Bill. In my father's family, two of the four siblings went to college. For the most part that generation in the end did better, not without struggle; but I grew up in a solidly middle class family with middle class aspirations. My father's issues with alcohol left me to start afresh leaving home at 17. But I was fortunate.

Education was not out of reach for me. There were schools where you could work part of the time and study part of the time. That's where I began and then got lucky enough to go to a place that provided great scholarship aid for those who needed it. We managed our way to a reasonable life with both parents working. It still often seemed paycheck to paycheck, There was always a roof and food, though in the end we didn't have enough to provide much help to our own children to get an education, but there were still ways at the time that something could be worked out. One son made use of a good state school and a graduate fellowship, the other got help from his father-in-law.

But this was all a little more than treading water and not exactly upwardly mobile. In my generation and theirs we public school kids competed with the scions of the rich who were assured their places in the very best schools. If we made it, we made it on work and competence. The up elevator was creaky and slow and we had to hand crank it. My brother did night school for his undergrad and then got a scholarship and used loans to attend a premier business school. His life since, featuring three marriages and two divorces (my track record as well), has also been blessed with at least three major corporate demises and subsequent layoffs, the last leaving him to find income as a night watchman and newspaper deliverer. No surprise that he has become quite cynical about the value of his MBA. I, too, have faced the layoffs of corporate America. In one I got out ahead of the wave and effectively had to start over, but the other two, both driven by economic downturns, left me on the unemployment rolls for longer than I care to remember. Only aggressive saving when I was employed and a younger wife, and the best of cash managers, have given me enough to hope for a reasonable retirement, as long as I don't live too long.

Even then we took a serious hit 2008-2009 as Goldman Sachs et al played with our money. But we'd been conservative about our housing with short term mortgages and we'll manage. I get a little pissed off that some of the people with McMansions or those who used their equity for consumption in the run up to the crash have gotten mortgage relief and bail-outs, but I can't buy getting all pissy about the people really on the low end of the totem pole getting a few measly tax credits the way the doctrinaire "no new taxes" pledgers can.

But the prospect of another financial meltdown scares the crap out of me, and I don't see how either party is offering real solutions.

We have to do things that help the vast middle have restored confidence in their own futures and fix the damn busted elevator. In the world of the "dismal science" as doctrine, I guess I'm what you would call a "demand-sider." I think the engine of prosperity is an engaged and fully employed middle class. A government owned by the corporations, for the corporations, and by the corporations isn't going to get us there. For every good citizen CEO who is trying to do the right things with his business I sometimes think there must be a thousand who are pretty much committed to lining their own pockets. Just go take a look at the 10-Ks on the SEC website.

We are in a crisis. It is a crisis that is not unlike the lead up to the Civil War or the late nineteenth century excesses of the Gilded Age. There was a theory proposed by the apologists for slavery that the lowest rung of society was a "mudsill" that was the required foundation for the upper classes to rest upon. Like so much of the rhetoric today, it was a justification for exploitation. "Trickle-down economics" seems to me just a more benign sounding term for the same thing: the coins tossed from the speeding aristocrat's carriage as it runs over the small child that happened to get in the way.

If we make it, and I sincerely hope we find the ways, it may be said of this time that "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

My Life with Dogs, Part 2

My wife and I have owned cats. Cats work for a couple where both have to be at work nine to five. We started with her cat Bailey, an apple-head Siamese. He was calm, not terribly talkative, and only moderately affectionate. He was an outdoor cat. Next to our place for much of the time he was with us was a vacant lot full of brambles and that's where he liked to hide out. He did pretty well, though one psycho neighbor cat (both the neighbor and the cat) ripped him up pretty good one weekend. He recovered. After my Grey Tuxedo bugged out we talked for a bit about another to "keep Bailey company" and decided on an Abyssinian. Annie was much more fun than Bailey and very affectionate and alas, though she appeared to have short hair, was a real shedder. They got along okay and everything was copacetic. Later, after Bailey died, we got another cat, a male Tonkinese we named Timmy. The idea of dog was pretty much out of mind.

Then my wife had a long break from work that she decided to take fishing and reading by a river in Montana. Coincident with that, friends were going to be away traveling and my wife offered to take their rather large puppyish dog with her to Montana. So she ended up having a dog for a couple of months.

Meanwhile at home one Saturday I went to get the paper at the front door and was greeted by the cutest little dog, who went into a sit when I opened the door and just looked at me. Some kind of spaniel. She had no collar and tags, so I let her into the garage and set out some paper and water and just a little bit of dry cat food. I didn't think it would be a good idea to have her in the house with the two cats. Then I called Animal Control. It took them four hours to get to us. Each time I would check on the dog while I waited, she would go into a sit and look at me. She never made a sound.

When Animal Control finally arrived I told them that "If no one wants this dog, I want her." He said that he thought someone would be looking for her. "She's a Cavalier." Turned out she had been micro-chipped so they could find the owner; but for me it was the beginning of an investigation.

Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are a very interesting breed that is in some ways old and some very new. They are the dogs in the paintings of the Restoration period, hence the name for King Charles II. The characteristics seen in the pictures were bred out of the King Charles Spaniels over the years leading to the standard for the English Toy with its pushed in face. In the 1920s a man started looking for "Blenheims of the type" in the pictures from the Restoration, found some rejects from the King Charles Spaniel breeders and began to rebuild the breed. They almost didn't survive WW II in England--people could hardly feed themselves let alone pets--with only six at the end of the war from which all the current Cavalier King Charles Spaniels descend. They weren't recognized by the AKC until 1997, and have now become very popular, which may be unfortunate.

A few years later in the fall of 2003 I was laid off. My wife may have waited a somewhat respectable 24 hours or so before she cheerily said, "Good. Now we can get a dog."

We found Sunny that fall. Regis Olivia Sunlight Rose was the runt of a litter of six that a hobby breeder about an hour south had whelped. My wife had found an ad in the paper. It was pretty much love at first sight. She was a cutie. She wasn't perfect. She had an overbite that required having her baby lower canines pulled and her adult ones ground down, but it actually made her prettier with a slightly longer nose. She's been with us since.

We found a home for Annie the Abyssinian because we knew she would be a bit freaky about the dog, but Timmy stayed. We have some very cute pictures of the 13 week old puppy dancing around Timmy and the cat just staring at her. They have become great buddies and they often end up sharing the same blanket or corner of the couch. Timmy gets pretty bitched off when we take Sunny with us fishing or on vacation, and lets us know very loudly for a couple of days after we come back.

Sunny is very shy and very quiet. She can be not very great on a walk to a strange place, freezing up from time to time, but she loves people and seems to enjoy greeting other dogs of all sizes a lot. Interestingly, she seems to recognize her breed mates and other Cavalier owners have said their dogs do as well.

She's nine now and the life span of Cavaliers tends to be on the short side of nine to fifteen years. They have a propensity for heart problems and no matter how much breeders work to test that out of the lines, most will die from mitral valve disease. Knowing this we had talked about getting another but not too seriously until recently. But now I'm semi-retired and what work I do is from home, it began to make sense. We had a serious Europe trip to get done with first, so when we came back we started looking around for local breeders. One link led us to a fairly hard sell operation that despite its local name turned out to be national and they asserted that we could have "the puppy of our dreams" shipped to us in days. Gave me the creeps. Puppy mills are the most heartless of operations. they don't charge any less than reputable breeders but you have no idea what you are getting.

We found two breeders locally who had just had litters, so we went to visit. Both had very nice looking dogs and were especially interested in seeing if we were the kind of "parents" they were willing to have adopt a puppy. We passed muster at the first but explained to them that we had made another appointment with another breeder and would wait to decide. Turns out they knew the other breeder and were friends.

At the second breeder we were greeted by a literal cavalcade of Cavaliers. She had three generations in the house. Not counting the litter of four puppies there were around a dozen. They wandered around the living room, scrupulously clean by the way, greeting us and occasionally checking out a lap. We met the charming sire of many of the clan, Rodney, and the mom and pups; and then our hostess let in a couple more from outside. One of them, a young male headed straight for me, jumped up in my lap and lay on his back looking up at me dirty paws and all.

Then we find out that he was available, too. At nine months she was still looking for the right home for "KC." I was smitten, of course. KC jumped down and checked my wife out, but then he was right back in my lap after his owner mom had washed his dirty paws. We didn't decide in the moment but asked some questions and then promised to let her know. By the time we had finished the 30 minute drive home we had decided that we wanted him.

