Category Archives: Personal

The beauty of knowing where you are

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One nice thing about ebooks is that you can keep them always handy.

I don’t have a temporary relationship with books. I think public libraries are very wonderful things, essential community assets, but I don’t often borrow books from them. If I read a book, and enjoy it or learn something from it or both, I don’t want to give it back. I want to have it handy to refer to, always.

This has led to a good bit of bookshelf-building on my part, but also a gradual turn toward downloading some of my favorite books to my iPad, using the Kindle and iBooks apps. This way, I always have a few of my favorites with me, because that’s where my iPad stays. This enables me to indulge, in quiet moments, my great weakness — rereading books I love. It’s something I can do for five or ten minutes, then move on to something else. And I almost always gain something that I didn’t fully get before.

This morning, at breakfast, it was one I’ve mentioned before — Rose, by Martin Cruz Smith. I’ve praised it before, said some of the same things before, but I promise I’m making my way to a different point today. Above is one of the passages I read this morning. It’s a good reminder of why I’m so into this book. Of course, this has been a forte of Smith’s work ever since Gorky Park. As I’ve said before, of both him and Patrick O’Brian, they are “capable, to an extent I’ve never seen anywhere else, to take their readers to an alien place and time and make them feel like they are really there.”

That passage above helps me to connect closely to Blair with a certain fondness (despite his extremely off-putting personality), because while I lack his skills as a mining engineer and explorer, I have always loved maps myself — even when studying one involved pulling it out of the glove compartment, and then enduring the challenge of trying to fold it back properly when I was done. Now, of course, Google Maps and Google Earth are always right there, the apps ready for reference as I read a book, or serving as a constant guide on my car’s dashboard. Blair would have loved interactive maps.

Today, though, I’m really focusing on something about entirely familiar places rather than exotic ones — although places I wish I knew as well as I know 19th-century Wigan from Smith, and Port Mahon circa 1800 from O’Brian. This is inspired by a paragraph that appears a bit after the one posted above:

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That immediately brings to mind a place where I have have actually been: Wichita, KS, which is where I lived and worked before returning to South Carolina. It’s a city like Columbia in some superficially impressive ways. For instance, it’s located at, and sprawls across, the confluence of two rivers, the Arkansas and Little Arkansas (pronounce “ar-KANSAS,” not “arkansaw”). The place where the rivers came together to form one had been an important gathering point for pow-wows between Indian tribes before the whites arrived. A cultural center sits on the joining delta today. (I’ve witnessed a pow-wow there.)

Wichita is nothing like Wigan, except in this one respect: It is historically sharply divided, by class and culture, by the river at and below the confluence. The West side was like Smith’s miner side: When the city developed in the 19th century, that was where the stockyards, saloons and brothels waited eagerly to welcome exhausted, filthy cowboys who had driven their herds hundreds of miles to get them to the railhead. They had a lot of steam built up when they got there, and Wyatt Earp was among those lawmen trying to keep them in line until they left.

Across the river to the east were the respectable folk — the people who owned those stockyards, saloons and brothels — where they lived comfortable, proper lives with their families, insulated by the river from their rowdy source of income.

An ironic thing about that… we all know that newspaper editors are, or at least do their best to emulate, “liberal elites,” right? Just full of politically correct values. Well, one of the first things I learned about my fellow editors at that paper was that they all lived on the proper, safe, smug East side of the river, largely in a Shandon-like area called College Hill.

All of them but one, a guy named Tom Suchan. I liked Tom, naturally enough. He was a Catholic like me, and had four kids, as I soon would (my fourth was born there, my fifth not until we got here). And he lived as far West as possible while remaining in the city. Across the street from his house there was a wheat field, and nothing else visible beyond it for miles and miles of prairie.

The other editors gave him constant grief for being such an outcast, a wild man beyond the pale. Oh, they did it kiddingly, but I felt the jokes covered something of a real difference between him and them, one that reflected to his credit, in my book.

When I moved to Columbia in 1987, I immediately perceived a similar dynamic. When we had our daily editors’ meetings, I looked around at the dozen or so crowded around the table, and knew that most of them lived in Shandon (while I lived over here on the West side). But a starker difference was that all of them were alumni of USC (I had never encountered such a uniformity at a newspaper). Well, all but one. Tom Priddy (who ironically had almost the same job as Suchan, being over the photographers and artists at the paper) had gone to Clemson. No one ever let him forget — joshingly, of course — what a pariah that made him.

I don’t know where he lived while he was here. But the similarity in the situations was striking.

But there was an important difference. Although I know South Carolina overall so much better than I do Kansas, I can’t sum up the central narrative of Columbia nearly as well as I can that of Wichita. There, it was simple: Cows, the railroad, cowboys and the townspeople who lived off of them. It was hard to forget, with historical reminders such as that Indian cultural center, and the “Cowtown” attraction that was located, of course, on the western side.

