Warm Tears

29 February 2020

Sometimes, it must seem my Facebook posts are totally random. Really, they are not. Most of my postings result from conversations I have with myself arising from stimuli in my home environment, or from the news I read on internet-based sites.

For example, having retired together with my wife, we are engaging in offloading a great many possessions that we no longer need.  One of the real battlegrounds between us is what to do with the books.  I am a pack rat and it is very, very hard for me to let go of a single volume. 

This is true of even the most dog eared and ragged book, perhaps something I picked up in the basement library of Pedricktown Grammar School during a Scholastic Book Fair.  Emptying out one box of paperbacks I came upon a book called Across Five Aprils. Across Five Aprils was one of the first books I ever bought with my own money. I purchased it probably in 1965 or 1966.  The book is for a preteen audience and is a Civil War narrative, but this particular work introduced me to the power of the novel. How do I get rid of that?

And then there are the Boyton baby books.  The Barnyard Dance and the Going to Bed books stand out.  For the first couple of years of my children lives I would read the books to them at bedtime.  As anyone who has ever raised a child knows “reading” really doesn’t capture the experience.  For my kids the night time tuck me in tale was more theatre than not.

When reading the Barnyard Dance there were hand motions and changes in voice tone required at different points in the store.  The motions had to mimic the story, to and fro, left and right, etc. For the Going to Bedbook, a stuffed animal would be used to show the trek up the stairs and down the stairs set out in the book.

Pulling those books out of a box and seeing them made my eyes tear up.  How quickly that period of childhood flies by.  Sacred are those moments when you were snuggled into bed with a two or a three-year-old and they were asking you the endless “what is” and “why” questions. Such moments are only memories now, fond memories. Back then it was easier in some ways because you could make those statements, true or not, that you would always be with them.  In your heart you had hope that you could fix the problems they would face. Such hope fades as the years wear on.

Immersed in those memories I recorded the Moo, Baa, Fa La La book and posted it to Facebook.  Personally, I didn’t really care if single person sussed out why I had read the book, or read it in the way I did. Maybe, just maybe, after I am gone my kids will do a search of electronic media and find that bit.  Maybe, and this is really a maybe, they will remember that moment in the year 2002 when we read that book and others, like Jessie’s Journey, Chugga Chugga Choo Choo and the one that ends with I love you to the moon and back. Perhaps they will smile.  Perhaps they will remember the unconditional love they had from both their father and their mother.

The Baby Jay books were another story. Around here there is the informal network of friends and acquaintances who engage in the hand me down rituals. Trousers, winter clothing, toys and books, if their kid has outgrown it your kid gets it offered to them. I know who gave me Baby Jay, she is one of my dearest friends. Seeing the book, (and I put the glasses on baby Jay), reminded me of the good in the world that we can have if we believe in people and share our lives with them. Although the donor lives miles and miles away now, I know she is good people I can rely on if need be.  Baby Jay stands for everything our world does not stand for now.  It stands for the open hand and heart and for congeniality and hospitality. Baby Jay in its gifting stands for love and friendship

I don’t miss dealing with foul diapers, runaway children in malls and trying to calm a child who repeatedly had night terrors.  But I do miss the overarching feeling of love and community that you have in those early years.

Rocketman, The Myth of Elton John (or The Cosmos is Smaller than you Would Think)

16 February 2020

  

Prologue

Being a fourteen-year-old boy was just a horrible thing.  Why? Acne, changing schools and losing familiar patterns of interaction with hometown peers stand out. After I left eighth grade, they put me on a bus and sent me 7 miles away to a regional high school. I was thrown into a population where people from my little burg made up maybe 1 in 10 of the school’s population. Who to trust and what to do, God these were seemingly unanswerable questions.

To be a fourteen-year-old boy who had lost forty pounds over the summer between eighth grade and freshman year, to have grown six inches in the same period so that I now stood six feet tall and to have had my braces off after four years of orthodontic torture meant I was lost. 

Nothing was the same. The people from my old school just knew me as fat, weird and ugly; the black horn rim glasses did not help.  And yes, having looked at my photos from back then and remembered how I behaved, I was stone weird. My hometown contemporaries treated me as they always had, with disdain. People from the new school don’t understand why I ducked every time someone raised their hand. They didn’t know how many times I got punched just for existing back in your old school.

And then there were the teachers who just didn’t like my mouth and my attitude.  There was my homeroom teacher who gave me a detention four out of five nights of the week.  That was a great number of missed bus runs home.  If only I could have shut my mouth and not always needed to have the last word, things might have been so much different.  But Ira Riddle did not like my attitude.

Then there was my science teacher. Round Ron.  I did not come up with the name. A kid name Hillman whispered in my ear and it stuck forever.  Mr. Nixon too did not like my smart-ass nonstop mouth.  It did not take long for him to twist my name up from Todd to Toad.  And from there it was only a short step of pedagogical sadism to my having my own green chair with a Dymo’d label that said, “The Toad Stool”.  If I tried to switch out that chair Round Ron gave me another detention.

But science class was almost bearable because that girl with the black hair, blue eyes and freckles. Always smiling she was always nice to me. She seemed to think I was funny. She treated me like a human being; she didn’t see the baggage of the weight and braces that was stacked up high in my soul. And as all fourteen-year-old boys do, having been shown kindness I developed a crush, a major crush.

One night I had taken a ride with my aunt because she has some business at the town hall in the town where I went to school. I might have been on the weaning end of high.  Not sure on that though, but it would have par for the course.  I leaned up against the front of my aunt’s big Ford station wagon and just starred up into space as the minutes ticked by.  The astral gazing is one clue I was kind of, sort of high. Suddenly someone right next to me said, “What are you doing me?” I almost jumped out of my skin because I didn’t hear her the black-haired girl from science class come up and move next to me as I leaned against the solid metal grill of that Motown built monster family mover. This shock and lack of attention to my surroundings is a second clue I was mildly high.

