Lance Mannion

Study for a painting in the manner of Edward Hopper

This doesn’t really look like a painting by Edward Hopper.  For one thing, the light is wrong.

But this morning when I looked at the Saugerties Lighthouse from this angle, my imagination, sparked by my habit of reflexively comparing all lighthouses to paintings of lighthouses by Hopper, “saw” it as a Hopper painting.

Actually, in color and tone and mood, it reminds me a bit more of some of Hopper’s paintings of Gloucester.

The Italian Quarter.

Freight Cars.

Prospect Street.

If you really want to see some Hopper paintings brought to life or life rendered as a Hopper painting, you should read Norman Buckley’s blog post.  Buckley is one of the directors for the TV series Pretty Little Liars and a Hopper fan and when he’s seen the chance, he’s made his love of Hopper’s work clear.

Remind you of anything?

Click on the image to see what Buckley was going for.

And read his whole post, Hopper and Teen Noir.

Also, nice story from NPR on Gloucester as an inspiration to Hopper.

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The last great places in America

Went to the hardware store this morning to buy some lawn bags and ask about having the blades sharpened on my lawn trimmer.  This is the hardware store here in town, which is a hardware store, not a Lowes, not a Home Depot, not even a Tru-Value.  I had to step over the owner’s dog to get to the counter.  She raised her head and shoulders and slapped the floor a few times with her tail to say hello then lay back down.

“She’s a real watchdog,” the owner said.  “She trips people come in here to rob us.  That’s her talent.  Also she trips customers.  She hasn’t learned to tell the difference.”

Magenta is nineteen months old.  She’s a chocolate lab, named by one of the clerks in the store after the paint color her coat turns in certain lights.  The owner says he’s owned labs all his life and Magenta, young as she is, is already the best natured and best behaved of any lab he’s ever known.  If you’re a fan of labs, you know that’s high praise. It’s not like saying she’s well-behaved for a terrier.

I learned from the owner that he sends out tools that need sharpening.  The guy who does it for him is good and charges a reasonable price and won’t touch anything that would be cheaper to replace than to have sharpened.  The guy’s a farmer and he’s “kind of tied up” at his farm this week, so he wouldn’t be able to get working on the trimmer until the weekend.  I asked the owner would it be all right if I brought it back Friday then so I could use it today, the blades aren’t that dull they won’t do the job at all.  The owner said sure, the guy’s flexible.  When he has something for the farmer, he gives him a call and the farmer swings by. 

I also learned that the owner has gotten out of the rental business.  My trimmer is a stand-up, hand-operated contraption, one of my favorite yard-working tools, but the blonde hates it.  She wants to buy a motorized one.  I refuse. I tell her I hate the noise.  She points they make electric ones.  They just make a different kind of annoying noise, I say.  They whine.  Really, though, it’s that  I can’t see spending a hundred and fifty bucks on a tool we’ll use maybe every other week for three or four months out of the year.  Now if she wanted a table saw…

So I asked about renting, just out of curiosity.  I’m also thinking of renting a power washer.  But the owner says he’s tired of listening to rental customers complain about tools and equipment that don’t work.  Actually, he says, it’s almost always the case it’s not the tool, it’s the operators.  They don’t know what they’re doing.  I believe him.  It’s been my experience that a person’s anger at a balky tool, machine, electronic device, or gizmo of any kind is directly proportional to their incompetence.  The owner said he can’t put up with it anymore, angry customers storming in---tripping over Magenta on the way in---slamming something down on the counter, and demanding their money back.  He used to make the mistake of checking the allegedly broken tool  and demonstrating that it works and how to use it properly.  That never went over well.  He’s decided it’s better all around, for his peace of mind and his business, if he just doesn’t bother with rentals anymore.

So I learned a few things.  I learned a little about chocolate labs, one in particular.  I learned how farmers pick up some money on the side sharpening lawn trimmers and lawn mower and saw blades.  I learned about the perils of the tool rental business.  That’s a lot to learn in one morning.  I paid for the lawn bags, remembered to pick up some ant traps while I was there, and left.

If when Saturday rolls around I tell you that today’s visit to the hardware store was the highpoint of my week, it won’t because I’m being sarcastic or because the week was all downhill from here.  It’s because local hardware stores are among the last great places in America.

Local hardware stores, diners, and public libraries.

Babe magnets

Nurse Baker (breaking off their kiss, as if she’s suddenly remembered): I’m engaged to a pilot!

Hawkeye:  So am I.  I just hope it’s not the same one.

