Month: April 2024

The other day I was mentally comparing my own boyhood to the one available to today’s kids, and it was even more dramatic. For no particular reason I made a short list of items taken for granted today that have arrived during my lifetime.

• Jet planes
• Television
• Computers
• Internet
• Atomic energy
• Atomic bombs
• Antibiotics
• Heart surgery
• Drones
• IV pumps for hospitals
• Antidepressants
• CT scans
• Tom Petty
• MRIs
• Portable electric tools of all kinds
• Microwave ovens
• Tubeless tires
• Slow cookers
• Food processors
• Plastics for home use
• Napalm
• Cell phones
• Transplant surgery
• Ballpoint pens

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The last few years something has gone wrong on each of our first campouts that might have been avoided by a test run at home. So Wednesday night I camped in the backyard, testing backpacking tent, inflatable sleeping pad, sleeping bag, and personal resolve. Robin did not join me, but did not call in the mental health SWAT team, either. So there is that.

The evening temperature was lovely as I slipped into the sleeping bag and tried to find where the pad was located under me. Somehow every time I shifted the thing would move of its own accord to a new place in the tent’s interior. At no time during the night was I fully on top of it. This inconvenience was soon followed by the required number of zipper snags.

But I was still only slightly uncomfortable so I settled back and watched the full moon for a while. It was brilliant, and lit the yard like a searchlight. It was so bright that if you had dropped a handful of peas in the grass you could have searched for them in the light of that moon.

You don’t search for peas in the grass at night? Who raised you, anyway?

Once I had settled, the cats both wandered over and stood outside my tent, peering in at me. They did this for several minutes and I could only guess at what they might be thinking.

Willow: WTF is he doing?
Poco: I have no idea
Willow: You’ve been with him way longer than I have, and he’s not done this before?
Poco: Not once
Willow: Think this is it? The last marble has dropped?
Poco: Your guess is as good as mine
Willow: Wonder if he’s got any food in there?

Later they both ventured inside and walked around sniffing everything, especially Willow, who has a nose like a bloodhound. Once their curiosity was assuaged they left, never to return. I finally fell asleep in that lunar daylight until about three A.M., when I received the nightly call from my plumbing system and had to get out of the tent to find a place to relieve myself. In that brightness I felt that public exposure was not the order of the day, so I went indoors and used the bathroom. At that point I decided that the gear testing session was over, and I would finish out the evening on the futon.

One thing is mildly interesting. Sleeping on the ground at my time of life is not much more uncomfortable than on a bed. There are already a host of creaks and stiffnesses associated with being horizontal anywhere for several hours, and the rougher surface of the ground is only one more layer added on.

Getting up in the morning is another matter. I can roll out of a bed without too much difficulty, but climbing to my feet after several hours on the ground made me wish I had brought along a skidloader with its operator to scoop me up and set me standing.

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*Socially inhibited white people

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Not everyone I have ever met is fond of sleeping out under the stars. A neighbor in Buffalo NY had served in the Army during the Korean War, experiencing the great outdoors in the mud, snow, rain, and exquisitely poor hygiene of the Korean winter. He returned home vowing to never sleep anywhere but under a roof for the rest of his life.

Then there was the RV salesperson in Yankton SD who was showing Robin and I a hard-sided camper. His spiel included this golden paragraph which we still find amusing:

“And one other thing to keep in mind when comparing this unit to one of those pop-up campers with the canvas sides. Someone can stab right through those walls with a knife, and you never have to worry about it with this beauty.”

Oddly enough, I’ve been camping for three-score years without ever encountering a stabbing.

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Robin took a call from a grandchild in California earlier this week. The young woman, a very bright high schooler, had been given the assignment of interviewing some senior person about the Cold War. Looking for the personal side.

The call triggered some memories in another senior, me. The first memory that flashes when the subject of the Cold War comes up, at least for this armchair cowboy, is the Cuban missile crisis of October 16-29, 1962. I was in my first year of being a new medical student and new husband and definitely not looking for additional stressors.

Rumors flew, one of them being that here was going to be a massive military call-up. This was not music to my ears, what with my being 22 years of age and all. Eminently draft-able.

But then, thought I, why worry? If this was to be the big one I (and everybody else in Minneapolis) would be vaporized so fast I wouldn’t even have time to button my new army shirt and zip up my new army pants. So being drafted wouldn’t be such a big deal after all.