Sputtering I spewed out that I was waiting for my aunt who was in the municipal building and I didn’t know how long she would be. The blue-eyed girl with the infectious laugh told me she was happy I wasn’t a pervert just hanging out in the park.  She volunteered she was walking home from the YMCA. 

And then we just talked and talked because my aunt was apparently caught up in a long conversation in the municipal building. We talked about people we knew in common.  We talked about books we liked and I promised to give her your copy of Slaughterhouse Five. 

We talked about music and I rambled on about the Grateful Dead and she talked about Elton John. In twenty minutes, we had shares lifetimes of personal history. We moved to the back of my aunt’s car so I could smoke a cigarette.  Finally, my aunt came out and we said goodbye. She shrugged and said it looked like I had to go.  With the heavy metal sound of that station wagon’s doors opening the moment was over.  But that 20 minutes has changed the arc of my high school experience.

Truth be told I was madly in love with her in that high school horny puppy dog way.  For me she was and the unobtainable image of romance and lust.  I can’t minimize the lust angle here.  But what unrolled in reality was that we became fast friends. Hell, we had more shared experiences than most couples who dated all the way through high school did.  She was with me the night Richard Nixon was unceremoniously booted from the White House.  She smoked dope with me and then stomped through muddy fields singing hymns and songs by the Dead and by Elton John. We shared filthy jokes. For four years she was a point of light that kept high school from being hell. 

And then we went off to different colleges.

In the summer 1974 I was living at the beach, in Ocean City, NJ.  Elton John’s music was everywhere.  He had released all those monster singles from Your Song to Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.  A day never went by when you didn’t hear Daniel or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on a jukebox or a radio, or blasting out of a fun arcade.  Prep’s pizza at 34^thstreet had a pretty decent jukebox; I mean they had Sugar Magnolia by the Dead on it.  But if you went in there later in the evening somebody would always play something or maybe more than one something by Elton John.

I had several of Elton’s albums including one well-worn copy of his debut American album, the one with Your Song.  I loved that record and I loved Tumbleweed Connection. I had consumed the Kool-Aid and I was a completest for his music.  Well, I didn’t buy Friends but nobody did.  It was in cut-out bins for a decade marked down to 99 cents for a new copy.

Well, in Ocean City there was a record store that was situated on Asbury, between 9^th and 10^th Streets on the west side of the street.  The records were way over priced but that had an interesting selection. I would always go and check to primarily see what the Dead and the Airplane were doing, and what might have come out from any of the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But when I was in that record emporium I would flip through each and every bin. There were no shorts visits to a record store for me in 1974.

One day as I was going through the bins there were two copies of Empty Sky, an import Elton John album.  I asked the guy at the counter about it and he said he had a special deal for imports and what I was holding was Elton’s real first album.  I shelled out several days’ worth of pay for that record.  Later that night, after I finished my shift on the boardwalk selling ice cream novelties, I ended up at my cousin’s apartment and played the thing end to end on some very fine speakers. To me Empty Sky was awesome. The high point was a song called Skyline Pigeon.

As I listened to the record again and again, I thought of that lass with black hair, blue eyes and freckles, the big fan of Elton.  Knowing that I would be going off to the Midwest to university and she to Rutgers I decided to buy her a copy of the rare album and give it to her as a kind of farewell gift.  She told me she loved it.  In return she gave me later gave me a copy of Aztec’s Two Step’s Almost Apocalypse.  I treasure that gift with all my heart.  It is one of the few perfect albums I own.

Now on to Rocketman

Sadly, and with shame showing on my face I must admit I have been consuming a great deal of media.  Turns out my local public library has an ample supply of Blu-Ray discs of recent releases.  In the past week I have watched Stuber (simple and stupid), MIB International (the same), The Art of Racing in the Rain (gag, ugh, ptewe), and last but not least Rocketman.  

My expectation of Rocketman was that it would be a biopic of the life of Elton Hercules John.  Not so much.  Instead it was a treatment for a fantasy Broadway show that has yet to be produced. If you have seen it, tell were those musical numbers designed for anything but Broadway? Rocketman was also a myth.  At no point in the movie did the subject of the picture ever move from being framed as the good guy or victim to being the bad guy. As depicted, Elton at his worst was a morally neutral and that occurred only when he married a woman knowing he was gay.

I was a fan back in the day.  I read Crawdaddy, and Creem and Rolling Stone from cover to cover. Make no mistake Elton John was a first-class arse, a bastard of the highest order to quite a number of people. People are not just good and not just bad, and Elton was just another person.  Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the film immensely.  Those song and dance numbers were amazing.  I really enjoyed the music and even the narrative, but it was a fable, a fantasy.  The lack of assigning to Elton responsibility for the darker parts of his history bugged me.

When I go to see a movie that impliedly is based on a true story, I kind of, sort of expect more truth.  Rocketman is more a Gabriel Garcia Marquez telling of Reg’s tale.  Rocketman is magical realism than biopic.

But there was a moment in the film that sent me tripping down the corridors to those days when I, and most everyone else, loved Elton. It was the scene where he goes to see his father, his cold and distanced father.  Elton’s old man asks Elton to autograph an album cover, the one pictured above, the one discussed above, Empty Sky. When I saw that LP Cover it me to summer 1977 and one of those moments of odd congruence of events that don’t really happen, but sometimes really do.

