Category Archives: Personal

Vista Publix — a local success story

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Publix

Well, it finally happened, one day this week.

To be more specific, it happened Wednesday. The thing that happened was that I went to the Publix in the Vista, the one that’s sorta kinda in the old Confederate printing plant, and there wasn’t a single available parking space.

It was lunchtime, and it being Ash Wednesday, I needed some non-meat item for my midday repast, and what would be more appropriate than lentil soup in a convenient pop-top can? Even better, Publix had Progresso soups on sale, buy-one-get-one-free. So now I’m set for Friday as well.

Anyway, while the parking lot is often crowded, that was the first time I couldn’t find any space in the lot. (Rather than continue to circle with others, I went ahead and parked next to Trustus theater.)

So congratulations to the folks who run Publix for their success. But also, congratulations to those city leaders who had the vision to promote the redevelopment of the Vista into a district that could support, and be supported by, such a supermarket, starting with the late Mayor Kirkman Finlay.

More specifically to this case, I congratulate the city leaders who, during the last decade — no longer having The State’s archives at my fingertips, it’s hard for me to be specific as to the date — agreed to help Publix redevelop that property. That involved an investment of city funds in the range of about $300,000.

For years, we on the editorial board would refer approvingly to what we called “the Publix standard” for public investment in the local economy. We adamantly opposed the hotel the city wanted to invest millions to build, own and operate, seeing that as something far better left to the private sector. But the relatively modest ante by the city in return to a much bigger private investment — and particularly one as smart as the Publix — seemed like a nice, reasonable Baby Bear sort of risk (not too big, but just right) for the city to take with tax money.

And it paid off. Which is why I had a little trouble parking to get my lentil soup on Wednesday.

We know neither the day nor the hour

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Jo Rick

I’ve spent much of today with family, saying goodbye to my great aunt, Jo Evans, who died the end of last week at 102. I was a pallbearer this morning with my brother and cousins, then there was a luncheon, and finally a memorial service this afternoon at Shandon Baptist Church, where she was the oldest member, having joined 70 years ago.

Once, when I was young enough to be taken aback at the notion — I don’t think I’d ever been to a funeral at the time, and didn’t know what was expected, but supposed they were nothing if not somber — my Uncle Woody (who of course was there today) and I were looking at a family album, and as we viewed a page of candid shots of smiling relatives happily chatting in their Sunday best, he remarked that the Paces always had a good time at funerals. Meaning they enjoyed each other’s company. Jo’s, and my maternal grandmother’s, maiden name was Pace. They were from Marion.

Today was the biggest gathering of Paces — and Collinses and Warthens and many other branches — in a number of years, and we all enjoyed one another’s company, as we have for generations.

We also enjoyed the kind presence of others, such as Shandon Baptist Pastor Dick Lincoln, and Minister of Senior Adults Jerry Long, and the talented singers who Jo had particularly wanted to perform at her funeral, as she and my mother had planned it out a year and a half ago.

And still others, such as Lanier Jones, president of ADCO — who knew Jo many, many years before he knew me. He knew her through her job at Tapp’s department store, where she worked into her mid-80s.

That was the thing that people kept marveling over today: In terms of health and having her faculties about her, Jo was until only weeks ago not much different from my very first memories of her. Dick Lincoln said that if we knew we could be that healthy, we’d all want to live to be 102. Jerry Long said she was briefly lucid again when he visited her the night before she died. That was not the case when I saw her hours before she died, which was a shock to me.

Four of my children, and three of my grandchildren, were with us at the church today. Over the weekend, I suddenly realized that to my grandchildren, Aunt Jo was the sister of their great-great grandmother. That’s the same relationship I have to the Civil War generation. Five of my great-great grandfathers (think about it; you get eight) were South Carolinians who served the Confederacy in uniform.

Then, with a further jolt, I realized that when my grandmother — Jo’s sister — died, the morning after Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon, I was almost exactly the same age my eldest granddaughter is now. Jo’s husband, whom I barely remember, died in 1960.

And yet, so very long after her contemporaries were gone — we lost her last sister in the early ’90s — Jo carried on, active in work, in her church (where she sang in the choir, including Shandon’s renowned Singing Christmas Tree), and in her community. She had no children, but she had a wealth of nieces and nephews and their descendants, and she was a part of all their lives.

I tell you all this because that’s where I’ve been today and that’s what I’m thinking about. But I also share it to help you understand just how shocking I found Rick Stilwell’s death on Friday, only hours after we lost Jo. Even though I only knew him in the virtual sense, as RickCaffeinated. The irony was reinforced on Sunday, when their pictures were practically side-by-side on the obit page (see above). Rick Stilwell was 44, living his life, driving down the street, when he just died, without any sort of warning. Rick would have been a babe in arms when my grandmother died. So Aunt Jo outlived her, essentially, by Rick Stilwell’s whole life.

Words are inadequate to describe the emotional distance between what his family is experiencing today and what mine did. I am so, so sorry for their loss.

We just don’t have the slightest idea, do we? We could go right now. Or we could continue, without even slowing down much, until we’re almost 103.

Yeah, I know that lots of people have realized this before. It’s in the Bible, and everything. But I say it because that’s what I’m thinking about today.

Welcome to the new blog!

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Yeah, it kinda looks different, doesn’t it?

But it should function much the same. Which I know some of y’all will see as a good thing, others not so good.

This was sort of a quick, semi-emergency move, meant to deal with three factors:

  1. I needed to move to a new host, because my old host — Period Three, which had generously supported me for close to three years — was getting out of doing that sort of thing.
  2. Google had for months been giving an ominous-sounding warning, along the lines of “This site may be compromised” on the search result for this blog. When I looked it up, Google said it was something only my host could solve, and I eventually determined that it was essential to get on a newer version of WordPress, which should clean up the problem. That made the need to move more urgent.
  3. I had not had any working stats for several months (Webalizer had collapsed on me, for reasons I don’t fully understand), so I had no idea what my current traffic was — which is one reason I hadn’t sold more than one or two ads during that period. Which was not good.

Chip Oglesby of Creative Spark Columbia is my new host, and he’s been extremely helpful and responsive, basically getting all of the above and more besides done in a short time span. Chip is a former colleague at the newspaper, who among many other things shot this picture of me (or my shoulder, anyway) with Barack Obama.

Beyond the immediate challenge of dealing with the above three factors, Chip has also solved some knotty problems associated with my old blog, from when I was with the paper. I continue to link regularly to posts and comments from 2005-2009 (to me, one of the best things about the Web is that everything said in the past on a topic can be instantly available), but when you got there, you probably found that the links from that period were broken. Chip has fixed those thousands of links, something I had thought impossible. Now, through this blog, you experience a seamless continuity from May 2005 to today.