I know lots of things about Columbia. By the way, when I use that name, I’m referring to the overall metro area, which is stunningly fragmented, legally and politically — two counties, about 10 separate municipalies, five school districts, and so forth. Wichita has one advantage over that. Despite the historic split, it’s all one city (except from some odd little conclaves similar to, say, Arcadia Lakes. It’s all in one county. And there’s one public school district (although my kids attended a parish school in the large, separate, Catholic system).

Consequently, it’s a community that finds it easier to get its act together. For instance, its riverfront areas were completely and beautifully developed long before I there. Progress has been made here, but it’s been fitful.

Of course, there’s that huge similarity in the Big Split between East and West. And I can give you all sorts of reasons why that alienation exists here. And it’s very long-standing. It has to do with why the first editor of The State was shot and killed by the lieutenant governor in broad daylight, in front of a cop, across Gervais Street from the State House in 1903 — and his lawyers got him office by obtaining a change of venue to across the river, where folks reckoned he had it coming.

But this post is already too long for me to elaborate. I know the division exists, and you know it exists. The difference is that I can’t explain it as simply and starkly as I can the split in Wichita. The causes are more complicated here on the Eastern Seaboard. There are things we know and could explain if we were willing to talk about them, and other things we have trouble fully wrapping our heads around.

I’d like to be able to do that. I’d like to be able to explain it — to myself, to my neighbors, and to outsiders — as clearly as I can explain Wichita (or at least, how it formed).

Can anyone recommend a book that treats this entire community in a way that makes that manageable? The author doesn’t have to be a Patrick O’Brian or a Martin Cruz Smith. Just someone who explains us and the place we live clearly, coherently, accessibly, and most of all accurately.

If y’all don’t know, I’ll check with friends at the libraries on both sides of the river. I don’t check out their books much, but I know what a valuable resource they are…

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Aren’t ALL dreams stress dreams?

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In some dreams, I’m trying to put out the paper on outdated technology like this, and strugglng to log into systems I used 40 years ago.

I have this vague memory from the psychology classes I took in college that Freud (or someone) described dreams as being about “wish fulfillment?”

Googling just now, I find that my memory was a bit off, but not entirely. And he explained, apparently, that sometimes your dreams had to be interpreted (I suppose by a guy with a couch) for us to see how they involved such satisfaciton. But explaining all that is not my point in this post, so I’m not going to break it down further. I’m just interested in asking this question: Do any dreams involve wish fulfillment?

Do yours ever involve that? I’ve read of people being disturbed because they are awakened from dreams that were so pleasant they hated for them to end. Well, good for them. I don’t have those, at least not in a long time.

Oh, occasionally I have one that might fulfill some people’s wishes, but I generally find something in them to worry about. I wrote about one of those back here.

But mostly, they’re just about stress. They’re not nightmares, not the kind of things where you wake up in a sweat and are afraid to go back to sleep. I occasionally had one of those when I was very young, but that was decades ago. No, these are just stressful, in a way that exceeds the stress levels of everyday life, but not by much. Mostly, they’re just irritating, something I could do without (as least I think so — perhaps they serve some purpose that eludes me, lacking the Freudian “interpretation”).

I’ve touched on this topic before, but I return to it now because I was particularly irritated last night, but it’s hard to describe why — beyond the fact that they woke me up repeatedly, and when I went back to sleep, I’d return to the same stupid dream (which didn’t have much plot, beyond having constant trouble performing a particularly silly task). That was unusual, and frankly I think it was drug-related. I’ve got a cold, and trying stave off chest congestion, I took something we had bought in Amsterdam when I had mild COVID during our Europe trip last year, because we couldn’t find the more familiar guaifenesin.

I’m not taking that again, at least not at night.

But that still leaves all those other, “normal,” every-night stress dreams.

So what am I talking about here? Well, there are several categories, most of them themes that I’ve visited many times:

