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.

A sign of age

 What does it say about the people I know that the last three emails I wrote had the phrase "sorry to hear that ..." in the first sentence? One was to my brother, who's having his boy gland zapped, which isn't bothering him, and hormone treatments, which are. The second was to an ex B&N coworker who needs to have surgery on her neck in November to fuse parts of it together, and the third was to a friend who's mother is ill enough that she's moved in with her. She said the highlights of her days are when she walks the family dog. 

It says that I'm gittin' old.

If I was in my twenties, I bet a lot of my emails would say things like, "So happy to hear you're getting married!", "Congrats on the promotion!" and "You're buying a house? Cool!" Of course, when I was in my twenties email was something known about and used by only tech geeks for exchanging things incomprehensible to people like me.

Getting high

 I've been eating a not-quite-keto diet for about six months now. By not quite, I mean many fewer carbohydrates—goodbye sugar, pasta, bread, a variety of fruit—and more vegetables (though I've always eaten more of those than most), but not gorging on fat, as many on those diets do. The idea of frying up a pound of bacon sounds fun sometimes but it's not for me. I eat modest servings of salmon and, occasionally, chicken. I eat six eggs a week, some cheese, and yogurt. I've been combining this with intermittent fasting, which for me means eating only between noon and seven p.m. and not eating at all two days a week. I have a four-ounce glass of rice wine once a week.

I feel great. I've lost over ten pounds and my mind has never been clearer. I exercise fairly often. Both of my cancers are at bay, I sleep well, and there's been relatively little stress in my life. 

Then I got blood work done last week. 

My cholesterol level has soared. I've read in many places that eggs don't have the kind of cholesterol that damages human hearts, but I'll change to two a week anyway, and have just one slice of cheese a week too. I've also read that keto diets and fasting can make cholesterol go up and that the form of cholesterol your liver is producing isn't harmful. Something to do with the particle size.

My doctor is a good one. He's in his late sixties, a G.P., but the kind of doctor who keeps up with things. I mentioned that after a painful operation in August of 2020 I'd been cleared to use medical marijuana, which is the only kind legal in my state (Pennsylvania, which is technically a commonwealth, not a state, but I was trying to be less wordy. Blew that, didn't I?) but that it did little for me and he said the weed (tincture in my case; I have lung issues and I don't want to smoke or vape) in Pennsylvania was bad because all of it has to be grown and processed in Pennsylvania, which prevents the best strains from being sold here. 

I doubt my doctor has taken a hit in his life and I was surprised he knew so much about it. He's on a bicycling trip this week, a vacation, and will get in touch with me when he returns. I know he'll want to put me on statins. I'll resist this unless scans show real problems and want a recount after a month or so of improved eating and without a thirty-six-hour fast before the blood draw.

On the driveway

 

The most interesting letters I've ever read are ones I've found. Unlike hearing half of a phone conversation ("When? ... Oh ... Uh-huh ... Nah, I'm gonna stay over there till Tuesday") they have enough context that you get them ("After Montana, we drove up to Canada and went to that town that had a museum of coaches, which sounds like it'd be boring but it's not"). 

Between the two is cards and I found one after recycling day in my neighborhood. There was no envelope and I know my immediate neighbors and wasn't from any of them.

The outside is in the photo above. Inside, the printed copy is:

May each tear that falls be a gentle reminder that you and your loved one meant so much to each other, and that no loss or sorrow, time or distance can ever take that away.

With Deepest Sympathy

 Under this, hand written:

So sorry for your loss. Our thoughts & prayers are with you and your family.

Jerry and Pat T.

I guess when I die there will be a few similar cliché ridden (in both forms of copy) cards and letters sent to my brothers, who will be my only undiluted survivors. I hope they'll at least write out the word "and" instead of using an ampersand, like I do when I'm writing grocery lists. Not that I'll know or care about it.

The Loser's answers

The below, by Scott Mautz from Inc.com, is the usual kind of thing you see online these days. Usually, it's pure clickbait, sometimes it's valid. In this case, it's more valid than in most others. Unless you're a Complete and Total Loser.

 A 27-Year Study Says 1 Thing Is Key to Happiness and Longevity in Work and Life

It all comes from one thing that you can spark with eight questions to yourself.

Here’s a news flash: In today’s world, work and life are intertwined beyond separability. We’d love to work longer, more productively, with more passion, and live that way too. Which is why a study published in May 2019 caught my eye.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by a team of University of Michigan researchers. The team analyzed data from the 27-year-old Health and Retirement Study (a U.S.-based, nationally representative well-being study) and found that one thing led to people living longer.

That one thing is inescapably interwoven with happiness, fulfillment, and maximum productivity at work.

Working and living with a sense of purpose and meaning.