Now that the main move has been made, let me know if you identify any problems in your interactions with bradwarthen.com. And yes, I know there are things that readers have long wanted, such as the ability to edit their comments. I intend to try to address those in the near future. But I needed to make this big move first. Thanks for your patience.

First-person shooter: What games did Loughner play?

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This is a post I wrote back in early 2011, and didn’t publish. Recent discussions of gun violence bring it back to the fore, so here it is…

In my Monday Wall Street Journal (the only edition I received after coming back from England until late Wednesday, which was really frustrating), I read the following about the Arizona shooter:

“All he did was play video games and play music,” said Tommy Marriotti, a high school friend.

And that got me to wondering: What sort of games did he play? Since initially reading that, I see he recently played Earth Empires, a strategy game. But I suspect he has at least at some time — maybe back in high school, maybe some other time — played another sort of game.

I find myself wondering whether he was into first-person shooter games…

I have two reasons for wondering that. First, there are the theories of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (ret.). Col. Grossman is the foremost expert in the field of “killology,” a term he coined. He wrote a fascinating book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, which I recommend. It discusses the psychology of killing, mostly within the context of war. He explains that for most of military history, as long as we’ve had projectile weapons in the hands of the average soldier, the overwhelming majority of soldiers did not shoot to kill. Frequently, they didn’t fire their weapons at all, and when they did, they tended to fire over the heads of their enemies — to engage in a sort of threat display, rather than use deadly force.

They did this because for most humans, the reluctance to kill is deep and strong.

The U.S. military, realizing this (on the basis of extensive studies during and after WWII), started conditioning that reluctance out of soldiers starting with the Vietnam era (or perhaps a little earlier; it’s been awhile since I’ve read it). Soldiers started to be trained to quickly acquire the human target and fire accurately before thinking about it too much. The result is that the U.S. military is, soldier for soldier, the most deadly fighting force in the world, perhaps in history. (Probably the most dramatic demonstration of this was the battle of Mogadishu in 1993, in which elite soldiers faced mobs of Somali militias with a tendency to fire randomly and wildly with their AK-47s — the result was 18 dead Americans, but about 1,000 dead Somalis.) But soldiers who shoot now often pay a profound psychological cost later, and that was what Col. Grossman was motivated to study.

He has also ventured into related peacetime phenomena, such as the popularity and increasing sophistication of FPS games, which train the reflexes of the kids who play them to shoot quickly and accurately, without reluctance. He asserts that it’s not a bit surprising that we have Columbines given the ubiquity of such games. Kids have had conditioned out of them the hesitation that affected trained soldiers through most of history.

You may say Col. Grossman exaggerates. And indeed, some experts are far more phlegmatic about such games. I don’t think he does, but that’s because of the other reason I was interested: I’ve played these games myself. A decade or so ago, I had a copy of an early version of Wolfenstein. The violence was non-stop, but it was also cartoonish and unconvincing, only a step or two beyond Space Invaders. Now, it’s different…

Two years ago, I got myself a copy of Call of Duty: World at War. I was fascinated by the premise, which was to put the player in realistic scenarios from the Pacific and Eastern fronts in the Second World War. (Some of them weirdly realistic. When I saw some of the scenes from the Peleliu campaign in “The Pacific” recently, I thought, I’ve been there… It was weird.) But I was completely unprepared for two things: First, the realism. When I first booted up the game on my computer (and I had to get a more sophisticated video card to run it, even though my computer was almost new), I thought I was watching a video prologue — I didn’t realize the game had started. I couldn’t believe the graphics were that realistic, that high-res.

Second, the emotional manipulation, which was stunning. There are two story lines: In one, you are a U.S. Marine named Miller, fighting your way across the Pacific. In the other, you are a Red Army soldier. The designers of the game came up with their own way of overcoming any reluctance the player might have to shooting the enemy. The Marine scenario begins with Miller being a prisoner of the Japanese. As Miller, you watch the Japanese torture and kill your buddy, before one of them moves toward you with a knife, prepared to serve you in the same way — before he is stopped by the commandos who have come to rescue you. Your rescuers hand you a weapon, and by this point, you’re expected to know what to do with it.

In the start of the Russian scenario, you are lying still among dead and dying comrades in Stalingrad. As you lie there (the game won’t let you move at first), you watch German soldiers step around you, casually shooting the wounded as you watch helplessly. Somehow they overlook you. As the enemy moves away, a grizzled Red Army sergeant who was also playing dead whispers to you to follow him, and he will show you how to get your vengeance on the fascists, who, as he keeps reminding you, are raping your homeland. He hands you a sniper rifle…

Creepy, huh? At this point, you’d like me to tell you I didn’t go on and play the game, but I did. I’ve played it all the way through a number of times. It’s very seductive, because it’s challenging. But I wouldn’t argue if you were to say, “Yes, of course it is — like other forms of pornography.” I expect those of you who’ve never played such games will have all sorts of critical things to say about me for playing it, and I won’t argue with those assertions, either. I know how it looks. When my wife enters the room when I’m playing, I hastily shut it down. Because she is my conscience.

But that’s not the really creepy thing: Over time, I played the game less. I had mastered the easier levels, and the harder ones were just ridiculous. Also, well, I’ve tried to spend less of my life in nonproductive pursuits. But a number of months ago, I got curious about something: I had never played the “multiplayer” option, in which you fight against other players over the Internet. So I tried that.

And I discovered that either the world is full of unsuspected super-soldiers, with reflexes that are not to be believed, or there are a lot of geeks out there who spend WAY too much time getting ridiculously good at playing these games. The latter, of course, is most likely. And hardly surprising. But I discovered one thing that positively sent chills down my spine. I quickly accepted that I could not survive more than a few seconds against people whose reflexes were so finely honed to aggressive play of the game. Fine — I have trouble with basketball, too. And I figured that the guys who spend a lot of time on these games are 20-something, and an old guy like me can’t hope to keep up. But what got me was when I encountered a few players who had activated the feature that enabled them to speak with each other in real time as they shot and stabbed their way across the landscape.

The thing that got me was when I heard their voices.

They were little boys. They sounded like they were about 10. And they were very, very efficient, hyperaggressive and unhesitating virtual killers.

I quit playing at that point.

Anyway, that’s why I wonder — what sorts of games did Loughner play?