  • One huge category involve riffing on the common dream that you’re in college, and it’s time for the final exam, and you’ve never been to the class, and you don’t dare ask anyone, so late in the game, where the class is. For me, these seem to be only a slight exaggeration of my first couple of years in college. But I hear almost everyone who’s been to college has them. And there are variations, such as: I’m at a conference that my work sent me to, and it’s the last night before i fly home, and it occurs to me that while I have socialized with the other attendees in the evenings, I haven’t been to a single work session.
  • This may occur more than any other sort — so often that I think my lack of imagination regarding regarding plot is worse than Hollywood’s. These are newspaper dreams, which is understandable. But I haven’t had a newspaper job in 16 years. I’m aware of that in the dream, but the plot twist is that I’ve been asked to come back (frequently to the most stressful paper I ever worked at, in Wichita) and do stuff I used to do. Specifically, I’ve been asked to work late nights or weekends, which means I’m entirely responsible for everything that happens. And things don’t go well. I get way behind on reading all the copy; baffling technical problems arise, etc. Routine stuff, but it’s all happening on the night I’m in charge, and I’ve still got to get the paper out, as always. Anyway, I know exactly where all this comes from; I just don’t know why I’m still having them.
  • Variations on details of those previous categories. For instance, it’s often the night before I have to return home from a trip, and my hotel room is unbelievably strewn with enough clothes to fill the Belk men’s department, and most are dirty, and I can’t figure out how to pack them. Or speaking of technical problems, some dreams are about nothing else: I need to look up something simple, that would be easy in waking life, but I can’t get to the right page on any device. Which is weird, because all my life I’ve loved technology, and helped my coworkers learn it. Knowing that makes it even more frustrating….

That last word might be more apropos than “stress.” I should refer to a lot of them as “frustration dreams.” But that doesn’t describe all of them, so I’ll stick to “stress” as a catchall.

I’m not looking for diagnosis, advice or a cure. I can live with these things; I’d just rather not.

And I’m wondering: Does everybody have these, all the time? If you have satisfying dreams about wonderful things, cheer me up by telling me about them. No, don’t. I might start having “envy” dreams…

Looking at the ‘good side’ of my college transcript

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My big finish in the summer of ’75…

You don’t want to see certain portions of my college transcript. Or rather, I don’t want you to see them.

I had what you might call a very slow start in higher education. When I left Hawaii to travel all the way to Columbia to attend USC, I thought I was ready, and had everything I needed. I was thinking about that in recent days as I heard from folks with young kids enduring the herculean mess of moving them into their dorms for this fall semester. My parents, who in any case were back in West Honolulu, didn’t have to help me move enough stuff to furnish a small house (which seems to be the fashion today) into the Honeycombs. I just had the three things I had brought with me on the plane: my Dad’s old overseas bag, my tabletop stereo and a box full of record albums.

But at 17, I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I thought. For instance (just to keep it simple) I initially thought one of the best things about being off at college was that nobody made me get up in the morning to go to class. Turns out that was one of the worst things for a guy like me, since the people who ran the classes still expected me to show up, and would hold me accountable when they handed out grades. Who knew? Nobody told me. The only thing I remember from my freshman orientation was when the guide taught us guys what it would take to make the ball atop the Maxcy monument spin. Some of you older guys no doubt know the answer, but they probably don’t teach that anymore at orientation. If they did, they’d get canceled.

Enough about USC, which I only attended for that one wreck of a semester. I want to reflect on Memphis State, or at least on the more positive aspects of my time there. This came up because I’ve been thinking lately about taking advantage of the senior deal on tuition to take a course or two at USC, and the Gamecocks want a transcript. Turns out that you can’t order a transcript from Memphis State anymore. You have to get it from a place called “the University of Memphis.” But I sent off for one a couple of days ago, and had it back in my email almost immediately.

It contained good news and bad news. The bad news was the lingering effect of the mess I’d made in Columbia. That was because I had crammed my schedule that one semester at USC with honors and upper-level courses, but (thank goodness) had taken them on a “credit/no credit” basis. The deal was that a “no-credit” didn’t count against my GPA. But out on the Tennessee frontier they’d never heard tell of such a thing, so Memphis State carried them as Fs, until I finally spoke to the right people and got it fixed. That gave me a chance to climb out of the hole.

But just a chance. Unfortunately, my climbing those first couple of years in Memphis was not what you’d call spectacular. Lots of Cs, and a couple of times worse than that. I was still, by habit, a slacker.

Dang. I promised in my headline to show you the good side, and I’m still dwelling on what went before. Well, here we go: the good bits…

Then I met my wife. That first semester that we were dating, I picked up one of her habits. She called it “studying.” I had heard of it — I even knew some people who did it — but I had never seen it as a needful thing back in high school, and had not changed my ways. But she did it like it was a normal thing, and since I was hanging out with her so much, I just fell into the same habit. I didn’t turn into a grind or anything, I just studied some.

The results were rather remarkable. I do recommend it to young people, if they can find the time. (And I should say that none of my grandchildren should ever emulate the shameful record of their grandfather earlier in his academic career.)

It took me awhile to get the hang of it, and the occasional C still cropped up in the first couple of semesters. But my last spring semester, and the crammed summer schedule I took on that last summer so I could graduate in August, showed the kind of work I should have been doing in Columbia back in 1971. You can see the part covering the summer above.