The researchers found that those who had meaning and a sense of purpose (as measured by answers to questions from well-being self-assessments) lived longer lives than those who'd self-reported little to no sense of purpose and meaning.

Other University of Michigan research (2010) clearly shows that working with a sense of purpose and meaning leads to far greater engagement, motivation, productivity, and retention.

Purpose is the profound “Why?” Having it creates a sense of mission to do something worthy. It’s your significant “yet-to-do” in life. Purpose integrates who you are with what you do. It inspires us to renew our commitments and stretch further to manifest it, which is why having a sense of purpose in your work is so powerful.

So the case for working and living with a sense of purpose is crystal clear. But how to enable that?

One word: introspection.

In my book Make It Matter, I shared a set of introspective questions, the answers to which can help you identify your work and life purpose. I’ll share a selection of those questions here. To unlock your purpose, consider each of the following:

1. What are your superpowers?

Don’t be modest. You know what you’re really good at. How can you leverage that strength, like a superhero, to do good for the world? When you choose to use that strength towards a purpose, something bigger than yourself, it elevates to superpower status.

Loser's answer: None, unless knowing you suck at anything worth doing is a superpower.

2. What are your values and beliefs?

What do you most strongly believe in—to the extent it helps guide your everyday actions? Staying true to those non-negotiable values is one of the simplest, most direct ways I encourage people to work and live with a sense of purpose.

And when people at work see you unswervingly living your values, even in times of adversity, it’s downright inspiring. 

Loser's answer: Whatever those of the people around me are at the time. It's my pathetic way to get people to like me.

3. What would you do for free?

Pay attention to what you’re doing when you lose track of time. What do you daydream about? Those things you get absorbed in can be signals of something you were meant to do and that if you pursued further would bring profound meaning. 

Loser's answer: Nothing I haven't tried and failed at already.

4. What have been your happiest moments?

What were you specifically doing in those moments and what about them brought you such joy? Look for themes. The common threads can provide clues as to what your purpose might be. 

Loser's answer: Pushing stalled cars to the side of roads.

5. What have you learned from career misfires and triumphs?

Wrong turns in your career, while also being valuable learning experiences, help you bring the contrasting triumphs into focus. Reflect on what was happening during both misfires that brought pain and victories that brought joy. Who were you in those times? What did you excel or flounder at? Clues to your purpose lie within. 

Loser's answer: That I'm not good enough at doing anything I enjoy doing to make a decent living from it. 

6. What deed needs doing?

What is your cause? What problem needs solving? What does the world need that you're well suited to provide? Note the higher-order, bigger-than-you, nature of each of these questions. Our purpose often feeds something greater than ourselves. 

Loser's answer: The best thing for me to do in my remaining years is to keep out of the way of others.

7. What would co-workers miss if you weren't there?

This speaks to those inspiring, magnetic characteristics you have that others are drawn to and well-served by. What would be missed could be telltale signs of what you can perpetuate and accentuate in service of your purpose. 

Loser's answer: That's happened a few times already and I've been forgotten quickly and replaced by better people.

8. What would people say you were meant to do?

What characteristic would others feel compelled to speak about in your absence? What have others said about your talents? Have you ever heard the phrase, “Wow, you could be a ______”? Still more clues on the path to purpose.

So be purposeful about discovering, articulating, and living and working with purpose. Lots of things will be longer (and deeper)--your work, life, happiness, and fulfillment. 

Loser's answer: Clean things. Offices, especially. Wash dishes, polish metal, sand wood.

 Scott Mautz is a keynote speaker and the author of Find the Fire and Make It Matter. Follow him on Twitter @scott_mautz.

 

Heart trouble

 Yesterday morning, my brother came home after exercising and complained of light headedness. His wife drove him to a nearby hospital and by the end of the day he had a chestful of stents to wedge open arteries that were at a Jerry Garcia stage of being clogged. 

My other brother (there are three of us) is also having heart concerns and is having scans and stress tests and other monitoring. And there's me, with two types of cancer and an aneurysm in my heart. We range in age from sixty-three to sixty-seven now, with me being the youngest. I'm still betting that of the three of us, I'm still the least likely to make it to seventy. With an aneurysm, if something happens you don't call an ambulance, you call a hearse. 

Completely unrelated: Two days ago a friend and her boyfriend came from the city to the suburbs and we met up at Valley Forge Park. I'd never spent time with the boyfriend before. We spent around three hours there. The friend, who is in her late thirties, did something I consider remarkable these days: She didn't take out her cell phone once. Her boyfriend did, but just once and briefly. I considered her not doing this a great gift of a different kind.

Half vaccinated

 

It feels funny to be half vaccinated the way I am now. In between shots. I'm somewhat safer, but not completely. It seems to make many less cautious, but in my case more so. Even when fully vaccinated, there's a ten percent chance you can catch COVID. You probably won't get as sick as you would if you were unvaccinated, by who wants to take chances? 

