Also, he wanted my notes from that interview. I told him that really wasn’t practical, and wouldn’t be helpful even if I produced them. First, there was thge problem of my handwriting. Second, I seldom wrote down full direct quotes (unless something the speaker said was so obviously a quote I would use that I thought it worth the time), because I was a slow note-taker for a journalist. My notes were so sketchy that I always had to write within a day or two of taking them to remember what they referred to. They would mean very little to me now, and nothing to anyone else.
Finally, I seriously doubted that I could produce them before the trial, even if I quit James Smith’s campaign and did nothing but search through the pile of boxes in my garage until I found what he thought he wanted.
So he dropped that idea, to my great relief.
Soon, I won’t have to worry about such subpeonas, because I’m getting rid of most of the notes.
The end of last week, we bought a car. A new car. Believe it or not, it’s the first new car we’ve bought since 1986. Yep, at least 38 years. We’ve gone with “previously owned” on every subsequent purchase. We were sick of the stress of constantly having to come up with money for repairs, and we wanted something with a warranty.
It’s a middle-of-the-road — in terms of cost — Toyota, but in unadjusted dollars, it cost more than the first house we bought, back in 1980.
So we want to take good care of this vehicle — which means parking it in the garage. Which we use for other purposes now, mostly (measured by cubic feet) storage.
Those couple of dozen boxes have got to go. They’ve been piled up in a sort of uneven ziggurat right next to the steps leading into the house. They’ve been covered with a big sheet of heavy plastic, which (I’m now finding) didn’t protect them as well as I’d hoped.
The going is slow, because I’m going through every sheet of paper in each box. (I’ve never been a person for blithely throwing things away.) I’m doing it fairly quickly, but it still takes maybe an hour per box. I was discouraged by the result on the first box, because I eliminated less than half the contents. But that was stuff from college days, and my decade at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun, right after school. Which means I had winnowed through that several times before.
One thing that amazes me is the time I spent on administrative matters while putting out a newspaper — especially the correspondence from the days before we had printers that produced something of letter quality. Letters to readers, letters to prospective reporters (I was over all the news reporters at the Sun), letters to people running some conference I was about to go to. All produced on a typewriter. All that time spent on things that I really don’t care about now (which make up most of the stuff I did toss out). Wow, the energy I had in my late 20s.
Since that box, things have gone much better. I’ve thrown away something like 90-95 percent of each box. And a LOT of that is notes from the ’90s and double-aughts. Still haven’t run across those Harrison notes, though.
But I have run across a few notes here and there that I’ve pulled out to keep. Sometimes because of the interesting topic, but mostly because of the people being interviewed — people I like or enjoyed talking with (Joe Riley, Fritz Hollings, John McCain, Joe Biden), people I found completely appalling (Grover Norquist, for instance) or people who have subsequently become more widely interesting (like Nikki Haley).
I put a few of those together on my scanner so you could see the kind I’m talking about. I have a long way to go — including the dreaded box of an odd shape (like a cubic yard) that I know is nothing but notes. Who knows what I’ll find next?
In any case, I’m making gradual progress. But I thought I’d tell you because while there are always a lot of things preventing me from having time to blog these days, this is one of the bigger ones right now…
As of right now, I’ve eliminated 11 boxes. This is what’s left of the pile…
Finding myself at the beach this Saturday morning, I woke up a bit before 7. My cramped shoulder, from the drive the day before, was still bothering me after a restless night. But it took me about 15 minutes to decide not to take a muscle relaxer and go back to sleep for hours, and to go see the beach sunrise instead.
That made me a bit late for the actual sunrise itself, at 7:38. My first pictures, one of which you see above, were taken about nine minutes after the definitive moment. But as you can see, a bank of clouds blocks the horizon, so the sun was just beginning to come into sight.
As you can also see, the beach is not what you would call overpopulated, even if you are a devoted disciple of Paul Ehrlich. This trend continued, as I went down the beach and visited the new pier. I encountered few fishermen, one of them who hadn’t unpacked his gear and was leaning on the rail, taking his time finishing his Red Bull. A guy sweeping the pier at the shore end of the pier. A couple of people near him setting up a booth — for what, I couldn’t tell. An occasional walker like myself.
Almost everyone was quite cordial in offering a friendly “good morning,” although no one was seeking further conversational engagement. No one wished to break the spell of a beautiful new morning.
Since I would normally be sitting at the breakfast table at about this time doing a Dutch lesson on Duolingo, I thought, “We zijn de morgen mensen.”
We are the morning people.
Later, I would question myself on that. Dutch has the same problem as Spanish. The Dutch use “morgen” for both “morning” and “tomorrow.” As Spanish speakers do with “mañana.” When they wish to be precise, the Dutch have an alternative word for morning: ochtend. (I’m sure there’s some rule for when to say “morgen” and when “ochtend,” but Duolingo doesn’t teach rules.)
I later checked Google Translate. Sure enough, my we zijn de morgen mensen translates as “We are the morning people.” (Although maybe I should have formed a compound noun, morgenmensen.) So I felt good there. But if I do it the other way around, asking for the Dutch translation of that English statement, I get Wij zijn de ochtendmensen.
Oh, well. “We are the tomorrow people” sounds pretty cool, too. And I wanted to express my momentary sense of kinship with these few mensen who were up with me.
It was a nice walk, and as I write, this is still a beautiful morning…
At 11:37 a.m. Friday at the West Columbia Community Center. About 50 people behind us, too.
Finally.
I have voted. After what seems like 100 years of people yammering about nothing but this election, to a point way beyond weary disgust. (People talk about Kamala Harris having only 100 days to campaign. That’s more than enough, people.)
Anyway, it’s over. And as I’ve said before during these last four years since I voted early for the first time, can we just go ahead and count the votes and move on? Not one of us needs 11 more days of this hysteria.
Anyway, the line was fairly long outside the West Columbia Community Center. You can see above what it was like at at 11:37 a.m. At that point there were also 50 people behind my daughter and me in line (this wasn’t the first picture I took). But it moved pretty well. Going by my texts and other evidence, we were at the door of the building at 11:54. And we were completely done by a couple of minutes after noon, in spite of my usual obsessive slowness, checking and double-checking each step as I’m voting.
As we were leaving, and the lady was about to hand me an “I voted” sticker, I pulled out my phone. She reflexively started to tell me not to take pictures, but I explained, that no, I wanted to show her something. That was the photo below, of a friend’s 3-month-old after her parents voted at this same location yesterday.
I told the lady I wanted a sticker that would make me look THIS cute. She admired the picture, and gave me a sticker, but It didn’t work….
Russell Ott — who, as I’ve pretty clearly indicated, is the candidate I’m trying hardest to promote in this cycle — is in those last pressing days of a long, hard campaign, so I really appreciated that he stopped by to say hi this morning to some friends I wanted to meet him.
This is an updated — but I guess not all that updated — version of a familiar campaign trope: Shaking hands with the old guys sitting around on the benches around the courthouse.
When I said so this morning, Clark Surratt — that’s him at the right in the picture — nodded. As an old political reporter, he’d been there, too.