And then the crisis vanished, the Cold Warriors retreated, and I didn’t get that uniform until 1969, when the Viet Nam War was burning high and now there I was looking smart in my Air Force blues. But I was not fighting Cubans, or Russians, or even North Vietnamese. I was squabbling occasionally with Americans who were bringing their children to the hospital at Ehrling Bergquist USAF Hospital in Bellevue NE. Squabbling because they sometimes wanted more child care than the USAF was willing or able to provide for them.

While I was (ahem) routinely able to do the work of two normal pediatricians, I barely made it by when asked to cover for three, and the need … well … the need was for six. Another story.

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I find that I am extremely comfortable with saying “I don’t know” these days. There was an earlier time when I was impressed at how much I thought I knew, but that era has long since passed. For me, the change came with Buddhism’s relentless insistence on leaving illusion behind.

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President Biden is out there being Joe Biden. When he gets wound up in a speech, he begins to make stuff up, and the fact checkers of the world get right on with parsing his statements for the evening news. This is not a new behavior for him, but goes back decades.

The habit of embellishing one’s stories, as he does repeatedly, is a common failing and perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him. The issue for me is that if I tell a whopper there is never any concern about dire consequences for anyone else and only my reputation suffers.

I wish for more sobriety of speech from the leader of our country. I think a new motto to be placed on the desk in the Oval Office might be: If you can’t say something without resorting to mendacity, for God’s sake shut up!

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I have been encouraged by several factors to eat more vegetables and fruits and less meats. While I haven’t converted entirely to vegetarianism, I’ve come a long way.

One of those factors is the increasingly high price of being a carnivore. Our local market has an armed guard at the meat counter who is ever on the lookout for some shifty shopper trying to slip a tenderloin into their pants to smuggle it out.

Yesterday I saw this same burly gentleman administer a proper whaling to a hungry larcenist. Other shoppers gathered ’round to watch, some cheering the guard on and some soberly thinking of how tasty that tenderloin would be and what was to become of it now that it had been retrieved from an unapproved location.

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Possibly overstating the case department

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It was a 77 degree after noon, and I had done my chores and thinking about rewarding myself. I decided to drive to Lake Chipeta, about 12 minutes from my home. It was a 20 mph breezy day, and there were about twenty other souls arranged around this small body of water, seeing if they could choose what the fish wanted to eat.

A great blue heron sailed to a rock thirty yards from me, giving me a great look at this remarkable bird. But as soon as it settled there, it was attacked by three red-winged blackbirds, who flew kamikaze missions within reach of that huge beak but were obviously discomfiting the much larger bird. The heron finally gave up and flew off to somewhere far from blackbird nesting areas.

I had that happen last year in a very different location, where I stumbled onto a sort of heedless trout “feeding frenzy” where I could do no wrong, and then suddenly couldn’t do anything at all. Like you threw a switch. It’s a pleasant experience, since most of my fishing life I’ve arrived on the scene just after that switch had been thrown.

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There is something called The List Of All The Music That Is Great And Good that I am personally responsible for maintaining, since I am its creator and curator and the only one who gets to look at it. Every once in a while I give people a peek at a small part of it but never the whole thing, because most mere mortals … well …

So when I say that you should listen to some music, you should listen. If you do, I suggest that you will find no group of people who exemplify what happens when you throw egos out the window and become servants of the music than the Tedeschi-Trucks Band. You won’t find a track or a video of theirs that isn’t looking for the soul of what is being played.

Here is a live video of these fine musicians playing Midnight in Harlem. If you watch it … this is church, people, so put away your godforsaken phones and be respectful.

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We’re going through the inordinate number of days that are required when anyone who is very very wealthy goes to trial. This is because a highly-paid lawyer’s skillset consists largely of knowing how to drag a proceeding on until everyone involved is exhausted and doesn’t give a blue fig about what is true or not but simply wants to get it over with and get on with their lives.

If the judicial proceedings of the French Revolution had been conducted in a similar fashion the first potential victims for Monsieur Guillotine’s instrument would still be waiting in gaol.

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Pediatricians, as I’m sure you are all aware, are generally mild-mannered and extremely virtuous people.* As the lowest paid medical specialty, they can only sparingly afford to travel and this limits their ability to get into nearly as much mischief around the globe. So when a pediatric leader makes the news it is an unusual event.

David Brooks got off yet another good op-Ed piece in Friday’s NYTimes as he looked admiringly at the work of a British pediatrician who has added an ingredient to the steaming stew that is the debate about how best to help kids who question their sexual assignment. The missing ingredient is sanity. The title of the piece is The Courage To Follow The Evidence In Transgender Care.