Sorry about that one B. My whole time since I had declared a journalism major I had been avoiding the two required editing courses taught by one L. Dupre Long. Mr. Long was the adviser to the lab newspaper The Statesman, which he ran with an iron fist. I never went near The Statesman until I was required to when I took those two courses under him. I had my existence over on the independent, relatively anarchic student paper, The Helmsman. We ran a student-drawn comic strip with a character named “El Depraved,” who was sort of a villain, or at least an object of ridicule. For some reason, this led at one point to my being invited to visit the office of the department chair, who gave me a stern talking-to, but probably not as stern as Leon (as Mr. Long’s friends called him) would have liked.

I took them both over the two summer terms, which were much shorter than regular semesters, thereby diminishing my suffering.

Anyway, the grading in the editing classes was highly subjective, and Leon just wasn’t going to give me an A in that first course. On the second one, he relented. But instead of posting it on the door of his office, he gave me the news in a face-to-face meeting that seemed to last hours, and it was mostly about how I was full of potential but too much a slacker to show it, and I sat there in agony because I knew that had once been true, but I also knew my work in his class could not be faulted, so I sat there nodding and thinking “Alright already! Just tell me the grade!”

Finally he came out with it, and it was an A, as you can see. That was the last grade I learned about before graduation, and it pulled my cumulative GPA to exactly 3.0. I walked out with the first B average I’d had in my entire college career, and in those days (before the grade inflation of the 21st century), that was enough to graduate cum laude.

But the programs for graduation had already been printed, so I never had any proof of it I could show to anyone until now. So I’m glad I got this transcript, because there it is.

Similarly, I had never declared a second major in history. But sometime toward the end of that last spring semester, I realized I had taken so many history electives that I was only six hours away from meeting the requirements of such a major. So I crammed two of them into the summer, one of them in the three-week mini session before the two summer sessions, which turned out to be one of my favorite courses ever. (“US SO IN HST TO 1865” on the transcript refers to “U.S. Social and Intellectual History to 1865.”)

I like to tell people that I majored in history, because let’s face it — journalism isn’t an academic subject. It’s a trade for literate people to engage in. You learn it working in a newsroom, not sitting in a classroom. And I want to seem at least somewhat educated. So I tell people I also majored in history, but I always explain that they would probably find no written proof of that anywhere.

I always say that because to me, one of the most amazing news stories you ever see — and you see it quite often — is about idiots who brag to the world, for instance, that they were Marines and received commendations for valor in the last war — when some aspect of that, or all of it, is a lie. And of course, the first reporter who checks it out discovers that and tells the whole world. It has always astounded me that anyone would be stupid enough to think he could get away with something like that. I would never do anything like that — not only because it’s wrong, but because I would expect to get caught.

But now, I don’t have to attach asterisks when I tell people about my history major, or my at-the-buzzer 3.0. Which is nice. I know neither is a major achievement, but I see them as better than nothing. Having done nothing at one point in my youth, I know.

This is great. I should have sent off for this transcript years ago…

The good news: I can see baseball again, LOTS of it!

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Baseball wasn’t just always there for me, it was always there for my family. That’s my grandfather squatting to the right in this picture. He had been the captain of the team at Washington and Lee, and after college he was always playing on multiple teams in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. He only worked for the Post Office so he could play on this team. You’ll notice that others on the team played for other teams as well — they wore the wrong uniforms on picture day, without the Post Office ‘P.O.’

When I was a kid, baseball was always there.

It didn’t matter my age or where I was. As a preschooler, I always had one of those skinny little wooden bats that were later outlawed by the worrywarts. I think it came with those old solid rubber balls that didn’t bounce much, but since my Dad was a tennis champion, there were always cans full of balls around the house that really traveled when you hit them. I loved that, although Ring Lardner, the enemy of the “lively ball,” would likely have harrumphed.

When we lived in Ecuador from the time I was 9 until I was 11 and a half, I missed out on a lot of critical time for developing basketball and American football skills (which I regretted when I started 7th grade back in this country, in New Orleans), but I didn’t lose ground on baseball. We played it — or at least softball, at recess — whenever were weren’t playing fútbol (which is what we used the school’s concrete basketball court for).

My one regret was that I didn’t get to play Little League (on account of my family always traveling during baseball season) until I was 15, my last year of eligibility for Senior Little League (in Tampa). And by that time, I just hadn’t had the practice trying to hit a ball that someone was deliberately trying to throw past me. The point of “pitching” in sandlot play had always been to let somebody hit the ball, and put it in play. I did manage on one occasion that year to break up a no-hitter in the fifth inning, with a solid base hit to the opposite field. I couldn’t have hit it to left or center, because the red-headed southpaw I was up against had the sort of fastball that nightmares are made of. But I got my single, and they took that pitcher out of the game. It was my one, brief moment of baseball glory.