In fall 1974 I went Michigan State and the black-haired girl went 60 northeast to Rutgers. We wrote a few letters back and forth.  We agreed to catch up at the Christmas holiday.  I really don’t remember when it happened that freshman year, or what exactly happened, but this truest friend decided that university was not for her.  We got together a couple of times before I returned for my sophomore year.  In one of those meetings she let me know, probably because I asked her to play it, she no longer had her copy of Empty Sky.

When I asked what happened the story was murky but she implied some skullduggery that only happens in college had occurred.  She told me she had loaned, or maybe he had borrowed, the LP to a guy named Eric. According to her Eric was her Resident Assistant in the dorm. Although she wanted the LP back, she never had retrieved or received it, from him. Hey, I had spent hard earned money on this disc and I was not happy about this.

Several years pass

So, at the end of 1977 I was elected the president of the undergraduates of the MSU Department of Communication.  Probably the biggest perk I got out of the election, besides something to put on my grad school application, was that I was given an office to share on the second floor of the new wing of the Kedzie building on MSU’s campus.  The office was to be shared but to this day I have no idea who with, they never showed up.

While I didn’t meet my officemate, I did meet were the two hairy freaks that had the office next to mine.  One of them was Ron, another exile from the Delaware Valley.  He was a graduate student in Communication but he was so very cool.  He had worked on South Street in Philly.  He had worked at the Trocadero. 

The other guy was from New Jersey, just like me.  His name was Eric and he too was a graduate student in Communication.  Over the weeks we did all the things people do to get to know each other.  We talked about the old home country, the Garden State.  We talked about favorite books; I think mine by this time was Frank Herbert’s Dune. We all need the spice.

One day in my office got around to music.  We talked about the Dead, the Who and eventually got to Elton John.  I bragged that I had Elton’s first album and import.  Eric told me he owned it too.  At that point things began to click in my head.  Eric was from New Jersey.  He went to Rutgers.  He owned a copy of Empty Sky.

I very clearly and unambiguously said, “You don’t own a copy of Empty Sky.  You stole it from Kathy and she wants it back.”  I believe his response was the ever popular, “How the fuck did you know that?”  He just looked at me flummoxed.  After a few seconds he offered up that I must be that guy from south Jersey that gave it to her and that he didn’t steal it, he just didn’t have the chance to give it back.  Quickly, he made me come into his office while he searched the books on his shelves.  Eventually he pulled down one and opened it up and there was her signature, he had bought the book from her.

Eric and I became good friends.  My now wife even took a class from him, Com 100 I believe, or as she describes it Mastering Underwater Basket Weaving.  To this day she has disdain for what she asserts was my puffball major. Eric and I did the Jersey thing and when Springsteen came and played our 5,500-seat hockey arena we went and saw him. Twice.  Two of the greatest concerts ever.

I lost touch with the blue-eyed freckled girl, but life is such that people drift in and drift out of your life and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I still keep up with Dean Eric on Facebook. And my wife loves Aztec Two Step’s Almost Apocalypse as much as I do My wife was a big Elton fan too. When I was in law school we went and saw him. The concert was a great show, Elton still had his voice then. Due to a tip I received in line while waiting at the Ticketmaster outlet in the old downtown Detroit Hudson’s were the closest people in Joe Louis Arena to Elton due to an odd stage configuration.

A copy of a record flashed in a movie reminded me of how many times I have found the world smaller that I thought it ever could be. Two guys shooting the shit 600 miles from home talk about a record and find there are connected by a person they both thought was a wonderful human being. Small world but I wouldn’t want to paint it.

Lyle Mays has Died

22 February 2020

When I was young and studying at university, I went to concerts all the time.  Many of them are now quite forgettable.  But there was one band that stands out. I saw a number of times in a very small hall. They were the Pat Metheny Group.  The core of that four-man ensemble was the interplay between Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays.

This music was lyrical and very spatial.  The lyricism of the May’s piano and Metheny’s ethereal guitar took you to places out and beyond the confines of the 250-seat hall they were playing in.  Hearing Pat’s solos and Lyle’s journeys to the softer side of forever left me feeling clear, aware and alive.  These concerts were as invigorating as sleeping outside on a North Dakota night and being overwhelmed by the sheer number of stars you could see from the middle of nowhere.

Lyle died recently.  But his piano work will live on for a great many years.  Take some time to go back and listen to the music he was making in the late 1970s.  It will take your breath away.

Why Attorneys Die Younger Than They Should

23 February 2020

Sometimes and only sometimes, I think back on the times when I did work that required me to appear as an advocate in court.  I did some trials but mostly I did motions.  One of those sayings popular among attorneys when I was in practice was that if my client had to undertake a trial, I had failed my client as an attorney. Trials are rarely in the client’s best interest.  

What they depict on TV about attorneys bringing a motion before a court really doesn’t capture the whole experience. What you see on TV begins with a couple of lawyers spit balling some ideas about how to approach a contentious legal issue.  Usually two lawyers on the same side are seen framed in a library with lots of thick bound law books going back and forth on a very clear and clean legal issue a couple of times.  Eventually, one of them either turns to a laptop or leans their head down and begins to scribble on a legal pad.  Next you see them in a courtroom for about 1 ½ to 2 minutes of screen time maximum. Opposing counsel fire some pithy sharp barbs back and forth. Suddenly the hero attorney of the story is in the hallway talking to a client explaining what happened.  Start to finish the TV process for a motion takes about four minutes. Blech, it isn’t like that at all.

In reality the process is much longer and much, much more stressful. Cigarette manufacturers, candy vendor and liquor stores would not fare well these days without the legal profession. Preparing for a motion or a trial requires booze, sugar, smokes and caffeine. 