"Casey," which is what we will name him, has the kennel name Kid Curry or "KC," but we like spelling it out. We are really curious about how he will fit with Sunny and Timmy. He's quite sweet but clearly has a bit more energy than Sunny. At one point when we were visiting he was rolling around on the floor grappling with his cousin, Dallas. Dallas is being kept for show and has much more of an attitude than Casey, but he was staying right with her, mouth to mouth nipping and rolling, clearly in play. He comes home with us on Monday. Even though Sunny has been with us for nine years, it feels like my life with dogs is just beginning again.

My Life with Dogs, Part 1

The first dog in my life was a Lab-English Setter mix. I don't actually remember Bingo, but there were stories about him and I am told I cried when we got word that he had died. I was maybe four or five. Bingo had been the runt of a litter of 16 pups and was apparently the well-behaved exception to my father's usual choice in dogs. One story was told that on a night when they hadn't heard his usual one scratch at the door, my parents found him the next morning under a blanket of snow.

The next one, I remember. Lady was a Collie, the Lassie type not the working dog type. The old man had wanted to have the popular dog breed and the big long-haired Collies were the number one. And then old man went off to work and left his wife with two small children to care for the animal, which of course did not get enough exercise. She must have been a puppy mill type dog, but we got her when she was no longer a pup. She was high strung and eventually was put down after biting a couple of kids in the neighborhood.

A couple years later when I was eight or nine I remember a lengthy weekend drive in the family car when we ended up at some farm in the rural part of Long Island to pick up a jet black dog that turned out to be part Chow. He was built like a tank and had the black tongue. We got him home and I was told I'd be responsible to walk him. So dutifully I put him on leash, walked out the front door, and proceeded to be dragged face down along the sidewalk. My father was "going to put in a dog run," -- a cable between garage and house to clip the dog's lead to so he could move about the yard -- but for now he screwed an eyebolt into the corner beam of the garage and fastened a long chain. The dog went to the end of it and pulled and then went back to the garage and took a run. When he hit the end of the chain, choke collar and all, the heavy screw ripped out of the garage with a three inch thick chunk of wood. My father returned the dog the next day.

Then came a Beagle, when Beagles were all the rage. I don't even remember her name. She lasted about six months. She was an unspayed female who was a runner. She'd disappear and be found miles away. I suspect my mother put her foot down. This was just shortly before the divorce.

No more dogs for a while.

When I went to live with him again the summer I turned seventeen he was friends with a woman, actually a couple of women, who bred Dachshunds. I was going to be given a dog for my birthday. Great, just what I wanted. My father out of work, living on the income of his male "friend" with a seventeen year old son who didn't want to be there in a two room city apartment, and we were going to get a dog that I would "take care of." There you have the old man in a nutshell. Someone else was going to take care of the dog even if that someone else had a one hour bus commute to school.

A year and a half later Hermione (that was her name) started having weird skin problems with her skin scabbing up and sloughing off. I was instructed to "just take her to Angell Memorial," which was a free pet hospital. Repeated trips and various treatments later I came home to be told that he had taken her to be put down. Supposedly "my dog" and he makes this decision all by himself. Thanks, Dad.

No more dogs for a while.

When I met my first wife to be, her family had a Springer who was hefty and getting on--Portia--but she was the sweetest most well dispositioned thing. My father-in-law liked to take her for long walks in the woods and later I was allowed to take her pheasant hunting. Portia was a natural in the field. She would work a field thoroughly and aggressively. In tall cover she would leap in the air every once and a while to see where you were and would take hand directions. When she put up a bird, if you didn't get it, she would let you know her disappointment. Lovely dog. She would lead to my first screw up like the old man.

We had cats. Mostly Siamese but then some litters that were not intended. Learned that lesson. Then at some point I was doing a second part-time job in a mall and there was a pet store and they had Springer puppies. Puppy mill dogs for sure, but I brought one home for "the kids," and proceeded to waltz away from the responsibility like the old man. The dog, unfixed, got knocked up and had the pups in our powder room, where they stayed until they were old enough to be adopted out. Fortunately whatever the mix was it was cute enough and we were able to place them; but cleaning up that bathroom was a nightmare. I did do that at least. Then we had the dog fixed and found a home for her.

Divorced, there were no more dogs for me. I had a couple of cats when I met my current wife. She had two as well, so we each agreed to give one up. Her gentle old Siamese, Bailey, freaked out my Grey Tuxedo, which then decided to leave us. He adopted a family down the street who were happy to have him. We talked about having a dog but we were both working. It didn't make sense.

During one trip to the shore on a gray rainy Saturday we were greeted in the parking lot by a black Lab female, who proceeded to walk with us on the beach. She did all the good things that "your dog" would do with you on a walk. It was almost like she had adopted us. I was enchanted. When we got back to the car, she gave me a nuzzle and then just trotted off. I think we were probably a long line of temporary owners that she made use of when her own were too busy for her.

I like dogs. I love their unrestrained affection, how they love to be rubbed, their incredible attentiveness. I probably would have had one a long time ago if my life with them hadn't been part and parcel of a life I really needed to get away from. But there's more to the story.

Being a Man

I was at one point researching and writing about the construction of masculine identity. A couple of the more ardent feminists of my acquaintance had a bit of a bird about that, but I think it was because I was early on in my investigations and not able to articulate what I was doing. They took it to be an anti-feminist inquiry. This is natural in our world where we seem to run to adversarial stances when trying to deal with the issues we struggle with. It is kind of ingrained.

It's ingrained enough that in one acting class I took the instructor made a point that we introduce our comments during discussions of our observations with the word "and" rather than "but" so that we would be adding our contributions rather than offering alternative views. And that's not a bad idea when we are investigating matters of the human spirit.

My study was based on some threads in contemporary research about how identity, who we are, is actually constructed in a narrative that we tell about ourselves, and that in the case of men, that it evolves over a lifetime. I'm sure the same thing happens with women, but as much as I would like to I don't know women's experience from the inside. I know my own and I happen to be a man, perhaps a bit atypical, but a heterosexual white male of a certain age.

There's a lot of injunctive stuff about "being a man." We have the "stand up guy" phrase. We have the macho images from popular culture. We have layer upon layer of role expectations much of which we as men impose on ourselves as much as anything. We have the reactions that my feminist acquaintances were expecting to be part my inquiry, the unwillingness to appreciate the lot of women that was much of the male response to second wave feminism. And of course we have the jokes. Men don't come off well in the cartoons or in sitcoms.

Then, of course, we have the demonstrated stupidity of men in the behavior of prominent figures who have their sexual peccadilloes exposed for all to see. Funny how that doesn't seem to happen with women. The women who get negatively exposed are exposed for bitchiness, like Leona Helmsley.

I think part of this has to do with the injunctions. Be in control. Be strong. Be brave. Be smart. Be capable. Be rich. Take care of your woman, your family. Impregnate. Don't back down. Be tough. Do I need to go on? The result is the cartoonish character of a "Rambo," all muscle and craftiness, inarticulate, bent on payback and getting even.

In parts of our city this year "being a man" has been about having a gun and being willing to use it to settle disputes regardless of who happens to be in the line of fire. For those who know who the shooters are, it is about not ratting out someone. For our cops it appears to be "kicking the Mexican piss" out of someone down on the sidewalk who, it turns out, was an innocent bystander; and then stonewalling the Department of Justice investigation into whether the local police force exhibits racist behaviors.

I am coming to believe that all those testosterone ridden, macho stereotypes of "manliness" are in fact not "manly" at all. They are the straight line extension of the bullying ethos of male adolescence into adulthood. It is playground bullshit, if you'll pardon the phrase.

What has driven this conclusion to the front of my consciousness--it has always been there, but in the background--is what has happened recently and over the last several years to a special friend, someone I have considered to be one of my two best lifetime friends.

A number of years ago, six or seven, my friend had an aneurism that paralyzed him and almost killed him. He was in his fifties but arguably in his late prime years. He made a commitment that he was going to run again and ski again and set about the hard work of rehabilitating himself. I hadn't been in a lot of contact with him. The call where I found out about his stroke was over a year after the event, but we started talking about once every month or so after that.