After that, I stuck to slow-pitch softball — in college intramurals, with the Knights of Columbus team in Jackson, Tenn., and with the Cosmic Ha-Has, a self-deprecating name for the loosely organized team of journos from The State (mostly), sponsored by the now-defunct Mousetrap restaurant and bar. That was more my speed, in the literal sense.

Now, I’m at an age when I’m finally ready to enjoy my sport vicariously. I’m ready to watch the games on TV, the way my elders did when I was a kid. Back then, even though we seldom lived in a place with the three basic channels (and sometimes only one, and that barely visible), baseball was always on the tube. And it was free. But at that age, I considered it boring to watch other people play a game — I wanted to go out and play it myself. Oh, I watched it sometimes, but I wasted a lot of time not watching it, back when it was so easy to find. My parent, grandparents, uncles and such got full enjoyment from it, but I was probably out in the heat whacking at a tennis ball — or inside reading a book. I was a mixed-up kid, right?

And then I grew older, and started wanting to watch it all the time, and it was gone. Especially if you’re like me and long ago cut the cord to cable. (Not being a consumer of TV ‘news,” I had little use for live broadcasting, other than baseball, which was too seldom on offer). Suddenly, even if you still consider it the national pasttime (the pasttime of the country that I love, anyway) you could find no evidence of it by turning on the tube.

You’ve heard me complain about this multiple times on the blog, but not lately. Because now, I have access to more baseball that my elders ever dreamed of, and on a 4k color flat screen rather than a snowy black-and-white that only worked if someone (often me) stood outside turning the antenna atop the house back and forth.

It started late last August, when I saw a promo from MLB.TV offering to let me watch the rest of the season — meaning 10 or twelve Big League games a day, for $29. It seemed worth it, and it was, even though “season” didn’t include the playoffs and World Series — which was OK, because those actually get shown on other platforms that were free to me.

A few months later, I thought a couple of times whether I ought to go in and quit that subscription to keep from being charged for the following season, which I figured would be a LOT more than $29. But I sorta kinda forgot to do it, accidentally on purpose, and next thing I knew, I was informed that $149.99 had already been taken from my account by MLB. Which was bad news. But they also told me I now had access to the whole MLB 2025 season, which was great news. I then confessed to my wife, who is responsible for handling money in this house (on account of being married to a doofus who does things like that), about my failure to prevent it from happening. But as I hoped, she didn’t make me go demand the money back, probably because she knows how much I’ve missed baseball.

I also pointed out that $150 was a lot less than it cost us to see one game at Fenway in 2022. Two seats in the right-field bleachers for about $200. That was just to get in; I paid extra for the peanuts and Crackerjack, and the Polish sausage I had for dinner. But we got to watch the Sox beat the Yankees that night, and beat them soundly! And we had either Jackie Bradley Jr. or Aaron Judge playing right field right in front of us! So it was worth it. But not something we could do every day, or perhaps ever again. Whereas with the MLB deal, I see baseball every day. So, you know, we’re saving money. You see why I don’t handle the accounts?

Anyway, it was and is really great news.

It’s been wonderful. It really has. I’ve loved it, and there’s far more there than I can ever hope to watch. I feel blessed by that. So I just watch a few teams, as I can — the Red Sox, the Phillies, the Dodgers and the Yankees, mostly. What I don’t watch is the Braves, which a few years ago I would have said was my favorite. I don’t say that now because I’m so out of touch with them that I’m not sure that I can name or picture any current players.

Why, you wonder, have I turned away from the Braves? I haven’t. They’ve turned away from me. Or rather, the MLB has separated us. All of their games are blacked out. I thought that at first they were doing that because I live so close to the ballpark. It’s only an 80-hour walk from my house, after all, according to Google Maps. But it’s more complicated than that. MLB also blacks out other games occasionally, ones that I might really, really want to watch — like the Sox playing the Yankees.

But I’m still having a great time. Alas, this is the first of a pair of posts on the subject of baseball, and the other will be less cheery, with the headline beginning “The bad news…”

That’s partly because of a piece I read in the NYT  by Joon Lee, headlined “$4,785. That’s How Much It Costs to Be a Sports Fan Now.” It’s not just about the money, or the blackouts. It’s also about how the new business model of professional sports has destroyed the sense of community across the country. In other words, Mr. Lee takes a communitarian approach, as I would. More on that in a day or so…

A picture from our expensive bleacher seats in right field at Fenway. We had a great time.

Just so you know: I did NOT kill the fig trees

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There’s so much bad news out there — pretty much nothing but — that I thought I’d share with you a bit of good.

Remember when I worried that I might have killed my fig trees when I pruned them a couple of months back?

Well, I didn’t. And I’m very glad, because one of those trees — the one you see at right — was given to me as a sapling by my uncle who died in 2016, and was therefore irreplaceable, at least on a personal level. Not only that, but as small as it still is — I’ve kept it from spreading like the other one — it bears more figs each year than the other one.