Let us say that you are engaged in a civil lawsuit.  Key to civil litigation is discovery. In going through a file, you realize what process the opposing party undertook with regard to people with similar problems to your clients. Your client’s opponent’s acts in remediation appears to be key to resolving the case.  

Having come to this conclusion you think about what kind of information will disclose this pattern.  What did you really want and need; letters, e-mails, memos?  You spend a couple hours trying to think of what you want from the opponent to develop this issue, and then you write up your request to produce.  

Writing up a request to produce and its sibling document, the interrogatories, is complicated.  If you have ever read a story about somebody dealing with a jinni you understand the precision of the words to be used in the exchange is critical.  You ask for this but not that.  You want items created between this day and that date.  You want documents created specifically by certain persons. As you type this all up you are rocking back and forth in your chair. Every so often you flex the muscles in your calves and you squeeze and release your hands.  After you are done you print up a copy and then you lay into it with whatever correction pen you prefer, blue, red or black.  There are carats and arrows and indecipherable squiggled lines of text to be added.

Eventually you finish up your document and you send it off to a clerical staff member to format and get ready for service. Off it goes first class mail.

23 days later you get a response that refuses to provide anything. The response asserts everything you asked for is irrelevant or immaterial or doesn’t exist.  You absolutely know some of this material exists because you client brought in affidavits and letters from the opponent to people who had been in the same situation as your client.  Having been stonewalled it is now motion time.

In numbered paragraphs you detail your reasons why the judge sitting on the case should order the other side to give you the papers you want.  In 20, 30 or maybe 50 paragraphs, you list what you want. Worked in among those paragraphs are some statutes and case law that you believe show why the refusal to produce the information is improper and unreasonable.  This work goes on for hours or maybe a day.  You do a brief in support.

The whole muscle flexing process continues.  You go out to Westlaw on your computer or you pull down one of those books of case law and read. As you are researching the law you are angry at the bullshit the other side is pulling and the money they are wasting.  Your anger sends your blood pumping.  You drink coffee when you are slogging through the long dry passages of caselaw. You eat high sugared candy for bursts of calm and extra energy. Snickers has the highest quickest energy blast. The same editing process with pen and carats and circled text occurs again. Looking the opponent’s response again to see if you missed anything just pisses you off.

Eventually you finish up the motion and brief.  Your clerical calls the court and gets a motion date.  You have the clerical do you a notice of hearing.  You review the whole packet one more time before it goes off in the mail.

Probably at 4:30 pm on the 3^rd day before the scheduled hearing date, the opposition’s response comes hand delivered.  You read it and your face gets red.  You clench your fists.  You make copies of the response and by 7 pm that night with more coffee and candy having been ingested, and you may have sucked down some gut bomb burgers, you have drenched a copy of response with circles and citations responding to their arguments and citations. Your body aches and you go home and have a drink.  Because you are a lawyer you drink only one shot of scotch, okay well maybe two. Okay, three at the most.

The next day you pound out an outline with the key law highlighted and all the arguments of law and equity you can muster.  You work through lunch.  You take phone calls. You meet with a highly needy but not high value client on a different case. 

If the door to one of you associate’s offices is open, you go in. You spend 15 minutes running through the key issues and both your position and the opposition’s. You re bouncing what you are facing off this person to try to get a gut feeling of whether you really have the law and facts on your side.  You talk about the judge and the judge’s predilections.  Yes, he really does have a pistol in an ankle holster when he is on the bench. You go back to your office and rework your outline; you eat some more candy or maybe some cold French fries somebody had left in the breakroom on the table.

Finally, comes the day of the hearing of the Motion.  You show up early because this is a cattle call, first come first served. So, by 8:15 on a Wednesday morning you are hanging out making small talk with the judge’s clerk and other counsel as they check in.  These conversations are important because they tell you who has cancer, who has had a heart attack, who has died, who is fucking their secretary and who has gone off the wagon and is back in the crosshairs of the attorney grievance commission. Given the fishbowl you work in, you need to know this stuff.

And then you sit in the courtroom and wait and wait and get pissed off at wasted time.  Papers get pulled out of your briefcase and you look at other files. When the judge takes the bench, you listen for your client’s name to be called. Yes, you scan those other files, but you are half listening to the other hearings.  You want to hear the ebb and flow of those proceedings and the tones of the voices involved. This moment is when you can gage what mood the judge is going to be in when you get up to speak. And every muscle in your body is tense.  You want to win. Your heart keeps pumping at maximum.

The culmination of all this comes when your case gets called.  You stand up at the podium and your hearts is pounding even louder now.  Palms sweat.  Take in a deep breath and let the outflow of air slowly escape over your lips.  The outline of your argument sits on the podium. Your hands grasp both sides of the podium’s top. Words begin to flow from your mouth and you try to hit all the salient point. Still you mind and body are on full alert for you are waiting for objections from opposing counsel, or you are waiting for the judge to pose a question. Muscles tense and stay tense and your heart continues to pound away. Take another slow breath and end your argument on a well-articulated, relatively loud, short clean syllogism. 

As you take your seat opposing counsel begins to speak.  No matter what his words actually are he is essentially restating Joe Pesci’s comment in My Cousin Vinny, “Everything the proponent’s attorney said is bullshit.”  You listen to see if he uses the tired argument he raised in his response. You jot notes down and put exclamation marks beside things you want to say in a quick response, if the judge lets you give it.  Your BS meter has to be on high, because you might have to jump and assert opposing counsel is mischaracterizing the law. And then it is done.  The judge states his finding orally. You won.