What was so about him was that he never wavered in his commitment to heal, and never seemed to me at least to get down on himself about it or to claim any kind of victimhood; and he remained the kind of friend who would listen to what was going on with you and offered support and clarity in the conversation.

For the last few weeks I had called and left messages for him on a few occasions and not gotten a response. I was beginning to worry and I had no other way to get in touch. He's single and lives alone. On the off chance I sent an email last night.

Today I got a call from a friend of his. She let me know that he had had a series of difficult medical events--a spinal bleed that required reducing blood thinners, then another stroke--but that he was alive but in a round the clock nursing care facility. His leg is paralyzed again but he can move his arm and is able to speak. He has lost so much core strength that he cannot move himself and requires assistance and a hoist to get out of bed for physical therapy. He is extremely unlikely to ever live independently again, which is my worst nightmare.

What she said next is what prompted me to write this. First she said that he told her to find my name in his rolodex and to call me. She was about to do that when she saw my email. Then she was at pains to make clear that despite everything he was in good spirits, and I could almost see his shock of red hair and a smile on his face as she described him and how alert and present he was.

I thought to myself and said to her that "he has always seemed to me to know how to be a man even in the most difficult of circumstances."

Falling into a Hole

We have been away on a very extended trip in Europe. It was great fun and quite challenging to plan and execute. We traveled from Lisbon through Portugal by car, overnight train to Madrid, train to Segovia and Seville, car to Granada, overnight train to Barcelona, train to Arles, a barge cruise on the Canal du Midi, and finally a train to Paris. Except on the barge, which was for the most part a lush decompress, we were on the go most days from early until late usually with a nap in the afternoon. Almost no television (the only things that seemed to be on were soccer and snooker).

We walked a lot and used the excellent public transport in the bigger cities. In the smaller ones most of what we wanted to do was a short walk away. We blogged about the trip as we went along and took probably well over a thousand photos with camera, iPhone, and iPad. Those we have winnowed down to around 700. Each night we'd review what we took and toss the ones that weren't good. We've put together a half dozen montages of pictures--she calls them the highlight reel--and she plans to do a scrapbook.

A typical day had us up for coffee and croissants by around nine. We'd visit a church or museum, grab another coffee, take the metro to another site, visit that, grab a bite to eat somewhere (in Portugal and France that would be around 1300 or so, in Spain later), go see something else or even just wander through a pedestrian mall of some kind, get back to the hotel around 1600, take a nap, and be out again in the evening. In Portugal and France we'd eat between 1900 and 2000, but in Spain it was often later, sometimes as late as 2200 and that was when the locals were just beginning their evening perambulations. It rained in Coimbra, Porto, Madrid, Segovia, and Paris, and was cool for much of the trip, but we managed.

Some highlights: The Cloister of St. Jeronimos in Belem in Lisbon; the Chapel of the Bones in Evora, a field of megaliths outside of Evora, the Ribiera in Porto in the rain, a Real Madrid game, the Prado in Madrid, Guernica at Riena Sofia in Madrid, the Alcazar in Seville, the Alhambra in Granada, the Picasso and Miro Museums in Barcelona, Gaudi's magnificent Sagrada Familia, Parc Guell and La Predrera by Gaudi, the Cote du Rhone circuit outside of Arles, Les Baux (an ancient hilltop castle town in Provence), the Gardens at Giverny and the Monet Waterlilies at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris.

The six days on the barge were the exception. Though we took some side tours by van (yuccchhh!) and cycled a very few kilometres along the canal, most of it was a slow cruise with every need attended to and chef prepared four course meals every night (appetizer, entree, cheese course, dessert with a different wine for each course). The motto one of our fellow travelers, a Brit, created was "I could get used to this."

A couple weeks after my wife made the comment that she'd "fallen into a hole," and now I realize that I have, too. I don't know whether this is normal post action let down or something a little deeper, but I can't seem to get focused and operating. I manage, but just do the minimum. This is the first writing of any consequence (for what it is worth) that I have done since we got back. I have a course starting in two weeks that I need to get set up and running and I keep veering off from doing it. I've even struggled a bit with my not smoking, cheating a few times in the last couple of weeks.

She's been good about not chivvying me about any of it, and I've been careful to keep up with household maintenance things that are my job, and I've been mentally beating myself up about it and trying to think my way through it. It has occurred to me to write my way out, so maybe this is a start. And I am starting to queue up things I should attend to. Back to one step at a time.

Coming Home

It has been a while since I posted here. I've been traveling for six weeks, living out of a small suitcase in fourteen cities in three countries. I had an iPad and wrote a few things thinking about possible posts here, but mostly enjoyed the trip, took pictures, and posted to another blog about the trip. I probably won't get back to what I wrote for this one while traveling. Things move on.

We got home about three and a half days ago and it seems to have taken that long to shift the nine hours. I'm just beginning to feel adjusted. Topping it off has been a mild recurrence of the cold I had in the early weeks of the trip.

I came home to learn of the death of another friend. I guess it is going to be like this from now on, but I don't have to feel okay about it. As much as my own demise doesn't seem to have much charge for me, the deaths of people I have valued or been close to in some way seem to have a deeper effect. I lit candles in a couple of cathedrals for my friend Don, and wish I had known my other friend, Bob, had been ill. I would have lit ones for him.

Bob was a little less than a year older than me. We met doing community theatre in a small New England town. After acting together in a couple of shows Bob asked me to try out for one he was directing and that's how I ended up with the lead role in Neil Simon's "Prisoner of Second Avenue." It was a remarkable opportunity and experience for someone who had no training and uncertain skills. It was more a testament to Bob's faith than to my abilities. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Bob's life took some tough turns. His wife left him for a younger man who Bob had mentored. He battled and beat a lifelong problem with alcohol. He was laid off from work but made a go of starting a small business and then counseling others who had drinking problems. I hadn't seen him for over twenty-five years but kept slightly in touch through the connection of my kids and my ex with the town where Bob lived. He had some fairly serious medical problems over the last few years. In the last two years we made a Facebook connection, and it was through Facebook that I learned of his passing.

I miss him. He was a man with a great heart, and I miss him.

Passing Ships

So this friend's dying has gotten to me. I'm still sorting out how I feel about it.

There's that and there's our being about to go on a six week grand tour of sorts, which may be a kind of milestone for me since 1) I've never done anything quite like it; and 2) it is something made possible by my no longer being full time employed, so it puts a sharp underline on my new status.

Then as part of the organizing for the trip my wife thought we should set up a blog we can post to while we travel. Okay. So that's done. As part of that I sent the link out to the folks who have expressed some interest about our journey and some old friends.

I heard back from one of them quite quickly. A colleague from my old stomping grounds: we had been each other's date of convenience during my single periods in the eighties. We were both divorced, both had kids about the same age--hers two girls, me two boys--and we moved in the same circles. I think I probably had wished at different points that it could have been more as she was quite attractive in a very whitebread kind of way. She was pretty clear it couldn't be and teased me a bit about how many attractive women I always seemed to be with. BTW, it never seemed that way to me. I remember that being a pretty arid time for me.

Anyway she pops back that she is on her was to Texas to marry her high school sweetheart. So there's a change. Originally from that part of the world, she had lived and worked in New England for most of her adult life.

Here's the other piece of this weaving. She was the one who introduced me to my friend who just died. When I came west, she thought he would be a good connection for me, which he was of course.

So weave three lives. We are all about the same age, born right at the beginning of the baby boom, maybe just a bit earlier. Similar careers in the same field, and who had families on about the same arc. Don's girls were adopted and a little younger and as far as I know he was married to the same woman, while Linda and I were both divorced around the same time.

The three lives could be marked as parallel arcs up until right now, when Don's ends, Linda's makes a sharp turn, and mine a slighter turn but quite different than hers or his. The image I think of is like a braided contrail that splits and forks at its apogee.

Significance

So I'm back at this again. I guess it is important to me. A whole lot of my motivation around career and personal life has been around whether I made a difference. I suppose one could argue that the mere fact of my existence requires a positive answer, but you know that's not what I am digging at.

The line of thinking goes something like, so what? There are some 6 billion of you. What possible difference can one in six billion make? Then I think about Sirhan. Without him there might have been some very interesting differences in how things worked out in the last four decades, unless, of course, the regression to the mean is so powerful as to damp out what might have been with RFK.