The other one, at top, is one I bought at the farmers’ market — the good old farmers’ market, located where people could find it — quite a few years ago. While my uncle’s tree is a reliable brown turkey, this one is… well, I forget the name that was on the label. Something Greek, I think. Anyway, it’s brilliant at producing leaves in great abundance (as you can see), but a slacker at yielding fruit. When it does force itself to do something useful, the fig is quite large, and never turns color. When it’s ripe, it’s still green, and you have to tell by touch whether it’s ready. But it’s very sweet, which is great. But we never get more than a handful in a season, if that.

Meanwhile, remember those four other trees I’m trying to propagate from cuttings I got from our friend Scout? Well, two of them are definitely among the living, but nowhere near ready for the ground. (See below.) The life seemed to have left the other two… but one of them is still showing a bit of green here and there. So I’m not giving up yet on either of the laggards.

Dum Spiro Spero.

Or perhaps in this case, that should be:

Dum Ramus Viridis Est Spero.

As least, that’s what Google Translate says…

I’ve put them in slightly roomier pots, but they still have a lot of growing to do.

A sober reflection on ‘Flowers for Algernon’

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Happy New Year, folks.

I often hear people talk about teachers who opened their minds and transformed their lives during their schooldays. This is usually in the context of extolling education in general by offering a heroic figure for everyone to admire.

Well, I had a lot of great teachers, and still do, although school is far behind me. But I’ve never been able to point to one that had that sort of “I was blind but now I see” impact on me. I do have some more modest stories about teachers who turned me on to something.

Like Mr. Kramberg, down in New Orleans when I was in the 7th grade.

I’m sorry I don’t have his full name — and maybe I’m even misspelling his surname, after all this time. I’ve tried researching him on the Web, without success. And that worries me. You see, toward the end of that year, we were told that Mr. Kramberg wouldn’t be returning to Karr Junior High School after that 1965-66 school year, because he was going into the Army, and as I remember it, he was going to Vietnam (as my Dad did the following year). I assume (possibly wrongly) that since he was a teacher he would receive a commission, and while I may not have known then about the survival chances of second lieutenants in the infantry, I know more now.

Anyway, I remember him fondly, and not just because of the novelty of him being my first teacher who was a Mister and not a “Miz.” He had that quality that you find in “Conrack” (I never read The Water is Wide, but only saw the movie) and other books and films about teachers who made an above-the-call-of-duty effort to connect with students. And here’s the example of that I remember best…

For part of that term, he spent a few minutes each day reading a short story to us. I was a fairly voracious reader as a kid, but this story was different from any written work I had ever encountered. I had a habit in those days of letting my attention wander far from what was going on in English classes. I couldn’t help it. Classes in which the teacher went over and over rules of language that were second nature to me as an avid reader practically put me in a coma. But I was riveted by every word that he read aloud from “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes.

Yes, I said “short story.” That’s all it was, initially, when it was written in 1958. I later found out about the novel version published in 1966 and read and enjoyed that, once I realized it was the story Mr. Kramberg had read us.

Aside from the story being compelling, the unique (to me at that point in my education) way in which Keyes told it was what grabbed me. It’s told in first person by a retarded man named Charlie Gordon who wants more than anything to be “smart.” He studies hard, and his motivation causes him to be singled out for experimental surgery to greatly increase his intelligence (yes, the story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1959, and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards).

Aside from that premise, the story was decidedly down-to-earth, particularly because of Charlie’s very humble writing style. The doctors involved in the experiment have asked him to keep a journal, and he does his best, even though his grasp of spelling and composition are at best marginal. The story — in both short and novel form — is told entirely through that journal.

It’s a very compelling way to tell Charlie’s story, and that’s what grabbed me from the beginning Mr. Kramberg’s class. He did a great job of conveying Charlie’s challenges as a writer, and it really pulled us along. Or at least it did me. Since then, I have read and enjoyed the novel quite a few times.

If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.

After this, though, if you have not read it, I must give you a SPOILER ALERT. You probably shouldn’t read beyond this sentence…. Even though I suspect you would still enjoy it even if you knew how it ends. The appeal of the work is more in how the story is told than in the outcome itself.

But if you hate spoilers, read no further.

Those who have read it know the sad fact that this is, as Keyes described it, “a classic tragedy.” After the initial chapters, Charlie undergoes his “operashun,” which he assures us “dint hert.” It is a dramatic success, and the following journal entries showcase a process — gradual at first, then rapidly accelerating if I recall correctly — of a simple man becoming a genius, and discovering things about the world and himself that he had never suspected.

