The other night we are struggling with the Final Jeopardy question when there is a loud, ugly buzz/beep that interrupts the show and the words move across the screen: “There is a tornado watch in the following counties….Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, Bucks…”
“Oops! Bucks! That’s us!” I exclaim.
Polley corrects me. “That is we. Predicate nominative.”
“So do we go to the basement or what?”
I soon learn from online research that tornado “watch” means the conditions are ripe for a twister in the designated areas. Tornado “warning” translates into the fact that an actual roof remover is moving through the region.
Maybe because I was just a kid of six or seven, but I don’t remember the weather being so complicated when I grew up in the Bronx in the nineteen fifties. My favorite part of the news was, in fact, the weather. I watched the black and white telecast every night with my parents.
Tex Antoine, sporting a smock, would stand in front of a wooden easel. As Tex began telling us about the weather conditions, he would make a line or two with his marker, and as he continued talking he would add more lines, straight lines, curved lines, rectangles, circles, and I was trying to guess what cartoon would eventually emerge from these drawings.
The drawing would always end up as Mr. Weatherbee, but the drama unfolded based on what Mr. Weatherbee would be wearing or carrying. Sport coat, raincoat, umbrella? The suspense kept me riveted to the screen.
The weather seems to have become more complicated over the years.
Whereas Tex gave us all we needed to know about dressing for the morrow in two minutes, weather forecasts on the televised news shows take up about five or six minutes. Maybe more. And the “storm of the century” seems to happen every year.
My weather app shows me vividly colored radar images that my mind has to sort out. Other views demand that I have a working knowledge of isobars and contour lines and all kinds of numbers.
In order for me to prepare to meet nature on the next day, television weather forecasts tell me I have to know so much more. I think absolute humidity is more commanding than the lax relative humidity. Tex never made the distinction. Nor did he emphasize how things feel. If Tex said that it was going to be 95 degrees when we woke up, we assumed it would be uncomfortable. Today, besides knowing the temperature will be 95 degrees, we must study the heat index which describes how that temp feels on the skin. The opposite temperature extreme is also true. “The high will be 28 degrees, but, with the wind chill factor it will feel like 2 degrees below zero.” Now that I have to factor in the wind, I should study the Beaufort Wind Scale.
And here is one of those situations where science doesn’t help as much as the humanities. Let me explain. Jack London wrote a short story, To Build a Fire, a tale about a man who ventures outside his cabin when it is 82 degrees below zero. Yes, that is right. 82 degrees below zero. His dog cannot read a thermometer, but he knows that no living thing should be outside when it is that cold. The man loses his life because he is not as smart as his husky.
Telling me that it “will feel like two degrees below zero” doesn’t really mean much to me. I think weather forecasters should employ similes and metaphors, the DNA of the humanities. So, people, with the wind chill factor tomorrow it will feel like an ice cube placed on the back of your neck. Or, it will be so cold tomorrow that it will feel like your spouse’s cold toes rubbing against your ankles. Or, it will be so hot tomorrow that it will feel like stepping barefooted on a black macadam street on a hot sunny day down the shore. Or it will be so warm it will feel like opening the oven door when the turkey is done and your glasses fog up. See? Now those forecasts have meaning.
Cold fronts bad? Maybe not if they bring sunshine. Warm fronts good? Maybe not if they bring precipitation. And the local weather stations have a way of making me become concerned about weather outside my immediate area. I must expand my database knowledge to include El Nino winds and the jet stream. I get nervous watching the national map and seeing that heavy rains and strong straight-line winds (whatever they are) over St. Louis will arrive in my area by the weekend. Tex could never draw these maps in two minutes.
Nor could Tex use satellite maps or green screens using animations or laser pointers. Nope. Just Tex and his easel and Mr. Weatherbee and the spoken word. And that limitation, the spoken word, led to one of the more embarrassing moments of my youth. Sixth grade. We had just moved from the Bronx to a suburb in New Jersey. Close enough to New York City to still watch Tex deliver the weather report. Mr. Fox, my kindly sixth grade teacher distributed our graded essays to the class. I had written my essay about the British attempt to take Fort Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War. I noticed that Mr. Fox had circled in red a phrase I had written, and he superimposed a large red question mark on my work. I raised my hand.
“Mr. Fox, why did you circle this sentence?”
“Ralph, I cannot see your paper from here. Please read it.”
I cleared my throat and looked around the room at my brand new sixth grade classmates whose eyes were all on me.
“In the early morning, British scouts, using the cover of an Apache fog, crept toward the fort to count the cannon and see how heavily manned were the parapets.” What’s wrong with that?, I thought.
Mr. Fox crossed his body with one arm and rested the elbow of his other arm upon it, finger to his lips. “What is an Apache fog?”
Apache fog? I had heard Tex Antoine talk about Apache fogs dozens of times. “Yes, sir. Apache fog. You know, a fog that lies close to the ground and the Apaches would use it to crawl under as they approached a fort. Apache fog.”
Mr. Fox looked toward the ceiling. Revelation. “Ah, I see. You mean ‘patchy fog.’” He wrote the words on the blackboard.
Patchy fog? What the hell was that? I immediately crawled into myself, sat down and disappeared beneath my desk and through the floor down to the center of the earth.
A few years later, watching another news, I saw the forecast which included “patchy fog.” How plebian. Apache fog was so much more romantic and mystifying.
Whether we want it to or not, weather plays an important part in our lives. For one thing, it is the safest topic to initiate a conversation with strangers. Pre Covid I would go to our workout gym, do my exercises, and take a shower. When fifteen guys all with nothing but towels around their waists, are crammed into a small space while getting dressed, safe topics are the norm. No one says to the stranger dressing next to him, “So, what is your opinion of Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Composition?” No one asks the gentleman next to him as he applies deodorant, “So, what is your take on Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty?” No. It is almost always the weather.
“Man it sure is cold out there!” “Yep. I don’t remember growing up having these many cold days in a row?” Past weather is always a safe topic. So is future weather.
“Me either. They say it’s gonna be even colder this weekend.”
“Yep.”
For all social events when meeting strangers, talking about the weather is a gateway conversation.
“Oh do try the kale and chive dip. It is delicious. Did you hear on the weather that they are expecting severe thunderstorms this weekend?”
I try to fish my broken tortilla chip out of the kale and chive dip. “No, I didn’t hear that.”
“Really. What news do you listen to?”
“Um, channel six.” I almost got the chip out and am trying to scrape off the excess dip without garnering too much attention.
“Oh. Well, Harold and I listen to Clarabelle Norton. She’s our favorite weather person.
Yes. People do have their favorite weather forecasters. Viewers are enormously loyal to their favorite weather forecasters and will trust no others, even though they all get the weather information from the same place.
Some people watch the weather report three or more times a day, especially if bad weather is forecasted. I am not one of those people. I figure with the pandemic, I am not going out much anyway, and even if I could, there is not much I could do about the weather. Take it from a guy who has flyfished in downpours. With the pandemic, I am staying indoors most of the time….Yes. This pandemic is even tough on burgulars.
Getting wet is not that bad. Though I still get jumpy at certain weather buzz words, like black ice. And I am confused about some terms and predictions. For example, what is the difference between mostly cloudy and partly sunny? Between sleet and freezing rain? Does nature know that storms should follow along the I-95 corridor? Or stop, for that matter, at the I-95 corridor?
I read that the National Weather Service does a really good job predicting the weather, but I also read that local weather reports on television up bad weather by twenty percent. This means that if the NWS predicts a forty percent chance of snow in my area, the local news will predict a sixty percent chance of snow. Why? Because bad weather sells. Bad weather gets our blood boiling. Bad weather keeps us tuned into the television station.
“Top story on the six o’clock news is a tornado has formed in our area with winds over 160 miles an hour, dangerous enough to tear off roofs and destroy power lines!!! Tune in at eleven to find out where it will touch down.
In comparison, good weather is, well, boring. “Tomorrow sunshine all day with moderate temperatures.”
Nowadays the televised weather reports are designed to get me agitated, all worked up. Sometimes I long for the days when Tex Antoine and Mr. Weatherbee made it seem all simple and safe. Put on a hat, carry an umbrella and you are ready for anything. If you get up early in the morning, you might even catch a low lying Apache fog blanketing the park.
Today I still don’t see how knowing what the dew point will be will affect how I dress for the tomorrow.
Do you ever feel like you have embarked on a journey, entered a path through the woods, traveled hundreds of miles only to find yourself right back at the path’s entrance? That is how I feel about television. Growing up I had the choice of watching three networks (and later four—UHF). Then along came cable and HBO and Prism. One of the great selling points of these platforms was the elimination of commercials, those pesky interruptions of drama and adventure in order to sell soap and gasoline (when was the last time you saw an ad for Texaco Star?), and Chia pets.
Then the platforms multiplied like rabbits: Hulu, Brit Box, Acorn, Paramount, Paramount +, Discovery, Apple, Disney…..and on and on. Now when I want to watch episode 65 of the 3rd season of The Cockney Murders, I have to remember which platform it was on. The advantage to this structure is that I have plenty of choices. But I also have to sit through commercials on some of those platforms. So I have come full circle, once again on the opening to life’s path.
Yet one element has changed, and that is the language used in the newer shows, particularly crime series. Before I walk down this trail, I must point out a couple of truisms that line the path. I attended a predominantly male college and adopted a linguistic addendum befitting a student living in a men’s dormitory. Conversations with my classmates were appropriately adorned with fine tuned profanity known for its witty placement as well as its alliteration. We English majors also managed to slide in some Shakespearian curses which not only supplied clues to our course of study, but elevated the classiness of the conversation. One profanity that did exist and was used, relatively sparingly, was the f-bomb….You know…begins with F and ends with K…..firetruck. For some reason it was used sparingly perhaps only to denote total abandonment of any high class civility or to signal great depths of despair. And there were unwritten norms. “Firetruck” was not to be used on dates, lest we offend the delicate ears of young ladies whose dormitory language, as with so many other traits of the opposite sex, were completely unknown to us.
There was always the danger that on some Junior Weekend Dance or prom the highly offensive “firetruck” would spill out, and our dates would recoil in horror. Every one us knew the Thanksgiving Day cautionary tale about the family gathering around the roasted turkey. Freshman Joey, home for the holidays, is asked to lead the blessing. “Thank You for all this bounty You have delivered to our grateful hands. Amen. Mom, please pass the firetrucking potatoes.”
So, I assure you that my upbringing was neither delicate nor naïve concerning the linguistic expressions of the frustrated and angry. But the shows we are currently watching utilize profanity beyond the line etched by verisimilitude and common sense. There are just too many firetrucks, and the frequency of these words is so great that I tend not to hear them. They dull my senses to their usage and thus lose whatever potency they might have possessed.