But still, really? I am but a mote in Brownian motion. When that's burned out who will give a crap? Given what I believe, I certainly won't. Which takes me back to the starting point again.

Inevitably where I net out is where I did in conversation with one of you some months ago. The only thing that I can hope to have done is to have made small differences along the way, just as some along the way have made them for me as I have written about them here. And there are some.

I keep going back to my Sheldon Kopp lines. The relevant one today: "We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that's all there is."

So if we do make a difference to one another along the way, that may be the very best we can do.

I can be sorry for having failed to make as much of a difference as I might have wished for my sons, but there's not much to be done about it now. I did what I knew how. For a few for whom I may not have been the best of friends all of the time, there's no going back to repair those. It is what it is.

Is it significant? Obviously to me in some way or I wouldn't gnaw at it. Is it significant in some larger context? Nope. Nada. Sorry mr. 1/6,000,000,000th.

Reading the Obits

I don't read the obituaries. My wife does. Odd given that I'm eleven years older, but that is the way it is. So it is unusual that I note the passage of someone I know. It happened a couple of years ago with someone I knew from a writing group I once was part of. I didn't know Sharma well, but she had passed through my life during a brief two year window and then I happened to see her obit. She had used a different name in the writing group so it was really an accident that I had seen her.

Not so this morning. And, yes it was my wife who brought it to my attention this time.

Don Summers, 68, died while on a teaching trip to Vietnam. This one is close. When I first came to Seattle another colleague from Boston suggested I talk with Don. Don was generous with his time and offered some useful suggestions to help me set feet down in the Northwest. He had preceded me by only a couple of years, worked in a senior role with a local bank, had been laid off following a merger (I think) and then set up his own consulting business which is when I met him.

I struggled to get started here. It was during the first Gulf War and everything was on hold. I had few connections in the community and got precious little business consulting. Then the person who connected me to Don, got me in touch with someone else and I got a gig for a year doing outplacement work for a somewhat sleazy low budget outfit. It kept food on the table. Shortly after that, Don suggested that I apply for a job with a local private university where he had designed a executive style program that needed someone to manage it. Because the organization was not particularly well run, things led to a rough patch in our relationship. I was put into the middle by my employer who had decided that Don, who was the lead faculty on the program, was "the problem." The real problem was the administration. There's more to it than that, but let that suffice.

Fast forward a couple of years and I ended up in another much better job, really getting my feet here finally, and I think I reached out. I was doing some research on the construction of identity in middle aged men and it occurred to me that Don would make a good interview. I think we were both about 59 and 60 respectively. He had survived a heart problem and I was just yet to get a cancer diagnosis. As ever, Don was fit and engaged, full of wit and great colleagueship.

We stayed in touch a bit more over the next few years. Had lunch a couple of times near his office at SPU. He invited me and a couple of other friends to be a panel for one of the evening MBA class he was teaching. I was pleased that he thought that well of my abilities and experience. It could easily have gone the other way after we had hit that rough patch, but he was a gracious man. The last time I saw him was at a breakfast he invited me to. It was one of those fill a hotel ballroom deals sponsored by SPU and featured the Governor, Susan Enfield (the interim School Superintendent), and Tavis Smiley as the main speaker. Don was a table captain.

I am beginning to understand why old people often read obituaries, and why I usually don't, though I am glad my wife pointed this one out. Reading about Don made me feel like a small piece of me died. It is as if my existence extends in this world through the physical bodies of the people I know and when one of them passes it is like observing a physical part of me disintegrating.

I have never felt exactly that way about the members of my family passing, with one notable exception, but almost always when it was someone I had made a personal connection with. That goes for the family member. He was the one who had put himself out to make a difference and with whom I had made a connection.

Kind of like a psychological version of Hansen's disease, watching parts drop off. I don't think I'm going to take up reading the obits. I will admit to being thankful that my wife does so that I didn't miss this one.

We are about to take off on a major adventure, traveling in Portugal, Spain, and France for six weeks. I had been resistant to the adventure my wife had suggested, but Don is proclaiming what a silly fool I would be not to go, and even if he's a year younger than me I'd better take his advice.

Blogging

So where is this going? What started out as largely introspective seems to have morphed into something else. It's been highly personal at times and sometimes not.

One of my more regular readers says he thinks these are my "morning pages" ( as in "The Artist's Way") and I suppose that is a good thing since at least for now I seem to have crapped out on those. Another friend/colleague/teacher/mentor has suggested a website called 750words.com. 750 words is pretty straightforward--it is "morning pages" automated and done on the computer. Seems to fit my current writing style a bit more, despite my beloved fountain pens.

I thought to avoid political commentary, but it appears it is close to not possible. If what this is is about my subjective experience of my world, then the political will inevitably creep in, or maybe even stomp right through. So much of what impacts all of our lives is currently tied up in the screwy political debating going on. Who would have thought that in 2012 we'd be talking about birth control as an issue in a national election.

So I guess that's what this is--just my subjective musings on my world as I see it and experience it. As an introvert in Jungian terms, a lot of that is going to be introspective. Most of you who know me, know that that is a big part of who I am. For the few who may get impatient with my "navel gazing," I apologize, but I make no promise that I won't go there often. And some of it is going to be about my outer world which will inevitably in this crazy year sometimes be about politics.

Right now my crazy world is about getting ready to be away from home for six weeks on the road in Europe. I'm still deciding what to do with this during that time. If you have broken the code, what you already know is that I just write these as they come to mind and then schedule them to publish some days ahead, and sometimes have several in queue. It means I'm not writing under any pressure about "gee I haven't put something up for a while," and I can write about what is on my mind when it is. Traveling may present fewer opportunities for reflective writing. Also I'm not sure travel reporting is a fit for this, but we will see.

I probably won't post quite as frequently here, but we will be putting pictures up on facebook, so if you want those as we go, we gotta be facebook friends. Sorry.

Trip Planning

I've been getting organized on our upcoming vacation trip for the last few weeks. I started last summer when my wife announced that she wanted to spend at least six weeks in Europe during her sabbatical.

My first reaction was my more or less typical, "we can't afford it," but after a conversation a few days later with a friend whose mother has a stage four cancer I came home and said, basically, "it's only money," and started planning the next day.

A trip this long presents some interesting options, but we are focusing on five areas--Portugal, the Madrid area, Sevilla and Granada, Barcelona, and the area around Arles in France. We'll have a few days in Paris on the far end, and have booked a barge trip on the Canal du Midi. After a brief consultation with one of the Rick Steves people we have been doing most of this on line.

It's fun. We'll be doing some train and some car. There are some limitations on how far ahead that train reservations can be booked and the overnight ones do have to be booked ahead. Cars are pretty easy and a lot cheaper than stateside rentals. What's interesting is deciding on what needs to be done ahead and what can be done on the fly. We really didn't want to book everything tight. The barge trip, accommodations first night in Lisbon, first night in Madrid, the overnight trains, and rooms in Barcelona and Paris which can be a challenge; but that's it. About two thirds of the accommodations we will make on the way. There are some advance tickets that are needed for certain sites, but most of this ip will be an adventure.

We've done it before. Turns out Rick Steves' guidebooks are a great tool. In Italy we were doing an unplanned road trip around the hill towns of Tuscany and rolled into Sienna at sunset. We walked into a small hotel Steves had listed that was just off Il Campo and had a room.

It's kind of a nifty way to travel. Makes me deal with my own stuff about insecurity. I haven't done it often, in Cornwall and Devon during a trip to England, and with my son during our cycling trip through Denmark. You'd think given my history I be a little less nervous about this kind of thing, but it is a stretch. Good to do, to stretch.

I Support Your Right To Arm Bears

And I have no desire to pry your firearm from your cold dead fingers, but I'd just as soon not have to pry it from the cold dead fingers of your child.

In the last three weeks the local news has had some horrific stories. The first was of an eight year old who took a gun from his mother, who he was visiting. He took it for "protection" because he was being bullied. The gun was obviously loaded with a round in the chamber because at some point he jostled his backpack and it went off, critically injuring a classmate. The mother and her boyfriend, both with previous felony convictions, are being charged with a felony.

A few days ago the parents of a five year old and seven year old left the children in the car to do a quick errand. The father is a police officer. The children found a gun in the car--not clear whether it was the father's service weapon--and the five year old shot the seven year old who later died.