Three more nights, counting tonight

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Schoolteacher and former state superintendent candidate Kelly Payne shot the picture above last night, from the moment in scene 2 when I announce, “May I present our new neighbors at Netherfield: Mr. Charles Bingley (top), Miss Caroline Bingley, and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy…”

Though I’ve shot a lot of pictures of the production myself, is actually the first picture I’ve seen with me in it other than the dance one in which I am tiny and blurred. Seeing this, I’m thinking I might need to make the smile bigger. Sir William is an ebullient and convivial fellow.

If you’d like a better view of the whole thing, come on out. We’re performing in the amphitheater at Finlay Park at 7:30 tonight, Friday night and Saturday night, and then that’s it.

And it’s free.

“Breaking Brad,” or, “I need an old drug”

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With the change of weather, my throat started feeling a bit scratchy yesterday, although with the help of an antihistamine, a decongestant and cough drops, I got through dress rehearsal last night.

Today, there’s a definite soreness creeping in, and it feels… I hesitate to type this… the way it does before my voice goes all croaky and barely inaudible. I share that periodic condition with Bill Clinton. Related to allergies.

And we open tonight.

So I started thinking about what I could do about it, and my mind naturally turned to thoughts of Tedral.

Tedral was an amazing, cheap little pill that used to be prescribed for asthma, but I discovered a neat side effect — it cleared my throat, and my voice, like nothing else in the world. Back in the 70s and early 80s, I used to take one before speaking, or appearing on stage, or singing in the folk choir at church, and it worked wonderfully. It was like magic.

Very off-label, of course.

So I was about to call around to some pharmacies (starting with my own) to see if anybody still had it, or knew who did. Because near as I can recall, the last time I got any, it was available over-the-counter.

But I thought I’d check the Web first. And as near as I can tell, Tedral was banned from the U.S. market in 1993. Although I haven’t really found what looks like an authoritative source on that.

It probably had something to do with the ingredients, which according to the Web were:

  1. theophylline
  2. phenobarbital
  3. ephedrine

I had known about the theophylline (a bronchodilator) and phenobarbital (a narcotic that I suppose was meant to take the edge off the bronchodilator). But I hadn’t remembered the ephedrine.

Looks like I’m out of luck. And I’m glad I didn’t start calling multiple pharmacies looking for it. They might have thought I was a Walter White copycat.

So... you wouldn't happen to have any, um, Tedral in stock, would you?

Opening tomorrow night at Finlay Park

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This morning, ten days after I trimmed my beard, one of the regulars I see at breakfast pretty much every week day suddenly noticed and asked, across the room, what in the world that was I had on my face.

Once again, The Chops provided me with an excuse to invite someone else to come see SC Shakespeare Company’s production of “Pride and Prejudice.”

It opens tomorrow night — that’s Wednesday night — at Finlay Park, at 7:30.

Last night (see picture above, at dusk, shortly before we ran the show), was our first time testing the lights and using the full set that we didn’t have at Saluda Shoals last week — winding staircases to descend, etc. (Which is a bit of an adventure when you’re turned delivering a line to another character, and bright lights are in your eyes, and you’re having inner-ear problems.) Tonight we’ll test sound for the first time in this venue.

And tomorrow we open. Hope to see you there.

Cold turkey times three

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If at any time this week I seem a bit out of it, it’s because I’m in withdrawal.

I woke up Monday morning with a feeling like my right ear was full of water. But it wasn’t. I felt pressure, and sound was distorted — loud and distorted. Through it all was a loud ringing/rushing sound. I had trouble making out what people were saying to me.

So Tuesday, I managed to get in to see an ear, nose and throat doc when he had a cancellation. I figured he’d put a tube in my ear, and that would relieve the pressure. I figured it was an infection. But my ear drum looked normal.

After a hearing test, it turns out I’ve lost some ability to detect high pitches in one ear, and low pitches in the other. The doctor ordered some tests to figure out why I would have such asymmetrical hearing loss, along with the other symptoms. This is what I may have.

I haven’t arranged for the tests yet. I need to get on that. But I’m having some trouble getting it together the last couple of days, because I’m following the doctor’s orders:

  1. No salt.
  2. No alcohol.
  3. No caffeine.

It has something to do with all of those things causing fluid retention. There may actually be a problem with fluid, but deep in the inner ear, where a tube would do nothing to drain it.

The first two, I can do standing on my head. The last one is tough. Really tough. One day, the usual three or four BIG cups. The next day, nothing. Makes a guy feel pretty weird. Although today has been a little easier than yesterday.

But I’m very spacey. The symptoms are not going away. In fact, when I slipped up and finished a bag of chips I’d left open on my desk from earlier in the week, the ringing got louder. So maybe there’s something to the salt connection, although perhaps it was just the chewing action.

I talked to someone this morning who also recently gave up caffeine. As confused as I was, I forgot to ask the burning question: How long does it take before you feel normal again?

The State-Record Newsroom Reunion of 2012

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With Jim Foster and Jeff Miller.

Note the similarity between the photo at top, from Saturday night, and the extraordinary black-and-white photo at bottom. And no, it’s not that both contain anachronisms. It’s that Jim Foster — former city editor, former features editor at The State — is at the center of both. And is, compared to most of us, relatively unchanged.

The one on the bottom was contributed by Maxie Roberts, former denizen of the photo desk at the paper, to the effort to gather people from across the country for The State-Record Newsroom Reunion of 2012. Near as I can tell, this was taken probably within the year before I joined the paper in April 1987. I say that because I recognize most of the people, they look about the way they did when I arrived, but there’s one person who I know left just months before I got here. Actually, the clothing isn’t all that anachronistic, but check out those old Atex terminals, connected to a mainframe array that in total, contained about 1/50th of the storage space I have in my iPhone. Which is why we had to constantly kill stuff out of the system in order to keep publishing.

At top, you see me with Jim, who now does communications for the Beaufort County School District, and with Jeff Miller, now the vice president for communications of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Washington.

At right, you see me with former Managing Editor Bobby Hitt, who now does something or other in state government.

You may notice a trend here. Yes, pretty much everyone I saw during my brief stop at the party was a former employee of the newspaper. Scrolling through my memory, I only saw one person currently employed there — reporter Dawn Hinshaw. Of course, I suppose that’s to be expected at a reunion, but still.