You walk up to the bench and hand the judge the proposed order compelling the production of the material you requested.  In a minute three copies are signed and trued and handed back to you.  You hand a copy to opposing counsel and head out to your car.  While you were at the bench the judge put his hand over the microphone recording the proceeding and asked it you saw the goal in the last two minute of the hockey game the night before.  You and the judge have had some beers together at games past. As soon as you got up this morning sucking down coffee and eating dry toast, you had made sure to be familiar with the game’s highlights before you came in today, you knew the question would be coming.

At the point you sit in your car with a sour gut.  Nexium just doesn’t cut it anymore. You are agitated because you didn’t sleep well the night before because your mind was running down every possible turn in the hearing it could imagine. Every muscle in your body is aching.  The whole time in the court room, without your constant awareness, your muscles were stretching and contracting. Just 10:30 am and you so want to take something and drift off to sleep.  But the phone rings and answering it and you know you are heading back to the office to put some fire out on one file or another out. Tonight, the scotch level will move to three or four shots.  And maybe you wash that down with a dose melatonin or maybe Xanax.

This cycle repeats again and again.  Years turn into decades. The hours at the office grow, and when you do a trial the stress on your body burns off 5, or maybe 8 pounds over a short three-day affair.  You shit razor blades.

 A human body was not designed to eat stress at the level an average attorney’s life requires. The diseases that arise are not a surprise, cardiac, vascular and maybe mental. Poor diet, rotten exercise patterns, alcohol abuse and just downright burned out hours lay waste to the body’s defenses. As a result, cancer is always waiting in the wings. Unless you were raised in a family of lawyers, you don’t know any of this going in.  By the time you figure it out, the hour is far too late to stop you from joining the circus.

Don’t get me wrong I love the fact that I was a lawyer, and then an administrative law judge.  It was great stuff.  I have learned things about things I didn’t not existed. I have knowledge of things from impellers on water cooling systems for manufacturing plants to what the term plain vanilla box means in the construction trade. But the toll it has taken I do not know.  I have had diseases and health issues that maybe I wouldn’t have encountered if I had gotten a job in my preferred profession, i.e., as a librarian. Every career has it burdens, roofers shoulders and knees get destroyed, OTC drivers go deaf in their left ear, pipefitters get irradiated at nuclear plants, and field workers get a buildup of pesticides in their livers. But the stress level of being an attorney really takes its toll.

Mall Walking

17 February 2020

I am a 63-year-old man with a bunch of maladies.  So, it goes.  Glad to have made it this far.  Trust me I have seen things that would blind you and heard things that would burn off both your ears. (Thank you, Robert Hunter, for that line). The ride has been fun.

After my most recent surgery I lay upon my couch for two months watching TV and eating bon-bons. Yup, you are right following this recovery regimen I gained some weight. Once the pain abated, I notice how bloated and icky I felt.  Clearly, I needed to address this situation. Sound of blaring trumpets here…” I will eat less and exercise more”.

Now mind you, I have a gym membership. I have had this membership for a decade.  Mostly I never use it and I view it to be a charitable donation to the City of East Lansing, the owner of the gym. 

The gym is located in the Hannah Community City. Inside the exercise space are a fair amount of treadmills and some stationary cycles.  Weight machines and ellipticals are also present.  The gym really has the stuff people want when they are working out.

When you are out of shape there is nothing as emotionally awkward as setting a twenty-minute ride on an exercise bicycle at Level 2 while the person next two you, a silver haired lady ten years my senior, gets on the treadmill and runs for twenty minutes.  WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT, DAMMIT. Oh, I am such a miserable slug.

I know, I know, I need to focus on the personal only.  No comparisons with others. My goals have to be realistic to me.  However, there is silent judgment from the more in shape in a gym such as often as not.  Thus, while I go to this gym, it cannot be the first line of exercise for me.

Enter stage right, mall walking.  Both the area malls by me are open by 8:30 am, the earliest time I plan to be there, I mean I retired so I don’t have to get up at 6 am. In reality I think they open at 7 am. Both have comfortable indoor air temperatures. Thus, park close, leave the coat in the car and dash for the door. 

The mall closest to me has a circuit if the stores are closed of just over a mile.  The one further from me has a circuit of about 8 tenths of a mile. Each has its pluses and minuses.

The farther mall has that shorter distance to walk. However, its aisles are wider. Also, there is a coffee shop open at 8 am. The coffee shop at the closer mall opens at 9 am. At the farther mall, the walking population is mostly men my age and above.  This mall is close to a now gone GM plant or two.  Most of the guys in there are clearly GM retirees.  Lots of UAW Local jackets on display.  My guess is that their circuit is the cardiologist recommended mall walk.

The mall nearer to me is longer, this extended distance for a morning walk is a real plus.  However, the closer begins piping in canned music as soon as it opens, the other mall does not play any music until it is officially open.  This closer mall apparently has only one tape for its canned music.  If I hear Call Me Maybe, one more time I am going to kill someone. The crowd is more diverse in terms of age, race and ability.  There are two women who must be training for a speed walking competition.  They are then when I get there.  They are there when I leave.  They always lap me twice while I am walking.

Given the weather here in Michigan I will continue walking these malls alternating between them every other day.  I like to walk.  I like to get exercise. I want to survive.

Nota bene, my Apple Watch is the bane of these walks.  If I walk the closer mall, I can sometimes complete my 30 minutes of exercise. In actuality I do complete my exercise.  My pulse rate is up, I walk 1.3 miles minimum and I walk 30 minutes minimum.  If I have my watch with its face on the palm side of my wrist/hand, have the watch band on the fifth notch and turn the blue tooth on/off/on just before I start my walk, I will get credit for my walk.  Mostly. If I don’t do all these things, I may get some credit, or all the credit or none of the credit. Nothing pisses me off more than getting to the end of a walk at 3 mile plus per hour and finding out I have been given only 2 minutes out of 30 minutes of exercise the watch demands of me. GRRR. No matter what the watch does I will keep mall walking, it is healthy and I enjoy it.

