The news, late January, 2025

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My first died

 My first being Jimmy Carter. I was a senior in high school and eighteen. All these years later, eighteen seems almost too young to be allowed to vote. 

Gerald Ford, whom Carter beat that year, was a decent enough man, but the nation needed a kind of mental housecleaning after Watergate and its loss of the war in Vietnam. How the two spent the years after their presidencies says something about them. Carter worked tirelessly to make the world a better place. Ford played golf. 

Carter was famous for his smile. I read an article about what was appealing about it and it was the way that when he smiled, all you saw was teeth. No carrels. This was in a time before most kids had their pallets spread and I remember being mad that I'd never have a smile as good as Carter's.

Getting worse?

 It seems that my incidents of phantom pain are getting more intense, lasting longer, and happening more frequently. It's a horrible kind of pain because there's no reason for it; it's all mental. But even though it's all mental, it feels as real as any other pain. I'm five hours into an intense episode of it now.

   On the other hand, it's not like any other pain. If you asked me to replicate it, I'd have no way of doing so. Scalding water? No. An electric shock? Closer, sometimes, but still no. Deprived blood flow? A broken bone? A hard slap? No, no, and no. 

   Pressure therapy helps a little. What that means is that when a phantom pain hits my non-existent right leg, I grind a knuckle into the corresponding part of my left leg. Using pain to stop pain. It stops it alright, but only for a little while. You have to keep on top of it, like the pain is a rat in a burning room with one hole to escape though and you can push it back but it will try again, sometimes for just a few hours, sometimes for an entire day.

   Christmas, the day I'm writing this on in 2024, is not special to me. What cards I send say Season's Greetings and are more about celebrating the end of the year. Still, there's a little part of me that thought this morning at ten, when the current attack began, "Aw, come on. It's Christmas!"

What it's been like in Pennsylvania in 2024

 My home state is actually a commonwealth, but if you call it a state, only dorks like me will point that out. You'd think that living in a ... place ... that's the center of the political universe for so many months would sate the lust for attention we all have in some form.

Voting for me went smoothly. (Yay burbs!)

Not for me. A geezer of over 65 now, I watch so little broadcast TV that there are often appealing photographs of Big Stars on magazine covers and I have absolutely no idea who there are. Shows that have lengthy runs come and go and I've never seen an episode even when they're on channels I get for free with my rabbit ear antenna, which has a piece of aluminum foil wrapped on it to pick up more. 

When I'm not streaming on Netflix or Amazon, the only two services I have, I'll watch the national evening news and local news occasionally, and Jimmy Kimmel's monologue. The only show on network television I watch in full is Jeopardy! The regular version only. It makes me feel old when the contestants don't know the answer to something that is, to me and others of my generation, common knowledge. A couple of nights ago, the question was about what James Cagney mushed in Mae Clarke's face in the 1931 movie, Public Enemy. None of the three knew.

 

On Jeopardy! these days, in my part of Pennsylvania—the crucial Philadelphia western suburbs—there were, last night (Monday, November 4) a total of 22 commercials. Of those, nine were for either Trump or Harris, eight were for local races, and just five were for "normal" things like cars and prescription drugs. The ads are meant to induce at least anxiety, and often outright fear. I hit Mute on the remote and block all but a sliver of the screen with my knee, but some of the negativity seeps through. Bill Clinton was the first to target ads to the states that mattered. Apparently, it works. Thanks, Bill!

For uninteresting health reasons, my diet has been somewhat restrictive and disciplined for a few years now, and I haven't touched a drop of alcohol for two years, even though drinking was never a problem for me. Today, however, I went nuts in the grocery store and bought things to indulge in, stopping short of alcohol. It's as if I've gotten over a lengthy illness.

Really, Gmail?

 They probably spent millions of dollars on labor and computing power to change this: 

 

To this:

I don't know about you, but the suspense was killing me!

 Of the books I’ve read so far this year, I find myself thinking more about one passage more than any others. It’s from a non-fiction book, Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under a White Sky,” and it’s not the main theme of the book, which is about human efforts to manipulate the natural world to prevent things like flooding and the loss of species:  

We got to talking about climate history and human history. In Steffesen's view, these amounted to more or less the same thing. "If you look at the output of ice cores, it has really changed the picture of the world, our view of past climates and of human evolution," he told me. "Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago?
 "You know that they had just as big brains as we have today," he went on. "When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was very stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance."
**Side note: This isn’t meant to start a climate change debate, but I know that some might see it as evidence that the climate has changed cyclically throughout time. No one would argue that—it’s been well known for decades and supported through geological evidence and ice core samples. But if you’re going to cite this, it would only be fair to note that over the past sixty-five million years, the rate of change since the Industrial Revolution has been about one hundred times faster than at any other time. Or you could just take the excerpt for what it is.