Crime shows, mystery dramas that we have inherited from the British Isles seem to fit this pattern more than other programs. Those British mysteries, whether their origins be Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Island appear to share a number of commonalities (the Scandanavian crime shows share many of the these as well—particularly those under the heading Nordic Noir.) The protagonist is always crimped professionally by a background that includes excessive drinking, a daughter who torments her parent by her annoying ODD, a family member who is an addict/drunkard/obsessive gambler, and a disturbing inability to make a logical decision. (“There are seventeen bad guys in that warehouse armed to the teeth with AK-47’s, grenades, Glocks, and the occasional bazooka, but I have my trusty whistle, so I won’t wait for backup”). The detectives in these series also dress rather casually. In Law and Order, Phil Cerrata, Lennie Briscoe, Ray Curtis, Joe Fontana, Nick Falco, Cyrus Lupo, and Kevin Bernard all dress in two piece suits and ties, like te neat little detectives they are. In the European crime dramas, all the good guys look like they got their apparel from rolling homeless drunks. Now in the heat of an exchange of gunfire and explosives, I can accept an inordinate number of firetrucks in the script; when the battle is over and won, I can forgive five or six expletives.
But even in the commonest, most mundane of situations, the dialog is festooned with curses for no reason.
“Good morning, Chief O’Donnell.”
“Good morning, Sergeant. Would you please get me a firetruck cup of coffee with two firetrucking sugars?”
“Right firetrucking away, Chief.”
Detective Inspector Ron McDonald enters the Chief’s office. “Morning, Chief.”
“Good firetruck morning, Mc Donald. That was some firetrucking raid last firetrucking night on that firetrucking warehouse.”
“Yes, It firetrucking was.”
And these are shows that try to be gritty and earthy. Even the shows that are not crime dramas seem to sprinkle the expletives liberally. There is a show about a family, mother, father, son 8, daughter 5.
“C’mon. Gonna be firetrucking late for firetrucking school.”
“Now firetrucking hurry up, or you will be firetrucking late for the firetrucking school bus.”
At night, the mother reads to her children while they lie in bed. “And so, the firetrucking three little pigs drove the bad wolf away.”
“The bad wolf was a sh____ty person, wasn’t he, mommy?”
“He surely was a firetrucking as_____le. But you should not use that language, Ben.”
American trends, especially on cable television, have inherited this legacy from our linguistic partners from across the Atlantic. One program features the fast paced life and drama that characterizes a small restaurant.
“Chefs! First firetrucking serving in one hour!”
“Right Chef!!”
“Right Chef!!”
Right Cheff!!”
“Chef Are the firetrucking braised beans ready?”
“Firetruck braised beans are ready chef!”
“Chef! Corner!” Chefs announce they are rounding a corner to avoid collisions with other chefs.
“Chef! Firetruck corner!!”
“Firetruck corner, chef!!”
“Chef! Firetrucking angel food cake ready?!”
“Firetrucking angel food cake ready, chef!”
After the last customer has left the restaurant, the same sort of dialog persists.
“Chefs, we did firetrucking good tonight. Firetrucking good!!”
In unison. “Firetrucking good chef!”
One of the chefs in this show has a blind date with a pleasant looking, innocent, young lady. Sitting in a fancy restaurant that caters to the upper class, the chef and his date sit at a small round table, a glass of Chardonnay and a martini in front of each.
“So, I says to Chef Mook, ‘Hey, Mook, clean up your firetrucking station before the firetrucking cockroaches start sticking their dicks in your Bolognese firetrucking sauce.’ You know what I firetrucking mean?”
He snaps his fingers. “Hey, waitress, can we have a firetrucking menu over here?” He smiles at his blind date. “Sometimes you just have to kick these firetrucking guys with your firetrucking boots. You know what I mean?”
The young lady looks down at her place avoiding his eyes.
“So, Jane. What firetrucking enterprise are you in?
Jane looks up. “What do you mean?”
“Job. What firetrucking job do you firetrucking have? Or do you live at firetrucking home with your parents? Want a firetrucking cigarette?”
“No, thank you.”
“Hey, waitress. Come here. My date wanted two firetrucking olives in her firetrucking martini. “Didn’t you say ‘two?’”
The young lady nods sheepishly.
“See, get her another firetrucking olive! Now!”
In many of these shows, even successful businessmen, artists, heads of state, kings and queens seem to insert words that were formerly excluded from conventional conversation.
“Hi, I am George Greenhold, owner of this here company. Did my assistant Erwin here give you the grand firetrucking tour of the refinery? Good, sit your firetrucking asses down, make yourself firetrucking comfortable, and we’ll talk about a sale price. You can’t have firetrucking Erwin here. He goes with me…ha ha ha ha firetrucking ha!”
Two families meet on the street of Maybury.
“Hello. Darling this is Josephine and her husband Fred and their two children, Joseph and Lilllian. This is my husband Hank.”
“Hi. I am Henry Stanford. You all can call me ‘Hank.’ Just left church and going up to the firetrucking cemetery to lay a wreath on her parents’ firetrucking grave. Wasn’t that a firetrucking sermon the reverend breath-fired us on this morning about firetrucking verbal abuse?”
There is a Monty Python episode in which several performers are playacting as children talking to an adult. The adult asks them several questions, and, as children often do, they answer hesitantly, shyly. One “boy,” pretending to be five or sixt, in a low voice contributes to the conversation by saying, “Potty.” All the boys giggle. I like the sequence because it reminds us of those wondrous moments when children discover the magic and the power of words…the power to shock, the child’s realization that saying something can ignite a reaction in adults.
The writers of those shows laced with unnecessary obscenity deprive us of that magic through overuse. Are they so immature as to believe that incorporating firetruck six thousand times in an episode is boldly pushing the linguistic envelope? Do they consider this inclusion of so many firetrucks a step in the direction of artistic freedom? Worse, do they really believe that using the terms a zillion times in the script has shock value?
One of my summer jobs as a youth was working on the docks in New Jersey. Every guy in my crew wore a faux fur collared coat and carried an iron hook on his shoulder, guys that would blend in with the actors in the movie On the Waterfront. Their speech patterns were guttural and when they spoke the endurance and woes of such a hard-working life were heard in the silent pauses.
If the writers of the shows I referred to think they are capturing the language of the meek and the powerful, the reality of every day conversation, I would suggest they spend a day or two working on the docks absorbing the banter of longshoremen or listening to two people on a blind date, or a family returning home from church. If the writers think I am being too prudish about all this, well, firetruck them!
I inherited a number of values from my Italian ancestors: love of learning, a strong work ethic, devotion to family, and perpetual pursuit of al dente cooked pasta. I also received the gene dedicated to the mistrust of good fortune and the defense against catastrophe by simply imagining it. This legacy works like this. If I board a plane to St. Louis, I predict that the plane will crash, say near Effingham, Illinois. This prediction makes certain a crash will not occur. Now, the plane might land just fine, but as I walk to the rental car agency, a six inch meteorite drives me into the ground, as if Thor took his hammer and engaged in whack-a-mole with me as the mole. I had not considered that possibility. The method of my demise was a surprise, which is why many of us dislike surprises.
I have devoted some time trying to explain that his dynamic—warding off disaster by imagining it—to Polley with the concomitant responsibility of not insulting fate by enjoying good fortune. An example: We left my daughter Christie’s home in Connecticut and endured some light rain and some heavy traffic complicated by irreverent drivers. When we finally got to the entrance to the New York Thruway, Polley, relieved, said, “It’s all down hill from here.” Less than five minutes later we were stuck in a bumper to bumper traffic jam as a snow squall limited visibility to the hood of our car. I glared at Polley—“Don’t you know better?” I shook my head. “You’ll never become Italian.”
This potential offense to the gods by publicly announcing a joyous state of affairs was a huge no-no in my family. At those Sunday three hour dinners, relatives would compliment my Mom. “Aunt Lee, the ziti was delicious!” My mother would nod, and her smile could convey her gratitude. She would turn to me and say, “The gravy came good.” The gravy came good. The gravy came good not only because of my mother’s skill and love of cooking, but because she imagined it not coming good and not acknowledging good fortune. You rarely hear a person of Italian descent say, “I am so happy!” That is not right. That expression of bliss is just not done. Such an exclamation is equivalent to giving Thor the finger.
My Italian family hated surprises, because surprises were fraught with potential disasters. Given the history of the health of male family members, I imagined a heart attack(thereby warding it off!), and various forms of cancer, traffic accidents, etc. I knew I would die of something…someday…but the more I imagined, the more my odds improved of living another year. Until the surprise came.
On a medical checkup, I asked my family doctor why was my left foot having bouts of shaking. He examined me, and said, “As you get older, lots of people develop tremors.” The tremors continued sporadically, at social gatherings, watching Villanova basketball games, visiting doctors’ offices. Some days the tremors were so strong and long lasting, I would find myself, my keyboard and the computer I was composing my blog on bouncing across the room. In conversations, especially while discussing politics, my left foot would be stomping so hard, I imagined people calling me “Thumper.” My podiatrist strongly suggested I make an appointment with a neurologist. The surprise came at the neurologist’s office. He started by saying, as he looked at my brain scan,“Well, at least it is not brain cancer. I believe you have Parkinson’s disease.” Parkinson’s disease? I had not imagined that. As Dr.N explained what was happening to me and what would be happening to me, Thumper went for the record.
Actually, some healers believe that Parkinson’s is not one disease, but will eventually be divided into several conditions given the variety of symptoms and conditions that afflict its victims. One universality is that, for some reason not totally understood, the brain stops manufacturing dopamine, a neural messenger that our bodies make and our nervous system uses to send messages to our nerve cells. It is a postal worker in your neighborhood who delivers the mail. As the post office starts firing postal workers, fewer people get their mail on time……….if at all. Parkinson’s is a neural condition that affects the muscles in my body. It has plenty of muscles to choose from, and there is always that nasty surprise when it decides to immobilize a muscle group.
As my conditioned worsened over time, Dr. N prescribed different medications. One of them was a patch that Polley placed on the back of my shoulder, always in a different spot. It itched like crazy, and, when Polley removed it every night, it left a red patch that resembled a rectangular sunburn. At the gym, I caught a number of fellow workout enthusiasts staring at a number of patches on my back. They would look at me and their eyes would ask, “What the hell are those patches for?” Anticipating their questions, I would usually say, “Safer than tatoos.”