But back to the gym.  Both my sons need to lose weight.  In order to make sure they are getting some cardio, no matter what I did earlier in the day at the mall, I go to the gym for about 30 minutes each night.  One or the other comes along to watch over me, but they exercise as I pedal away on the stationary bike.  What is the down side for me?  Nothing. I do believe at this pace I will be ready for the hills of Lisboa next month.

One of the Things We Lost Raising Boys.

18 February 2020

Saturday night, Francie and I went out to dinner with a couple, people we consider good friends, for pizza at a locally famed pizza joint.  Subjectively I think we all had fun.  I know for sure I had fun. Conversation touched on all sorts of things, from politics to plans for the future. The evening was nice, really nice.

Outside a core group of friends this is the was one of the first times we have been out for an evening meal with “adults” in forever.  We used to dine out with other couples a fair amount in the past.  Back when we lived in Delaware with used to go out with several different couples where one or the other member of the couple worked with me at AIG. Those meals were always fun.  

You have to understand that back in those days AIG had a great many employees who had been at one time “attachés” at US embassies in some very difficult countries.  One guy had stories from just about every hotspot in the 1960s to the 1980s.  He was always very vague as to what his job in the diplomatic service was.  His job at AIG was equally hard to define and vague. Still, it was clear he had the ears of people in power. We were pretty convinced that that AIG hired a great number of former CIA operatives.

I digress, we would go out with these work friends for Japanese noodles, Thai specialties and the occasional fine dining, say at the Brandywine Room of the Hotel Dupont.  Buckley’s Tavern was also a favorite. 

When we left the Delaware Valley and came back to Michigan, we had a core dining and socializing group of about 8 people.  This aggregate was comprised of people who were our friends before we left Lansing in search of opportunity in the far too busy and far too aggravating east. That group eventually winnowed down to 6 or 7 depending on the occasion.  

For us it was a Friday night tradition to hit a Michigan State hockey game and then go to Beggar’s Banquet for food and beers.  Liver pate, London broil, chocolate torte and dark beers were the food, and anything and everything were the subjects of conversation. 

We would also grill out at each other’s homes.  Got a vague memory of drinking home brew, eating ribs and ending up floating naked on a raft in the pool on one of these occasions with a number of people watching.  I emphasize I was not alone floating au naturel.  Counting me there were a physician, a computer engineer, and a lawyer floating there with barbeque sauce on their fingers as their only bodily covering.

Then came our boys, Spore I and Spore II, Satan and Beelzebub, Primus and Secundus.  I had different names for them depending on the circumstance. For the first few years we still got together with our core group, but then came hockey, debate, orchestra, choir and every other wonderful time suck you can experience while watching two you men travel from their diapers to their twenties.  And if our time was not sucked up in one of these activities there were the trips home to the beach, to Toronto, to Chicago, to Kentucky, to DC that siphoned off any spare time.  Cultural enrichment was a key goal for our duo.

Of all of things that could have done it, hockey was the one that killed our going out with other couples.  On any given weekend we were travelling three hours round trip through ice and snow to rinks all over Michigan. The best you could come up as a meal with other adults normally involved sitting in a fern bar with twenty young men (and one young woman) gnarring at pizza and drinking pop, and the parents scattered at tables surrounding the feast. 

Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite memories are of tournament socializing. There we were somewhere in Ohio, eating buckets of fried chicken from a local grocery store’s deli counter in a hotel’s conference room, while drinking beer with other moms and dads.  But the time commitment, two nights a week for practice and two nights a week for games and the real-life requirements of work that bled into the evenings killed just getting together with anyone for socializing.  Factoring in my decision to run, and get elected to the 20+ hours unpaid position of school board member, there just was no time for other things.

On January 10^th, a great block of time opened up for us.  We walked away from the burdens of our jobs. Concurrently the boys have become socially self-sufficient, if not economically so (yet). Saturday nights for them means Dungeons and Dragons and Wednesday are for bar trivia. They have people now, they don’t need us to manufacture fun.

Now is our moment to re-emerge. My plan here is to get together with people whenever we can. I want to re-engage with the quiet pleasures of sharing a meal and talking about things that are not ritual. Ritual may be the wrong word, and so is routine.  Left to our own devices we establish patterns regarding what we talk about and how we talk about it. When you go out to eat, you hear from people who live differently, who experience life differently.  Now is the time to get “other” people back into our lives.

Hopefully all that was lost shall be regained.

Folk

13 February 2020

Often, I listen to story songs. A singer, and it can be a man or a woman, is telling of things desired but which no longeår exist. When I hear these ballads, I find myself very caught up in the narratives. 

The majority of such songs deal with love lost due to inadvertence, misunderstanding or outside interference human or otherwise. In rising melodic words, the singer says, “Some things just can’t be fixed.” And the next line will be about cardboard boxes being packed into a car, or set by the trash, keys that don’t work, or a light that won’t come on even though the curtain moved and you know someone is home. Sometimes there is a warning at the end reminding you all you have is your honest heart or your soul.

Sometimes the singer is painting a picture of a desolate motel on a barren stretch of highway. An empty pool surrounded by an eight-foot high unbroken chain link fence with a sign saying, “closed until further notice”, is offered up as the image to make the motel even lonelier. The singer is staying in a well-worn room with an air condition that barely can keep up with the heat. Looking at a picture of someone who was once important to her, she is singing about not knowing whether to go west or east. 