Aside from Bobby, there was even more senior brass at the party, two former executive editors — Tom McLean, of Columbia and Blythewood; and Gil Thelen, now of Tampa. Tom’s the guy who hired me at The State; he was also my predecessor as editorial page editor. I also saw Mike Fitts, Fran Zupan, Kristine Hartvigsen, Michael Latham, Tim Goheen, Tom Priddy, “Coach” Bill Mitchell, Bunnie Richardson, Jim McLaurin, Bob Gillespie, Fred Monk, Claudia Brinson, Grant Jackson, Tim Flach (OK, that’s two who still work there), and others whom I would no doubt be embarrassed to have forgotten to mention.

Most were wearing clothing appropriate to this century. The reason I was not was that I was playing hooky from Pride and Prejudice. I had been thinking I wouldn’t be able to drop by the party until 11 or so, and I knew it would have thinned out by then. But then, after my last appearance in the play in Scene 9, my daughter said, “Why don’t you go now (it was about 9 p.m.)?” I wouldn’t have time to change, because I’d have to be back by 10:30 for curtain call. But the party was nearby, at the S.C. Press Association HQ, and I could just run over there and spend about 45 minutes and say hi to everybody.

So I did. And used the awkwardness caused by my attire to plug the show, and urge everyone (all those who still live here, anyway) to come out and see it when we open at Finlay Park next Wednesday night at 7:30 (our Saluda Shoals run ended last night).

But this rare reunion of old friends and comrades would only happen once, so I’m glad I ran out and caught what little of it I was able to catch.

The newsroom, circa 1986 -- or the portion of it available for the photo that day. And yes, it's been a long time since this many people were in the newsroom at once.

Moving so fast we’re a blur

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Saturday was a very busy day for the Warthen clan. After the opening of “Pride and Prejudice” Friday night, 12 of us got up early for the Walk for Life. Then we had a double family birthday party (my own and my younger son’s), I took a brief nap, and it was back to Saluda Shoals, where three members of my family were onstage and four of us in the audience. After my last scene, I left the play to attend a party that was going on at the same time, then ran back for curtain call (a separate post on that is to come). The day ended really late, with a cast gathering at a local pub, and then to bed.

The four youngest members of the clan prepare to participate in the Walk for Life.

Next morning, my mother called to say we were on the Metro front in The State. I had to think for a moment as to which of all those activities might have constituted “news” in any form. Ah, yes — it was the Walk for Life.

Above is the photo, which ran six columns across the top of the page. We’re easy to miss at a glance, because we’re in the very blurry front rank — there’s me, my daughter who organized the family team, my wife the 11-year cancer survivor, and my son whose 32nd birthday this was.

I suppose it’s appropriate that any snapshot from that day should be a blur.

There I am on opening night with my granddaughter and daughter. We are portraying, respectively, Sir William Lucas, Kitty Bennet and Lady Lucas.

How they opened windows in olden times

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OK, so this is a re-enactment -- I asked her to point to the mysterious lever again.

Ever since they were babies, the Twins have loved my beat-up 2000 Ford Ranger. When they were smaller, they’d get excited every time they saw a pickup truck, of any color, thinking it was mine.

But neither ever had a chance to ride in it, until today. And that only happened because of an unforeseen circumstances.

I was running out of the office thinking to go to Starbucks and get something to fortify me through rehearsal tonight. But as I got into the truck, I had another thought: I called my wife to find out where she and the kids — the Twins, both 4 and a half, my son’s daughter who is two years younger, and her baby brother — were. They were at the park. So I went there instead.

When I got there, they were getting ready to leave, but had a problem. My wife asked which vehicle I had brought, and was disappointed to learn it was the truck — which has no back seat, and no child seat in any case, which is why the little ones have never ridden in it.

But one of the Twins had developed a bad blister and couldn’t put on  her shoes to walk back to the house. So I strapped her into the seat and drove her back the four residential blocks or so very, very slowly, making sure not to get anywhere near any other vehicle. At one point, she cried, “Your truck goes really fast!” I looked at the speedometer. I was doing 15 mph. I slowed down anyway.

Safely back in the driveway, I reached across my passenger to roll down her window, to keep the cab cool while we waited for those who were walking back. Then, as I was rolling down mine to get some cross-ventilation, she said, “That’s a funny thing.”

“What?” I asked.

“That thing,” she said, pointing to the manual window crank.

She had never seen one before.

Pride and Prejudice and Skeeters

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Monday was our first night with lights. In this scene (still sans costume), the Bennets get to know Mr. Collins better than they'd like to.

Just to remind y’all that one reason I’m not blogging as much as usual these days is because of rehearsals for “Pride and Prejudice,” seven days a week.

Over the weekend, we further prepared our state of mind with Karen Eterovich’s (mostly) one-woman Jane Austen show at Drayton Hall. Just days before those performances, I was asked to play a small supporting role in that. Master Thespian that I am, I quickly mastered my three lines, which were as follows:

  1. “No.”
  2. “Yes.”
  3. “YES!”

Moving on from that triumph… Sunday night, we moved to Saluda Shoals park, where we open Friday night, which I believe is starting to freak everybody out just a bit.

Sunday night, we experienced rain. We moved inside to a very small room, and did a hurried run-through, which directors Linda Khoury and Paula Peterson said were our best performance yet. It was certainly… intimate. In a dance scene, one of the actresses and I ran into each other via our posteriors. It occurred to me that this was unexplored cultural ground: I had just done “the Bump” with Miss Jane Bennet. Lydia I could see, but Jane?

Then last night, there was a challenge of outdoor theater I had never anticipated, as we stood at the edge of woods damp from the rain, waiting to go on: Mosquitoes. As I waved and slapped at them, I took solace from Marty Feldman’s immortal words: “Could be worse. Could be raining…”

Three more nights…

At the edge of the woods, waiting to go on: Mr. Darcy (Gene Aimone) and my daughter, who plays Lady Lucas.

I, Sir William Lucas, hereby invite every one of you to the ball we’ll be hosting next month

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Have you seen any of the series AMC has been rerunning lately, “Into the West”? I watched some of the first episode. It had a lot of mountain men in it. I thought, “What a fine bunch of distinguished-looking gentlemen…”

Lately whenever we have a meeting with an ADCO client, one of my colleagues will at some point in the meeting say something like, “In case you’re wondering why Brad is looking like this…”

To put it one more way: Lately I have not been mistaken for Don Draper.

Here’s the story:  I have a role in the South Carolina Shakespeare Company’s production of “Pride and Prejudice,” which opens at Saluda Shoals Park. And yes, we all know that the Bard did not write that one. But I suppose the company’s repertoire is broader than its name suggests.