(I just paused for a moment to dig up some old images of what I was thinking of, from my first time on the road covering a statewide campaign, back in the summer of 1978. I couldn’t find a full print, or the negatives, but below you’ll see some blowups from a contact print sheet. I used to always make one of those when I developed a roll of Tri-X in those days…)
Anyway, I was glad to get Russell together with Clark, and with John Culp. That’s him in the middle. John is a retired Methodist minister, perhaps best known as the guy who started the Salkehatchie Summer Service program. He’s also my neighbor. Clark was my predecessor as governmental affairs editor of The State, back in the ’80s. Clark occasionally comments here. He and John are friends from back in their school days. They gather for these breakfasts frequently, and sometimes let me join them.
I had wanted them to meet Russell, and as it happened he had to be in this part of the district this morning for a Greater Cayce/West Columbia Chamber of Commerce meeting. So he joined us a bit before 7:30 at the Just Us Cafe in Cayce, then on to the Chamber before 8. I’m probably going to see him again this evening because he’s visiting my mother’s HOA meeting, and she wants to meet him. But he’ll only be there a few minutes before he has to charge off to a Lexington County Democratic Party meeting.
I know what that kind of schedule is like, and I don’t envy him. I don’t know if I could do today what I did out on the road with James and Mandy in 2018. In fact, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t. But Russell seems to be holding up pretty well. I’d say that shows it’s a young man’s game, but I watched Joe Biden moving like mad when he campaigned with us that same year, and he was amazing. Some people are just made for that. But eventually, of course, we all wind down…
As I said, Russell couldn’t stay long, but we had a good chat. Some of the news we shared (almost entirely political) was encouraging, some not so much, as we fly headlong through this home stretch.
I just hope he wins. He is just the right candidate to replace Nikki Setzler in this Senate district, and he will represent it effectively and with great dedication. Most of all, he’ll work hard to represent every single constituent, regardless of race, color, attitude or (gasp!) political party. And senators like that are too rare these days…
OK, let’s put away the tam and kilts, I’m apparently back to being a sassenach.
I just happened to look the other day, and Ancestry has again “updated” my personal ethnicity — which is something they think they can do. Of course, they cover themselves by calling it an “ethnicity estimate.” And their estimates keep swinging wildly this way and that. My European ancestors still lie in their graves, unmoving, but, my ancestry keeps skipping around.
Lately, they’ve been sure I’m mostly Scottish. That is to say, a huge plurality of my DNA bits: 47 percent, back in 2023. (The year before that, it was 53 percent!) Now, I’m down to 35 percent, and the largest percentage of me is from “England & Northwestern Europe.” That’s jumped from 27 percent to 43 percent — again, in one year.
How do they define “England & Northwestern Europe?” Well, that’s fuzzy. They created that category several years back, and on their map it looked like England plus the tiniest bit of France. That tiny bit sort of equated to greater Calais. Here’s how they depicted it in 2022:
See how the line loops over from England to take in the Pale of Calais?
You see England, Calais and I suppose the Channel Islands. Which I suppose makes some sense, because Channel Islanders are British subjects, and England ruled the Calais area for a couple of centuries (they called it “the Pale of Calais“), and were bound to have left some of their DNA lying around. You know how men are. But since that’s the case, why not just call people possessing such DNA “English” — or at least X percentage English?
Of course — this being the Ancestry universe — the category doesn’t show up that way now. On the map at the top of this post, only England is green now. But if you click for more details, you get … well, it looks like this:
Wow, that’s a huge proportion of Western Europe, minus the Iberian Peninsula.
See how the larger, lighter green area takes in — well, most of what I think of as western Europe? That’s nice and vague, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, I’m no longer Scandinavian at all, even though last year I was 7 percent from Sweden or from Denmark, and 1 percent Norwegian. And suddenly, I’m practically not Irish at all — which would have been a great shock to my grandmother, being a Bradley and proud of that heritage. Finally, for the first time ever, Ancestry finds that I am 3 percent Dutch. And Belgium shows up, but I don’t see a specific percentage.
How could these things be? Well, here’s a wildly unscientific theory: This new estimate was issued in July of this year, even though I just noticed it a few days back.
Where was in July? Let’s see… For about four days, I was in England — London, Canterbury and Dover. Then, after crossing the Channel, we spent a couple of nights in… Calais. On the way north, we spent two days in Ghent. Eventually, we spent more than a week in… Amsterdam. During that last week, we took a day trip down to Bruges.
So. At the very time they were setting out a new vision of where my ancestors were from, I was physically in the places to which they decided to shift my “estimate.” So they appear to be basing the whole reassessment on where I, personally, was at the time.
Yes, I know that makes no kind of practical, cause-and-effect sense. But my theory has this going for it: It’s more fully understandable than the explanation Ancestry provides:
How do we come up with your estimate?
To figure out your ancestral regions, we compare your DNA to a reference panel made up of DNA from groups of people who have deep roots in one region. We look at 1,001 sections of your DNA and assign each section to the ancestral region it looks most like. Then we turn those results into the percentages you see in your estimate. Your genetic link to these regions can go back hundreds of years or even more.
To me, that seems to raise at least as many questions as it answers. I could enumerate some of them, but this post is already long enough.
Wherever numbers go up, they track our July itinerary.
Excuse the archaic language from my beloved Patrick O’Brian novels, but I enjoy that way of saying that today marks 50 years of marriage to my true, original, and eternal beloved, Juanita!
It just means “congratulate us.” Even lubbers should know that.
It’s been quite a celebration, and it will continue through the day. But it’s not just today. We’ve been celebrating since July 10. We have celebrated in England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. We came back, and almost immediately ran off to the beach for a few days with the whole family — or most of it. In between those things, I crammed in what little paid work I could. At the moment, I’m sitting in an AirBnB that our kids rented at Lake Murray for today’s family party. The two of us spent the night here, and we’re waiting for the first of the kids and grandkids to arrive in the next hour or so, which is why I have a few minutes to send you this.
I still haven’t gone through email from July. I tell you that so you know why I haven’t been blogging.
Anyway, I’m going to go in a minute, because even though the kids are in charge of this, there are things to do. I don’t have time to tell you of my love for my wife — which would take something like Proust’s magnum opus. I’ll just note the obvious: longevity speaks to commitment, and commitment like that comes from the heart. I cherish every moment of it.
Gotta run. The picture at the top was taken on our wedding day. Juanita’s maid of honor had driven us from the reception to the parking lot of her mother’s condo, which is where we had parked the actual car that we were taking on our honeymoon from Memphis to the Grand Strand. We did this to keep Juanita’s four brothers from “decorating” it. It worked, which was good, because that was a long way to drive covered in shaving cream or whatever. Anyway, the version you see above was one in which I dropped out the background in Photoshop and added hearts to turn it into a Valentine a few years ago. Yeah, I know I look like a goof. It was the ’70s.
As we approached JFK on our return, I wondered why a guy can’t take a little time off from the madness down there…
What, a guy can’t go spend two or three weeks traveling abroad without the whole country going stark, raving mad behind his back?
Apparently not.
I’ll write about the trip later. I’d rather write about that, because the topic is more pleasant, and it interests me more. But this is sorta kinda a political blog, or was. Frankly, I’m less and less interested in that stuff every day, because politics has gotten so insufferably stupid. But most of the craziness back in the States had to do with presidential politics, and that seems to be all that occupies the country’s collective hivemind in years bearing numbers that can be divided into whole numbers by four — no matter what’s going on in Ukraine, or Israel, or China. Or Venezuela, for that matter.