Let me say a couple of things about this noisy national and international debate:

• In general, humans are not to be trusted when it comes to areas of sexuality. Our track record is atrocious and shows few signs of improving
• If the general run of humans is suspect on this subject, when politicians and lawyers get into the act the milieu becomes even more strained and difficult. Some things do not lend themselves to legislation, which is a clumsy process at best (see Tucker’s quotation below)
• Being a physician does not guarantee that your opinion on all things is automatically to be taken as correct. One needs a good memory to become a doctor, but an M.D. degree is no guarantee against stupidity, which is a characteristic that is very democratically distributed in the general population
• Making good medical decisions in cloudy areas involving sexuality needs clear heads, open minds, and the willingness to move deliberately rather than precipitously. This approach guarantees that you will come under fire from those who want the answer NOW even if one has to make make that decision based on insufficient data.

*Full disclosure. I am a retired pediatrician, and as such my opinions are above reproach and invariably sensible

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No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Gideon J. Tucker

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It is 1976 miles from Paradise to New York City. I looked it up after reading rave reviews of two musicals* opening on Broadway, and wondering if driving there on a long weekend were possible. Eventually I decided that even in a car as reliable as a Subaru Outback the logistics were against me.

Of course, even if the trip were feasible, there would be the searingly high ticket prices to contend with. In the old days, such a purchase could have been funded by selling one of the children into bondage, but now said offspring are all middle-aged and I have no idea what their market value might be. (There would be the additional factor of their resistance to such a maneuver.)

So instead of packing a bag I simply wailed and gnashed my teeth for a bit before settling down once again to ruefully accept that to live in such a spectacular spot meant giving up a few things. Regular attendance at Broadway shows were one of them.

*The musicals are Gun and Powder and Stereophonic.

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Brothers and sisters, we conclude our services this morning with a rendition of Neil Young’s soulful song Helpless. When the members of the Music Committee are finished, please file quietly out the side doors and don’t forget to leave something in the collection boxes as you pass. Pick up those pledge cards, too, if you will. Spirituality is a wonderful thing, but someone has to pay to keep the lights on.

Amen, y’all.

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The cicadas are coming, but not for me. The emergence we’ve been reading about for the past year is upon those who live in the areas with dots. I am being smug because none of my family members are in those areas. We will not be among those who can’t sleep because of the noise or cannot walk anywhere without stepping on bug bodies.

My sympathies go out to those who do live in affected states, but not to the point where I am willing to contribute to rescue efforts for the inhabitants. It doesn’t require much imagination to see that the states affected are also red politically, and I think that they deserve a mild calamity as a wake-up.

Mend your wicked ways is my advice to them, and maybe the insect landscape will be different the next time around.

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On Sunday, about noon, our internet went out. Only ours. Nothing was getting through. The person answering the tech line at our ISP was nonchalant and informed me that help would be coming “the next working day.” When I asked if that meant tomorrow (Monday) she was noncommittal, only repeating “the next working day.”

So Robin and I settled back, confident that we had the survival skills necessary to deal with perhaps 24-36 hours of internet deprivation. And we were wrong.

Here is a partial list of what we found ourselves unable to use to cope with a difficult and occasionally hostile world:

• checking the weather
• checking the news, especially to see if we were at war with anybody new
• no streaming movies to watch that evening, nor could we go online to see what was showing downtown at the local cinema
• no access to any cloud-based programs, which meant that our time-wasting game apps were unavailable for the duration
• couldn’t fact-check anything on Google
• none of our devices could sync with any of the others, meaning that each was now an island unto itself

One of us remembered that there used to be something called the Yellow Pages, and that we might have such a directory stashed somewhere. Once that resource was located, we called the cinema and found that one of the three movies showing was worth the trip down the hill. But then we opted instead to watch one of the handful of DVDs we actually own, choosing Grapes of Wrath, a classic. Robin and I sat on the loveseat for two hours to watch the film on the 13 inch screen of a portable computer that was resting on my lap and angled just so that both of us could watch the movie.

On Monday a serviceman arrived as promised, and he found that the line bearing our internet service entered the building, wasps had nested and chewed through the covering on the wire, causing a short. Within thirty minutes all of the problems mentioned above ceased to exist and we were back on the road to complacency once again.

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It doesn’t take a lot to interest my particular form of ADD, but here’s an item that did.