There are other songs of longing and loss, dead spouses and estranged children, but the standard song depicts love gravely in peril or a romantic relationship clearly and absolutely lost. The singer may say their heart was never claimed, or that they know they were too critical and they brought the loss of love on themselves.  The events may be told as a sad narrative of small things gone wrong.  In the alternative the song may focus on a single event and be surrounded by the singer asking why, and then why again.

Some of the songs use techniques to tell us something profound about the loss, like going to the first family wedding alone after a lover has left in anger.  Or they tell us something mundane, say finding a partial bag of the departed love’s coffee pushed way in the back of a cupboard. The singer opens the bag and recites memories after smelling the coffee from some morning of a shared delightful day.  This is followed by the questioning lyrics of what could have gone wrong.

Often the instrumentation tells as much of the romantic disaster as the words.  Have you even not reacted to a mournful run on a pedal steel guitar, or a rising fiddle solo that sounds almost like someone crying? Lamentation and loss, there are so many songs.

No matter what kind of life you have lived, it is virtually certain you have had a relationship disaster.  You had just gone out on you own, somewhere beyond the iron fences, somewhere beyond the point where the steeple and water tower of home have faded from view. Out there the old ways didn’t work. Your winsome smile couldn’t hold a heart so important to you. We have all crashed and burned, maybe repeatedly.  As a result, those with talents in crafting music and words write these experiences up in rhyming and melodic forms. then the singers sing these songs withal the heart and pathos they can muster.  

If you listen long enough you will hear something that resembles your pain.  In that moment you know you are not alone.

Disappointment

13 February 2020

Disappointment. Oh well. Sometimes losing is a plus.  Tried to get some Dead and Company tickets yesterday, thanks to Ticketmaster’s system snafu it didn’t happen.  In the end I could have gotten some billets in my range, but the mature adult in me decided that buying four tickets at the cost of two round trip tickets to Europe, just didn’t make sense.  This was especially true given the hearing loss I have suffered over the years.  Growing old, maturing, damn this is just not the route I thought I would follow.

Instead I bought four tickets to a folk concert celebrating the life and music of the late, great Stan Rogers.  So mid-June you will be able to find me at the Aeolian Hall in London Ontario Canada. At $140 for the four tickets this show was a relative bargain.  And even though the seats are close to the stage, fifth row on the aisle, I think that the sound will not exacerbate my tinnitus. And if any of the performers, Stan’s wife, son, friends, etc., sing White Squall my youngest will just be over the moon.

Personally, I find it interesting how attracted my youngest son is to folk music, and particularly to Canadian folk music.  The lad has been exposed to so many types of music, electronic, pop, folk, hard rock, grinding metal noise and more.  Even Fado. But for whatever reason he has been drawn to the songs of Stan Rogers. When we go to folk concerts, he is always among the youngest of the patrons there.

I wonder why folk music, a new folk music, hasn’t taken on with the current members of the aggregate under 35s.  There are good performers out there, Mandolin Orange, Joshua Radin, Jason Isbell and the Avett Brothers. But when you go to these performers concerts the audience is clearly 45+. It is an absolute sin that Richard Shindell and John Gorka aren’t better know and filling 1500-3000 seat halls.

My suspicion is that with our interconnected/over connected world the attention span required to sit and absorb a folk song has disappeared.  The songs these people are singing are mostly about human relationships, not the get back to the farm ethos of the late 60s. Maybe the fact that there is no time we have a moment to be separated from an ever-intruding demands of media has rendered soulful contemplation of human relationships obsolete.

Not seeing Dead and Company disappoints me.  Having a wonderful category music fading away disappoints me. I guess I will close with a link to a wonderful song that shows what folk music today can be. This is Richard Shindell singing Reunion Hill.  Give it a listen and savor it. 

And writing a blog post at the Friendship Circle Biggby in Lansing is a close second to the East Lansing Public Library for a writing space.

Fading Fast

12 February 2020

Far quicker that I would have anticipated, the faces of my clientele are fading. Seemingly soon their personal stories of agony and asserted redemption will be gone.  Amazing how the stories quickly slip away.  No matter how strange the tales I heard, it is clear that I simply won’t be able to hold on to individual stories without some triggering event to make me return to a face or an odd set of circumstances.  

Without a case packet before me, I am not daily reminded of all the screwed-up things alcoholics and dope fiends do. My morning case review was a refresher in their many attempts at denial of personable responsibility. Invariably the mannerisms, the twitching, the inadvertent cursing and the sweating, would take me back to someone else I had seen before. Lacking that daily display of tics and involuntary muscle movements, I have no reason to even think about all those 30,000 cases.

Over twenty years I have heard people tell me on at least one hundred occasions they killed someone while drunk, high or both. Invariably the person who was killed was a friend or a family member. For such people their worlds had exploded and not matter how much time has passed they were always going to be shunned by family and friends.  Most had done at least a year incarcerated and some had served as much as ten years inside.

Most of the time I was told the decedent was also intoxicated.  Rarely was the person who died a stranger. In cases where strangers died, the person telling the story often would break down completely losing it. Sobbing, and with their head on the table, they would stop their practiced narrative and ask for a tissue and pant for breath.  

The vast majority of the people telling me their tales of drunkenness and death would be clearly and truly remorseful.  You could see the tremors as they talked about running into the dead person’s wife at the local IGA.  Often, they would have had community service imposed upon them as a term of parole, and now many years after the death, they still volunteered at the animal shelter or the literacy coalition.