So let me try to get it all out of the way, and once we’re caught up, we’ll move on to other matters.
Oh, one other thing — the years numbered as I described are also known as “Olympiads.” And that was going on, too, during our travels. I was reminded vaguely of it when we turned on a TV in our waterfront room in Calais (I think that was the only time we touched a boob tube during the trip), and saw apparently unending coverage of some event having to do with the Olympics. The arrival of the torch in Paris or something. Huge crowds in the streets and uninteresting popular music performed on an outdoor stage. Which, we recalled, was why we had decided to avoid Paris on this trip. (I mean because of the crowds, not so much the blah pop music.)
“La grand soiree” goes on and on about “la flamme olympique.” Which was why we were avoiding Paris…
But onto the politics. Now mind you, we’re not talking “politics” as the word was used during the first 60 or so years of my life. You know, relatively sane candidates vying seriously for serious offices by offering their credentials and their character to a discerning electorate. It’s a far weirder thing now. But you know that already. Social media, and all that. So on with it…
Trump weirdness goes into overdrive
Let’s take it in chronological order. Nothing back home intruded upon my vacationing consciousness while we were in London. But then in Canterbury, just as I we were trying to drop off to sleep (it being five hours later than here), the news popped that someone had taken a shot at Donald Trump, clipping his right ear. Which, you know, was like all we needed. I turned off audible notifications on my phone and iPad, and being extremely tired — as tired as if we’d walked all the way there with Chaucer’s pilgrims — went to sleep.
That didn’t mean it would leave me alone over the next couple of days. I kept seeing this kind of stuff:
I found out that kid with the rifle, who couldn’t hit his target squarely despite being given minutes to aim in an ideal sniper’s position — but tragically managed to kill an innocent bystander, and seriously wound others — was also dead himself. I guess that’s the way it goes with deadly weapons fired from four to five hundred feet by someone who never received Marine training….
Oh, hang on — don’t get the impression I wanted him to kill Trump. No way. Total nightmare scenario, that. Worst thing that could have happened. Things went plenty crazy enough without that. Meanwhile, we were hearing how much the whole thing would help Trump get elected. Which I suppose we should expect, since “sympathy voting” is an old tradition. Voters in general are easily swayed by emotion, that goes especially for voters who might be susceptible to voting for this guy.
Where we were, the usual response tended to be “those crazy Americans and their guns,” from a column my wife read in Le Monde to the African Uber driver who took us across Amsterdam several days later. (We’d left England, and were not subjected to The Guardian, which adores that line of discussion.) We could ignore Le Monde (I could especially, since I don’t do Paris talk), but we felt we had to be polite to the driver — he was a very nice, intelligent guy — so we said things like, “Yes, you have a point, and it’s hard to explain, and no one knows what to do about it,” while thinking, Can we talk about windmills or something?…
That mass of crazy sort of blotted out our awareness of the GOP Convention over the next few days, although at one point I did stop to think, wasn’t he supposed to be sentenced by now? Wasn’t the sentencing date just before the convention? I even looked that up briefly, and saw an explanation having something to do with the recent Supreme Court decision, which made no sense, and I moved on. Fortunately, I had lots to distract me…
Wow, this post is taking some time, innit? That’s why I hadn’t written it yet. But to move on…
Joe drops out
Well, I had sort of expected this to happen before I got back. The pressure bearing down on my main man Joe, no matter what he did or said, was reaching a level that no one could withstand. Not even the kind of guy who would step up to save his country — and knew how — despite being at an age when he had served enough, and richly deserved to stay at home and enjoy his grandchildren.
But people weren’t interested in that anymore, if they ever had been. They were too busy twitching in response to things that mattered more to them than the unavoidable fact that a qualified alternative hadn’t emerged in 2024 any more than it did in 2020. And Kamala Harris, who would be the obvious replacement at this date, had been about halfway back in that pack of 2020 also-rans, in terms of qualification for our highest office.
Y’all know very well what my position was: The country, and the world, needed him to stay in office. Not that it would have been good for him — it was the worst possible thing for him personally, and I’ve felt guilty for years for my willingness to exploit his willingness to put himself through it. But Americans, and the rest of the world, needed him to keep his hand on the tiller. Because there was no one else.
It might help you to understand my long-held position if you reflect that my mind doesn’t center around such questions as “Who can win the election?” For me, the question was “Who should win the election?” Of course, you need someone who both should, and can. That’s the trick, and Joe knows it as well as anyone. Which was why he dropped out.
Which means we now ask ourselves other questions… but I’m going to have to take a break and do some paying work, or none will get done today. I’ll try to get back and finish this before the day is over, because I really want to put this stuff in my rear-view mirror…
…OK, I’m back, and now I want to correct what I just said. We don’t need to ask ourselves any questions at all, old or new. The world may be nuts now, but it’s a lot simpler.
Now, the choice is between Donald Trump and… somebody else. Kamala Harris, with close to zero experience that applies to the job of president, is a bit of an unknown quantity. But that’s OK, because it clearly brings us to a simple point. I’ve often said that anyone would be better than Donald Trump. Kamala Harris doesn’t quite qualify as “someone chosen at random off the street,” but she shares a characteristic with that person — I don’t know anything bad about her. She’s basically a neutral character in this situation.
Well, I do know one bad thing — the way she stabbed Joe in the back in that first debate in 2020. Major cheap shot. But Joe forgave her, so I feel obliged to do the same.
So, no bad things (maybe you know some bad things about her, but I don’t). And she’s running against a guy with more bad qualities than anyone who has ever reached this point in American politics.
So there’s nothing to think about. You vote for Kamala, and you hope she keeps Joe’s team in place — people like Anthony Blinken and Merrill Garland. People who know the job. That way, there’s a chance for things to be OK.
Whereas, with the other guy, nothing — at home or abroad, on any level — will be OK.
So there’s not a lot to discuss. Vote for Kamala.
To be more encouraging…
That’s not sounding like a really enthusiastic endorsement, I realize. Let me try to offer something better.
Back before we headed to London, some smart, thoughtful people — not just the freakout crowd, or the people who never liked Joe anyway, like the Bernie Bros and the editorial board of the NYT — were starting to suggest that maybe someone else could take Joe’s place, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Sometime way back on July 5 — a few days before we left the country — he did a podcast titled, “Is Kamala Harris Underrated?” This being based on the assumption among smart, thoughtful observers that she hadn’t shown us much yet. But he suggested that now that we’re in this fix of the abundantly qualified and accomplished incumbent’s numbers plummeting, maybe she possessed qualities that made her better than we thought. Among other things, he said:
There are ways in which Harris seems perfectly suited for this moment. She’s a former prosecutor who would be running against a convicted criminal. She’s the administration’s best messenger on abortion by far, running in the aftermath of Dobbs. She’s a Black woman with a tough on crime background, running at a moment when crime and disorder have been big issues in American politics.
And unlike Joe Biden, who I think has very little room to improve from here, the American people don’t really know Harris. The opportunity for her to make a different impression if she was speaking for herself, rather than for the administration, is real. Now, that doesn’t mean she’d be able to pull that off. That’s a hard political job. But she’s a lot sharper in interviews and debates than I think people are now prepared for.