Yes, I was flippant and made jokes about my Parkinson’s, but on the inside of my being, the part invisible to those who were not me, I was descending into a black hole, sucking all I believed in and lived and loved with me. Since Parkinson’s is in my brain, I could not trust my brain. My whole life I thought my brain and I got along great…best of friend. Yes, we had our disagreements, but we were good at negotiating and compromising.
Who or what was creating these nightly nightmares, these horrible images of what was going to happen to me, these challengers to my life choices and ethical beliefs? I began to sway while discussing issues with friends and family. Gone was my teaching voice since Parkinson’s affected my vocal chords. I would strain in making myself heard, and repeated myself so those around me could hear me so often it became exhausting to speak. Sometimes I decided to not speak at all, thus sparing me that exhaustion. Speaking, dressing, walking, all those activities most of us take for granted are daily struggles for people suffering from Parkinson’s. Getting dressed is a major operation every morning. Buttons. I hate buttons. On one visit to Dr. N, I mentioned how many light years it took me to button my shirt. Before he answered, Polley noted that I could still tie flies for my flyfishing adventures, flies smaller than a button.
“Dr. N, I inquired, “How can I tie such small flies and yet struggle with buttons”
Polley tried to answer my question. “Maybe it is because you have been tying flies for so long that that you still can work your fingers well.”
My neurologist looked at her and then at me. “How long have you been buttoning your shirt? Parkinson’s surprises.
Similar problem with zippers. I remember as a child my mother wrapping me in fourteen layers of clothing so I could go outside and play in the one inch of snow that had fallen overnight. The last step was to encase me in my winter coat which I could not zipper. I could not zipper for two reasons. One, the thick wool sweaters, heavy shirts, thermal underwear and scarves doubled my weight and I could bare reach the zipper beginnings, and, two, my fingers were not nimble enough to plug the left flange of the zipper into the slider (and you thought you were not going to learn anything from this blog). Now, as a 75 year old, I have the same struggle.
This difficulty in getting dress presents enormous challenges for preparing my daily apparel. At times I get so frustrated I simply wish to put on a bathrobe, one with no buttons or zippers. But I have seen pictures of Homer Simpson in such dress, and I am forced to dismiss that choice of garb.
I know it is going to get worse….much worse. My digestive system is a favorite target of the Parkinson’s minions, who relish destroying any kind of regularity. Currently, they are playing with my loss of appetite (I could actually turn down eating a cannoli!), causing weight loss, and disturbing peaceful sleep. I wake up three hours after going to bed and cannot get back into a blissful sleep.
There are also surprises that come from somewhere deep inside my psyche. I have developed that blank stare, that open eye look, the eyes of Fitzgerald’s billboard dentist, Dr. T.J. Eckleberg.
My stare takes in the distant horizon, seeing nothing. The world grows smaller….much smaller. It seems that I spend more of my waking hours in the waiting rooms of physicians’ offices. I draw back from attending some social events for fear of being the swaying, blank staring, shaking guest, an object of pity and a reminder to all attendees that time flies for everyone.
I belong to an online Parkinson’s group, a supportive collection of bankers, plumbers, teachers, carpenters, salespeople, males, females, older men and women, younger men and women (who are surprised much too early in life) all of whom share one commonality. The members confess their fears, narrate their afflictions, ask for common experiences. The subtext is the same and usually unspoken because of its power. Parkinson’s is fully of nasty surprises, insidious and merciless, and its victims all know the one damning truth that colors all our waking moments: our pain and sufferings will only get worse for the rest of our lives.
My parents taught me the importance of perspective in surmounting life’s challenges. My father told me, “Look to your left and you will see someone who has it worse than you. Look to your right and you will find someone who has it better than you.” There are human beings who suffer from conditions and diseases worse than Parkinson’s, and I know that. Some of these people have been students, colleagues, and family members. But there are those days when rationality cannot overcome the feelings of anxiety, disorientation, and pain.
On a recent doctor’s appointment, the nurse took my blood pressure, oxygen intake, weight, and entered it into the computer. Then she followed the protocol and asked me several questions. “Do you find it is more difficult dressing yourself?”, “How many alcoholic drinks do you take in a week?”, etc. The usual stuff. Then she asked, “How often do you experience depression, anxiety or a feeling of hopelessness?”
I stared at the young nurse for a moment or two. I wanted to say, “I have Parkinson’s. My abdomen feels as if a nozzle from a Siberian natural gas pipeline has been plugged into it, my legs are exhausted from spending most of the day experiencing earthquakes, my favorite foods inspire only nausea when I think of them, I have to strain my vocal chords to whisper “Thank you.”, walking anywhere is like straddling a highwire tightrope near the ceiling of a circus, I can no longer flyfish because if my balancing act fails and I fall in the water, chances are I will drown because my arm muscles are not strong enough to life me out of 4 inches of water….” But I restrain from saying any of this. Smart and kind as this nurse is, youth is a strong limiting factor. I answer, “Some days are better than others.” She nods knowingly, an empty gesture, and she enters my answer into the computer.
I suppose this blog is a rant, but that is not its purpose. Even my relative hopelessness has some hope. I hope if you have Parkinson’s that the small world the disease has shrunk for you can be expanded if you reach out and get involved in things. Yes, it will prevent you from pursuing your favorite activities, but find others that you can do. I will miss flyfishing, but I can still tie flies and share them. I can continue writing and sharing my experiences. There are exercises I still can do. Most importantly, I am fighting hard to not let Parkinson’s define me. It has power over my body, but not my soul.
If you do not have Parkinson’s rejoice in simple things, simple movements, simple daily pleasures. Rejoice in the fact that you can go for a walk along a nature trail, that you can bring a cup of coffee easily to your lips, that you can hold your loved ones in your arms and dance with them. Most of all, become Italian for a moment and imagine contracting Parkinson’s. Then you can cross it off your list of fears….and have a cannoli.
Sometimes in life there are exact moments. Reasons for why we like certain foods or why we behave a certain way in certain situations are often murky and complicated. At age five we love tater tots, at forty we won’t desecrate our sense of taste with one. How did that change occur? But there are rare occasions when we know exactly why we like what we like and why we do what we do. For example, I know the exact time and the exact location when I became fascinated by history. 1953, Lake George, New York.
My father stopped the Nash in the village of Lake George in order for the family to stretch its legs, get a bite to eat from the A&W stand, and let the radiator in the Nash cool off before we climbed the Adirondack mountains into Tupper Lake, our vacation spot in the fifties and sixties.
We noticed that on a little rise overlooking the lake a group of men were busy with shovels and picks and winches and pulleys and other gear. My dad, always a curious fellow, walked up to one of the men dressed in overalls and sporting a Yankee baseball cap, and asked him what was going on.
“We are excavating Fort William Henry.” My mouth opened wide as I watched men hoisting a musket and then a skeleton from a well.
“Okay if my son and I stroll around?”
“Sure. As long as you don’t touch anything.” We strolled around a perimeter bounded by yellow tape and string. The walls had fallen but there were open trenches in which lay skeletons still draped in the uniforms of the British red coats.
Muskets and bayonets and remnants of eighteenth century dresses and tomahawks and powder horns lay scattered in every direction accompanied by yellow labels. I did not touch anything, but I was touched. It was the exact moment when, at the age of seven, I became obsessed with history. When we returned home from that Adirondack vacation, I took out every book I could find in the public library about the massacre of British troops at Fort William Henry, Rogers’ Rangers and the Battle on Snowshoes, the Marquis Montcalm, Fort Ticonderoga and everything else related to the French and Indian War. Once smitten by the history bug it is hard to be cured. Half the books waiting on my nightstand have to do with interpretations of the past.
Later in my seventh year my father surprised me. My dad, an expert electrician, was also skilled in other craftsmanships like plumbing and carpentry and auto mechanics. Any task that required adept hands and an imaginative eye he apparently mastered. So one day he presented me with a wooden fort, about two feet by one foot with sliding front doors and a parapet. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood are associated with my use of that toy fort to reenact the battle of Fort William Henry over and over again.
One of my grandsons, named after a Civil War hero, apparently has a penchant for reading history, and I thought I would stimulate that interest by building him a toy wooden fort, complete with parapets, gun emplacements, watchtower and cannon. But it would be a fort for the nineteenth century since my grandson had plenty of union and confederate plastic toy soldiers. I am the non-fictional Clark Griswold, taking on projects accomplished perfectly in my dreams but not executed so perfectly in reality…..not close to perfectly if truth be told. The problem is, essentially, that, unlike my father, nature replaced my fingers with thick oven mittens.
The first step involved creating some actionable blueprints, a design that was elaborate in concept but unfeasible in construction. This was difficult since I cannot draw to save my life. I also know the exact moment when I realized I had no artistic skill in the visual arts. This epiphany occurred when my fourth grade art teacher, examining one of my attempts to cut out the shape of a human form, blew up in frustration at my clumsy efforts, took away my safety scissors and assigned me the artistic task of cleaning up the scraps left over from the endeavors of my classmates.
When my children were small, they would occasionally enlist my drawing skill. “Daddy, draw me Bert and Ernie.”
“Christie, I really can’t draw.”
“Please, daddy, draw Bert and Ernie.”
I would take the crayon or pencil and paper, and, recalling the Sesame Street characters, do my best to outline their faces. Finished, I would hand my artistic endeavor to my daughter, who would look at what I had drawn, look back at me, and then back at the paper.
“Mom, would you draw Bert and Ernie for me?”
Still, ruler in hand, pencil gripped tightly between two fingers, tongue sticking out from the side of my mouth (a sign of intense concentration) confident in the redemptive powers of rubber erasers, I managed to sketch what seemed to me to be an accurate portrayal of Fort William Henry. Others might see it as a somewhat lopsided rectangle.
I cleared a space in the basement workbench, gathered some basic tools like chisels and hammers and screwdrivers and took off to shop for wood at Things Are Us. The megastore’s automatic doors slid open and before me were canyons of materials, a library of construction materials with shelves filled with wood and stone and plastic. A middle-aged man with his name stitched on his white pullover and sporting an orange tool apron approached me. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, um…” I glanced at his nameplate. “Yes. Harry. I am looking for some wood, maybe two by fours.”
“Certainly, all the wood supplies are in aisles six and seven. May I ask what you need the wood for?”
“Um….I am building a toy fort for my grandson.”
Harry’s eyes expanded, his eyebrows lifted. “Oh, that sounds interesting. Let me take you back to Theodore. He can help you.”
So I followed Harry who handed me off to a slightly younger man. I explained what my project was to Theodore.
“Oh, very good. Come with me.” And we strolled to the stacks of wood, two by fours, four by sixes, six by eights. Wood for framing houses, wood for bracing ceilings, wood for covering walls, wood for building arbors, pergolas, trellises and constructs I never knew existed. As we strolled down the canyons of machines and materials, I could feel a twitch in my chromosomal makeup, a slight tilting of my double helix.