Those chapters are exhilarating. Unfortunately, the effect is not permanent. And once he becomes far smarter than everyone around him and has thoroughly studied and absorbed the data that underly the procedure he has undergone, Charlie is the first person to realize that he will soon return to being the way he was. The doctors who are so proud to have transformed him reject the suggestion that their project will fail, but Charlie knows. And then the journal entries start sliding down from brilliance to the stumbling level where they started.

Which is painful to endure, but it’s still a great story. In fact, if I can’t find that old paperback around the house, I might go buy myself another copy.

But if I read it again, I’m a bit worried that I might identify with those latter chapters a bit more than would be pleasant.

Everyone declines if one lives long enough. Sometimes in ways that don’t matter very much. For instance, I was a bit alarmed 20 years ago when I suddenly realized I no longer had perfect recall of every lyric the Beatles ever wrote or recorded.

Somehow, though, life went on, and in fact I still remember most of them. So what, me worry?

I got somewhat more alarmed this week. Remember how I theorized awhile back that studying Dutch had sharpened my language skills, even in English? As I wrote in early November:

Also… back when I was doing 10 and more [Duolingo] lessons a day, before the Europe trip, an interesting thing happened. I suddenly was really, really good at the NYT word games I play — Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections. I mean crazy good. There was one week when I got Wordle in two tries three days in a row, and also hit the “genius” level — which means I “won” — three days in a row [on Spelling Bee].

It was a bit like experiencing in real life what Charlie went through in the period after his “operashun.” I was still digging that, even though I had stopped doing the 10 Duolingo lessons a day, and was only completing one or two, to avoid breaking my streak (which now stands at 297 days).

Well… today I decided to step up the pace to three or four lessons, and may do more before the day is out.

That’s because suddenly, I’ve hit a wall on Wordle. I did not complete the puzzle on Tuesday. But that’s OK, right? It was just because I forgot to go back and complete it. That happens occasionally — it happened one day when we were in Europe over the summer. And on Wednesday, I got through it just fine.

But then on Thursday, I failed entirely. Six tries, and no cigar. It had been awhile since that had happened.

Then today, it happened again.

Two failures in a row? I don’t think that has ever happened to me before. Sure, these were both of the kind of puzzle I hate — the kind in which it’s not at all hard to come up with a five-letter word using the letters that are still available. The problem is that it’s too easy — there are far too many possibilities, so it’s more about guesswork. Luck comes into play.

But enough excuses. I’m looking toward Saturday with some degree of dread. And I’m thinking I not only need to do more Duolingo lessons each day, but maybe it would be more mentally stimulating to start tackling a whole new language. Italian might be fun. And Russian would be challenging…

Anyway, I just thought I’d give y’all a warning in case, as I start posting on the blog more with the holidays behind us, my posts start to read like the later chapters in Flowers for Algernon.

I don’t think that will happen, but you never know. Meanwhile, I thought it would be nice, for any of you who have not read it, to turn you on to that book, so many years after Mr. Kramberg did me that same favor.

And more importantly, if anyone who reads this knows Mr. Kramberg and where he can be found, I’d like to send him a nice “thank-you” note…

 

 

 

 

Remembering Jimmy

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a Jimmy in 1976

Gerald Ford was a pretty decent guy. I would have been fine with him continuing as our president back in the mid-’70s. But he never had a chance of getting my vote in 1976. That’s because he was up against Jimmy Carter.

I had voted for the first time in 1972, and I had a terrible time getting the job done. I must have been in that booth — and we had actual booths back in those days — at least 15 minutes. The holdup was voting for president. I didn’t think much of McGovern. He had run a lame campaign. I was still mad at him for dumping Eagleton. Eagleton had actually been treated for his mental problem. Think what a comfort that would be to us today as we look forward to the inauguration in the coming month.

Mostly, I thought McGovern’s blundering incompetence was an indicator he’d be terrible at the job. Meanwhile, I knew Nixon at least knew how to do the job — but I didn’t trust him one bit. I was sure, even at that early point in the investigations, that he was involved in Watergate. Fortunately, there was a solution — I was sure McGovern was going to lose. So I voted for him, as a protest vote against Nixon. I suppose I finally pulled that lever just as the election volunteers were contemplating sending a search party in after me.

I was happy to have no such problem in ’76. I was for Jimmy all the way. I liked everthing about the guy, mainly that he was different. No, and not “different” like the excuse people use today. He was different in that he was not a crook like Nixon, and a more inspirational figure than poor Ford. And I’m not going simply by the influence of that new show, SNL — which had told me Ford was a klutz, and Carter was the coolest presidential candidate ever — a guy who could, if called upon, talk you down from a bum trip on Orange Sunshine (the cure involved listening to the Allman Brothers).

And it was more than the fact that he had that million-watt smile, which made us feel like everything was going to be fine. Jimmy was here, and we were done with all the crap the country had just been through.