She has a résumé and some skills quite well-suited to this moment. It definitely doesn’t seem impossible that she could rise to the task. There is a reason she was considered so strong in 2019 and in 2020. Wouldn’t you want to see her debate Donald Trump?…
OK, that’s not a really ringing endorsement, either. But he said enough good things — or at least potentially good things — about her that I felt a little better about the situation as we prepared to take off. I felt like Joe might not be running when I got back, and I was glad I was going to miss those last days before that happened. And Klein made me feel like maybe things would be OK. At least, after January, Joe will finally get the time off that he has so richly earned. (About time he had a little Joe time.)
And so far, they have been pretty OK. She seems to have done OK with her first big test — picking a running mate. I’ll probably write more on that subject in coming days.
But I don’t think I’ll be writing as much about the presidential election as I might have otherwise. Maybe because it’s all so simple now. We’ll see. In any case, I look forward to writing about other things. And now that I’ve dealt with this stuff, I can go on and do that.
I don’t think it will be another month before you hear from me…
I’ll come back soon to tell you about our trip. Until then, enjoy the flowers…
One of the various newspapers to which I subscribe had a story this morning about people who have done an extraordinary job of sticking to ambitious resolutions. I can’t find that story now, but who cares about those slackers? At the moment, I’m more impressed at what I did.
In early May, I reported to you that, having dropped down to 167.9 pounds, I was at least theoretically eligible to wrestle Shute. That was nothing.
I’ve now dropped below 160, which was my goal all along. I thought it was kind of crazy when I first told my wife I was going to do that, late last year, and she probably thought so, too. I was in the low- mid-180s then, and sick and tired of all my pants being too tight, and having to buy new ones. At Christmas, I was wearing new pants with a 36-inch waist. Which was unprecedented.
Now, I’m back in my old 34s, and most of them are a bit loose. The looseness is OK — it’s way better than being tight, and I figure at some point I’ll relax discipline and put back on a few pounds. Almost anywhere between 160 and 170 seems like a comfortable, healthy weight. And entirely doable.
Speaking of relaxing discipline, I now know I can do that without disastrous results. I first got down to 159.9 on June 5, and was a bit lower on D-Day. But then, we spent last week down in the Tampa Bay area, and since I was traveling, I allowed myself to eat pretty much what I wanted. And with my routine disrupted, I only managed to achieve my usual daily goal of 10,000-plus steps once.
But I still only gained back a pound or so. I weighed in at 161.5 yesterday. But today… and here’s the good part… I was back down below 160. The photo above of my scale was taken this morning.
For anyone who cares, here’s how I did it:
Smaller portions, on smaller plates.
No going back for seconds.
No snacks of any kind at any time.
Walking at least 10,000 steps a day. Last month, my average was 12,000.
So, in other words, it wasn’t that hard. And I’m glad to see the new weight isn’t all that hard to maintain. I had been wondering.
I know it’s harder for other people. I was always a skinny guy, and when I was young, I lost noticeable weight any time I skipped a meal. The hard thing was gaining.
That has changed in recent years, and I found the way I felt last year kind of a drag. So I did something, something I had never tried to do before. And I’m pleased with how it turned out…
You know, the shtick about how I was a high school wrestler, and there’s only one really great high school wrestling movie, and it’s “Vision Quest,” yadda-yadda…
Well, this is sort of about that, but more about the fact that at least I’ve kept ONE of this year’s resolutions. Or rather, I’m more than halfway to achieving it, with less than half the year having passed. Here’s the resolution:
Lose weight. This still feels new to me, although as you know, I have tried before. It still feels new because I was a skinny kid, and continued the tradition for several decades after I grew up. When I was little, I was also almost always the shortest kid in the class. I got over that in high school, reaching my present moderate height of 5’11” and a fraction. Which was satisfactory (although an even 6 feet would have been more so). But talk about skinny… In my junior year, I was this height, but in the 115 class on the wrestling team. The following year, I was in the 132. Now I weigh in the vicinity (sometimes more, sometimes less) of 13 stone. In the 180s, that is. In the past, I’ve tried and failed to get down to 168. This time I’m going for 160. (That way, maybe I’ll get to 168.)
I’m proud to report that this morning, I broke the 168 barrier. See the image of the bathroom scale at right. Like Louden in the clip above, I, too, had to ditch my shorts — as I do every morning for weigh-in — but I found it unnecessary to blow all the air out of my lungs. So here we are. Ya ready, Shute?
It’s not 160, but I’m headed there. Which is pretty good for someone who weighed in the low 180s at the start of this thing.
And basically, I really just did it in the last month. I sorta kinda was losing weight there for the first few. I had managed to get too small for the 36-waist pants I’d bought at the end of 2023. I got a couple of pairs of 35s (which aren’t that easy to find), and they were sort of working, but then I kicked the project into gear…
It wasn’t that hard. I just went from simply avoiding seconds to fairly serious portion control on first helpings, plus zero snacks. And… while I kept up my 11,000 steps a day routine, I added ankle weights. That risks adding leg muscle and therefore weight, but it really ramps up the loss of fat. And waist reduction.
So now, the 35s are too big, and I’m back to the size I’ve worn for most of my adult life — 34. Just in time, too: All of my shorts are 34s, and it’s that time of year.
Since I had posted my resolutions, I figured I had a right to brag. A little. We’ll talk about those other resolutions another time.
No, I won’t read this or thousands of others. But it still takes time to glance over them and delete en masse…
I’m getting close to cleaning out my personal email once again. By “close,” I mean I succeeded in going through everything that comes in under the “Primary” tab on my Gmail IN box. Right now, I’m working on the 2,500 that still remained today under “Promotions” (which is much easier, since I delete almost everything — I’ve gotten it down under 2,000 in just a few minutes). I haven’t yet looked at the 238 I have under “Social” (doesn’t sound like much, but I have to look at quite a few of those individually).
But I’m taking a moment now to share with you something I read in The New York Times this morning. It’s a column from Ezra Klein, whose podcasts I enjoy so much. Here’s the special link that’s supposed to allow me to share it. I don’t know whether that means I can share it here, or just with one person. Please try it and let me know if it works.
A few months ago, I euthanized that Gmail account. I have more than a million unread messages in my inbox. Most of what’s there is junk. But not all of it. I was missing too much that I needed to see. Search could not save me. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Google’s algorithms had begun failing me. What they thought was a priority and what I thought was a priority diverged. I set up an auto-responder telling anyone and everyone who emailed me that the address was dead….
On one level, that makes me feel so much better. “More than a million?” Now, I won’t feel such shame when I let mine get up around the 20,000 range, which I occasionally do. That is technically manageable. All I have to do is neglect work, reading, and of course blogging, for at least several days. Then I have a clean IN box, and everything starts piling up again as I resume my life.
I’m not ready to do what Ezra has done, however much I understand why he did it. He says he’s moved to an email provider called “Hey.” My eyes lit up at that, because he said “Hey assumes that only the people you want email from should be able to email you.” Sounds nice, but then he went on to describe numerous drawbacks to Hey.
But I applaud his courage in striking out in search of an alternative. And I think he should not beat up on himself this way:
I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself….
Lighten up, Ezra. You’re a busy man. You have a life. Actual humans (not the algorithms that send you most of those emails) are depending on you to do things in Meat World.