In ten percent of the cases the person telling me their story would not provide me details of the death.  Some would tell me they had no memory due to a traumatic injury or intense intoxication.  If it was a TBI they usually had some proofs of long-term therapy or hospitalization.  Some of these could recite details of the accident they had learned after the fact.  

A handful of the overall total number of people I saw, completely missed the point. They would try and deflect every question about what happened and would simply talk about their hardship. These people seemed not to think at all about the hardship of the wives or husbands or children of the people they killed.  A few would claim it was not their fault but the jury got it wrong, or they took the plea because their useless lawyer told them the jail time would be longer if they didn’t save the family from a gruesome trial. This tiny subset would be the loudest almost screaming about their needs.

Only one person that I remember said he simply did not do the driving and cause the death. The facts were odd.  It was in the Upper Peninsula and neither the deceased or the man convicted of manslaughter had their cell phones with them. This person claims he was passed out and a passenger when the what would ultimately be a fatal accident happened.  He asserted he pushed the dying driver over to try, and tried to head to a store to make a phone call for help. This person had taken a plea, serving 9 months of a year sentence in county jail versus prison. I don’t know what I did with the case.  You see I tell you this stuff is fading. But just 9 months of county time implies the judge believed him, at least partially.

I guess I should try and write down at least one of the stories I do remember each week.

Practicalities

11 February 2020

Not quite eight a.m. and I am waiting for a contractor.  When I had some work done in the Fall it disclosed some other problems that needed to be remedied.  These are not big problems, but still it is dollars out of my pocket.  A single-family house is, and always has been, and always will be, a money pit.

Yesterday I did practical things.  I moved as many of my recurring bills to auto pay, gas, phone, electric and the like.  I figured that if I am going to be away from here for long periods, I had better not have to rely on any form of mail forwarding services including my children. Going paperless makes sense.

Just need to take care of a couple more things and I can nail down the housing situation in Lisboa. Yes, I am a little nervous but what the heck, life is until it isn’t.  So, I better damn well make the best of it.

Note the contractor came and did some of the demolition for the work I needed.  I was fixing the walls and ceiling in my breezeway.  When he tore out the ceiling of the breezeway four five-gallon buckets of walnuts fell upon him.  Apparently, the space between the house and the garage above the breezeway was the neighborhood squirrel larder for winter walnuts. This additional issue will be remedied.

Retirement Month One

10 February 2020

Today marks the anniversary of my last day at work.  Several people have asked me how it feels.  Well, it feels good with a couple of caveats.  

Most of the last month has been dealing with financial issues.  Transferring monies out of the State of Michigan’s defined contribution plan has been a nightmare.  The plan contains a clause that you cannot move the money for forty-five days after your termination date.  At this point, 30 days since my retirement, Voya cannot tell me what my termination date is yet so I can count out 45 days for the rollover.

My advisor at TIAA was surprised.  Apparently only two companies of any size enforce this kind of rule relative to 401k rollovers.  Give to the State of Michigan to ensure walking away is not easy. I talked to another friend who works in the industry and her comments were that Voya was the worst financial company to try and move money from.  Ugh, it has been issues like this that have eaten up just a ton of time.  Don’t get me wrong I expected some of this, but Voya is in a class all by itself in term of being befuddled and aggravating.

On the other hand, I have dropped into new routines.  First, I created a block of time for writing.  Every single day I spend between 1 and 1 ½ hours at the public library in either a lovely room with a nice wood table or out in the general flow of the library, again at a wood table, working busily away. I work in time for laundry, making the bed and daily shopping.  And, there is the mall walk. I try to get about 30 minutes of exercise in according to my Apple Watch.

Getting set for the first trip to Portugal took a little bit of time.  We have some commitments here in the form of meetings and the like.  However, the flight and flight insurance and parking for the car have now been arranged.  One night’s reservation has been made.  My thinking is that I will wrap of the rest of the reservations this week.  Once in Portugal the ritual will change dramatically. 

So how do I like retirement, well so far so good.

Social

9 February 2020

For me there came a point where socializing with me drinking alcohol just wasn’t as important or practical as it used to be.  When I was younger, I was probably on my way to moderate alcoholism but one day my body told me in no uncertain terms to stop the abuse.  

Back then I could drink a pint of Wild Turkey or a twelve pack of beer. Now, when I drink too much my heart races. When my heart races I am prone to things like fainting and cardiac arrest.  Thus, my socializing is conducted using minimal alcohol.

Don’t get me wrong, I still drink from time to time but never more than two or three drinks.  My guess is that at my retirement party I had four drinks and that was more than I had consumed in one sitting in over a year.

Because I don’t drink socializing is different. Meeting at a bar at the end of a day is not required at this point in my life to engage in meaningful socializing. Today, I went out for brunch.  It was a delight.  The place was busy and lots of people were laughing and talking.  Some of them might have been taking advantage of the $4.00 Boddy Mary special. 

This day I had decaffeinated coffee.  My friend had Irish coffee with both Jameson’s and Bailey’s.  I had some eggs with cornmeal biscuits covered in sausage gravy. She had a breakfast burrito.  But most importantly we talked.  

And we talked.  And then we talked some more.  Outside the sky was light and the winter sun was shining in through the windows. Like any good breakfast place, you couldn’t really see out the windows because they were steamed up from the cooking and the conversation and the body heat generated by so many hungry people in one place.

Me, I have reached an age where I don’t need alcohol to let my barriers down.  What shred of pretentious self-concept do I have to protect at this point? What great secrets do I need carry?  The answer is not many. A moment in a window on a winter day talking about people, places and things with an old and trusted friend is as effective as six shots of single malt to make me feel good.