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

7,572,792 views Jul 12, 2019This song was recorded from a German radio station called NDR between 1982 and 1984. Search (online) has been active since the early 2000s, when the song was made available online, and to this day no one has been able to give any accurate and correct information about the origin of the song. Facts like the band’s nationality and exact year of recording are unknown, and to this day, we have not gotten any information about the whereabouts of the authors, or even the correct title of the song. Apparently there is no alternative online register/archive of this song, since the only source we have of this song is from the cassette tape that Darius recorded from the radio. Recently, a Reddit user found that in the chorus of this song, a synth called Yamaha DX7 was used, there’s a preset called Syn-Lead 5, and it’s exactly the same sound they used in the song, the Yamaha DX7 was released in 1983, so we may have a basis that the song was probably recorded in 1984, or late 1983.

Wikipedia

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My Dad smoked cigarettes by the carload. At present day prices of those tombsticks, if he were alive today he wouldn’t have been able to afford to eat or buy new socks with what was left over after a trip to the tobacconist. They eventually were what killed him.

I seem to have adopted his habit, but with a twist.

My appreciation for incense of all sorts was recently rekindled, and now you can find them smoking in more than one spot in our little house at one time. Rarely the same scent, they are in essence competing with one another. I think it got started with that article I mentioned some time ago that spoke about the elderly having their own aroma, which was part of what makes nursing homes all smell the same.

The article grossed me out entirely, and I was momentarily overcome when I had to consider that the aging process was already making me shrink, slow down, wrinkle up, and forget everything but to breathe … and now to think that I was possibly identifiable in yet another way, even to people who couldn’t see me. It was too much.

Anyway, there are now incense burners in three of our rooms, and I am shopping for a fourth. If that dreaded aroma (which I don’t know that I have) can stand up to being beaten to death by patchouli and pine sap, I will concede defeat, but not until then.

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I think it is perfect that the Arizona Republicans have shown how far off the track they are by invoking an 1864 law against abortions. This should come as no surprise, not after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The law allows no exceptions but for preserving the life of the mother. This last term has proved itself in the past to be notoriously subject to interpretation in both directions.

The conservative court opened the tent flap to the circus which we now are watching play out. While lawyers and zealots play their games in courtroom after courtroom the list of women whose lives become immensely complicated grows longer.

To me the reliance on a court decision handed down one year before the Civil War was concluded is not as lunatic as the Alabama Supreme Court’s declaration that a fertilized ovum is a child.

When jurisprudence is not prudent at all, but radical and/or misinformed , all sorts of mischief is possible.

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Our elder cat, Poco, is now almost eighteen years old. His joints bother him quite a bit so chasing his dinner out in the long grass is a practice long forgotten. He probably also has a kitty form of dementia, causing him to make decisions much more slowly.

Usually he will come to wake me at around 1:00 AM, having come to the conclusion that his happiness absolutely requires one teaspoonful of food at that moment. He can be quite insistent about it all but I humor him (as I imagine Robin humors the other 84 year-old in the house) and give him what he wants, then return to my bed.

Poco, I love you but you’re an #*+#@$ idiot. Why wake me so early?

Is it early?

Of course it is, Can’t you see that?

See what?

The big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the ten. Plain as day.

Well, you see, I can’t tell time.

Wait …

No one ever bothered to teach me how.

But …

And I have no watch of my own to employ when darkness dims the clock’s face. So I guess when we start to allot blame around here we better think it over before we open our mouths, hadn’t we? Remember that famous quote of Abraham Lincoln’s:

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Did you have a watch picked out?

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Friday afternoon we took our boats to Chipeta Lake, a small body owned by water just on the south edge of town. A lazy and warm afternoon, no one else on the water but Robin, myself, and about sixty coots.

There were fishermen scattered along the banks, and we saw a few small trout landed.

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As members tell their stories at AA meetings, what is striking is the similar tales coming out of very different people. There are those who spent time in jails, lost jobs, lost families, lost health and years of their lives. Then there are those who say these things never happened to them, but either they could see them coming or they realized that they had been rolling dice all along and sooner or later the wrong number was going to come up.

There are scads of tales of driving cars when they absolutely shouldn’t have, ending with “I could have killed somebody, and it’s only by chance that I didn’t.” Then there was the night at a meeting when a visitor spoke up and said “I did kill somebody with my car when I was driving drunk.” Unlike all of the other recitations we’d heard or given, this guy had been someplace none of us had been, and we were stunned to silence by his admission. He was sober, he was straight, he was trying to rebuild a life he’d spent tearing down. And there was an amend he was never going to be able to make to a person he had not known.