And if this were 1980 or 1814 or 44 BC or any other time — when you were only expected to answer an occasional letter from an actual acquaintance — you’d have no cause to issue such a mea culpa.
I’m sure the robots will have a time machine ready for us soon. Just kick back and wait…
I mean, it was easy in terms of not having to wait in a line, and the weather was nice, and the pollworkers were all helpful and professional. And I was unconflicted about it — despite my Hamlet routine the last few days — because I love to vote for Joe.
But in other senses…
I showed up at my usual voting place — for the Quail Hollow precinct — and was greeted by the sign you see at the end of the post. Which made me wonder, WTH, but when I got to Gray Collegiate, one of the pollworkers — who normally works the Saluda River site — explained to me that the party, trying to save money, had asked for the reduction in polling places, to save money.
The arrows were helpful, since I’d never been here before…
OK that made sense, since I and everyone else knew the turnout today would be next to nothing, with Joe having no actual competition. (The weird thing, though, is what I heard later from another pollworker who works at another site across the county — she said the voting places are reduced for the Republican primary on the 24th as well. If that’s correct, THAT is going to be a mess, with all the Trumpistas out to crush Nikki’s bones to make their bread, and 90 percent of Democrats turning out to vote for Nikki. Yeah, I made up the 90 percent, but it feels like that.)
Almost everyone else in the place normally works my precinct, since they’re my neighbors. Everyone addressed me as Brad. And there was no point being cagey about what I was there to do, since all these folks knew me and are used to seeing my yardsigns and bumper stickers. So of course, I wasn’t. Cagey, I mean. Not that I ever am. In fact, I probably blathered more about it than was quite right, but it’s not like I was tying up busy people. I only noticed one other voter the whole time I was there.
I had no line to wait in, which was sweet. I went to my little minikiosk thingy (still haven’t learned a term for those things that are not booths), inserted the paper ballot, pressed the screen to vote for Joe, pressed again to check my vote, and pressed once more to print out the results.
Which is when everything went haywire. There were all these distorted images flashing on my screen, and eventually the screen went white. And there were no sounds of printing going on. So one of the workers had to open the machine and make sure nothing had printed, dig out the unmarked ballot, and give it to me to take to another machine.
So I got to vote twice! Of course, it only counted once, but I had the pleasure of doing it twice. Which was nice.
That will end soon enough. But I will continue to see it everywhere I look. I always have.
Do you? I’m curious whether this is a South Carolina native thing, or just a South Carolina resident thing. Or (and this seems less likely), do folks from other parts see the same shape?
This tendency is embedded pretty deep in me. My first memories of doing this are from my birthplace, Bennettsville. Behind my grandparents’ home, at the foot of the back steps, were some white flagstones. They gave an impression of being marble because of the color, but had a sort of hexagonal design. Not that they were shaped like hexagons like so many such stones you see. I mean there were these black lines etched across the surface in a honeycomb pattern, with each hexagon a little more than a square inch in size.
The overall shape of each stone was random, like the pieces of some larger slab that someone had broken up with a sledgehammer.
But one of them looked exactly like South Carolina. As a child, there was nothing random about that to me — of course it was shaped like that, I thought. I spent most of my school years elsewhere — in Virginia, New Jersey, Louisiana, Florida, Hawaii and South America. But that house was the one place I always returned to. It was home, or the closest thing I had to a home growing up. And the fact that one of the features of this house was this stone that was “randomly” shaped like South Carolina seemed to be something of cosmic significance.
I’d show you a picture of it, if I could go there and take one. But you can’t see it now. Decades ago, my uncle — who has lived in that house his entire life (he’s the opposite of me in that respect) — built a deck at the back door. I can’t remember whether the stone is just hidden away, or gone. Anyway, it’s no longer in evidence.
But still, since that one perception early in life, I’ve seen the shape everywhere else. In a stone, or a pancake that was carelessly (or extremely carefully) poured into the pan, or a torn piece of a roofing shingle. I’m not just talking about triangles. I’m talking about triangles that manage to imitate the less regular border with North Carolina. Triangles that look intentional.
And it always seems significant to me, in a fundamental, subrational way. Like someone has put it there as a message or something.
I don’t always take pictures when I see one. But the other day on one of my walks around the neighborhood, I saw the road cracks you see above. I don’t know why I’d never noticed the pattern before. Maybe the cracks were new. Anyway, this time, I shot a picture.
Here’s how it looked, up on the lift at the muffler place.
Or at least, I couldn’t. I certainly wasn’t trying to when I did.
Last week, when we were hurrying about to go to the beach for a few days, I noticed that my old truck’s bed had a lot of water standing in it. I generally park it off to the side of our driveway under some trees, and the way the pine-needle-covered surface slopes, the water couldn’t escape.
So I backed it out to let it drain onto the driveway, which slopes the other way.
Then I had a bright idea (watch out for these, by the way). I decided to back the truck into its usual position, so if it rained, the water would drain out.
The idea was simple enough, but delicate to execute, because it involves slightly tricky maneuvering to avoid backing into a couple of trees and not running over some azalea bushes. But I was careful, very careful, with most of my attention focused on the trees.
Suddenly, I heard this grinding, wrenching sound that I didn’t understand — I was still a foot and a half from the nearest tree. Whatever it was, I couldn’t back up any further. I decided I would pull forward away from it before changing my angle and backing up again.
But I couldn’t pull forward, either. It was like some giant, supernatural hand had a grip on the truck. And each careful attempt to move either way produced slight noises that suggested I would hear huge noises again soon if I gave it more gas.
So I turned off the truck, got out, and peered under the bed from the rear. I saw the tailpipe you see in the photo above, bent almost double. I had backed over a stump of a pine we had removed sometime back.
This stump had not figured into my calculations, because it rose only about four inches above the ground immediately surrounding it. I should have cleared it easily, and would have on a level surface. But back here in the trees, there was sort of a dip in the ground, and my rear tires were in that dip. So the stump had easily bent the pipe into the shape you see.
But that’s not the really genius, amazing part of what I did. With its new shape — which I would describe as a sort of fishhook, or maybe grappling hook — my tailpipe had dug into the stump to a surprisingly firm degree, which was why the truck was going nowhere.
Nothing I could do right then. So I drove away to the beach — in a different vehicle, of course — with a troubled mind. I had a plan, but I couldn’t execute it right then.
Several days later, when we were back and both my sons were at the house, I got them to lift up on the bed slightly — a millimeter or two would do — and I drove off the stump easily.
The next day I drove off to buy a tailpipe and a new muffler, since the old one had suffered damage in the incident. Cost me a little over two hundred bucks. Happy New Year.
Anyway, I’m still sort of marveling at what I did.
Today, I was going to work on that stump with chainsaw and ax and see how close I can get it down to ground level. But it’s raining today. And I suppose the truck bed is filling back up…
See how low that stump is? You can hardly see it for the pine straw. I was worried about the TREE behind it…
I’m not shooting to getting back to THIS skinny, but this gives you the idea…
OK, so, these things don’t usually go so well, but here goes. Fortunately, most of them don’t require much typing, because I can refer you to when I made the same ones in years past. But I’ll start with something a little different:
Lose weight. This still feels new to me, although as you know, I have tried before. It still feels new because I was a skinny kid, and continued the tradition for several decades after I grew up. When I was little, I was also almost always the shortest kid in the class. I got over that in high school, reaching my present moderate height of 5’11” and a fraction. Which was satisfactory (although an even 6 feet would have been more so). But talk about skinny… In my junior year, I was this height, but in the 115 class on the wrestling team. The following year, I was in the 132. Now I weigh in the vicinity (sometimes more, sometimes less) of 13 stone. In the 180s, that is. In the past, I’ve tried and failed to get down to 168. This time I’m going for 160. (That way, maybe I’ll get to 168.)