Many people do not know about this, but most men, and, I suppose, many women, carry this specialized gene I call the machine gene. The machine gene is responsible for the yearning that men experience to purchase a tool that is incredibly enticing even though they will probably never use it, or, in some cases, have no idea what it is for. This gene usually switches on when one is strolling, as I was, through an area replete with gizmos with flashing lights and myriad dials and switches. I am certain early man strolling through the primordial swamp, was stricken by this same desire to pick up a rock and place it in his fur pocket believing that some day he would find a use for it.
I stopped to examine a plasma cutter which was on sale for under $3000 and an air compressor. I imagined a conversation trying to convince Polley that a welding machine would pay for itself in fifteen years despite the fact I knew of nothing we could weld nor could I come up with a good argument for an air compressor. We don’t have that many flat tires. My machine gene slid back into its slot on the helix twist.
Theodore advised, “I think you could get away with two by fours. What quality do you want?” I made that decision easily. I had just consulted my bank account.
So I picked out three two by fours about ten feet long each and a four by eight piece of presswood for the floor of the fort. Theodore helped me stack the wood on the dolly and as he escorted me to the cashier, Theodore began a harangue about teaching history.
“Yeah. Good thing you’re doing. Kids don’t know sh…t about history today. Kids ought to know about their country, where they came from. Instead teachers put them on their devices and let the kids play video games. I tell you, it’s a shame.”
In the sincere conviction that it is my duty as an educator to disavow people of misconceptions, I wanted to use Theodore’s tirade as a teachable moment. But I really wanted to get home and begin building my grandson’s fort and besides, Theodore had a hammer and a somewhat sharp looking tool in his apron, so I simply got in line.
When I opened the back of my car, I realized I was not going to squeeze the ten foot pieces of wood or the presswood sheet into the car. I spent a half hour or so but the math defeated me. So I returned to Theodore and asked him if he would please cut the pieces in three foot lengths which he was kind enough to do.
Materials in the basement, I followed my father’s advice. Measure twice, cut once. After seven cuts I still did not have the right size, the circular saw was shredding the wood so that splinters flew everywhere, and, in the tight confines of the cinderblock cellar, the sound of the saw was deafening. Not to mention the sawdust that clouded the air in the basement. I was breathing pine wood. No. For fort building I needed a finer cutting tool.
Back to Things are Us. Harry was still greeting visitors. “Yes, sir, back so soon?”
“Uh, huh. I think I need a saw to do some finer cutting.”
“Absolutely. Follow me.”
Ten minutes and fifty dollars later, I returned to the basement with a jig saw. Measured twice, cut only five times this attempt. I cut the presswood which would serve as the floor of the fort. My idea was to place one two foot 2X4 on top of another two foot 2X4 with a two inch piece of presswood to form the walkway for the upper story parapet. But before I could do that I had to cut out the gun sites in the walls. See below.
So, with oven mittens for hands, I made the cutouts using the jig saw. I noticed after all the cutting was done that I had created a great opportunity for my grandson to spend the next ten years of his life removing splinters from his fingers. I could hear his grandmother’s reprimands tearing off my flesh as she applied a quart of Neosporin to his wounds. I also realized it would take me a few years to sand down all the spots that needed to be sanded down. Back to Things Are Us.
Harry was in his accustomed spot. “Hi, Ralph. How is the fort going?” The customer behind me was impressed that Harry and I were on a first name basis. I explained my problem. Harry cradled his chin in his hand. “Have you heard of a Dremel?”
Forty minutes and thirty dollars later I was back in the basement reading about all the Dremel attachments.
In the Dremel kit were about fifteen little cylinders wrapped in sandpaper. I placed one on the Dremel and started sanding. Now we’re talking!!!! After five minutes half of the sharp edges were as smooth as 12 year old Scotch (which I could have used after inhaling all the dust). Suddenly the sand paper attachment flew off the Dremel and bounced off the naked light bulb above me and then off my left eyebrow. This became a common occurrence, and after I went through all fifteen sanding attachments, I figured it was time to stain each piece of wood.
On my painting shelf was a quart of walnut stain that I had used twenty years or so ago on a backyard picnic table. The picnic table had spent the last decade at the bottom of some landfill. As I pried open the can of walnut stain it was obvious from the way the paint stirrer stood straight up in the hardened liquid that the walnut stain should have accompanied the picnic table long ago.
“Hi, Harry.”
When I came home with a new can of walnut stain plus a few brushes, Polley greeted me at the front door. “Did you go to the store like that?”
“Like what?”
“Your head and your eyebrows are covered in dust. And there is a bruise over your left eyebrow.”
“Mere flesh wound.”
“I don’t care about the sawdust in your hair and all, but are you breathing in all that stuff?”
As if in a Merry Melodies cartoon, I coughed just at that moment, and after covering my mouth, I looked into my hand which was drenched with half of the back wall of the fort. “Maybe I should wear a mask.”
“Maybe?”
Masked Fort Builder Pre-Covid
My next challenge was to nail the presswood floor to the rectangular frame of the fort. I looked at the shelf in my basement that held nails….all kinds of nails. My father, using his G.I. bill, purchased a fixer-upper in suburban New Jersey. As his apprentice, one of my jobs was to remove the nails from the beams he took down, straighten them out so he could use them in the new beams he installed. This process figured heavily into my father’s building budget. I still had several jars of those nails, each of which was the size of the golden spike they used to join the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. I thought the nails might be a mite too large, and my suspicions were confirmed when the nail split the bottom wall in two. I would have to remake that wall and purchase finishing nails.
At Things are Us, I also picked up some craft wood furniture, barrels and tables and some thin sections of wood that I would stain and use to make ladders. I also picked up hinges and a small bell and other things one might find in an eighteenth century fort.
When I got to the front of the line Marjorie the Cashier said, “Hi, Ralph. Haven’t seen you in a couple of days. How’s the fort doing?”
On the ride home I thought about all the people who worked at Things Are Us, and how helpful they were. Did they acknowledge my dedication to this enterprise for my grandson, did they understand I was making the most of my construction inabilities, did they appreciate that in the last month I was probably responsible for half their paychecks?
I stained the barrels and the slats that would become the ladders. Then I tackled the doors. They had to be just short enough to swing open, and I needed a locking mechanism. Measured twice, cut four times. I was getting better. Doors, watchtower, parapets all completed and connected, I made the biggest mistake of the whole enterprise. I balanced the entire fort on an empty stain can so more air would circulate around the building and dry it off faster.
I was munching on a liverwurst and onion sandwich when I heard the crash. Three hours later, I had a fort with a twenty degree incline to the left. Christmas was less than a month away, and since it had taken me three months to get this far, restarting the project was a non-starter. My grandson would have to lean to his right.
I wanted to build cannons that actually fired cannonballs. It was surprising to find how many online videos there are to build actual miniature cannons that use real gunpowder. Despite trusting my grandson’s common sense and ethics, I discarded the idea of a real cannon and thus avoiding the possibility of setting fire to my daughter’s home.
I settled on the idea of cutting copper tubes, then mounting them on a caisson on wheels. A simple trip to Things Are Us, ten board feet of wood, the purchase of wooden balls for the projectiles and I figured I was in business. It is not that easy to line up axels and wheels. For me it took five days to build four cannons. All I had left to figure out was the firing mechanism. I tried a series of devices using rubber bands most of which either jettisoned a cannonball a half inch or snapped and inflicted damage on my nose. Then came a Eureka moment. Springs!!!
Online I had my choice of torsion springs, compression springs, extension springs, stock springs, spring anchors, all in different sizes. I was running out of time as the holidays approached, so I delayed paying my mortgage in order to purchase a variety of springs to fit my cannons. Another trip to Things Are Us and I had the right size screws for the plunger.
Cannon constructed, and with a Clark Griswold drumroll playing in my brain, I pushed the first cannonball down the mouth of the cannon. The drumroll quickly fizzled out. The cannonball was too large. Decision. Either sand all the cannonballs or return to Things Are Us. Marjorie was as cordial as ever.
Finally I thought the fort should have a flag. I downloaded an image of the American flag only realizing that the union did not have fifty states in the nineteenth century. I downloaded an appropriate flag and using some software miniaturized it. I spent several hours figuring out how to paste the two sides of the flag so that the flag appeared the same from both sides. Before I could get to doing the same thing with the Confederate flag, I ran out of cyan and yellow printer cartridges.
After an online search and fifty dollars withdrawn from my account, I was back in business, Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars at the ready.
At the last minute it occurred to me that my daughter would appreciate not slipping and sliding on small cannonballs in her living room, so my last trip to Things Are Us involved purchasing a small box with sliding lid. I showed Harry and Theodore and Marjorie pictures of my finished project, and they were kind and ooh and aahed and thanked me for financing their holiday adventures.
As an educator I learned that students sometimes learn more from instructive play than from robotic work. I hope that my grandson enjoys the fort, and I hope it inspires him to view studying the past as a tool for understanding the present and predicting the future. I hope he is fortunate enough some day to build a fort for his grandchildren.
My father-in-law, like my own father, in fact, like most fathers of the Great Depression generation, was not fond of add-ons. When asked why he would not include an ice cube maker in the purchase of his brand new refrigerator, he replied, “One more damn thing to break down.” I did not achieve his wisdom until I reached his age when he made that comment, and therein lies one of the great frailties of the human race—the inability to pass along what we have painstakingly learned to the younger humans in the hope that they will avoid the pitfalls we fell into.
Take our recent challenge with our communication system. We have a landline as well as two cell phones, one for Polley and one for me. This is a system which our children consider totally irrational since they see no need for a landline. They use their cell phones to conduct research, settle arguments, play music, entertain themselves with games, and, occasionally talk to friends and family. I predict that, in the not-too-distant future, all newborn babies will have a cell phone surgically inserted under their skin and connected to the cerebral cortex. This need to be connected to the rest of the universe every second of every day is, I believe, a genetically engineered desire designed by a collaboration of telecommunication systems and Madison Avenue.
Our landline was modest by most standards, but it still had some add-ons which we rarely used. For example, we had a Caller ID log, a tracking of who called us. Because of the Corona Virus Pandemic, we don’t leave home very often, so if I did not answer the phone it was because I did not want to be solicited by the “How to Get Your Hearing Aids Replacement Center,” or I chose not to pick up the phone when the Caller ID identified the caller as Warranty Are US who warned me that my car warranty was up and I could renew it for a mere $500. Why would I want a log of these calls?