Last night a couple stopped at a gas station and convenience store after midnight. The girlfriend went into the store while the man pumped gas. The three year old in the car got out of the car seat, found the gun left under the seat and shot himself. He died at the scene.

Children killed or seriously injured = 3; Dangerous Intruders stopped = 0

I suppose it could be argued what is the point of having a pistol if you don't keep it ready for use against those intruders. I do know that when I learned that my son had his Glock in the house without being in a lockbox or with a trigger lock I gave him the money to get a gun safe. I had visions of my granddaughters being an item in the news, despite being assured that they would "never do that."

I'm not anti-gun. I've owned guns, but never a pistol, which is basically a weapon for killing people. I mean really, lets be honest about this. The purpose of a pistol is to kill people. You can make all the "sport" arguments you want. That is the purpose. You can make all the "use it to threaten" arguments as well, but drawn a pistol is intended to be shot, shot it is intended to kill, or you shouldn't carry one.

I've enjoyed shooting and I'm a halfway decent shot, but if I did own a pistol, I'd leave it locked up at the range. Things get bad enough that I need firearms to protect me and mine then we're all toast anyway. Besides a side by side double would make more sense--easier to reload the cartridges and less likely to break down.

But the stats aren't in favor of the pistol owner. You're much more likely to get shot with your own weapon, shoot a family member, or have a family member shoot themselves or someone else than you are to actually use it against an intruder. I'm fond of the story I saw somewhere several years ago about a man who had a gun and surprised an armed intruder. They were in a small room and both men fired repeatedly, neither one hitting their target. I think the intruder fainted from shock. At any rate they caught him on the premises. Supposedly there was some underwear to be laundered. Could have been worse, much worse.

I really don't want to see another news story like those I mentioned at the start of this post, but with our wild west mentality I guess I am likely to. So you go ahead and make sure your bears are all armed and ready.

Help Me Understand, Please?

I called up my doctor's office to make an appointment for my annual "wellness check." I asked to talk to the nurse to see if I couldn't arrange to get the blood tests done ahead so that we could talk about the actual results. What has been happening is that I go in, they do the weight, bp, and listening to my heart and breathing, we have a nice conversation, and the blood draw gets done and I get a letter in the mail with the results with little explanation except everything is within the normal ranges. What's disturbing is that the conversation includes a little go round about putting me on statins because of some unspecified risk factors and "it's something we can prevent." Presumably that refers to clogged arteries. He is "concerned" but my cholesterol while on the high side of normal is not high. So I have said "no," for two years running.

So this time I want a real review with him of the test results. No can do. "Medicare has no codes for doing that." I cannot get the tests done first.

The yahoos would say "see what happenes when you let gummint mess with health care," but I think that while the regulations and required procedures are annoying--there is now an anti-fraud questionnaire to be filled out every 90 days, inconsistent answers will get your file pulled--in my experience the insurance companies are just as bad. Switching plans when changing jobs I could never know what was going to be covered. And of course there was that "pre-existing conditions" bullshit.

Actually right now I may have the worst of both worlds. I have my supplimental insurance through an insurance company who by virtue of this becomes my Medicare administrator. So I've got both government and insurance companies messing with me.

Here's what I don't understand. there is all this uproar about how terrible it is to have government involved in our health care, but in the name of "free enterprise" we have willingly surrendered all manner of control to private often run for profit insurance companies. I know the argument goes that in a "free market" you can choose and that "competition" will keep things lower cost and reasonable.

Well, here's the facts folks. The market is nothing like "free." You take what your employer offers. The employer makes the deal. You don't. And unless you are willing to pay the hefty premium on your own there is no "free market." At best the "market" is highly "inelastic." In my state the insurance commissioner is investigating the four largest providers for keeping overly large reserves, that he says should be passed on to consumers as lower rates.

During the run up to the federal health care bill, there was all this screaming about "death panels" and "rationing" of health care which struck me as utterly absurd given that the insurance companies already have "panels" deciding what treatments will be paid for and which ones not and they already ration what they provide unless you are willing to pay extra outside of the system. What makes that any different in its impact on you than a third party payer system?

So now with no employer I get Medicare and pay for the privilege of having an insurance company administer my Medicare for me. Worst of both worlds I think. I've been on it for two years and switched provider once already when I was about to get shunted onto a different plan by my original provider, and I am thinking very seriously about switching again. This time in part because my medical providers are part of the largest and most well regarded local hospital system, but which just acquired another hospital network which is Catholic owned. I'm not sure my health care directives would be followed in the new merged organization which has already shut down its reproductive health care center.

Just what is the *bleeping* problem with requiring employers to provide a specified range of health care coverages? We create this bastardized kluge of a system with private employers ("You don't have to work for Geogretown U., slut!") and private insurers in the mix, and now we should go around and make "exceptions of conscience" in what gets covered, at the same time that the use of a vaginal probe ultrasound is prescribed by a *bleeping* legislature as  a tactic to embarrass women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

None of this sounds very "free" market or otherwise to me. So explain please.

Oh, do us both a favor. DO NOT use the words "socialized" or "socialism," because what has been going on isn't even close.

Bullying Part 2

I wrote today's post a couple of days ago and then on yesterday evening's news there was a piece on a new film on bullying, "Bully," that has been given an "R" rating that would prevent it being shown in schools. The R was for violence--the violence of bullying.

In the film a boy who was being bullied is followed and filmed, one presumes with hidden cameras, while he is hit and taunted repreatedly. The telling scene was when the parents went to a school administrator to tell her how hostile the school bus environment was for their son. The administrator: "I've been on that bus. They are little angels on that bus."

As far as I am concerned that kind of attitude and response should justify the woman being charged as an accomplice in a physical assault, and being jailed.

There's is a movement afoot to get the film re-rated, as PG-13 (still to restrictive in my opinion) so that it can be used as an anti-bullying tool in schools.

Bullying

One of the recent ways our locale made the national news was the case of the nine year old boy who had taken a gun from his mother's house and put it in his backpack. It went off in school, seriously injuring a girl in his class. She has a bullet lodged near her spine and is still in critical care after several days. The boy has been charged but is being put into some kind of treatment program. He was being raised by an uncle after his family situation pretty much melted down. He got the gun during a visit to his mother who no longer has custody of him.

The first question up for me is who keeps a loaded gun unlocked where a child can get it with a round in the chamber and the safety off? But that aside there are some other disturbing things about this case that echo other similar events. Police initially reported that the boy supposedly indicated that he got the gun for "protection" because he was planning to run away. Now it comes out that in addition to his really shitty family situation he was getting bullied and had been suspended not long before after an incident in which some other kids "jumped" him and a friend after school. The school in its unselective bureaucratic "don't make me have to really solve this" wisdom simply suspended everyone involved. At which point the bullies threatened retaliation. The gun was taken for self-protection.

I'm not justifying the gun. Please don't think that.

But if you think bullying "is just part of growing up," I say bullshit.

In almost all of these kid perpetrated gun violence in schools incidents it eventually comes out that the kid had a history of experiencing bullying. In addition in many of the teen suicides it comes out that some kind of bullying was involved. Sometimes like the cyber-bullying case last year or the year before it actually involves an adult.

But here's my point today. Even if adults aren't directly involved, they are invariably complicit in allowing it to happen. I spent most of my teens getting bullied until I ended up for one year in a school that didn't accept it as the way things were.

Adults, teachers, administrators, whoever--in the past at least, adults didn't want to get involved and they typically made that plain to any bullied child who complained of it. Parents, often engaged in their own tsouris either don't want to get involved or aren't paying much attention. Trust me. I was one of them. Despite my own experience I was unaware that my oldest was having the same experience even though he was coming home and taking it out on his younger brother... (get this) for years. One of my most embarrassing things as a parent is to have learned this in the last few years.

Adult intervention is often simply absent, three monkeys style (see no evil, etc.). Often it is minimalist--"That's just the way things are. You have to learn how to handle it." Frequently it is indiscriminating as in the everyone involved gets the same treatment and it is to suspend rather than to counsel or advise or teach. I knew I never could count on adults to help me, not even my parents for a variety of reasons regular readers might appreciate. I knew I would be seen as the troublemaker if I complained. "Shoot the messenger" starts early in life.