Our director, Linda Khoury, has asked us not to get our hair cut from here on — mine was already pretty shaggy by the time she said that. I had also stopped shaving at that point. But English gentlemen did not wear beards during the Regency Period, you will no doubt say. You are right. But I thought it would look a little less crazy and anachronistic if I grew the whole thing out, and then cut it back to muttonchops at the last minute.

I have a fairly small part in the production, which suits my comfort level at this point in my acting career. It’s been more than a quarter century since I have trod the boards for anything more than a cameo, so it’s nice to know I don’t have more than about five lines.

I’m playing Sir William Lucas (who was played by this guy in the definitive 1995 BBC series). If you know the story, you know Sir William and Lady Lucas are sort of the local aristocracy in the environs of Meryton in Hertfordshire (and their daughter, Charlotte, is Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s particular friend). My character was in trade before his elevation to the knighthood, which I’ll thank you not to mention. Sir William’s function in the play is to throw the ball that gets the principal characters together, introduce them, and try with mixed success to get them to dance and have a good time. Sir William is sort of an early 19th-century party animal, and regularly gives two balls a season.

In being the hearty, jovial, back-slapping good-time Charlie, I’m playing against type, which I hope everyone will take into account in assessing my performance. (The character in the play whose personality is most like mine is Mr. Darcy, and I’m just a year or two too old for that.)

I got involved in this because my daughter and granddaughter are in it. They are portraying Lady Lucas and Miss Kitty Bennet, respectively. We’re all having fun so far.

Here’s the info on the performances:

Columbia SC—The role of The Bard will be temporarily played by the world’s most famous femaleBritish literary icon, as The South Carolina Shakespeare Company (SCSC) presents a celebration of all things Jane Austen to kick off its 2012-2013 season.  With a fast-paced and engaging adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and the debut of Cheer from Chawton, an internationally-acclaimed one woman Jane Austen tribute show, the Austen performances usher in SCSC’s 20th anniversary season featuring an extended calendar of events that include a winter production of Paul Rudnick’s contemporary comedy I Hate Hamlet and Carlo Goldoni’s classic comedy A Servant of Two Masters.

Entertaining thousands of South Carolina audiences with no-cost cultural enrichment since 1992, SCSC has selected Jon Jory’s staged adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous work, Pride and Prejudice, as its season opener. A tale of love and values in class-conscious England of the late 18th century, Pride and Prejudice is a witty romance featuring the five Bennet sisters – including strong-willed Elizabeth and young Lydia – young women who have been raised by their mother with one purpose in life: finding a husband.

“With the debut of our 20th season, we are presenting a novel experience for our loyal audience but one that is also in keeping with our classical programming,” said Linda Khoury, founding director of the SCSC. “Jane Austen is an author who shares Shakespeare’s cultural relevance and she is universally praised for her keen observations and strong critiques of classicism and economic conditions of the 1700s. The wit, wry commentary and romantic travails of her characters are contagious for both Austen-ites and new fans alike.”

With such immensely popular material that has enjoyed high-profile film and miniseries treatments, Khoury has assembled a top-notch cast that is challenged with surpassing any existing impressions people may have of this famous story.  Pride and Prejudice will feature Scott Blanks, Gene Aimone, Katie Mixon, Jessica Mitchell, Tracy Steele, Marcus Thomas, Sara Blanks, and Malie Heider.

Pride and Prejudice will be performed October 5—7 at Saluda Shoals Park at 7:30 pm and October 17—20 and October 24—27 at the Finlay Park Amphitheatre beginning nightly at 7:30 pm.

As audiences prepare to encounter Austen’s memorably rich characters, they will also have the chance meet the author herself, as Cheer from Chawton will be presented the weekend prior to the Pride and Prejudice opening. In a creative collaboration with the University of South Carolina’s School of Theatre and Dance, Cheer from Chawton is an internationally acclaimed one woman “Jane Austen experience” conceived, written and performed by professional actor and USC MFA graduate Karen Eterovich. Performed throughout the United States and UK, Cheer from Chawtonoffers an intimate glimpse into Austen’s life, including her pointed observations on family, friends, suitors, and society, as well as her own hilarious early efforts as an author. The play will be performed Friday and Saturday, September 28 & 29, 2012, 8 pm at Drayton Hall on the USC campus.

Guess I’ll be watching this convention on TV, too

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I'm hoping the Democratic Convention will be more engaging than this was.

I was at the movies with my younger son Sunday afternoon watching “The Bourne Legacy” (which I’m sorry to say I found far less engaging than “The Bourne Identity”), and the character played by Rachel Weisz had just been introduced when my phone started buzzing.

It was E.J. Dionne. I stepped out into the corridor to see what was up. He was just driving down from Washington, taking the scenic route through the Shenandoah Valley, one of the most beautiful drives in America (I drove that way many times when my youngest daughter was studying at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet). But E.J.’s not the kind of guy who finds pleasant vistas enough occupation for his hyperactive mind, so he wanted to chat.

The first thing he asked was whether I would be crossing the border this week, and I had to think a second before realizing he meant heading up to Charlotte.

Nope. I’m not. Or at least, I don’t think so. Ever since the DNC venue was announced a year or so ago, I had had it in my mind that since it was just up the road, I might bop up for part of it. But since that didn’t require any preparation, I made none. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I emailed Amanda Alpert Loveday with the SC party to see about credentials. That’s the way I had arranged it the couple of times I went to conventions before — just contact the state party, since it’s the state delegation I’d be following. But she said, “Press credentials were required to be requested by April and they are done by the Convention staff.” April? Like I’m going to prepare for an impromptu drive up to Charlotte in April?

I could still go. After all, when I’ve covered conventions in the past, I may have entered the actual hall where the convention was going on a couple of times total. But then, having those credentials did help get me into other places as well. Add to that the fact that the events worth being there for tend to happen early in the morning or very late at night — delegation breakfasts, and after-session social gatherings — and it just seems really inconvenient to try to cover any of it from home.

So I’m going to stick to Columbia, and watch the speeches on the Tube, just as I did the one in Tampa.

What do I expect to see? Well, I’ll tell you what I hope to see.

I hope to see a party that’s reaching out to independents and undecideds — a party that emphasizes things that pull Americans together — rather than a party that’s firing up its base with its ginned-up “War on Women” and other Kulturkampf flashpoints. You say there are no undecideds? Well, E.J. and I were talking about that, and he referred me to this analysis by ABC showing a large number of “persuadable voters:”

One in four registered voters may be persuadable in the 2012 presidential election – rich pickings if either Barack Obama or newly minted GOP nominee Mitt Romney can win their support. But doing so may be a challenge, requiring both subtle and substantive political persuasion.