A young man named Wyatt Flores comes out of Oklahoma and plays what is called country music. His few recordings have all the twang and guitars you could ask for, as well as the sincerity that new artists often have and which established ones do their damnedest to try to hold on to. Here’s one of his about that guy at our meeting who set a somber tone indeed.

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This whole drama of her year can be a teaching lesson. We are almost daily given instructions somewhere in the media about “letting go.” Most of these admonitions deal with past traumas or difficult choices we’ve made. But letting go applies just as well to happy times and for a very few, fame. If we have a great day, and expect that we will still have it tomorrow and the day after that, we will eventually run into one that is pretty ordinary. Followed in time by one that sucks. Good to practice letting go on all of those. What does that mean? It means recognizing that both good and bad times are transitory.

Everything changes, doesn’t it? Nothing is permanent. The mountain becomes the hill. A lake goes dry. The man I was when I wrote in this blog a week ago is not here any longer. Instead, you get a slightly different version of me, and that only for today.

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From The New Yorker

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Here are the last three signs from the El Arroyo restaurant in Austin TX. My favorite of all of them is the last one. It is dark. BTW, I think after abusing the privilege of using their signs in the blog, I should at least provide you with a link to their website, which is interesting in itself. They sell photobooks of their signs, with hundreds of pix like these in each one. (If you have a clever thought, they accept people sending them suggestions for new messages.) They sell caps and tee shirts.

And, surprise surprise, they prepare and sell food. Even ship it.

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Back in 1956 there was a best-selling novel entitled “The Last Angry Man.” I read it at that time and can remember very little about it, but then I can’t remember most of what I did yesterday. However, today I nominate Garry Trudeau for “Last Angry Man of the Last 50 Years.” Don’t bother looking it up, I just invented the category.

Trudeau will be 76 in July of this year, and I am grateful that he continues to share his sharp eye and his even sharper tongue with us. Personally, I think he nails it in this one. The thing is with Cluck, you don’t have to make stuff up. He speaks in satire of himself.

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In his book Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das quotes from one of his teachers, a very wise and very old Tibetan Buddhist monk. When the man was asked to sum up his life one day, he answered: “One mistake after another.”

Gotta love a guy like that.

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We were nowhere near the “eclipse zone,” but looking out our front door at 1:32 MDT Monday we saw this and snapped the pic. A ring around the sun that contained color. The colors were like a smudged rainbow (red, orange, yellow) and are not shown as well in the photo as they were to the naked eye. (That blue-green dot is a lens artifact.)

I googled it and apparently this an uncommon event. It’s formed by the sun’s rays coursing through ice crystals in a cirrus cloud. No matter, even if it happened every day at 1:30 PM it would still be a lovely and fascinating thing to see. Of course, I am still a person who will pull the car over for a rainbow. Almost any rainbow. My knowledge of the heavens is probably as deep as the average Neanderthal’s, and I am easily amazed.

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From The New Yorker

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More juicy bits from El Arroyo restaurant

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With a windy weekend coming up, Robin and I decided to take advantage of a quieter and very sunny Thursday to break in the new kayaks. We chose to do it on Lake Ridgway, a lovely reservoir surrounded by mountains and only 25 minutes away. The water level was down about twenty feet, which is normal for this time of year, but this meant that the spot where we launched the boats was a nasty gravelly gumbo at the water’s edge.

Nearly losing our footgear in the mud, we scrambled onto the decks and took off. It turns out that our old paddling skills worked well with these very different boats. The new ones are not nearly as fast but quite stable and maneuverable. We cruised the western shoreline where there were still patches of snow. After spending an hour going out we turned around and almost at that moment the breeze picked up to provide more of a challenge on the return trip.

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I don’t often put jokes in here, and especially not those about seniors. Mostly they are unimaginative. Except maybe this one …

One Friday night a dapper 95 year old man walked into a bar and spotted an attractive woman seated alone, sipping on a whisky.
After sitting on the bar stool beside her, he turned and said, “Hello, beautiful. Do I come here often?”

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I admire David Brooks for his thoughtfulness, openness to change, and a healthy low level of ego in his scribbling. A conservative with a modern brain, fancy that.

But I never thought of him as humorous. However, here he is affirming my own pet theory that inanimate objects are far from lifeless and are often out to get us.

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