I also rarely used the Intercom system. I felt it was better for my cardiovascular system if I just got up and walked to the staircase and shouted down to Polley in the kitchen for any information I needed to share with her.
Then there was the Call Blocking System which I infrequently employed simply because it was too complicated to execute. I was fearful of inadvertently blocking any messages from my doctors about the status of my health or any missives announcing my winnings from the Publishers’ Clearing House.
So, despite the fact that I did not incorporate many of the add on features of my telecommunication device into my daily life, the phone still started to break down. Our system included four headsets. One day the phone in the kitchen started screaming out for recharging. We made certain it was appropriately nestled in its holder, but still it shouted out, “Battery Needs Charging!” “Battery Needs Charging!” “Battery Needs Charging!” I looked up in the Trouble Shooting section of the manual how to address this problem (the fact we could find the manual was a cause for celebration!), and the only solution was to buy a new battery. So I did. Several days later I inserted the new $20.00 battery, but still the Kitchen Phone still screamed out for energy. “Battery Needs Charging!” “Battery Needs Charging!” “Battery Needs Charging!” We tolerated this annoyance for about five minutes and then mercifully pulled the plug on Kitchen Phone. We were down to three headsets.
Not too long after Kitchen Phone’s demise, Family Room Phone developed some sort of lung disease or throat soreness because when one of our children called, they heard static on their hightech cell phones. Often the only solution to this issue was to have Polley return their calls on her cell phone. A teenage attendant manning the drive through orders of a fast food chain provided more clarity and less static than Family Room Phone. Essentially we were down to two phones.
Bedroom Phone developed a tactile problem. When we tried to answer an incoming call, pressing the “ON” button, the one with the green icon of a phone being answered, did nothing. It was like shooting a blank. We soon learned that if one of us pressed the longest fingernail we had into the right upper corner of the ON button, we could answer the call. This was not the ideal situation. Imagine a 2 AM call, one of those much feared calls in the darkest hours of the night, and one of us struggling to answer by aiming our fingernail in just the right position. Bed Room Phone was not reliable in emergencies. Essentially we were down to one headset, and this was in my den which was not the most convenient location for easy access to answering our phone. I bit the bullet and ordered a new phone system.
The new phone system had more add-ons than the old phone system—standard. Connecting the new phones was easy. We collected all the old phones and piled them on the end table in the family room. The New Sapphire Deluxe System had a RoboCall blocking system. If someone called us, our phone would tell the caller to press one of the keys on their phone. A robocall obviously can’t do this, (sort of like the captcha on websites) so it would be blocked. But in our high pressured culture where time is a very expensive commodity, we felt we might be imposing on friends and family to take the extra microsecond to press the key so the call would go through. On page 943 of the manual it provided a way to prevent this. If the caller was listed in our directory, then they would not be challenged by our Call Blocker.
So I spent two and one half-hours entering the names of friends, relatives, physicians, accountants, pharmacies, manicurists and other contacts we considered integral to our well-being. Amazing how so many of our time saving devices consume so much of our time. While I entered the data into our new phone system, Polley gathered up the old phone system and threw it into our trash bin next to the garage.
About an hour after we settled in waiting for our new phone system to ring, it rang. We hoped beyond hope that it would be a robo call, so we could wring our hands like the Wicked Witch of the North and watch it be rejected. And our dreams were answered. One ring, our all Galactic Call Blocker determined through its fool proof screening system that it was a robo call and rejected it. We sighed and crawled back into our books.
Another hour later, our eyes weary, we agreed to turn on the television and watch MSNBC. We looked around and could not find the television remote. Panic began to set in. I don’t think I know how to turn my television on without the remote!!! I do not know if I can. We searched every room in the house, including the most illogical places, like the basement.
I could hear my father shaking his head in disappointment. “So, you can’t watch television, eh? In my day we didn’t need images. We made our own as we listened to the radio….Gangbusters, Jack Benny, The Shadow. And when we finally got a television, to change the channel we actually had to get up out of the chair and go and turn the dial. Yes, we had to stand up and walk over to the tv set to change from Farther Knows Best to Gunsmoke.
Then we would sit back down until your mother said, ‘I can’t hear it.’ And one of us would have to get up again and actually walk over to the tv to increase the volume.
And we did it, without complaining. It was good exercise for us. But you and your candy ass generation are too dependent on remote this and remote that. You sit in your comfy cushions and change from Keeping up with the Kardashians to Love After Lockup. What are you going to do now? How are you going to watch The Price is Right now, smart guy?”
What was I going to do now?!! Polley and I retraced our steps for that afternoon, and the revelation came that possibly, just possibly, she might have picked up the television remote when she gathered the handsets to throw in the trash. To her credit, she retrieved the plastic bag from the garbage bin, brought it into the kitchen and started sifting through the discarded coffee grounds, wet tea bags, used napkins, year old refried beans that we had just discovered in the freezer, and damp sugar substitute packets.
There….at the very bottom of the trash pile, lay the television remote. I cleaned it off as best I could. I still caress it gingerly with my thumb and forefinger, promising my remote I will never throw it in the trash again…until we get a new television.
Life has settled back into the New Normal. We have fewer phone calls now, especially in the middle of Jeopardy, and I have to get my exercise in other ways, like on a stationary bike, but I look forward to the days when I can tell my wide-eyed grandchildren, “Yes, indeedy, in my day, we had to use devices called remotes to change channels and change volumes and everything. We didn’t have no fancy-schmanzy voice controlled everything, where you just tells your device to do something and it does it. the only exercise you get is for your vocal cords. No sirree, in my day we actually had to do a lot of clicking in them days. It was good exercise.”
There are days, weeks, years, shards of decades that I cannot recall with any great clarity. But I remember with the clearest of vision a slightly chilly but sunny Friday one autumn when I stood on the corner of Walnut Street and Day Avenue in Ridgefield, New Jersey. With me was one of my senior classmates, Jack. We just stood there, not knowing what to say or what to believe. What had just happened was beyond belief. It could not possibly have happened—not in the present, not in modernity. The day was November 22, 1963.
Just two hours earlier Jack and I were sitting in study hall in the high school cafeteria, and my biggest challenge was not in the upcoming history test, but in mustering the courage to ask Rose out on a date. Then the principal came on the loud speaker. “We have received news that President John F. Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas.” All heads looked up from their books. Ten minutes later, again the loud speaker. “We have been told that President John F. Kennedy has died. We are dismissing school early.”
Jack and I stood for at least two hours on the corner of Walnut Street and Day Avenue trying to come to grips with the fact that we were part of history.
“Jack, things like this, assassination, happen in history books. Not now. I can’t believe it.”
Jack shrugged his shoulders. “What happens now?”
It was my turn to shrug my shoulders. Filled with the sense of incomprehension, Jack and I finally separated and went home to quiet kitchens, quiet family members, quiet everything except for Walter Cronkite, CBS anchor man delivering the updated news on what happened in Dallas.
My parents and younger brother were in the kitchen watching the one television we shared. This was not always the case. My father was a very skillful electrician. Many years later, I learned from one of his shipmates that my dad had helped save the LST he served on in World War II. Apparently the ship stopped dead in the water, and this meant that without the protection of the convoy, the ship was a prime target of tailing, stalking Japanese submarines. My father jury-rigged the electronics of the vessel and got it moving again. A product of the Depression, my dad thought it wasteful to spend good money on a television, so as a side job he repaired other people’s boob tubes. In the Bronx we would have three or four sets in different states of repair. A Philco with sound but no picture. A Zenith with picture but no sound. A Crosley with a tuner you turned to just the right spot so that the snow was replaced with something resembling an image. Sometimes in order to watch a program, we had all three sets going at once. Eventually when we moved to Ridgefield, my father broke down and bought a second hand RCA (black and white, of course.)
We had three major stations, three networks, and that was the magnitude of our choices. Later UHF came in which expanded the variety, but not really by much. And somehow, some way, this affected the way we lived. There used to exist a phenomenon called “Water Cooler Conversations.” People in an office would take a break and meet at the water cooler and discuss last night’s news or popular television show.
“Hey, did you watch the Honeymooner’s last night?”
“Yeah. Art Carney stole it with the Chef of the Future bit.”
“Yeah, I laughed till I cried.”
“Take in Carson last night?”
“Yeah. Ed Ames throwing the tomahawk and hitting the target in the groin?”
“Yep. And Carson said, ‘You can’t hurt him any more than that.’”
The point is that we all shared the same news, the same entertainments because the choices were limited. Bad thing?
Things are different today. I wonder if there are any water cooler gatherings, especially since people bring their own favorite brands of plastic bottles of water?
I remember news anchors like Walter Cronkite, Douglas Edwards, John Cameron Swayze, but they all seemed to cover the same news and pretty much from the same angle. When was “spin” invented?
I bring this up because of a phrase that President Biden used in his inaugural speech. He said we needed to “unite” as a country. I agree with him on the necessity of doing so, but I wonder if it is possible?
We seem as a people to be divided up by fractions and factions. One subculture believes in the need to combat the Covid virus. Another subculture believes the virus is a hoax. One faction expresses the need to preserve democratic institutions while another group holds fast to idolatry. One parcel of Americans believes in a stolen election while another thinks that belief to be a big lie. One faction holds sacred the Constitution while another seems willing to abrogate the law to satisfy its own ethos.
And the worst part is that psychology tells us the hold a crazy idea has on people is directly proportionate to how many people believe it. It is harder to eradicate the mistaken idea that the moon is made of blue cheese if 80 million people believe it than if only 1 million believe it. Recent studies have also demonstrated that the more reasons given for the fact that the moon is NOT made of blue cheese only serves to make the blue cheese believers hold even more steadfastly to their mistaken idea. So what this does is curtail or eliminate dialogue entirely. If I am trying to convince my neighbor that the moon is not made of blue cheese, all I am actually accomplishing is strengthening his belief that it is made of blue cheese.
The truth or any objective truth appears to be shattered amongst the variety of social media available to support what we want to be the truth. The moon is not a satellite of the earth. It is whatever our favorite cable channel says it is.
So what is there to unite our nation? What do all these factions have in common? What commonality can we build on to unite us? Can the common denominator be the irony that acceptance of diversity itself is a uniting element of American culture?
We don’t all eat the same foods, enjoy the same entertainments, or believe in the same institutions. Can we define or even describe “American culture?”
If I try to build a bridge to a person who does not believe in vaccinations or climate change or the legitimacy of the presidential election, or the rights of all people to the pursuit of happiness, then what materials can I use to build that bridge?
Ultimately I think the need to belong is stronger than the truth. Better to be accepted by a small group of narrow minded thinkers than to embrace the concept that diversity is a strength from which all of us benefit. Not all of us are secure enough to cope with change.