That’s because persuadable voters, as identified in this analysis for ABC News, are less apt to be ideologically committed ones, and more likely to take middle-ground rather than strongly held positions on issues such as Obama’s job performance, Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan and their own partisan views.

Good to hear that I’m not alone. OK, we’re out here — so persuade us.

Dick Harpootlian says Jim Clyburn’s role in speaking tonight is to “excite the troops.” That’s exactly the sort of garbage I don’t want to hear. Guys, you don’t have “troops.” You’re not in a war. You are in a marketplace of ideas, and you’d better have some that are compelling to people outside that convention hall.

Anyway, that’s what I’m looking for. How about y’all?

Paul Ryan: The Deerslayer, policy wonk version

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OK, you know veep candidate Paul Ryan is a major policy wonk. One thing you might not think of him as is a good old boy. But a magazine with a name that sounds like a stutter — Deer and Deer Hunting — is aiming to set you straight. See this release:

Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan opens up to Deer & Deer Hunting Magazine about his love of the outdoors.

“Bowhunting is my passion,” said Ryan to Deer & Deer Hunting’s Editor Alan Clemons. “Studying the strategy, preparing food plots, the strategy of where a dominant buck is living or will be moving and then being in position to get a shot, that’s really exciting.”

Ryan talks more about his childhood, being a father and balancing his hunting and Capitol life in an exclusive interview with Deer & Deer Hunting. The column will be in the October issue of Deer & Deer Hunting and will be available on newsstands September 4.

If you’d like to learn more about the interview, I can provide you with the pre-released interview, a press release, a copy of the magazine issue or any additional information you may need.

For more information on Deer & Deer Hunting, please go to www.deeranddeerhunting.com. For any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

I didn’t get to read the whole story because I didn’t want to give the mag my email address and have a whole new batch of emails to delete (I’ve made that mistake too many times in the past). But I confess to being curious as to whether the piece contains any other quotes as, um, interesting as “Studying the strategy, preparing food plots, the strategy of where a dominant buck is living or will be moving and then being in position to get a shot, that’s really exciting.”

Yeah, OK. I thought he only got that excited about cutting Medicare costs.

Of course, I’m a bit of an old hand with a bow myself. One day when we were in England last year, we were strolling in Hyde Park and came across a sort of carnival, which had a booth called “Robin Hood,” which enticed marks to shoot an arrow at balloons. Sure, it could have been a trap set by the sheriff, but I couldn’t resist. I immediately laid down my five quid (the real Robin Hood would have loved to find a fat friar carrying that on him), gave my camera to my wife to record the moment, and took my three shots. Unfortunately, my wife thought the camera was set for still photos rather than video, and merely aimed it at me, pressed the shutter release, and turned away.

So it was that she missed when I actually burst one of the balloons. But the great tragedy was that she missed my next shot, which split the previous arrow… yeah, that’s the ticket…

OK, so that last part didn’t really happen. But I did get one of the balloons. Of course, I’m sure that doesn’t match the excitement that Ryan speaks of. But that’s OK by me.

Take THAT, ye oppressor of good Saxon yeomen!

It was too loose; now it’s too tight

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This morning, we closed on a mortgage refinance, which we did partly because of the lower rates, but mainly to consolidate the initial mortgage and a credit line that we opened a number of years back to do some work on our house (hardwood floors, new HVAC, other stuff).

Anyway, the attorney helping us does this sort of thing all the time. (Over the years, we’ve been through this process with him — closing on a house or refinancing — at least three times.) My wife asked whether he’s keeping busy with these low rates.

Not really, he said. Oh, the demand is way up, all right. The thing is, though, about half of the loans aren’t getting approved.

Before, credit was too loose, which got us into trouble. Now, it’s too tight, which makes it harder to get out of the trouble. He said there are those who hoped real estate would lead us out of these hard times. But not at this rate, he suggested.

Just a little glimpse at the economy from a window other than my own, which I thought I’d pass on.

By the way, we had no trouble getting our refinance, through Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union. See the ad at right.

Product placement, baby.

Where do kids listen to their pop music today? (All I know is, it better not be on my lawn…)

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Spotify informs me that Darla Moore has subscribed to “my” playlist, “NPR Songs of Summer.” Of course, it’s not “my” playlist. It’s NPR’s.

For a moment I thought I’d discovered what Darla had been up to since Nikki bumped her from the USC board of trustees — listening to Adele, LMFAO, Taio Cruz, Gnarls Barkley, Simon and Garfunkel and the Stones. But then I realized it was another Darla Moore altogether — but one, it should be said, with pretty good taste, who also listens to Emeli Sandé, Kate Bush, R.E.M., Loudon Wainwright III, Beck, the Velvet Underground and the Psychedelic Furs, among many others, according to her public profile.

Which is aside from my point. The point is, I have a confession to share.

After having played them over a bunch more times, I realize I was wrong about some of those songs on the NPR list. Some of the recent songs I rated really low on my zero-to-five-stars scale are a lot better than I thought they were when I first rated them.

For instance… I wake up in the morning with LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” which has really grown on me, in my head.

And more dramatically, I originally rated Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” at two stars, which was ridiculous. I now consider it to be worth at least four, if not five. It’s amazing. I didn’t come to this decision because of seeing two of my older (male, amazingly enough) cousins dancing to it with abandon at a wedding a couple of weeks back — doing something that looked very like an Indian rain or war dance, which the song’s driving rhythm tends to abet.

No, I’ve come to that conclusion from listening to it over and over. And eventually going, wow. You know how I posed the question of what, exactly, makes Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” so mysteriously stirring? What, I asked, is the music doing to the ear, the brain, the soul in that part that “goes like this, the fourth, the fifth/ The minor fall and the major lift…?”

Well, something comparably awesome happens, building irresistibly, and then exploding, every time, when Adele sings this part:

The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling

We could have had it ALLLLLLL…

It’s just amazing.

But it took time for me to fully realize it.

And it occurs to me that that is a large part of the difference, in terms of my appreciation, between recent songs and something like, for instance, “Honky Tonk Women,” with which I was saturated during the summer of 1969. (When I hear it, it brings one particular memory specifically to mind… driving down Highway 17 between Myrtle Beach and Surfside, passing by right where Tad’s used to be, telling my Uncle Woody — who’s just a little older than I am, and therefore sort of like an older brother — that that was just the best driving song ever. This was possibly influenced by the fact that I had just started driving.)

It’s not that I’m an old fogy — although I’m sure some of you will have your own opinions as to that. The thing is, I react to music much the same as I did in my youth. I certainly feel the same inside when I hear it.