What you do is you learn to avoid it. You find new routes out of school and home. You know what groups to avoid going near. You learn to be a little sneaky and operate in the seams. You still get caught. I was in my second year of high school when I became the target of a nineteen year-old who was in his third year for the third time--a really shining example of suthren amurican manhood. He would hunt me down outside of school even on weekends in order to pummel me. One of my problems was that once caught I would not back down. "Go ahead, hit me if it makes you feel big." Once I'm pretty certain I was concussed. Didn't let my mother know. What could she do? She had her own health issues which were killing her and was working 13 days out of 14 to keep things together.

So you avoid, and you probably fantasize or day dream about getting revenge or justice. I know I did. I've talked to a few others who had similar experiences, and they did, too. Mine were heroic dreams about how bad guys invaded the school, did in my nemesis, and then I somehow was involved in saving the day. Kills two birds with one stone, so to speak--gets rid of my problem and makes me popular.

The difference is that most kids who get bullied don't act on it in one of the negative ways. They don't plan to shoot up their school. They don't actually commit suicide. They pay a price to be sure, one that requires them to do some healing as an adult. One of Sheldon Kopp's Eschatological Laundry List is the line: "Childhood is a nightmare."

Still, I think it is great that more and more effort is being put into anti-bullying programs in schools. More of it couldn't happen soon enough as far as I am concerned. Most of the schools I knew as a teen ( I went to a few) were only a few notches removed from "Lord of the Flies." The kid culture in them was something adults actively avoided and some pretty horrific stuff went down. Despite some injuries nobody died, but there are times looking back that I wondered how we all survived.

Counter to all this is another local news thing gone national: Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project to help youth of all persuasions but especially LGBT youth understand that there is life after high school, life where you don't get abusively teased for who you are or beaten up or ostracized. Maybe this is part of my "It Gets Better" statement.

Tin Soldiers

Over the years I have acquired and dropped hobbies the way a snake sheds its skin. I learned how to sail in my late teens at a public facility. Had a passion for it for two or three years getting approved as a racing skipper and even racing for my college team as a freshman. Got married, transferred to a different school, and so much for sailing. Considered buying a small sailboat a couple of times but nothing came of it.

The case could be made that I have been at flyfishing the longest, but maybe it is skiing. I downhill skied between 1962 and 1995 never avidly, because it's expensive, giving it up only after my wife dropped me at one of the cluster of areas near us--she was headed to cross country--and what turned out to be one of the steepest mountains I had ever been on. I had already had problems because the boots I had purchased to replace my beloved Hansens didn't quite fit right despite repeated visits to the shop. I got off the lift that day, took one look down the hill, and walked down. My skis went to the dump a couple of years later. Though state of the art when purchased, at nine years old and despite limited wear (I only skiied three or four times a season) they weren't even wanted by the second hand sports equipment places. She thought I was better than I was.

I've been flyfishing since 1985, so I'm catching up. If I last it will be my longest lived "hobby" in 2018. The equipment doesn't get superceded quite as quickly as with skiing. A cane rod is still pretty much the same as one made 50 or 75 years ago. They issue new graphite compositions every year or so, but I can never tell that much difference in the actions. You get new lines, a new reel once in a rare while. The rod companies guarantee their products for life even if the most frequent ways they are broken is getting slammed in screen or car doors. I'll probably still be fishing my beloved 1 weight, or the lovely 5 piece 3 weight, in 2018.

There is another hobby that I have had for a long time. I'm a gamer. I'm not a totally addicted to one game gamer like the D&D crowd, but I did have a D&D character. I have a pretty complete set of "Traveller" materials. "Traveller" is a space opera style role playing game put out by Game Designer's Workshop. I also have some stuff from a related futuristic after the apocalypse gaming system.

But my game preference was historical miltary simulation games. I played off and on and collected them from the early sixties into the early eighties, and acquired a few even since. I was a long time subscriber to Strategy & Tactics which featured a game in every issue. The games are realistic simulations and take a while to play so it is hard to find opponents. I haven't played the table top variety for over twenty years, but there are some on-line incarnations that work like the old play-by-mail versions of things that I have played more recently. It's a tenuous business model so they go in and out of business pretty often.

Along that line in the later seventies I started to paint armies of 15 mm figures from the Napoleonic era. I worked on them off and on over a dozen years, and moved them now six times. I still have a number of unpainted figures, and painted I have a couple of different French cavalry units, two regiments of British horse, artillery for both sides, and something like two or three battalions of infantry for each side. I may have actually played with them twice. Those rules are pretty complicated, too.

In any case what I told myself was that "when I retired" I'd spend my time painting. Well there are some inconvenient facts. One, I don't think I'm about to have that kind of retirement. But even more to the point, they way we have chosen to shape our lives and living arrangements doesn't allow for the kind of space it takes for the hobby. No place to set up a table, not much of any place to paint.

So they are taking up storage space, and memory share. Not much space, as they are all in boxes along with the brushes and what's left of the paints. I don't even know where I could replace the enamels I used. They were a specialty item and the last store I knew of in town that carried them went out of business a couple of years ago. They are there along with my collection of S&T games.

It's the memory share that is up for me now. I enjoyed them, enjoyed making them; and now it seems like some silly wasted effort and I haven't a clue of what to do with them. The spouse says Craig's List, but I would have to dig it all out and lay it out for photographs, etc. etc.; and besides it oddly feels like disappearing a part of myself.

So despite waking up thinking about it this week, I don't have a clue what I am going to do.

Smoking--A Remembrance

Everybody smoked once. And once everybody smoked everywhere. There was something enveloping and convivial about it, almost as if it was part of the general social glue.

Yes, I know that not everyone smoked; but it sure seemed like it.

There was a satisfaction in sitting back at your desk when you were thinking about something and lighting up and taking that first draw that filled your mouth with taste. Since we all must have smelled like that, smokers and the few non-smokers alike, you didn't notice.

These days you get on an office elevator with someone just back from a smoke break and the smell will nearly nauseate you. It even did when I was still smoking, so I made a special effort to do a walk while having my break so that I didn't get my smoke and all the smoke of the others on break in the same spot. I hope it helped.

Though just recently quit for the third time in as many years, I have not smoked in the houses I have lived in since the early eighties, except for short periods when I was on my own. I have not smoked in an office for even a little longer. I have smoked in the cars, but even stopped that about three new cars ago, with only a break of an instance or two.

But we are old movie buffs and often get reminded of the ritual aspects of the habit: lighting up after a meal, or after sex. Been a long, long time since I have had a cigarette in bed under any circumstances, and with the women in my life since the early eighties all non-smokers, there have been no after sex smokes.

It's really too bad it is so unhealthy and so nasty. There was always something soothing and pleasurable about it: the texture of the smoke, the smell of fresh tobacco, the narcotic effects. I'd be lying if I said I never miss it.

For some of the time I smoked, I smoked a pipe. I still love the smell of pipe tobacco. My father had taken me to Erlich's in Boston on my seventeenth birthday to select a pipe. He claimed it would be better for me than cigarettes. Of course I've since heard the horror stories about tongue and throat cancer. His father smoked pipes.

The story goes that the only time he smoked cigarettes was when he was in formal wear--pipe smoking acoutrements take useable pockets--when he would tuck a bag of Bull Durham in his cummerbund and could roll cigarettes one-handed as if on horseback. The other hand was for the martini, not reins. Must have been the old Maine Guide in him. He also apparently trained the women who worked in his offices to fill his pipes so that he could just pick the next one up and light it. Chain smoking pipes strikes me as really crazy. BTW, learning how to properly fill a pipe isn't easy. Those women either had a lot of patience or really needed the work.

I remember the pipe I bought. It was what is called a lumberjack or Canadian. Basically a straight-walled plain bowl with a long straight briar stem and a very short hard rubber mouthpiece. It's a shape I favored for a long time.

I ended up smoking cigarettes more and more as smoking was more restricted. Pipes and cigars were the first things outlawed from restaurants and airplanes, even those with smoking sections. And pipe smoking is maybe even a little messier than cigarettes and inconvenient. You have to carry stuff--tobacco, cleaners, tampers, and good matches or a good lighter. A bic would not quite do. And you can't really just light up and have one the way you can with a cigarette. Pipe smoking is a more deliberate act and one that should be done sitting at leisure, with a good book or a nice port.

Almost as satisfying to think about it and write about it as to do it.

And it is satisfying to not be smoking now. Three months and counting.