There were more serious reasons. I liked what I had read about what he had done as governor of Georgia. I liked how that might translate into performance as president.

I liked the fact that he was a smart guy — one of Admiral Rickover’s nuclear Navy whiz kids. And he spoke to us as thought he thought we had brains, as well. He leveled with people, even if it set him up for embarrassment, such as when he told Playboy that he had “lusted in his heart” after women other than his wife — and everyone mocked him. At the very peak — or perhaps I should say nadir — of the sexual revolution, he dared to speak of right and wrong, and admit his own failings.

He dared to speak of God, and inspire us by living his life as a man who loved God, and wanted to live according to the wisdom that faith brought him.

I was a copyeditor at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun at that early point in my career, fresh out of school. I had just joined the paper in the fall of ’75. I was frustrated not getting to write, and looked for anything that could add that enrichment to my dull routine. I volunteered to review books, and our managing editor — who was also our book editor, because that was something he loved — funneled to me any books about this exciting novelty, Jimmy Carter, who had just burst upon the national scene. That fed my enthusiasm.

Being a copyeditor, a desk man, I understood that reporters couldn’t go around with candidates’ bumper stickers on their cars, but cloistered as I was in the newsroom, I saw myself as an exception. And I really liked his green-and-white sticker scheme — a departure from all the blue and red I’d seen in my life, signifying that Jimmy, too, was a departure, and a welcome one. So I put one on the bumper of my orange Chevy Vega.

Probably the clearest (and least relevant, I realize) memory I have of that sticker was on one of my volunteer writing assigments. One weekend I went to Memphis for a book fair, attended by a number of prominent writers of that moment. The organizers set me up to take Mary Hemingway (How It Was) to lunch, and asked me if I’d pick up historian John Toland at the airport. I did so, but as I had not read his new biography of Hitler, we didn’t have much to talk about — except Jimmy Carter. He liked him, too, and therefore liked my sticker. He went back to my bmper and autographed it when I dropped him off at the hotel. By the way, I later read his book, and I recommend it. I learned a lot from it.

Early in the campaign, I got a chance to meet Carter — by, of course, volunteering to go cover a campaign event in Memphis. Since I was there in a journalistic capacity, I knew I wasn’t there to make like a fan. But I did shake his hand. I remember debating with myself whether that was OK, and I think I eventually decided it was. At least, I hope I decided that. It would pain me to realize I passed up that opportunity.

I remained a huge fan for the rest of his life. And it affected me. In the ’90s, I would become president of the board of our local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. That was totally due to Jimmy Carter.

At this point I should probably be running over things he did in office and analyzing them in detail. But while I thought Jimmy did a great job, that’s not why I was such an admirer. I liked and respected Jimmy Carter because he was the best human being to become president of the United States in my lifetime.

And now I thank God for letting him stick around here with us for as long as He did…

 

Throwing away all (well, MOST) of those old notes

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Some of the notes I’ve kept — there are very, very few.

When I was subpoenaed to testify in Jim Harrison’s trial in 2018, I was first asked to meet with the prosecutor, David Pascoe. He wanted me to testify about a long-ago (2006) blog post regarding an interview with Rep. Harrison.

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…

We zijn de morgenmensen

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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…

Well, I got that done. Did you yet?

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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….

A moment with the old guys on the park bench

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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…

 

 

My ethnicity is apparently linked to my current location

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The current version.

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.

Give us joy of our 50 years!

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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.

And here’s a picture from Amsterdam…

All that craziness back in the U.S. of A. while I was gone

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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.

One of those thoughtful people was Ezra Klein. If you can gain access to his podcasts, I do recommend checking them out. No, that wasn’t a link to his podcasts. This is, though.

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…

 

Well, I did it

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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…

I’ve kept ONE resolution, so Shute’s in trouble

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I’ve bored you many times with my long-standing ambition to lose enough weight to wrestle Shute.

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.

How are y’all doing on your goals?

Submitting myself once again to that great time thief, Gmail

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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.

The headline is “Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You.” Basically, Ezra has a much worse Gmail problem than I do, so he’s given up, and trying alternatives. Here’s part of his explanation as to why:

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…

OK, I voted for Joe, but it wasn’t easy…

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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.

I didn’t remember to take a selfie with my sticker until I got home. It’s at the top. See my hat? I think Michelle Norris gave me that hat when she interviewed me in 2008. Seemed appropriate — as you know by my recent posts, I do consider all things. Rather obsessively…

South Carolina is everywhere!

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No, it’s not perfect. But let’s see you do better, driving over asphalt with rubber tires.

At least, it’s cropping up everywhere you look in national media right now. For fairly obvious reasons.

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.

Do you see thing like that, too?

You couldn’t do this if you tried

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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…