But back in the day, we heard the songs so often, and they had a much better chance of growing on us. On TV, on the radio, walking down the street, coming from a juke box. Music was so common, and shared, and unavoidable. Grownups were able to mock The Beatles’ “yeah, yeah, yeah” because they heard it, everywhere.

There was one Top 40, and everybody was exposed to it. Now… music is more diverse, and specialized, and broken down. And I have the sense that you have to go out and seek it more than you do today. Even if it’s only clicking on a link from a friend via social media, you sort of have to seek it out.

Yeah, maybe it’s just because I’m not invited to those kinds of parties, but music just doesn’t seem as public and as ubiquitous as it once did. Is that a misperception? I don’t know.

I do know that music took a shift toward the private and esoteric and fragmented in the 70s, as we all became “album-oriented.” But then it came back together, became more democratic, in the 80s with MTV, to where most of us have a shared soundtrack for that era.

Now, just as people can choose highly specialized TV channels to watch — rather than having to be satisfied with three networks — they are more empowered to choose a specific musical direction, and have it be private, through their ear buds. Yes, it’s shared, but more person-to-person, rather than communally.

Or so it seems. As I say, I don’t go to parties where current pop music is being played, assuming such parties still exist. But then, I was a pretty antisocial kid, and didn’t go to all that many parties.

So what’s different? How do y’all see, or rather hear, the music scene today?

The music used to be so public, and unavoidable.

What my Paul Harris Fellowship means to me

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Today, I was one of a group of Rotarians called up to the front of the room and honored for becoming “Paul Harris Fellows.”

Let me try to explain, simply, what that means to Rotary: It means the “fellow” has contributed $1,000 to the Rotary Foundation. Although I’ve been told probably 100 times what Rotary Foundation does, I can’t seem to remember. According to this website, the Foundation’s mission is “is to enable Rotarians to advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through the improvement of health, the support of education, and the alleviation of poverty.”

Which is kind of general and vague, bearing a marked resemblance to a response given by a Miss America contestant. In a recent note of thanks I had gotten from Rotary International for a contribution of $9 (I have no memory ever of having given precisely $9 to the Foundation on any occasion), I got an elaboration:

On behalf of the mother who will receive prenatal care, the father who will have access to fresh water for his family, and the children who will learn to read and write in their newly furnished school, thank you for your gift to The Rotary Foundation’s Annual Fund. Your contributions provide immediate funding to projects that assist these individuals, these families, these communities.

If the first statement was too general, those examples were a little too specific, too retail, for me to get a clear idea of what the Foundation does. But that doesn’t matter much to me. I belong to Rotary for the fellowship of the specific people who are in the Columbia Rotary Club, and Rotary International remains to me not much more than a remote concept. Giving to the Foundation is just something Rotarians do.

Now… all of that said, my purpose in this post is not to communicate what the fellowship means to Rotary, but what it means to me, which is not the same thing at all. Oh, another thing I’m not doing — I’m not trying to get you to think I’m a swell guy for giving a thousand dollars to advance world peace, end poverty and so forth. It was pretty painless. In fact, most of the money I gave wasn’t even mine.

To get to my point…

A little more than 11 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It had already spread to her liver when it was found. We found this out in a quick series of shocks: First the lump, then the exploratory surgery that found that the nodes were involved, then the biopsy that found multiple tumors in her liver. Stage four cancer. It is a brutally blunt understatement to say that her survival chances weren’t good.

We lived the next few months in a fog of anxiety mixed with urgent determination to do whatever we could. When 9/11 happened, it had little emotional impact on me; I was too wrapped up in this (I wrote about that in a column at the time). There was the quick series of interviews to find the right oncologist (we found the best in Bill Butler). Then the biopsies, and one bad report after another. Then a massive round of chemo. Then the surgery. Then a brief period of recovery, followed by another devastating round of chemo. Followed, after another brief time for recovery, by radiation. Then, the beginning a routine of milder chemo treatments every three weeks for the next eight years.

One night, early in the process, I was watching television, and for a moment, had stopped thinking about this horrible thing. My wife, who had been on the Internet where she spent so much of her time during that period, walked in and said she had good news — she had found a site that said she might live for five years if everything went right. That, she said, was easily the most optimistic assessment she had found. I was devastated. That might, in fact, have been my low point. I had not actually internalized, in a quantitative sense, how bad things were until that moment. And my shock was exacerbated by guilt, for having for a moment forgotten about this thing hanging over us. Watching stupid television.

We got through this time through the prayers and concern of many, through determination, through the skillful guidance of the folks at S.C. Oncology Associates, with the helping hands of friends (all sorts of folks brought us dinners during that period). One evening our pastor, Monsignor Leigh Lehocky, visited and spoke with us. I don’t remember all that he said, but I came out of that meeting with a particular focus on something Jesus told his followers more than once: Think about today; don’t get wrapped up in worrying about tomorrow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Ask for your bread daily, not for storehouses that will supply you for life. Storehouses just keep you up nights.

So for my part, that’s what I did. I drew a line. I did not think about tomorrow, because it didn’t bear thinking about. I just focused on what we needed to do today to fight this threat.

But then one Monday, early in the crisis — sometime in the summer of ’01, I think — someone at Rotary spoke about how everyone in the club should try to become a Paul Harris fellow. The speaker — I don’t recall who it was now, although I can remember where I was sitting in that room at Seawell’s — said you don’t have to write a check for $1,000, although some in the club would do that. He or she said we could just commit ourselves to giving $25 a quarter, and in 10 years, we’d have accomplished the goal.

I sat, staring down at the carpet, almost shaking I was so upset. I was holding myself back from shouting, Don’t TALK to me about ten years from now! I don’t want to THINK about ten years from now! You’ve got no business, no right, trying to make me do that!

I don’t think anyone noticed what was happening to me, and I was glad for that. But I was shaken.

As much as I resented that pitch, at some point I started making the payments. It wasn’t about me; it was about the mission of Rotary, and I was in Rotary, so…

In any case, it wasn’t me doing the paying. I was in Rotary because my publisher (Fred Mott at the time) had told me to join (and because Jack Van Loan was recruiting me). The newspaper completely paid my way as a member. So, as the executive in charge of the editorial division budget — and as a member of the newspaper’s contributions committee, back in those days when we still had money to distribute in the community — I made the decision that if I were to be a member in good standing, the cost of contributing to the Foundation should be added to those quarterly payments I signed off on. It was a justifiable expense.