Here's to Mr. T.

When I got out of the grand institution that deigned to welcome me "to the fellowship of educated men and women," I had to get a job. I was married, with a young son, and awash in debt. And my degree was, god help me, Cum Laude General Studies. [I did not cut the mustard in my senior thesis and orals so the committee declined to grant me the degree in American History & Literature--mox nix, same difference economically speaking.] Truth is I think we were all dilettantes at that bastion of higher learning. That's why most of my peers went on to grad school pretty much straight away. I went job hunting.

I did the dance with the recruiters in the career office, and even ended up making at least one trip to Babylon on Hudson to be interviewed for an executive training program, one of those hot house competitive high potential things that were fashionable at the time. The city was straight out of "Madmen" even then. High powered men mostly playing one up games on each other. Clearly not for me and me not for them.

I was finally down to working with a local employment agency, considered one of the better ones in town. These were the ones where you committed to paying them a percentage of your first year's salary, usually 20% or so, unless it was "fee paid." This was the same period when you could pay a company several thousand dollars, which they would kindly take on installment, and they would remake you into the upwardly mobile man in the gray flannel suit of the day.

As it happened a local trust company doing some other business with that agency was looking for someone who could write, was employable for not much money, and had a degree from one of the "right places." So I ended up being the assistant to the Director of Public Relations and Advertising for this very conservative financial institution. [Basically they defined their customer base as the 3,000 richest families in the state.] They were also beginning an ambitious strategy that would have them found what is now one of the country's premier management consulting firms, and stretch out into markets across the country and a little internationally by acquiring boutique investment firms.

Job was perfect in some ways, if underpaid. I had to write the customer newsletter--mostly fluff--and do various copy writing and editing chores for the bank and affiliates, and to work with the printer doing the production work, all under the gimlet eyed Mr. T, [insert Ivy] class of 1932, gentleman C's. He had been a newspaperman and then did PR work for Ford. "Edsel wasn't a mistake. the market for its competitors dried up, too." During the war he had served with Halsey and at one point got trapped in the ammunition hoist of a battleship. He always walked the nine floors to the top of our building when he had to go up there.

Mr. T., a self-declared "anti comma man," was brutal with a blue pencil, but he suffered me the time to sit down and go over the copy with me explaining why he had made the changes and being willing to listen to why I had written it the way I did in the first place. As time went on, the way I saw it was that I began to win more of the arguments. Probably what was much more likely is that under his demanding tutelage I was getting better. The first time I got a piece of copy by him without a change I was ecstatic.

At the time I think I hated him. I was friends with his secretary. Good way to get things done. She let me know on two occasions when he rescinded raises that he had put in for me. Once when I had let him know I was on the waitlist for business school (so much for being honest with your boss) and the second when another group in the bank had asked if I could be transferred to them. He was among other things a stingy s.o.b.

My most amusing memory was of my last year with him. I was, at my own suggestion, honchoing a project to do the annual report. The previous year we had hired a top tier firm who had designed a product with an ink and paper combination that the color would come off on your hands. The whole run had to be done again with a special lacquer treatment applied to the tune of tens or thousands not to mention the $50,000 the firm had cost (and not returned). I had helped managed site selections for the local photographs and handled those logistics. Kind of a line producer role.

The following year, I had suggested that we get a local person from one of the fine arts schools in town, a student. We would put out an RFP and ask for submissions of ideas, pick one and do the production with our regular printer. We selected a grad student from the museum school and pretty quickly had a design which featured our holding company's logo silhouette on a background made of ascii paper tape--just the hole punch patterns. The point was that we were doing a lot of work in using technology for investment research and wanted to showcase that. The same paper tape patterns ran down the edges of the inside pages. Technology at the time involved communicating to computers using teletype terminals that punched and read paper tape.

Mr. T., bless him, approved, but there was one more thing. I had to provide him with the decoding of what all of the tape used in the publication actually said. To my what must have been incredulous look he gravelly intoned through the cigarette smoke swirling about his crew cut head, "It takes a dirty-minded editor to get out a clean newspaper."

Feeding the Birds

I know that eastern burbs feature lots of animal denizens, but out here in the west our cities are host to quite the assortment of wildlife.

I'm about 5 minutes from downtown. There's at least one racoon in the neighborhood that I see pretty often. a few years ago walking the dog in a school playfield one early morning I peered into a garbage can standing at the end of some bleacher seats and was greeted by the ratlike face of an opossum. He or she was rather upset being unable to get out of the can. I tipped it sideways.

I've seen coyotes inside the city limits. There are a lot of bald eagles nesting in various locations around town. Nothing like what we can see in the cabin we stay at in Montana, but it seems to me a lot more than cities back east.

The birds are coming back now, and with the trees still bare it is easy to see them. We've got robins now and a scrub jay. We've had hummingbirds all winter. We set up a feeder last year and attracted a pair of Annas we dubbed Bill and Hillary. There's a new batch this year--at least four or five different ones. Fun to watch. I've been on the deck using the grill and had one feeding two feet away.

Last year when the feeder froze one night, in the morning Hillary perched on top of it and seemed to be scolding me. I got with the program very quickly and thawed it out.

It's our second time with bird feeding. The last one we stopped after one of our cats proved unusually adept at snagging birds from the deck rail.

Then there was one weekend winter day when we heard thunks from our window and discovered that a group of grosbeaks were busy getting drunk on berries in the tree by the window and then flying into it. Went on for quite a while.

This year the orcas are back in the sound early. The weather has been much milder than normal, more days to see Rainier as I drive back toward the house. We are thinking about taking our "yacht" (the ferry) out to one of the local islands this weekend. It does not promise to be sunny but it should be mild.

Something special when you live where the mountains and the sea come together, and where eagles nest in the city. I'm really glad the accidents of life brought me here.

The Artist's Way

Two friends have pushed me to read the book and undertake the process. Both of them are in recovery from brain injuries, so they have something to say about bringing oneself back from the verge and rehabilitating mind and body.

I'll be honest. I have resisted.

I have never been good at a disciplined practice. My wife can tell you I have a hard time handling twice daily teeth brushing, and if it were not for her setting vitamins and daily aspirin up in pill containers, I wouldn't do that. I still usually forget to take them at least one day a week.

The only habit I had that was reliable was an addiction--smoking. So now I'm off that and there is nothing. My see-him-when-I-need-to therapist was wanting me to take up meditation. I have to tell you that everytime I have tried, there was no way I could quiet my mind and I ended up squirmy and with a hopeless sense of failure.

Well, Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," is a discipline, if nothing else; or at least a practice, and it is a kind of meditation. I started the day after Valentines with my first "morning pages" with great trepidation. We will just have to see what happens... one day at a time, as it were.

Thanks SB and MG, I think.

I'm the Cook

Time to lighten up.

Part of the way we divvy the chores is that I usually do the grocery shopping, after a little consultative menu planning some of the time. Whoever cooks doesn't have to do the dishes. We pretty much split breakfast duties on the mornings we don't go to the gym. Those days the starter is sharing a banana and having a latte (at home--we have this great machine).

Dinner is mostly mine to do, but on weekends she has started doing slow cook dishes, and training me to eat leftovers for those nights when we have been a little busy.

I'm a fairly decent cook. Not a great one. I'm a recipe cook and what I think is being a really good cook is the ability the create something good without a recipe, preferably from found ingredients. But we do cook. We don't use packaged foods with a couple of exceptions. We also don't have a microwave. The new house didn't have one installed and we decided to try doing without. Works just fine. Takes a little planning to thaw things from the freezer, and we have a couple of different vegetable steamers.

With help I do most of the company cooking. She will set up a salad or hors d'oeuvres and sometimes do some baking for a dessert. She makes a great pie crust.

For Christmas we used a cookbook put together by a local restaurant owner/chef, "Tom Douglas' Big Dinners." The meal featured eggs poached in wine, roast duck, mushroom and rustic bread stuffing, apple & radicchio salad with maple molasses pecans, finishing with a persimmon pudding with Calvados hard sauce and pear sauce, garnished with sugared cranberries and mint leaves. Douglas did a great job of spelling out what could be done ahead so the effort was spread over 3 days. It turned out great.