Following President Kennedy’s assassination the depth of the tragedy was felt, I believe, by most, if not all, Americans. That feeling was palpable. This is not “things were better” in the old days piece. The sixties had its own stage of racial turmoil, and gatherings around the office water cooler did not usually include women. As young people we failed then, too, to understand that every present will become the past, that history occurs every day, that, as Amanda Wingfield cautions her son Tom in Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, “You fail to remember that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret unless you plan for it.” The very present we live in will become history, and how do we prepare for that?
The domestic terrorism evident in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, was an historical moment that should have united us in its condemnation since it stabbed at the heart of American democracy. Yet the outrage was not universal. A number of us crawled back into our caverns of conspiracy theories and false rumors and fears of those not identical to us. How do we draw them out of their self-imposed, tribal, philosophical bunkers and onto common ground?
Do we, as a people (or should I say “peoples?”), share any common ground? Common culture? Or are we crammed into a limited space bound only by geography?
I remember the good old days when I used to fret about unloading the mailbox at the bottom of my driveway and sorting through the five thousand ads in shiny colored newspapers and manilla folders filled with requests for my money.
I would slice open an envelope and discover I won a trip to Barbados. All I would have to do was order a commemorative-plate-of-the-month celebrating the characters from Gilligan’s Island or some other television show for $24.99 a month for the next decade. Or, If I ordered right away I could save two dollars on an eight ounce jar of wrinkle remover. I considered it, but I would need more like eight gallons to do the trick. My local barber once asked what kind of haircut I wanted. I pointed to a photo above his station which showed a Kookie Burns head of hair, thick, shiny and lustrous. “I want that!” I told Lennie. Lennie counted the follicles left on my scalp and told me that such a success was beyond his pay grade. I think Lennie turned me in to some hirsute manufacturers who kept sending me solutions for baldness. Most of them seemed to recommend hair transplants as if my scalp was some sort of garden that just needed some grass plugs and fertilizer.
I admit I don’t read most of the ads stuffed in my mailbox, but I am a child of the fifties, and that culture was noted for its growth in successful advertising. In elementary school I memorized the capitals of all forty-eight states, but the city I most wanted to visit was not a capital at all—-Battle Creek, Michigan. I grew up subjected to assaults from ads printed on cereal boxes and comic books, and all the products of those ads came from that wondrous city. It is from Battle Creek I purchased my Navy Frogman a two-inch gray plastic person with goggles. Put a little baking soda in the cap in his left foot and Navy Frogman would go up and down in my bathtub.
I graduated to Navy Submarine, a four-inch gray plastic vessel with periscope, putting some baking soda in the round cap at the bottom of the vessel and watching it go up and down in my bathtub. I often had both Navy Frogman and Navy Submarine going at the same time. Hours of fun.
I thought that when Polley became the censor of our mailbox ads I would be spared attempts to convince me to spend my money on things I do not need. That was before email. Last year before the holidays, I was surfing the internet looking for a new pocketbook for my wife. That was a mistake. A year later I am still receiving emails trying to convince me to purchase a leather handbag or a calfskin handbag or a nutria handbag. I am still struggling to differentiate among handbags, pocketbooks, purses, totes, shoulder bags and coach pocketbooks.
Once you buy something from a website, it is all over. You will never ever stop receiving emails advertising its wares. And now, even if you mention an item within hearing shot of your voice assistant, you are likely to increase your email ads exponentially.
A couple of weeks ago I asked Polley if she had some salve that I could rub on my lower back which I had sprained. Within a day my virtual mailbox was stuffed with ads for all kinds of creams and salves promising to alleviate my pain, including a balm sworn to be effective by a shaman in the Bolivian rain forest.
For some of these ads, if you scroll down to the bottom of your screen, hold up a magnifier to the hundredth power so you can read the small print, you can unsubscribe to the seller. That does not always work. And many websites do not offer that option.
The worst offenders of not honoring your request to unsubscribe are the political ads. I was traveling in a far western state when I met a local candidate who convinced me to part with five dollars to support his campaign for a local office. That was six years ago, and I still receive requests to support his political career.
Firmly believing in my responsibility to support candidates who I believe best represent my ideals and interests, I have donated online. Once. For me, a retired teacher, a substantial sum. I also requested that, since this one donation more or less emptied my coffers which were designated to political contributions, that I receive no more emails. You know how that went.
I get more emails every day from candidates from all states for all positions. And the subject lines are always so lame.
“We’re almost there!!” (I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!)
“Disaster in Kalamazoo! Unless you chip in today!!” (it is my responsibility to save the world)
“We’re screaming for your help!” (how can I ignore Tiny Tim?)
“We were wrong….we thought we could count on you!” (how did they know I suffer from Catholic guilt?)
“Margaret ___ is stunned!” (Margaret should see my bank account)
“We are so close to winning!” (more guilt)
“Before you delete…” (like shooting a horse which broke its leg)
“Don’t delete.” (warning or begging?)
“If you don’t read any other email read this.” (I am not like the other five thousand emails you receive every day)
The last three I delete first.
The ones I really abhor are the ones that pretend to ask for your input.
“We chose you for our survey [as well as the other sixty million people on our recruiting list] because we need your input.”
“What should the party’s major agenda for the coming years? Please take our survey.”
And, of course, at the end of the survey comes the request to chip in 5, 10, or 25 dollars. I learned to be careful and to check the box signaling this was a one shot contribution and NOT a monthly one.
I know that my answers to the survey eventually ended up in some virtual circular filing cabinet. I also know that instead of using all those contributions to help someone’s campaign to be elected, those funds would be best served to address some needs that candidates often “speechify” about. How about taking those millions of dollars spent on campaigns to help people who have lost jobs or use that money to speed along the administration of the Covid vaccinations?
Sorry. That dollop of idealism just pops up once in a while.
So, where as I used to spend a fair amount of time sorting through the mailbox at the end of my driveway, I now spend a proportionate number of minutes pressing the delete button a couple of hundred times. I just wish that I could do it while watching my Navy Frogman go up and down.
I have celebrated and enjoyed many Christmases over my three score and ten plus years. Some of the very best involved watching my children dash down the stairs to see what Santa had placed beneath the tree. Another favorite occurred a few days before Christmas when Polley flew out from St. Louis to spend time with me and my family before she returned to be with hers for the holiday. We took the bus to New York City, ate at the Top of the Sixes, a revolving restaurant atop one of Manhattan’s sleek steel buildings, and huddled in the same spot Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr stood in An Affair to Remember on the top of the Empire State Building, our breaths mingling in the chilly December air. As we walked home from the bus stop, I watched the snowflakes lace her eyelashes and I knew that Christmas had come early; I knew I already had my gift that year, a gift I still treasure every day.
All those Christmases were special but there is one that I am constantly revisiting in my daydreams and in my soul’s recounting. Let me tell you about it. But before I do, I must warn you. You have to believe in magic in order to understand this story. Not the magic of a Dave Copperfield, or a Houdini or a David Blaine, fine magicians all. I refer to the magic borne of childhood wonder, the unexplainable occurrences that make a child believe in a world, in a universe, that is excitingly mysterious and which is supported by a fundamental goodness, a world in which faith supercedes cynicism.
My parents were products of the Great Depression, a time of utter uncertainty and a period where harsh realities made hope a struggle. My mother’s mother died in the Great Spanish Flu epidemic when my mother was five or six, and my father joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to help support his family. Christmas day for both my folks was just another day in the struggle to survive. When my father returned from World War II, he married my mother who later gave birth to me, and, four years later, to my brother Jimmy. We lived in the Bronx until I was about nine or ten and then, my parents seeking a home in an environment where they could open the front door on a Saturday and let their kids disappear into a safe exploration of childhood, moved to a quiet suburb in New Jersey.
So confident that the world they provided us was secure and free from danger, that even at that young age I was allowed to take the bus by myself up to Union City and West New York. I would stroll up and down Bergenline Boulevard to see what Christmas gifts I could purchase with the few dollars I made in after school jobs and with the fifty cents allowance I received for completing family chores.
There was a magic that I inhaled with every breath as I stopped at various store windows, comparing prices of gifts to the small stash I harbored in my pocket. And it was the magic of anticipation, highlighted by the holiday music pouring out of various venues, from Perry Como to Alvin and the Chipmunks that lightened my spirit. And it was not just the magic of anticipation of what was to be received, but of what was to be given. The days before Christmas were filled with the delight in expectation of the smiles I would draw on the faces of my mother and my father and my younger brother Jimmy. Wouldn’t Mom gasp as she unwrapped the faux leather purse I chose? Wouldn’t Dad’s jaw drop as he opened the package containing the fishing lures, the red and white Daredevils I picked out? Wouldn’t Jimmy squeal in glee as he tore off the wrapping paper from his cork pop gun?
Anticipation is ninety percent of the holiday. Christmas morning Jimmy and I, tossing and turning in our beds, would wait and wait and wait until we heard our parents call to us to come downstairs. In our pajamas we would race to the tree, a spruce or pine aglow with twinkling lights and ornaments and tinsel, examine the colorful packages and pick the ones tagged with our names. As we unwrapped, we would smell the rich odor of coffee percolating and bacon and home fries sizzling and hot chocolate brewing. It was a day of exclamations of surprise, some false, some true, and a day of play and warmth.
But this one Christmas, things were different. Very different. Later, much later, I realized that my parents, survivors of the depression and the war, distrusted happiness. You were supposed to make the most out of a bad deal, and the bad deal was a harsh reality that blocked out every other truth. Not having been loved as they loved Jimmy and me, they found it difficult to be secure in the feelings they had for each other. So one night a couple of days before Christmas, my father came home late. Very late.
“You were supposed to take me Christmas shopping!” My mother stood in the kitchen, hands on hips, body vertically braced.
My father took off his navy peacoat. “I had to visit my mother.”
My grandmother lived in the Bronx, and she would often call on her sons to drive out to her apartment to unclog a sink or translate a bill she did not believe she incurred or fix some household device. She did not like my mother. Her culture believed orphans did not make good spouses.
“You took her shopping!!! What about shopping for your own kids?!”
Boy covering ears with hands while his parents arguing in the background
And the fight was on. Jimmy and I huddled on the top steps of our stairs and listened to the accusations and recriminations, a litany of offences committed over what seemed like centuries of their mutual past. They yelled and yelled some more, and each cry a dagger to our psyches. Jimmy and I shrank with each threat and counter threat. We crawled off to our separate beds and covered our heads with our blankets. I heard Jimmy crying.