Afternoon laisons

 

I've been seeing a married woman I met online a few hours a week for the past two months. We meet at a third location for about an hour and a half, usually on Tuesdays and Fridays. I've never met her husband, but he sounds like a nice guy. During these meetings, I give this woman, I'll call her Z, something her husband can't.
English lessons. Z is from China and we were connected through a volunteer English teaching program in my county. I taught English as a second language full time in China and Japan for four years in the 1980s and part time in Philadelphia as a volunteer in the nineties. In both cases, I was teaching classes of varying sizes, seldom of fewer than a dozen. This is one-on-one tutoring.
The books and materials my student and I have been given are terrific. I had some decent teaching material in my previous stints, but nothing like this stuff. It makes sense that teaching material evolves, of course, but compared to what I had in China in 1985, material twenty years out of date then, this is like comparing a laser printer to a slate board.
Z has been in America for four years and if you met her you might be surprised by how low her level of English is and judge her negatively for it. I know better. She lives with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren in a large suburban house. Her daughter and son-in-law have high-paying jobs and are the breadwinners of the family, and Z and her husband's role is to take care of and teach Chinese to the grandchildren, who are four and seven years old. I begin each class with an exercise I call Weekend English. On Tuesday, it’s, "What did you do over the weekend?" and Fridays it's, "What are you doing this weekend?" The suburb Z and I live in is not especially diverse, so when Z said she spends her weekends meeting up with six other Chinese ex-patriots who live within walking distance of her house, I found it hard to believe.
She’s getting better and speaking and says her level of confidence is increasing. I’ve told her that learning a new language is like climbing a slippery mountain and that you’ll go up some steps and sometimes fall a few steps and get discouraged. Her understanding of that was in a way that made me think she’s already experienced it.
I am awful at learning languages and it was a source of feeling extremely bad about myself. Nearly forty years later, I remember vividly sitting alone on the platform of a small train station on a hot night and trying to grasp a concept in the Japanese language instruction book I had. It was a good book, one used in U.S. colleges at the time. I just couldn’t get it even though other foreigners who did what I was doing could. I realized that if I had a gun with me, I’d put the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger. It was one of the two strongest urges to commit suicide I’ve ever had, and it frightened me. Good thing Japan has strict gun laws!
Z is a basically happy woman, so I don’t worry about that with her. But still, I’m careful to make her language learning experience a positive one as much as I can without being insincere.

Cut your gas bills now!

 

Here's how:

Drive less. 

Americans these days see driving someplace at least once a day whether they need to or not as a fundamental right. Spend a little time outside any supermarket and you’ll see many shoppers with one bag, partially full. They shop three or four times a week. (I know someone who goes to Wegman’s every day. It’s a thing, apparently.) Our economy is based on consumerism (around 70 percent) and we’ve been made to feel bad if we’re not participating in it. We’ve been sold the paranoid proposition that “it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it” about thousands of consumer items—toilet paper, guns, pickup trucks and big cars—by corporations that laugh behind our backs at our gullibility.

• Schedule one day a week on which no one in your two-car (or three or more, if you have kids over sixteen) drives at all. It won’t be easy for most because it’s not “normal” but it is possible for many. Think of that: Fifty-two days a year of not using a drop of gas!
   
• Plan ahead when shopping. Make a good list and remember to ask others in your household for input. Warn them that if they don’t ask for it now, they won’t get it until later in the week
   
• Make your own coffee. The line to the Starbucks drive-through in Devon often backs up onto Lancaster Avenue. Many in it drive their three-ton cars six miles round trip daily to idle in line for their sugar-enriched cup of overpriced coffee. Stop that. Starbucks will be fine even if you do
• Drive no more than five miles over the speed limit. Put your phone away while driving. You know how at least once a trip someone honks at you while you’re checking text messages because the light has changed and then you floor it to make up for lost time? Back in the olden days, driver’s ed teachers called that a “jackrabbit start,” and they waste fuel
• Car pool. Chances are someone near you goes to the train station when you do, or returns at the same time as you, and that one or both of those trips could be eliminated. Someone nearby probably attends the same house of worship as you

Two friends

 

I have two friends who have never met each other that I haven't heard from yet this year. I suspect the reasons are bad ones having nothing to do with me. Both have mothers who are in their late eighties, one of which has been declining markedly for years. One has been having family issues regarding some rocky times between her son and his wife.