Eat better. Not just to lose weight, but to be healthier. I haven’t decided whether to go back to the paleo diet, but I’m going to cut out junk — once I get done with the stuff from my stocking. Don’t want to insult Santa.
Meet my step goals EVERY month.I mentioned that it took several days of heavy beach walking to make it in December. And I made it. I will this month, too — then take it from there. What’s the goal? An average of 10,000 steps a day. Back before the stroke, I was doing better than that. But now, 10k looks good. And I haven’t been hitting it consistently enough.
REALLY read more books. Yeah, that was THE resolution last year. And I did a little better. For instance, back then I mentioned starting le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies. I finished, and it was wonderful. But if you do read it, first go back and read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — if you haven’t read them already. It’s a look back at things that were going on at the same time as those books, and it contains huge spoilers. I also got into Candice Millard, reading her Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, and Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill. Both excellent. And I got her The River of Doubt among several other books for Christmas. And I’m coming off a success. I just finished (last night) reading The Scarlet Letter finally. One of my twin granddaughters is reading it in school, and I want to discuss it with her. The other twin is reading Moby Dick, so now I’m going back to finally finish reading that. Overall, I think I’ll make the goal a book a week. We’ll see.
Blog more, and enjoy it more. That means posting more stuff, and spending less of the tiny amount of time I have dealing with civility problems. For starters, I’m just not going to approve anything I see as problematic — thereby forcing me to spend more time responding and explaining. Maybe I’ll do away with comments altogether — probably not, but that’s on the table. In any case, I intend to enjoy it more. We’ll see how that goes…
That’s enough. How about you?
Oh, and to fulfill the promise the headline hinted at…
Just got back from the beach a couple of hours ago. Sorry I haven’t posted. I’ve been busy, you’ve been busy. You know how it is.
I’ll just try to catch up with some pictures, starting a couple or so days before Christmas…
Did you check out the big sale in the last few days of Barnes & Noble at Richland Fashion Mall? This was taken three days before Santa came.
Note that I am standing with my back almost to the opposite side of the store from the cash registers, and the line in front of me extends all the way to the registers. And I’m not even at the back of the line. I waited in the queue while my wife continued browsing. We came away with a dozen or so books, marked down by 50 or even 75 percent. One was for me — something I never got around to reading in school (A Separate Peace). The rest were gifts…
On the next day, Saturday, my middle daughter and I decided to take a last-minute swing through Five Points. It was the first time I’d spent much time roaming around there since the Götterdämmerung — the closing of Yesterday’s. I also had occasion to mourn the missing Starbucks, and my daughter and I had to help a man from Cayce find another musical instrument store when he was disappointed to find Pecknel’s closed as well. But Papa Jazz was still there, as was Loose Lucy’s!
Here’s the store!
And here’s persistent proprietor Don McAllister, who reports that he’s had his best year ever! He and I chatted nostalgically for awhile about retired local leaders such as Duncan McCrae and Debbie McDaniel, and the late lamented hero Jack Van Loan. And I learned a shocking thing: Don himself is 12 years younger than I am! I thought he’d been running this store forever…
OK, now we’ll skip over Christmas, because that’s all personal family pics. We went to the beach Wednesday…
I did a lot of walking — managed to catch up on my steps for the month so I didn’t even have to walk today to meet my goal. And on my first morning I was surprised to find this interesting rose on someone’s front fence. Yes, three days after Christmas. We are living in weird times. Not that I’m any expert on when flowers are supposed to be out. In fact, I’m only saying this is a rose because of the leaves and the thorns. I’m sure it would smell as sweet by another name…
Later that same day, the 28th, my wife and I took a longer stroll on the beach, and found more cool bits of nature than we would have found amid the crowds in August. I’ve seen starfish there before, of course, but this is the first time I’ve spotted a sea urchin that still had some spines on it. I used to see live ones at low tide on the Pacific coast of South America when I was a kid, but this was my first one in South Carolina, I think…
Back here in the Midlands, I often marvel at grown men out walking wearing winter coats over short pants. This kid had them beat. A jacket and a toque… with pants rolled up so he could wade barefoot in the winter brine…
We found quite a few beautiful, fully intact nice shells that we had to put back in the water because when you turned them over the critters were apparently still living in them — such as the one above…
We ran across an interesting confrontation between two avian species. (Click on it to see it better; I left it big.) Note the way the gang of gulls on the left is glaring as one at the pigeons, who are doing their best to ignore the gulls. Obviously, the gulls have a strong case on their side. I mean, it’s their turf, right?…
Alas, this magnificent crab — from port to starboard, he was about a foot across — was no longer among the living. But still, an impressive find. No idea what caused his (or her — I know even less about crabs than about flowers) demise…
Later that same day, I went to check, and Murrells Inlet was still there, with a pelican presiding…
That was a pretty full day of walking and shooting pictures. I thought this one I took that night was pretty good, for a phone camera….
And then, fairly early the next morning, I went for a similar composition, only of a bridge across a freshwater pond, rather than the ocean. Yeah, the moon and the sun kind of blew out on both of them, but I like them…
On Saturday, I made a significant archaeological find on the beach. This is the first sand castle I’ve discovered that the builder actually used stone as a significant part of its construction. Still, I see no evidence of use of tools…
Finally, later that day, we were walking back a block or two off the beach when my wife spotted this flag in the gutter below it. (A bit of unconscious political commentary on the state of the nation?) Since it was nylon and in good shape — it seemed to have simply blown off its staff — I went around to a couple of nearby houses to see if anyone would claim it. (Rather than, you know, burning it as I heard we should do with flags that touch the ground when I was a kid.) When no one did, I clipped it securely to the tree, hoping the owner would more easily find it…
That’s all. No actual commentary. Just, I’m back and hoping we all have a fine 2024…
I got a couple of ideas out of this week’s Matter of Opinion podcast from the NYT. I’ll write about the other later when I have more time, but at the moment I’ll just share this little interlude where they asked kids (ranging in age from about 17 to a vague “under 30”) to call in with their first political memories:
And we’re back. So we have something else up our sleeve this week, in lieu of a Hot Cold. We recently asked our younger listeners to send in their political awakenings. So let’s take a listen now….
And the callers weighed in with their thoughts on recent events (one first took note of the political world on Jan. 6, 2021) that to them seem to have happened quite some time ago.
Which got me to thinking back a bit further, although I wish they hadn’t used the word “awakenings.” It has a disturbing flavor of ideological orthodoxy, like asking “When did you get your mind right?” I would simply have asked them to recount their “first awareness,” or simply first memory, of politics. That interests me more.