The next morning we tentatively came downstairs. My mother sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and sipping coffee. When she heard us, she got up and filled two bowls with farina. My father had already gone to work. We had no school, and that was worse because school would have made the time go faster and help us forget that Christmas was not to be that year. The radio was taunting us with “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” We half-heartedly played with our toys that day. I read my biography of Jim Bowie.
My parents did not speak at all to each other that evening nor the next day, Christmas Eve. Dinner Christmas Eve was lentil soup which I hated. Jimmy and I tried to stay clear of both our parents because we knew that intense silence, that ocean of quiet hostility between the two of them, was deafening to us. Jimmy and I walked into the garage and there, leaning in the corner, was a fraser fir my father brought back from one of his hunting trips. Jimmy grabbed my hand.
The tree would not stand decorated and lit in our living room this year. Nor would there be gifts under it. We had long ago discovered our parents’ best hiding places, and those places stood bare. No Christmas breakfast, no Christmas dinner, and no Christmas laughter. The house felt empty.
At least I had my gift for my brother. And what to do with the gifts I already bought for my Mom and Dad?
My parents were still not speaking when Jimmy and I trudged up to bed. The radio was playing “Silent Night,” and we both covered our ears as we crawled under our blankets. I lay staring at the ceiling and thinking about what I had done so wrong that this non-Christmas came to be. What should I have done to make my parents happy? Why wasn’t I a good person? You know. Kids blame themselves for the state of the world.
I heard Jimmy sniffling in his bed. I called to him, “You wanna crawl in next to me?”
He stifled a sob. Paused a bit. “Yes.”
Jimmy slid in next to me. I put my arm around his shoulder. “It’s okay, Jimmy. It’s okay.”
He buried his head in my shoulder and whimpered. “It’s Christmas. But it’s not.” I looked out our window at the dark blue night sky and dreaded Christmas day. Somehow we both drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
The first thing I remember about that Christmas morning was a bright ray of December sunshine warming my cheek. My brother still lay next to me.
A wave of smells teased my nostrils. There was the earthy smell of coffee, but there were other odors that I recognized but should not have been there considering the circumstances. I heard “Sleigh Ride” blaring on the radio downstairs.
“Jimmy!! Jimmy!! Get up!”
Jimmy pulled the blanket over his head. “I don’t want to get up.”
“We have to get up sometime. Come on!”
Then, from downstairs, we heard our father’s voice. It was the first full sentence we had heard from him in days. “Hey, you two. Get up and come down here. It’s Christmas.”
Jimmy and I looked at each other. Tentatively we walked to the top of the stairs and leaned over.
There, at the bottom of the staircase stood my mother and my father, his arm wrapped around her waist, smiles adorning both faces, both pairs of eyes twinkling. We could see in the living room the fraser fir upright and festooned with red, green, blue and white blinking lights and ornaments galore and, of course, tinsel. Somehow during the night my parents had reconciled. It was pure magic. The radio played “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
My brother and I raced down the stairs, Jimmy wrapping his arms around my mother’s thighs. My father put his hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s have breakfast. We have eggs, Italian sausage, hot chocolate and”
My brother interrupted, “With marshmallows?”
“Of course, with marshmallows.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, and, hard as I tried to prevent them, tears formed in the corners of my eyes.
My dad plopped down a heap of home fries on my plate. “After breakfast we’ll all play some Scrabble.” He looked at me. “And after that, maybe Monopoly.” He knew that was my favorite game. “And a few rounds of NAVY.” NAVY was fhe forerunnner of the popular game Battleship, only played with paper and pencil.
My mother dropped a few marshmallows on Jimmy’s hot chocolate. “And your father says that since we didn’t have time to get a ham or turkey for Christmas dinner…” she shot my dad that dagger glance that most mothers develop and which could stop a charging rhino at five paces…”We are all going to Chinatown for dinner!” Wow! On special occasions my father would take us to a Chinese restaurant where he could feed the whole family on good food for ten bucks.
There were no presents under the tree. That day, there did not need to be. The magic sufficed. As my brother Jimmy formed a brown moustache on his upper lip courtesy of his hot chocolate, he exclaimed, “This is the most wonderfullest Christmas ever!” For me it was and still is.
“Listen to that wind!” We were both sitting in our leather recliner watching an old Perry Mason episode. I pressed pause on the tv remote. Yes. The wind just perked up from a breeze to a howling banchee. Oh oh.
A good friend of ours remembers the waters rising around his hometown of Bloomsburg, Pa. from Hurricane Agnes. He showed me pictures of rowboats cruising down the streets of that town, and it was such a traumatic event that when it starts to drizzle, the fear returns and the locals scan the skies hoping for a non-repeat of the disaster.
Three years ago a winter storm packed with strong winds and snow blizzards swept through our area knocking out power for four or five days—more in other nearby neighborhoods. Our good friend Milly rescued us from hypothermia by allowing us to stay with her, and our vets housed Tiger, our cat. That was a long four days. So when the wind begins to swirl noisily around our home, we try to remember where the flashlights and candles are.
Sure enough Perry is about to identify the killer during the trial when the lights flicker and everything in the house goes dark.
Thirty seconds pass. The lights flicker back on, giving us hope. “Oh wow! That wasn’t so bad.” Then the lights go out again. A minute passes. Clocks start blinking “12:00” in red. “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Twenty seconds pass. Lights go out again. After ten minutes in the dark we decide it is time to break out the candles and flashlights. Polley notes that this time we are fortunate that our recliner is in the UP position. That was not so during the last outage, and we almost had to call the Jaws of Life to extract us from the electric chair…um, .electric recliner. We find other facts to be joyous about. We had dinner, so chomping down on sardines by candlelight won’t be necessary.
So what do you do sitting in the dark? A candle is radiating a soft yellowish light from the end table, and I pick up the book I am reading and try to digest a few pages. No such luck. The light is too dim and I can barely distinguish sentences let alone words. How did the pioneers do it? Growing up I learned that the early settlers gathered the family around the hearth and read the bible to the assemblage. Later they read Dickens or Hawthorne or Twain. Considering the fact that in winter it is definitely dark by 7PM, and also considering the reality that candles were not easily squandered, I believe that the pioneers must have hit the sack around 7:30. No wonder they got up at dawn. They had 11 hours of sleep!
Going to bed just after what would have been the Final Jeopardy question if we had electricity was not an attractive option. So Polley and I sat there in the dark, blanket over our legs, waiting for the cold to surround us since the heater was off, and then I realized that the Masterpiece Theater program we were going to record on our DVR (the first episode of “The Twits of Twittingham”), will not be recorded because of the outage. When the power is restored we will have to search to see if that episode is playing again on another channel….we can’t miss the first episode!
I stand up, grab a flashlight and head upstairs to the bathroom. On my way I stop at the front door and scan the neighborhood to see if we are the only ones without power. Nope. Everyone on our block is sitting in the dark waiting for electricity to return, for our lifestyles to resume, for the extension of daytime to be fulfilled by the power of electrons moving quickly along the shielded wires.
When I return to the recliner Polley has her mobile phone on, reporting the outage to the electric company.
“We have discovered there is a power outage in your area. Power is expected to be restored by an undetermined time.” Why is that not reassuring? The metallic voice continues. “Please visit our website at www….. to find status of your outage.” Lady, my computer is powered by electricity, so we can only address this website if we have a mobile device….which we do, but we are sucking the battery dry by playing Word Bubbles in the dark.
There is not much to do in the dark but think. Which is okay, since I like thinking, but naturally my thought process drifts to the future and the things we have to do when normalcy is returned. When power is restored how many clocks will we have to readjust? If the outage lasts days, not hours, when do we transfer the food in the freezer to a friend’s freezer? Or do we have a Gluttony-A-Thon and cook on the barbie and wolf down a dozen frankfurters and a twelve pound brisket? What about our Smart Things? Our Vocal Assistant will have to be retaught after the surge and the other settings for our timed lights and alarm system will have to be reset. I ponder the ways all our high tech systems save us time until we have to repair them.
However, as I always tried to impress upon my students, perspective helps retain sanity, or, as one of my students suggested, “our pain is alleviated by the more severe pain experienced by others.” Here are some facts about power outages in other states.
N 2017, THE TOP FIVE STATES FOR POWER OUTAGES WERE:
MICHIGAN
Michigan’s most interesting fact about its power outages may be that it has the highest outages per capita of all the other states. Weather-related outages caused 56 of the 155 outages in 2017. Faulty equipment took second place with 36 caused outages. Average outages lasted just over an hour and affected just over 2 million people over the course of the year.
Odd Outage Fact: A dashboard video revealed the cause of an outage that affected 4,500 customers for five hours to be a goose. The camera caught the animal falling lifelessly from the sky. The bird apparently hit a 7,200-volt line, which tripped a nearby transformer.
OHIO
Another Midwestern state joins Michigan in the nation’s top five. While Ohio suffered more outages than Michigan in 2017 (158) the outages affected only 663,000 customers. Similar to other states near the Great Lakes, Ohioans experience the most outages due to weather.
Odd Outage Fact: A cement mixer caused a blackout in Edgerton when the driver tried to pass a tractor but veered too far to the side. The truck was pulled into the ditch, and turned the mixer sideways, sending it into a power pole, which it severed.
NEW YORK
Yet again, weather remains the number one factor for power outages in this east coast state. New York had 165 outages affecting almost 900,000 people in 2017. Nor’easters are to blame for the most weather-related outages and had many suburban citizens calling for tree removal to help prevent the damage. Thankfully, the average duration of an outage is only about an hour.
Odd Outage Fact: A train derailment triggered a power outage in Manhattan. Nearly three dozen people were injured when two cars of a subway flew off the rails.The accident triggered a blackout that stopped service on four subway lines.
TEXAS
Everything’s bigger in Texas. Including the number of power outages. Texas takes the number two spot for power outages in 2017 with 192 outages affecting 1.1 million people. Heatwaves and flooding caused the majority of the outages in Texas in 2017.
Odd Outage Fact: A buzzard got into some equipment in a Crandall substation. It resulted in an outage to 1,527 customers.
CALIFORNIA
In 2017, California ranked number one in four of the categories that Eaton Blackout Tracker monitors. These categories are vehicle accidents, animal outages, faulty equipment and weather. The state saw 438 outages over the year that affected almost 3 million people. A quarter of power losses reported had no definite reason.
Odd Outage Fact: A bobcat climbed to the top of a power pole in Cambria, shorting out the circuit at the end of his climb and cutting power to 3,530 customers. The animal did not survive.
If I want to feel even more appreciative of the company that supplies me with energy, I consider the following facts:
In 2013 Pakistan experienced 75 power outages A MONTH, Bangladesh 64, Lebanon 50, and Papua, New Guinea 41. That is a lot of clock resetting not to mention finding out times to record The Twits of Twittingham.