Pre-pandemic, I'd have been more struck by not hearing from them than I am. Another person I consider a good friend lives a half-hour-drive away, but we haven't seen each other for two years now. Neither of us are Zoomers or phone people. We email back and forth and I feel like I'm up to date with what's happening in this friend's life.

I'm not like most. I go days at a time without uttering a word to anyone at all, and when I break those silences it's only to say hello to the cashier when I'm buying groceries. As normal as this is to me, I do look forward to sitting in the sun and eating lunch with friends again.

2/2/22!

 

This is the eighth time in my life that the date has been a striking one, by some criteria.

The first was 6/6/66. I was eight years old then and would have been aware of people around me talking about it, but it wouldn't have meant anything to me at that age and I don't remember it. I was aware of 7/7/77, though. That was during the summer between my high school graduation and first year of college. Seven is a lucky number in the west and I remember hearing about people betting on the seventh horse in the seventh race at horse tracks on that day, and others playing 777 in states that had legal daily numbers games. 

As a child learning numbers, I liked writing the number 8 and I looked forward to the year 8/8/88. When that day came (it was a Monday), however, I was living in Japan and teaching English and I had no reason to write the date. Nonetheless, that was, looking back, my best year ever. I was youngish, 30, had hit my stride in my job, which paid well, and for a few days it looked like a woman I was nuts about might be nuts about me. (She was, a little, but not enough and we never did more than kiss. She married someone else in 1989.) 

Another good day was 9/9/99, a Thursday. I was working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper and at the time it looked like I might have a somewhat successful career in journalism, despite having entered the field relatively late in life, when I was in my late thirties. I did not, but I didn't know it then. The paper I worked for came out on Thursdays then, meaning my deadline was on Wednesday afternoon, so Thursdays were a relaxed day for me and my fellow employees, a time to sit around the office and think of what stories to cover for the next edition.

The beginning of a new century provides more special dates than the rest of it because of the aughts: 1/1/01, 2/2/02, etc. Now we're back to the dates that get mentioned coming just every eleven years.

I miss being young enough that exceptional dates seemed somehow important to me.

New car!

 My 1998 Toyota Camry was in the shop for three days this week having its front bumper replaced due to having been hit in a parking lot by a careless driver. Insurance paid for a rental. The rental was a late model Audi Quattro. 

It wasn't easy going from a '98 to a 21st century automobile and yes, I was looking for a keyhole when I got in it. All that tech! I didn't drive it long enough to trust the backup camera, and I'm still impressed by how the multiple cameras stitch an image of your surroundings to make it look as if you're getting images sent from a hovering drone. 

A funny thing about driving a new car is how fast you get used it. I drove the Audi as little as possible and didn't touch it at all for one of the days. (Putting gas in it wasn't needed.) Yet once I'd swapped back to the Camry, which is ten inches lower, I paused a little when I first exited it, wondering how the ground got so much nearer. 

The new front bumper on my car, by the way, makes me think of someone who's had a facelift. 

Time passes

 

Today is my mother's birthday. She died ten a little over years ago at age 80. 

Although I never considered myself a mama's boy, for many years thoughts of her death were so fresh they brought only solemn sadness. Now that's faded a little, though I'm still respectful of her and the life she lived. Today, while writing in a journal I write in every morning, I found myself forgetting to capitalize "Mom" when using the word as a proper noun. Later, when emailing a friend who shares my sense of humor, I wrote that my mother would have been 91 today if not for a tragic skydiving accident. 

I'm glad I've lived long enough that her memory has balance. She's still a daily presence in my life, but not one that saps joy.

In the photo she's recovering from a bad cold. The boy in bed is her big brother, who I'm named after, home on leave from the Marines. The nation is on the cusp of entering World War II. The newspaper she has is The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which went out of business in 1982 after a run of 135 years. For years it had the largest circulation of any evening newspaper in America, during a time when there were many. (People my age can tell it's that paper by the two-column wide spread of comics on the back page of one section.)

It looks like a happy day for her. No school because of her cold, warm in bed with the newspaper, Tip Top Magazine, with its stories and puzzles, her big brother, a Marine fly boy. Both she and her brother with a vast number of years ahead of them, not knowing, of course, that they would die less than a month apart in fall of 2011.

 The photo would have been taken by her father, who died six years before I was born.

New Year's Eve Channel Surfing

 The shows marking the coming new year last night aimed at a demographic much different from my own, so I wandered the dial with my TV remote. I don't have cable and if you don't have cable and live in a heavily populated area like I do you get many channels over the air. They're somehow affiliated with network channels but have higher numbers after a decimal point. In the computer world, the higher the number, the newer and more improved the program. In TV, it's the opposite.