Overall, it's good to have some protection, even though I seldom go out and when I do it's to uncrowded grocery stores. 

Life drags on as before. I sleep at odd hours and get up in part just to get the newspaper off the driveway so my neighbors don't think I'm dead. I eat tiny, healthy meals in a futile effort to lose a few pounds. One one indulgence is eating artichokes, which remind me of my mother because she, my brother, and I would eat them when my father, who saw little point to them, was on business trips. They are a convenient way to consume melted butter without going to a movie theater.

Snow days

 

It's been a snowy February in my mid-Atlantic region, where just three weeks ago long-range forecasters were predicting a winter of very little snow: "Sorry skiers!" they were saying.

But now there are several inches of snow on the ground with more to come. And once there's snow on a huge tract of land, reflecting the sun's heat back into space, what will happen next is anyone's guess.

While walking to the end of my driveway to get the morning newspaper yesterday, my head was down as a measure of extra care to try to prevent a fall. I was thinking about how when I was young looking at a newly fallen field of snow made me think about how lovely a sight it was. That virgin white. Now, in my early sixties, all it made me think of was how many floaters I have in my aging eyes. Will I ever need cataract surgery, or will death find me first?

* Photo note. The photo is of a woman named Katherine, who lived in the same apartment building as I did in Philadelphia. It was taken during a major storm in the aughts. She was a neat young woman who had just become a school teacher. I didn't know her very well, and like many in my small apartment building (a six-unit converted rowhouse) she moved into a better place after a few months, unlike me, a loser, who lived there for twenty years. When I first saw her shoveling I thought it was a kid helping out a mom or dad, she looked so small, but although Katherine was not very tall, she was no kid.

If only I had done this

 

A radio show I was listening to recently about self awareness featured an expert on the topic who said that while most people think they're degree of self awareness is high, the reality is that just ten to fifteen percent of us are, no matter how old you are.

Two things she advised that I wish I'd known and done when I was twenty-two instead of sixty-two:

1. When things go badly, don't ask yourself why they went badly. Why questions seldom get honest answers and harm well being. Ask what questions, followed by how questions. That is, instead of saying, "Why didn't that person want to see me again?" or "Why didn't I get that job?" ask "What went well on that date? What didn't?" and "What did I do well on that interview?" followed by "How can I do better the next time?"
2. Have a Dinner of Truth with a friend and ask them, "What do I do that annoys you most?" Choose honest friends, not ones who tell you you look great when you know you don't. No matter what they say, you answer must be, "Thank you. Tell me more."

The only thing I'd dispute is that age is irrelevant, especially regarding the second one. Over the years, enough people have told me of the social blunders I've committed that I have learned. But I get depressed by how long it took me to absorb their lessons and how many of them I could have learned and rectified by the time I was twenty-five instead of fifty.

The distraught friend

 I got home from grocery shopping yesterday as the news of the January 6 attempted insurrection in Washington, D.C., was breaking. Not long after I got home, a friend called. Like me, she doesn't have cable. Unlike me, she was watching CNN feed online. Also unlike me, she had worked herself into a frenzy about what she was seeing.

Sample dialog:

My friend: Oh look! There's another of those assholes wearing a tri-corner hat!

Me: You know, not that I'd ever wear one, but those are pretty cool hats. 

It went on for several minutes like that. I was unable to match her anger and level of agitation and not about to pretend to do so. I've never been like that, even when I was college age. It's not that I don't care, I do. I've missed voting just once in my life since 1976 and that was because I was living overseas. (It would've been hard to vote as I'd left the state I'd lived in for good and hadn't moved into another one. Also, it was obvious that the election would be one-sided: George H.W. Bush vs. Micheal Dukakis.) I've donated to politicians I'm in favor of, though not a lot as I really don't think it should be about money, though it is.

I have a few friends who need to disengage from the media flow more often than they do. They need to ask themselves what good it does for them to get as upset as they do. The friend who called me yesterday, for example, has a bad heart that had her hospitalized for two weeks a year ago and it's still not great. She lives alone and hasn't left her apartment since March of last year due to her concerns over the virus. Why do people let themselves thrive on anger? It's as bad for the psyche as spending hours a day watching pornography is for sexual concepts and feelings, or gambling is for managing personal finances. 

You have a choice when it comes to how much time you spend engaging with current events. Too little is bad, but so is too much. There is more of value in the world other than knowing what's going on, and I say this having been a journalist at one time. Find an old book, a novel, and read it. It doesn't have to be some dumb escapist book, though it can be. Just something about a different place or time than our own, something that transports you from now and here. Turn your stupid phone off and put it in a drawer or a room where you won't see it, and vow not to look at it for at least an hour. You'll live, I promise. And if you doze off while reading in a comfortable chair, great!