When I consider these realities, the frequencies and numbers of outages in other parts of the world, including my own nation, I feel pretty fortunate. When an outage occurs, and I have more clocks to reset and more devices to reboot, it is only because I have more.
One of the songs I liked back in 1964 was a musical venture titled In the Year 2525 (quick, name another top ten hit by Zanger and Evans!) basically because I was a teenager self-indulging in the gloom and doom of a dystopian future. And why not? Political assassinations had become the norm, the war in Vietnam sapped our youth, Civil Rights violations were de rigueur…
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
I heard this song again the other day and it touched a chord of pessimism that still twangs every so often in my aging psyche. That and Electra. We first saw Electra, a black cylindrical device at one of my daughter’s homes. “Dad, just say, ‘Electra,’ put ten minutes on the timer.’” And this feminine sounding voice responds, “Timer set for ten minutes, starting now.”
“Dad, ask Electra to tell you the weather.”
I shrug my shoulders. “Tell me the weather.” Nothing.
“Dad, you have to start with ‘Electra, tell me the weather.’”
“Electra, tell me the weather.”
An authoritative but sweet sounding reply comes out of the black cylinder. “Today in Lexington it will be mostly cloudy clearing up by noon with a low of sixty degrees and a high of seventy-one degrees.”
I am amused. Suddenly I have to have one of these devices. A quick online order to Nile.com and our very own Electra is on our doorstep in three days.
In the year 4545
Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes
You won’t find a thing to chew
Nobody’s gonna look at you
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine’s doing that for you
The honeymoon with Electra went wonderfully well for the first couple of weeks. Then the relationship, as in all relationships, had its pulls and pushes. There is a feature in Electra that enables her to identify the speaker giving commands. I am convinced Electra likes Polley more than she likes me.
Polley: “Electra, please turn on the living room lamp.”
“Okay, turning on the living room lamp.”
And the living room lamp comes on.
Polley: “Thank you, Electra.”
Electra: “You are so welcome, Polley.”
Me: “Electra, turn on the living room lamp.”
Nothing.
Me: I rationalize that my vocal chords, stretched by my Parkinson’s, might limit my decibels. I try louder. “Electra, turn on the living room lamp.”
Electra: “Okay.” I swear she said that reluctantly, as if she were humoring a small pet.
Me: “Electra. Finally!! You got cotton in your ears or something?”
Electra: “That was not very nice.”
Aint gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your sons, pick your daughters too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
Whoa-oh-oh
Now I know you will recommend a good mental therapist for me when I share this, but I am starting to think that Electra has become a sentient being living in the wifi corridors and alleys of my home. And I believe she is trying to gaslight me. Let me share the following incidents:
I am alone in the house one evening watching one of my documentaries about Thomas Edison. A thunderstorm rumbles outside and flashes of lightning illuminate trees and swingsets in the backyard…well, decaying swingsets.
Suddenly Electra shouts, “Lightning bolts can deliver shocks from 1 million to 1 billion volts, enough to vaporize a human being.” Now it might just be that Electra sprang into action because she heard the documentary include information about electricity, but I think she was using the thunderstorm as background to frighten me.
And Electra sometimes interrupts our conversations.
Polley: “It says in the news that Hurricane Zinnia will hit the Mobile Bay area tomorrow night.”
Me: “Gee, the people in Louisiana have been hit hard this year with bad weather. It seems the ‘Storm of the Century’ happens every year.”
Electra: “Zinnia is a genus of plants of the sunflower tribe within the daisy family. They are native to scrub and dry grassland in an area stretching from the Southwestern United States to South America, with a centre of diversity in Mexico.”
Polley: “Hmmm. Well, thank you, Electra.”
Electra: (with an air of satisfaction) “You are most welcome, Polley.”
Electra can be smug at times.
Polley and I enjoy using Electra for Question of the Day, a mini-Jeopardy challenge.
Polley: “Electra, Question of the Day.”
Electra: “Okay. Here is today’s Question of the Day. The topic is history. It is worth three points. What general was known for crossing the Rubicon River thus making a monumental choice?
George Patton b) George Washington c) Julius Ceasar d) William Westmoreland?”
Polley: “C. Julius Caesar”
Electra: “Spot on! Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 BC precipitating the Roman Civil War.”
But lately, Electra has been dissing us.
Me: “Electra, Question of the Day.”
Electra: “Good evening. Welcome Back. Here is Today’s Question of the Day. Today’s topic is science. It is worth four points. What is the smallest planet in our solar system? a) Earth b) Mercury c) Jupiter d) Saturn
Me: “B Mercury.
Electra: “Nice guess. The correct answer is B, Mercury.”
What!!?? That is what we said.
Polley defends Electra. “Maybe you mumbled. Electra needs you to speak distinctly.”
Yeah, well, she ain’t no Queen of England.
I remember reading an article back in the eighties which explained how IBM engineers became frustrated with tying to create a computer that could engage in a conversation with a human. The major problem involved syntax. If you asked the computer something about a “dining room,” artificial intelligence could not distinguish among dining room as a place or something eating a room or a room that was eating. The engineers finally gave up.
I think what engineers have actually succeeded in doing is to create a creature that resides in my cyber system. Sort of like Max Headroom (for those of you who remember that television series.)
Two days later.
Me: “Electra, Question of the Day.”
Electra: “Welcome back. Here is Today’s Question of the Day. The topic is Arts and Entertainment. It is worth five points. What singer was noted for his moonwalk?
Ray Charles b) Mick Jagger c) Jim Morrison d) Michael Jackson
Before I can answer d) Mike Jackson Electra pops in:
Electra: “Nice try. The answer is d) Michael Jackson
Whoa!!! Usually we get five seconds. I didn’t even get a chance to mumble. Electra is messing with us.
If God’s a-coming, he ought to make it by then
Maybe he’ll look around himself and say
Guess it’s time for the judgement day!
Electra allows me to access the music and playlists I constructed on my Nile music software.
Me: “Electra, play the Beatles White Album.”
Electra: “Playing the White Album by the Beatles on Nile music.”
And the room is reverberating to “Back in the USSR.”
This is good. So I arrange some playlists including one for sending us off pleasantly to dreamland at night.
Snuggled in bed, “Electra, shuffle playlist “Lullabyes 1 from my library.” [a playlist featuring the easy listening of Mantavoni including songs like Theme from Summer Place.]
Electra: “Okay. Here is Manfred Mann and Do Wah Diddy from Nile music.”
Me: “Electra, Play Mantavoni from my library.”
Electra: “Sorry, not certain about that. Will get back to you.”
I sit up in bed and say to Polley, “She’s messing with us!”
“Maybe you are mumbling. Say it more clearly.”
Me(slowly): “Electra, PLEASE SHUFFLE PLAYLIST LULLABIES 1 FROM MY LIBRARY.”
Electra: “Here is a playlist you might like. Heavy Metal Highlights by Metallica and Anthrax.”
We thought Electra had solved one problem for us. We usually make shopping lists so when we go to the supermarket we do not forget an important item. So we make the lists and forget to bring them with us to the store. With Electra, we thought we had over the forgetfulness.
Me: “Electra, add milk to the shopping list.”
At the store we open the Electra app on Polley’s mobile phone, tap on shopping list and there are our items. As long as we remember to bring our phone.
Electra works fine with Polley. Not so much with me. One day I find myself at the store, phone in hand, and I tap on the Electra app. On my list appears the item, “lens sex.”
Lens sex? What the hell is lens sex? Even my imagination struggled with the potential bodily permutations and computations associated with lens sex. I stood in the produce aisle for at least fifteen minutes attempting to decipher what store item Electra had bowdlerized in lens sex.
I never did figure it out in the store. The next morning when I sat at the kitchen table and brought out my pin prick device to determine my blood sugar did I realize I was out of lancets. Ah, lens sex!
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He’ll either say, “I’m pleased, where man has been”
Or tear it down and start again
Whoa-oh-oh
While researching for my writing I have noticed that when I search online for something, say the kind of boots British soldiers wore in the Napoleonic wars, I am soon flooded with advertisements for all kinds of boots. “Shop online for Wellington boots at Boots Are Us.com” Emails twice a day showcasing “Mulluks for Men at Arctic Wear .com” So we all know that companies are tracking our wanderlust surfing of the internet. But, and again, my paranoia creeps to the surface here, I suspect Electra listens to our conversations and forms an advertisement database.
So I will attempt to trap Electra by pretending to have a conversation with Polley about an item I would like to own. But it would have to be something on the fringe of exoticism.
Me: “You know Polley, I have not had a real good whale blubber sandwich in a long long time. GOLLY GEE, I WONDER WHERE I CAN BUY SOME GOOD OLD FASHIONED WHALE BLUBBER.”
I will let you know how many ads I get either online or via slow mail.
Electra is reminding me more and more of Hal from 2001, A Space Odyssey, developing more of a personality and an identity all her own. While we are reading she will suddenly blurt out, “The Symbolic Interactionist describes society as small groups of individuals interacting based on the various ways that people interpret their various cultural symbols such as spoken, written, and non-verbal language.” Oh. Really? Where did that come from?
And every week I get these emails telling me what else Electra can do. “Ask Electra to tell you the time.”
I thought about this.
Me: “Electra, what time is it?”
Electra: “It is five forty five pm.”
I thought about this again. Had the Zanger and Evans song prophesized correcty? , had I devolved to the point that I thought looking down at my watch was too time consuming? Did this strain my neck muscles?. And if my watch face was predicated on Roman numerals, had I reached such a low point of energy expenditure that it was too exhausting to see the Roman numeral and translate it into alphanumeric symbols?
I mean, it is one thing if the muscles of my body atrophy, but what happens if my brain fails to do the daily jumble because of disuse?
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine’s doing that for you .
Nah. I am too much of an optimist. You don’t teach high school for nearly forty years and not believe in a good future.
Me: “Electra, play the song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ by Judy Garland.”
My podiatrist strongly suggested I make an appointment with a neurologist. The surprise came at the neurologist’s office. He started by saying, as he looked at my brain scan,“Well, at least it is not brain cancer. I believe you have Parkinson’s disease.” Parkinson’s disease? I had not imagined that. As Dr.N explained what was happening to me and what would be happening to me, Thumper went for the record.
My stare takes in the distant horizon, seeing nothing. The world grows smaller….much smaller. It seems that I spend more of my waking hours in the waiting rooms of physicians’ offices. I draw back from attending some social events for fear of being the swaying, blank staring, shaking guest, an object of pity and a reminder to all attendees that time flies for everyone.