 

Last night I came across a The Tonight Show episode that aired on New Year's Eve of 1975, forty-six years ago exactly. I tuned in late and Orson Bean was talking about how he recently communed with a butterfly as he sat nude in the backyard of his South California home. The butterfly flew here and there and eventually landed on his finger at which point man and insect stared at each other for half a minute after which the butterfly took to the skies. Bean said he felt he experienced what it was like to be a butterfly, and that the butterfly experienced what it was like to be Orson Bean.

There are many remarkable things about this to me. The most remarkable is that I remembered watching that episode as it originally aired. I was seventeen. I'd forgotten it was Orson Bean, misremembering the guest as Charles Grodin, but I remembered much of what was said verbatim. I was very much a magical thinker at that age, engrossed in ESP, levitation, telekinesis, the supernatural in general, and I would be so for several years to come. (Eventually, after much research and reading and living, none of those things proved true to a level that satisfied me and I now see the world from a scientific viewpoint.)

Orson Bean was the most interesting guest on the show, which included Joan Rivers, Charles Nelson Riley, and Scatman Crothers. He was forty-seven at the time and was, to my generation, known more as a TV personality—a frequent panelist on game shows and guest on talk shows—than as an actor, though one of his later roles was as the 105-year-old Dr. Lester in the 1999 Being John Malcovich, a favorite of mine and a certifiable cult movie. ("If I was 80 years younger, I'd box your ears.") Bean, who died in 2020, showed a knowledge of theater you don't see now. (Look up what it means in the theater world to "swallow the file" and see what you find.) The Tonight Show back then was on five nights a week and was an hour and a half long, which meant that even with that number of guests, who all stayed from the time they came on until the time they left, the conversations meandered. Now, they're largely semi-scripted and promotional and about the only reason to watch these shows is for the host's monologue.

Bean's butterfly story was representative of that era, the mid 1970s, when such things were common. An actor, he would probably have tried drugs like LSD or others, and been very open to the things I was even at his age. Watching the show made me remember myself at that age. I would have been watching it alone, both brothers out, my parents at a party elsewhere. It was on a Wednesday night and I'd be off school for a the week. Other shows would have recapped the year that ended, highlighting events like the fall of Saigon and the movie Jaws, the first to be called a blockbuster. Betty Ford, the first lady, was Time Magazine's Person of the Year in an era when women were seldom given that honor. Americans anticipated the coming year as one of celebration as their nation marked the bicentennial of its founding. Things that got no attention in 1975 but would later happened, as always: Two young men founded a company they named Microsoft; a little known group of comedians started a show called Saturday Night Live; Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet, and Tiger Woods were born. 

Channel surfing used to be a thing. It's not now. With streaming services algorithms suggest shows people want, or they're dug into their beliefs enough that their TVs are set to the channel that best entertains them or reinforces their belief. But sometimes, it pays to just sit there and scroll at random.

Simple Seashore Shell Scintilla

 

While in Cape May, New Jersey, last month, my first time at a beach in decades, I noticed that the shells that appealed to me weren't the pristine ones I'd have treasured in my youth but gnarled oyster shells, incomplete, rubbed smooth by wind, sand, and water.

Shore enough

 I went to Cape May, New Jersey, for three days last week, which was in mid-November. I've always been an off season type and I'm even more of one now. 

I had no idea what crutching on sand would be like, even after using crutches for over three years on a variety of surfaces. Would they just sink in and make going anyplace impossible? They did sink in, but never more than three inches or so whether on dry sand, wet sand, or in-between sand. I could ambulate fast enough to not feel ridiculous but not fast enough that I'd invite someone to go for a walk with me unless they were very patient. Using crutches on dry sand is great exercise. Low impact and if you fall, you'll be fine. 

 The people I met in Cape May were friendly, but I didn't meet many of them and during the summer season those who work in stores and the like may become as surly as those anywhere else, though I'd think being near the sea might put people in a good mood for more hours a day than if they lived elsewhere. Fresh air and sunshine, even in November. 

One of the three days I spent was much warmer than average. This photo shows that a woman (or a man with small feet) had run barefoot on the beach. The usual person I saw was either a dog walker or someone fishing. 

The last time I took an overnight vacation was in November of 2000, when I spent ten days on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The only other times I haven't slept in my own bed have been housesitting gigs, which I no longer do, hospital stays, which I do too often now, and one funeral in 2002 that was overseas. The only other traveling I've done since 2000 has been day trips from Philadelphia to New York City via a cheap bus.