When I got laid off in 2009, I had a couple of decisions to make, among many others: One was whether to stay in Rotary, given that I had to pay for it myself now. The other was whether to keep making the Foundation payments. I’ve made these decisions over again every quarter when the bills come. Each time — so far — I’ve answered “yes” to both. So I guess a little over $300 of that thousand has come from me, in small increments. I sort of figured, I had come this far… and by this time, all members were expected to at least be working on becoming fellows. It really wasn’t seen as optional.

Since that first $25 payment, a lot has happened to us in our personal lives. Our children, three of whom still lived at home in 2001, have gone through all sorts of passages — graduations, and weddings for two of them. Most wonderfully, four more grandchildren have come into our lives.

My wife was first told she was definitely in remission early in 2002. In 2010, Dr. Butler said he thought it safe to take her off chemo altogether (for years, the regimen she was on didn’t have enough of a track record to give him a guide on when it would be safe to stop it).

For the past four-and-a-half years, she has spent most of her waking hours taking care of our four youngest grandchildren. She is their Nonni, and it would be impossible to overestimate how much she means to them. She is an irreplaceable part of their world, as she is of mine, and our children’s.

Last year, we spent 11 days in England, after delivering our eldest granddaughter to her Dad, who was studying at Oxford. Aside from one trip to Disney World with our two youngest daughters some years back, it was the first time we’d ever been able to go anywhere together other than the beach, or to visit family. We had a wonderful time together. Now, inspired in part by a whirlwind European tour our youngest daughter just returned from, we’re working on coming up with an excuse to go visit Wales and Ireland next summer. We may just go anyway, excuse or no.

So this is what the Paul Harris Fellowship means to me: It’s not about world peace or ending poverty, as wonderful as those things are. It’s not about standing up there today and having my fellow Rotarians applaud and congratulate me and the others, as kind as their intentions are.

What it means is that, even when things are at their darkest, the future is a thing worth investing in. Maybe you won’t make it to the end of the next decade; there are no guarantees in this life. But you might. And it’s worth a try.

Show the man we’re serious, little guy!

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"And there are no penalties for paying it off early, right?

I had an appointment this morning with a man at Palmetto Citizens to talk about refinancing the house, seeing as how interest rates are about half what we’ve been paying. (There’s no time like the present, folks — see the ad at right.)

So my wife walked me through all the documents she had gathered in preparation, and I nodded, and eventually said, slightly hyperbolically, “You realize I don’t understand any of this,” and she said she knew — but she had to be at my son’s house this morning taking care of our grandson.

In the end, she decided to bring him to the meeting. I could have handled it, you understand. I understood the broad concepts, and knew that we were shooting for a number that would enable us to wrap together the basic mortgage and our home equity loan into one payment that was sufficiently lower than our total now that we can still pay it off, via overpayments, in five more years — which is when we’d be done with our current 15-year mortgage. I had, after all, suggested we do this. Actually, I meant that I wanted her to do it, but you know what I mean.

I had the bundles of documents, and the numbers written out in front of me, and was all set. Except that she and I both felt better with her there, and doing  the talking, while I rocked my grandson’s carryall back and forth, and jiggled my keys in front of him.

But I tried to act like I was following the proceedings, with a fixed look of concentration on my face — just like our little guy in this picture taken during the meeting. We were a team, and together we got through it, and it’s looking good…

Take it from me, based on personal experience: Time travel’s just not worth the hassle

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I had a time-travel dream last night.

This is a first for me, which is sort of odd, given what a popular theme that is in movies. I’ve had dreams before in which I encounter people such as my grandparents who’ve been gone 40 years and more, but never a dream in which I was conscious of the fact that I, a denizen of the 21st century, was in another time.

What confirmed it this time was the price of gasoline: In the dream, it was 26 cents a gallon. Which means I landed somewhere between 1949 and 1959. I had a sense that it was within my lifetime, and a time I would have remembered, so we’re talking toward the last two or three years of that period. And no, I don’t remember what I was driving, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a DeLorean. It was probably something that didn’t look out of place.

That’s really all I can remember of the dream, but I recall a number of details about this gas station stop. I don’t specifically remember the attendants surrounding my vehicle to pump the gas, check the oil, clean the windshield, etc. I just remember staring at that pump price, and marveling at it.

Of course, it was the old-style pump, and the gauge had the old digital-yet-analog numbers — white on a black background — that physically clicked over to tote up the price as you pumped. The pumps looked kind of like the ones in this picture — the kind with rounded corners, like an old refrigerator, or a car from the early ’50s — only brand-new. The enamel paint on them was shiny white. I don’t recall the brand.

As it happened, my tank was almost full, to the point that I just needed slightly more than a gallon. My total was 35 cents. I felt this great disappointment that I hadn’t had an empty tank, so I could have the pleasure of filling it up for less than five bucks. I wondered whether I could spare the time to drive around a few hours and come back, just to experience that, before having to be wherever I had to be.

But then I realized I had a bigger problem than frivolous disappointment. I had no way of paying the 35 cents.

Out of habit, I was holding a debit card in my hand. I suddenly realized that not only was it useless — no way to swipe it — but I couldn’t let anybody see it, or it would raise questions I couldn’t answer: What’s this strip like recording tape on the back? What’s this shiny square that looks like a mirror, with the shifting image in it?…

I slipped the card into my pants pocket, and even before I started to feel around for change, I realized that even if I had some, none of it would pass a close look — or even the briefest glance, or touch, for that matter. Post-1964 “silver” coins are a different color from coins before that date, and feel different in the hand. They would look like what they are — cheap imitations of real silver. Never mind what would happen if somebody looked at the date, or if it were one of those quarters with the 50-states theme on the back: What’re you tryin’ to pull, Future-Boy?…

Without looking, I knew there was close to zero chance that I’d find a coin that would pass muster. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a pre-1964 quarter outside of a numismatist’s blue book? You still run across dimes and nickels that old, but they’re rare as hen’s teeth.

And don’t even think about trying to pass modern paper money. The shape, the color, the size of the presidents…

I started wondering whether the station manager would take barter (in which case, what did I have to trade that wouldn’t be suspicious?), or trust me for it while I tried to go scrounge the tiny amount I owed him, somehow. It was a tight spot.

And you know what? I’m not sure what I could have done to avoid this problem. I suppose I could have bought the coins from a collector before leaving the present, which would have totally ruined the joy of buying cheap gas, since the coins would have cost me many times their face value.

It’s all just a huge hassle. So take my advice, based on bitter experience: Forget about time travel. Just stay here in good ol’ 2012. Going back’s just not worth the trouble.