What is yours? Mine was from 1960, at more or less the very moment when I reached the age of 7. I’ve told it here before, but can’t find it at the moment, so I’ll just tell it again. I watched the presidential debates, and I decided I was for Nixon. That was based on my immature assessment of what I perceived as Kennedy’s aggressive tone on the subject of foreign policy. I don’t recall now what he said about the Soviets, but he sounded a lot more like a guy willing to go to war. And not a cold one. Of course, he may have said nothing of the kind. But that’s the way I heard it.
Thinking back on the impression now, I assume — if I heard it right — he was trying to sound that way because he was very young and widely regarded as inexperienced in comparison to the vice president. Maybe he was pushing the tough talk a bit in an effort to create a visceral impression of being a strong leader. But I didn’t know about things like that. I just knew my father was a naval officer, and Kennedy sounded more like a guy who would send my Daddy off to war.
I was quite serious about it, and took the election result hard, and rather, well, childishly. My mother watched Kennedy’s inauguration on the black-and-white in our Woodbury, N.J., apartment, and I protested loudly that I wanted her to change the station to something else (not that there would have been anything else at that moment). She ignored my requests, so in protest I hid behind a chair where I couldn’t see the screen. My mother told me to stop being ridiculous, but I persisted. Basically, I acted like a Trump supporter, although I didn’t storm the U.S. Capitol.
Anyway, I got over it, just not that day.
Speaking of my Dad, his first political memory was of his own father arguing loudly with a neighbor out on the sidewalk in front of the family home in Kensington, Md. The subject? FDR. The neighbor thought he was great, and I gather from his vehemence (which embarrassed my grandmother and caused her to call out to tell my grandpa to stop and come into the house) that he thought Roosevelt would be the ruination of the country. I’m guessing there, because my Dad was too young to understand and couldn’t explain it to me. I’m guess this was early in FDR’s time in office, so… maybe mid-30s. My Dad was born at the end of 1928.
Just thought I’d mention this, in case any of y’all are purchasing agents for any retail stores operating in the Columbia area.
To help you plan ahead to next year.
I had a lot of things to do today, but my daughter was going to Walmart. I wanted to go with her, despite the workload, but I simply asked her to please, if they had any left, get me some of the above-pictured product: Brach’s Mellowcreme Pumpkins. And if they did, to get two bags.
This was an urgent request, because we only have three days left before any that are left disappear, to make room for the Christmas candy. I’ve mentioned this problem before.
And I haven’t found any in the last few days.
You’re probably thinking (if you’re still with me), Oh, those are all over the place! I see them everywhere I go…
No, you don’t. You may see bags that look somewhat like that, but those contain candy corn. There are millions of bags of that within a few miles of my house. I don’t know why. Do you like candy corn? Does anybody you know like candy corn? I doubt it. Because way back in August, when all this stuff appears at Walmart, there are plenty of pumpkins, and of course I always think (fool that I am), Oh, Halloween is months away! I’ve got plenty of time! So I maybe buy a bag when I’m there, but I fail to stock up.
Then, about this time of the season, I start getting panicky. And the Walmarts start running out of the good stuff, and only have candy corn. Well, and those bags of stuff called “Autumn Mix” — which are, just eyeballing the bags, maybe 20 percent pumpkin by mass. The rest is candy corn of various colors.
Something else you might be thinking at this point: Those pumpkins look like they’re made from the same stuff as candy corn, so don’t they taste a lot alike? Maybe they do. But more than a half-century ago, I did extensive research on this point. And I decided very early in life that I did not like candy corn. And from the time I was a toddler, people offered me a lot of candy corn, because it was one of the few kinds of mass-produced Halloween candy to which I was not seriously allergic.
Then, when I was a little older, my grandmother sent us a care package — probably when we lived in Ecuador and didn’t have access to such things, but maybe later. And it contained a bag of the pumpkins for me, and they were fantastic! And when I was back in this country, I conducted a great deal more research, sometimes eating like half a bag, or a whole one.
Which is kind of like Cool Hand Luke eating 50 eggs (why 50? Because it seemed like a nice, round number). I mean, it’s practically suicidal. I’m always happy to share my pumpkins with my wife, because I love her and would give her anything, and… because she never eats more than one. Why? Because she is a sane person. I’ve written before that these things possess “a density approaching that of a black hole,” and most of that is sugar, corn syrup and honey. First, they’re practically indigestible. Second, two of them could probably cause a diabetic coma among some people.
So, you know, I could repeat the experiments of my youth, but I’m 70 now, and want to live a little longer. Far as I’m concerned the science is conclusive.
And others must agree. because they buy up the pumpkins and leave the candy corn. And it seems the people who stock the stores never, ever notice this. I guess they’re too busy buying 12-foot skeletons, or whatever.
I keep mentioning Walmart. That’s because, aside from the Walgreen’s in Five Points (which used to be an auto parts store, and before that a Winn-Dixie), I haven’t seen them anywhere this year but at Walmart.
And I was at the Walmart out on Harbison a couple of days ago, and they were out. Hence my request to my daughter, who was going to a different one.
And when she texted me to tell me the closest thing she had found was “the mixture of pumpkins and candy corn” — Autumn Mix — I started brooding, and wrote this in my head while running my other errands.
First the Phillies lose the pennant, and now this.
But… when I got home, and decided to console myself with the last pumpkin or two in the cabinet, I opened it and… there were two bags of pumpkins.
Happy ending! So, you know, never mind. But seriously, why doesn’t everybody stock these, and stock a lot more of them?
Three of these boxes — at the Walmart in Harbison — contain candy corn. The other is Autumn Mix. Typical…
I’ve said a lot of positive things about David Brooks over the years. I not only agree with the guy a lot, but I tend to wish I had written what he did. I feel like I should have written it. His thoughts just run that much in sync with my own.
I’ve never thought about why, but maybe this is why. Or part of why…
I’ve been enjoying this new app from The New York Times — NYT Audio. It’s particularly great for my walks around the neighborhood, a sort of supplement to NPR One.
My nursery school teacher told my parents, apparently, David doesn’t always play with the other kids. He just observes them, which was great for my life as a journalist, but maybe not great for having strong bonds and intimate connections…
Wow. I really, really identified with that.
Not that I didn’t play with the other children at that age. I did. But there was always that sort of theme in my childhood. Part of it was moving around all the time as a Navy brat. For awhile, I would observe this bunch of kids, and soon I’d move on and observe that bunch of kids, and so forth. And as much as I would enjoy their company, I wasn’t quite… one of them. Not quite.
And yeah, these are characteristics that lend themselves to the profession of journalism. In fact, I’ve noticed that it seems a lot of military brats end up in the trade, and I’ve always thought that characteristic had something to do with it. You know, the habit of observing a community of people rather than feeling fully a part of it.
I’ve also noticed that — it seemed to me (I’ve never tried to quantify it) — it seemed like more journalists were Jewish or Catholic than you would find in the surrounding population. In other words, they were used to looking at things in ways slightly different from the way the majority would. David Brooks isn’t a military brat, but he sorta-kinda fits in both of those other categories.
This tendency to be an observer rather than a participant can be problematic. When you share with other people something you have observed — particularly something outrageous, such as, say, having heard someone else say wildly racist things — they wonder what’s wrong with you that you didn’t react at the time. What did YOU do? they demand. And they have a point. They make me wonder, too.