Oddly what made me feel best was something I invented this week. I was in the store and saw golden beets and it occurred to me I could roast them. Then I wondered what could go with them. The dish I ended up with was a roasted beets and fennel bulb salad garnished with sauteed pine nuts and crumbled pancetta. I actually invented something I hadn't ever had or seen a recipe for, It's quite good. You dice the beets and fennel, put them in a roasting pan--I used a glass one--toss them with olive oil--I use the light version that can take more heat--add some salt and pepper and roast at 450 for 45 minutes or so, stirring about halfway through. Sprinkle with a dash of white wine vinegar before serving.

If your timing is off you can just turn the oven off after 45 minutes and the dish will hold.

Made me feel like a "real" cook.

I Give Up

I have tried to soft pedal stuff that could slide into partisan politics, but it is almost impossible to avoid. The web is already full of extremist rantings that reflect what is going on in the political arena. I don't intend this to add to that, but it is possible that someone reading this might take issue with some of what I have to say. So the caveat is that this is just my view and you are entitled to yours. It probably isn't necessary to degenerate into brick throwing.

So here's the deal as I see it.

The last three Republican candidates standing are members of a religion that once ruled the known world or of one with ambitions to rule it. Both of these institutions routinely weigh in on issues of interest to and decisions about things made by people who are not part of their churches.

So basically they are trying to impose their doctrine on non-believers. [Before you start screaming about Sharia, yes, fundamentalist Muslims do it too.]

Get this straight. These people want to take away the religious freedom of non-believers all in the name of "freedom of religion." Am I missing something here? I think not, but correct me if I am. The intersection of doctrine and public policy is an ugly zone, getting uglier by the minute. My only hope is that it gets so ugly that people will see how screwed up it is and walk away from the yahoos.

A couple of observations. One of the candidates "defending traditional marriage" has had three wives (and he's not the Mormon one) and ended each of the first two while he carried on an affair with the next. He should have taken a page from Joseph Smith who rewrote doctrine handed down from on high to justify his own baser desires to have relationships outside of his marriage, His church still spawns sects that encourage old men to take teenage wives and drive young men out of their supposedly loving families.

My guess is that the Catholic Church probably spent more money to defeat same sex marriage in California than it spent world-wide trying to root out the institutionalized abuse of children that went on behind its walls.

Can you spell hypocrisy?

This is getting personal for me. Washington State has a death with dignity law that protects people's right to decline treatment and even to obtain palliative termination if there is nothing facing them except months of deterioration and pain.

I have a medical directive that no "heroic measures" be taken. I make sure I have a copy with me on the few occasions I have been treated at a hospital. I want no instances of "we didn't have it in the file." Just recently my health care system acquired another one in a merger. The new one is Catholic Church affiliated. There have already been stories of how people have been denied information about their rights because it conflicts with religious doctrine.

So what the [bleep] about MY religious freedom?

Screw the rest of us as long as you can use visceral religious issues to mobilize the base to get that uppity [insert racist epithet] out of the White House.

Sigh....

Plus Ça Change but Not Plus la Même Chose???

Funny... I'm sitting here at my kitchen counter typing this on a "laptop" that is more powerful than early mainframes, not using any phone line or minute charges. I'm not wired to anything except AC--laptops still eat batteries.

I spent a good part of a career, as did my siblings, in an industry that did not even exist when I was in grade school, and now has gone through multiple generations. I've owned almost as many computers as I have cars, going from 16K of RAM to the monster I have now, for which I cannot find a bag to fit. Screen is nice though--bigger than the little screen on the Philco TV the old man got in 1950. Damn thing was always breaking down.

I remember carbon paper and a world without copying machines.

Cars, brand new cars used to cost 1/100th of what they do now. Not all of that is due to the change in the value of the dollar. Compare what you are buying. The average low-end car today has far more features standard than the best ones of even four or five decades ago.

We have a lot of stuff. We have a lot of stuff that is better. We have Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, and what's more you can send text messages on it.

[We have some other stuff that comes with that. Yesterday I watched in my rearview as the man behind me was obviously texting as he drove eight city blocks. Whenever he was stopped he was looking down at his lap and his hands were not visible on the wheel, and when traffic started he stayed stopped until he noticed the cars around him moving.]

And what is with the disappearing children? Did we just not know about that or pretend it didn't happen?

As kids we used to leave the house and be gone for hours. "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you did you do?" "Nothing." There were few organized sports outside of school. I played baseball in sandlot pickup games until Little League came to town. Then I stopped because I could not afford a uniform and glove even if I had been selected, which I would not have been. The parents quickly made it about winning rather than playing. I still hate parents like that.

I was in Denver attending a week-long seminar when Columbine happened. The facilitator invited people to talk about the event, to express their feelings. We got to one man, probably about my age, who started to pontificate about how things used to be better when we had communities and traditional values. I was not very nice about it when I pointed out that in his perfect gone-by-world, the abuse and alcoholism and child rapes happened behind the white picket fences and he was naive to think otherwise.

I don't know how much better or worse things are. They are different in some ways and not in others. Some quite substantively. My parents never went to Europe. For half of their lives they would have had to take a boat. I've been eight times I think, though it took me a long time to make my first trip. My mother had been to Havana, something I could not have done if I wanted to.

It is no longer necessary or meet to deal with your psychological dilemmas in years of analysis. Freud was the big thing in the fifties and sixties, big to the point of regular New Yorker cartoons about analyst-less Augusts in the city. Drugs are big now, but there are also a lot of other "talking cure" modalities as well, and all those self-development workshops.

We live in a world where one of the world's oldest institutions has to have its local branches sued into near bankruptcy in order to stop hiding its career pederasts, and where an eighteen year-old high school student can end up having to broadcast his status as a "level three sex offender" for the rest of his life for having had sex with the sixteen year-old he is now married too.

Corporations are people again. Historical note: after the Civil War the 14th amendment was interpreted by the Court to apply to corporations rather than the freed slaves it was intended for. But then we knew some of the current Justices were throwbacks, didn't we?

When my father moved from Ohio to Boston in 1959 he brought with him a large wooden shipping crate that was full of albums of classical music on 78s! We had the changer to play them that was also able to play 33s. Last year one of my projects was to convert my 300 plus vinyl albums to MP3 files. I didn't do the world's best job, but my ears aren't what they used to be and now at least I have the music in a form I can play. The wife hated hearing the noise that even the best treated vinyl could get.

You tell me what has gotten better or worse.

For myself, I'm not sure I'd want to be born now or coming of college age. I have this nagging feeling that the world is about to really go to shit, despite or because of all the technology (take your pick). College is becoming more and more unaffordable. I was lucky to have gotten a lot of help from the schools I went to and even then I was paying off loans twenty years afterwards.

This has been a pastiche, maybe even a little pointless, but interesting for me to muse about anyway.

Are You a "Boomer?"

The Baby Boom generation is technically defined as postwar--starting in 1945. If you look it up you will find there are two Baby Boom cohorts, the second starting around 1955 is sometimes called Generation Jones.

If you look at the bulge in the birth rate over time, what you will see is that the rise in birthrate began sometime before 1945, and in some other countries Boomers are considered to include people from earlier years.

The next previous cohort is known as "the Silent Generation," and as children of the Depression.

I was born in 1942. While growing up my mother had always referred to me as being part of the Baby Boom generation, and so that is how I have always thought of myself. I now struggle a little with the idea that I am not a "Boomer," and I certainly don't feel like or see myself as a Depression-born Silent Generationer. I guess you might say that I am really on the cusp, between cohorts.

But consider this. Here is the list of memorable events for the first Baby Boom cohort (born between 1945 and 1955) from the Wikepedia entry:

Memorable events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., political unrest, walk on the moon, risk of the draft into the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women's movement, protests and riots, Woodstock.

The comparable list for the Jonesers is:

Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the Cold War, lowered drinking age in many states 1970-1976 (followed by raising), the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages, Jimmy Carter's imposition of registration for the draft, Ronald Reagan, Live Aid.

The first list is for me my coming of age experience. Most of the second list feels less salient to me.

I was married a couple of weeks before JFK was assassinated. I was just starting college during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam and the protests against it was the context for that period for me. The year that seems most memorable to me was 1968 which saw the decision of LBJ not to run, RFKs and MLK, Jr.s murders, the Chicago riots, and the return of Tricky Dicky--supposedly the "New Nixon," but as it later turned out, just as tricky as ever.

So 1942 or not. I'm really a Boomer.