But I still tend to look at the person asking that rather blankly. Because when confronted with something really wild and strange, I tend to simply observe more intently. I might even think, in frustration, I can’t take notes, however much I want to, without interfering with this phenomenon. Which I wouldn’t want to do, because it would change the nature of what was happening. And not necessarily for the better. Sure, it might make the person act differently, superficially in that moment. But I always want to know what he or she is really thinking.
Way back during my reporting days, I was conscious of that on the job. A lot of reporters feel at home in a press box, or otherwise labeled and sequestered. I never did, because I was conscious of the Observer Effect, which in one thing in physics, but in journalism could be stated as, If the newsmakers are aware that a reporter is present, they will act and speak differently, and the news will change. Sometimes, that can be a salutary thing. But if you really want to know what they’re thinking and doing, it is not.
Anyway, in recent years I have rethought this mode of being, as you have seen. And so has Brooks, and that is the larger point of his little recited essay. It’s not about him. It’s about the fact that just when he started trying to change and engage better with other people, he saw that people in the surrounding, observable world were getting more distant, less engaged and even more hostile toward each other.
Which caused him to resolve:
I’m going to double down on spending as much time as I can, as effectively I can, and seeing another person, in trying to understand their point of view, and trying to make them feel seen, heard, and understood…
The ending is sort of upbeat. On his effort to be more of a full human, “maybe I’ll give myself a B minus.”
Why did I write that post about time moving so much faster as we age? Well, I’ve been thinking lately about writing more often about that phenomenon. I mean about aging, not time. So that was an initial installment, I guess.
You can ignore them, if you prefer. I write posts such as this one mostly for my kids and grandkids, assuming the posts are still available if and when they wonder about these things. (Which may be a lot to assume.)
One thing that has put this stuff more on my mind lately is that a couple of weeks before I wrote that, I realized I had now outlived three of my four grandparents.
I had been anticipating this one. That’s because a couple of years back, I passed my maternal grandfather. That one sort of snuck up on me. I had long been used to the knowledge that I had outlived my maternal grandmother. She died when she was only 61. I was 15 at the time, so it was a lot of years before I realized how shockingly early that was.
At that point, I was shaken by the loss, but I also tended to think, Well, grandparents are really old, right? So I guess we have to accept that this might happen.
Then, in September 2021, it hit me that just a few days before, I had passed my Mom’s father as well. Both had died earlier than you would have expected, after medical incidents that one might normally expect to have gone much better than they did — especially today. Their deaths were far from inevitable, under the conditions. They did not “die of old age.”
To ease the formality… I called them “Nana” and “Pop,” and I was still a kid when we lost them. Their names were Nathalie Smith Pace and Walker Heyward Collins.
After I realized I had passed Pop, I checked the family tree and saw the date was not far off when I would pass my paternal grandfather, Gerald Harvey Warthen. He died on July 10, 1958, a couple of months short of his 70th birthday, when I was 4. (Yes, those grandparents were a good bit older than the other set. My Dad was the youngest of five.)
And now, I will reach the threescore-and-ten mark in less than… four weeks. So, another milestone.
I should point out that Granddad Warthen should have lived longer, too. He had lung cancer, which is not surprising when you see how many pictures we have of him with a cigarette, a cigar or a pipe. I was an accomplice in this. I remember him taking me on walks to a nearby shop and buying me candy cigarettes when he bought his real ones. I very much enjoyed them, but I would have much more enjoyed having my grandfather around while I was growing up.
My paternal Grandma, Mary Shiland Bradley, lived to the age of 95. That’s a high bar to reach for, and beyond most people’s expectations. Of course, my Dad lived to just short of turning 93, and my Mom is 92, and much healthier than Dad had been for several years at that age.
No sense making predictions, though. I could check out before I finish this post. If you’re reading it, though, I guess I didn’t.
But I am trying, in fits and starts, to make better use of each day. That’s a struggle for me, as it was when I was in my 20s. I am known to my intimates as being bad at quite a few things, and one of them is time management…
Before I actually get back to work after finally posting Paul’s column, a few words as to why I haven’t been posting.
Mainly, it’s been three things, although there’s plenty of other stuff going on:
I’ve been trying to rearrange my home office, which mainly has consisted of building new bookshelves of my own rather unusual, rustic design (made mostly with treated wood left over from the revamp of our deck a couple of years ago, which my wife has been eager to see me use or take to the dump). That, and cleaning out the big closet in the same room, space that could be much better used. This project alone, which is still in progress, would have been enough to keep any normal person from blogging.
In the middle of all that, we had new windows installed in our house. So I had to rearrange the wreckage in the office so the workmen could get to the windows, and do the same in varying degrees with furniture all over the house. The biggest part was taking down all the louvered wooden shutter-type blinds in most of the windows. The windows are in, and since that happened last Wednesday, we’ve been installing curtains to replace the blinds, which went to the Habitat ReStore.
And in the middle of those things, after a week in which hours were wasted in struggling to reconnect to our wifi, we switched internet providers. This has been fubar in most respects since the start. We’re on I think our fourth new router. The second was FedExed to us to replace the faulty first one. When that one didn’t work (something Spectrum was able to confirm, again, remotely), an increasingly frustrated repair guy spending a couple of hours installing a third one, and, when that didn’t work either, a fourth one. Since then, part of every day has been spent reestablishing contact with one or more of the dozen or so devices in our home that depend on wifi. I’m down to one that still isn’t working, and I’m trying to get in touch with the device’s manufacturer.
And lots of other stuff. For instance, this morning we were on the phone with our old internet service provider to make sure we knew how to send back their equipment so we don’t have to pay some outrageous sum for it.
Of course, there have been good things about all this. One was that, when I was moving some books onto one of those new bookcases, an envelope fell out of one of the books, and I opened it and found these two pictures, above and below.
Well, y’all know how much I liked John McCain, so I was glad to find them. I didn’t know any pictures of him and me together existed, much less that I had a couple of prints of them.
Obviously, because of the setting — The State‘s editorial boardroom — this is before or after an interview with the board. Probably an endorsement interview, given some of the people I see in the room. The question was, 2000 or 2008?
Then, in looking closely at the one below, I saw it was 2000, just before South Carolina’s Republican primary. You may notice that in both pictures, you can barely see that there are people standing directly behind both McCain and me, like shadows, making it look like our heads and shoulders are kind of doubled around the edges. But in the one below, the figure behind McCain is emerging slightly from full eclipse, and I can see that it’s Fred Mott — who was my publisher in 2000, but long gone in 2008.
Ironically, Fred is the reason Sen. McCain didn’t get our endorsement that year. Fred wanted to back George W. Bush. The fateful decision was made in a board meeting immediately after this interview. We normally worked by consensus, but this time, being so divided, we actually took a counted vote. It was something of a mess, since some in the room (my good friend Robert Ariail, for instance) weren’t technically members of the board under normal circumstances. But anyway, it was a 50-50 split. And I could see no graceful way to dispute the idea that in a 50-split, the publisher’s side wins.
Let me be clear — Fred is a great guy, for whom I have great respect. He was just wrong this time. If you want to know the reasons why, I’ll let you know if I also find the 4,000-word memo I sent him several days before this meeting. Anyway, I lost that one, but we endorsed McCain in 2008.
Anyway, I’m glad to have these pictures. Now, back to work…