Got passed on the road yesterday by a pick-up with one of those evil pissing Calvin decals on the rear window. (I’ve often wondered why Bill Watterson hasn’t sued.  Maybe he gets royalties.)  It was a little pickup, a kind I don’t see much anymore.  Seems no one drives anything smaller than a F-150 these days.  I saw a 350 recently.  Thing was as big as a tank.  The driver was a very small woman.  I didn’t see the driver of the truck that passed me.  Compared to what I’m used to, and especially compared to my memory of the 350, the pick-up looked like a toy.  The driver was aware of this.  I know this because he, and as you’ll see it was almost certainly a he, had another decal in his rear window that called the truck a toy.  It said:

MY OTHER TOY HAS TITS

I’ll bet it does.  And I’ll bet it really is a toy and it’s inflatable.

Now there’s a babe magnet.  With the Calvin decal?  It’s like Sam Malone’s Corvette.  Women see that in a parking lot and they say to themselves, “Well, I know who I’m having breakfast with tomorrow!”

Why do I think this guy would be scared silly at the prospect of having breakfast with a real live woman?

Good gravy.

Who taught him that the way to attract persons of the female persuasion is to offend as many of them as he can?

Who taught so many American men that the best and only pickup line they need is some variation of “Me want you. Hur-hur.”?

Maybe they pick it up when they’re fourteen from beer commercials which are either aimed at guys like the driver of the toy pick-up truck or make fun of guys like him while pretending to be aimed at them.  By the way, have you noticed how fear of women is a theme of the second type of ads?  I don’t think the guys being made fun of notice.

Been a long time, but I don’t remember this “technique” ever working back in my salad days.  I remember watching in amusement as other guys tried it again and again and then I would shake my head in bewilderment when they whined about getting shot down.  I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t obvious to them why basically grunting like cavemen and beating on their chests failed to charm.

Not that I was a young Sam Malone or Hawkeye Pierce myself, although I had aspirations.  It was just that somewhere along the way I had learned that it was helpful if you actually talked to a girl first---I should say talked with---before inviting her to breakfast.

Frasier: Let’s face it, everybody.  In America, in the 1990s, there are no heroes anymore.

Sam (bursting in the door): Hey, guys!  I’d like you to meet my date.

Norm, Cliff, Frasier, and the gang (chanting):  Sam-my! Sam-my!

I’ve never been taken with evolutionary psychology as a method for explaining all human behavior, but I did develop an evolutionary theory for what those guys were doing, even if they weren’t aware it.  The purpose of the grunting and chest beating, I theorized, wasn’t to charm females of the species.  It was to scare off other males.  Once the competition was driven away, then the horny homonid could devote his attention and his energy towards charming a potential mate and convincing her that he was a worthy breakfast companion.  I just figured that these guys hadn’t learned the second step or that there was a second step.

But the more time I spent in the field observing their behavior, the more I began to doubt my theory.  I began to think that the reason they hadn’t learned about the next step was that there wasn’t supposed to be a next step.  Charming females wasn’t the point.  Getting invited to breakfast wasn’t the point.  Driving off competition from other males wasn’t the point, in fact, the point was almost the opposite.

The point, my theory had it, was to show other males that you weren’t competition for them.

These guys weren’t trying to attract girls.  They were trying to make themselves attractive to other guys.  Not as potential mates.  As potential members of the pack.

The object was for the beta males to demonstrate to the alpha male that they would support and cheer on the top dog but that they didn’t have any ambition to challenging the top dog themselves.

To put it in another, less pseudo-scientific way.  These guys didn’t want to be Sam Malone.  They already knew they weren’t and never would be.  They were Norms and Cliffs who desperately needed Sammy to like them and let them be part of his gang because they knew they were helpless on their own.

Or, to take a more literary approach.  In Romeo and Juliet:  Mercutio is often assumed to be gay because of his expressed contempt for Romeo’s infatuations, first with (the unseen) Rosalind and then with Juliet.  And for all I know or care maybe he is gay.  But it’s far more important that he’s the alpha male of the gang whose only other members we see are Romeo and Benvolio but that probably includes a bunch of other young Veronese bullyboys and swells.  As top dog, Mercutio would naturally try to discourage his gang from pursuing any relationships outside the pack but he would be especially suspicious and jealous of any of the other’s getting involved with women, either because that would threaten the cohesion of the pack---the poor smitten sot might wander off or his romantic and erotic success might incite jealousy among the others---or, since a perk of being the alpha male is first choice among potential mates, Romeo might represent a challenge to his alpha maleness.

It’s to Mercutio’s credit that when he realizes Romeo is seriously in love with Juliet he actually begins to enjoy his company more and treat him with more respect.  He starts to see Romeo as his equal and likes that.

Unfortunately for everyone in the play, a challenge to Mercutio’s place as top dog comes along that he can’t tolerate or adapt to.

And it comes from a cat.

At any rate, it seemed to me, and seemed strange to me, that there were a lot of guys for whom it was more important to show off to other guys than share breakfast with a girl.  And it still seems strange to me.  I don’t know if it’s evolutionary, cultural, or economic, but for some reason the point of gestures like “My Other Toy Has Tits”---and there are all kinds of variations of that, most of them actual gestures---is to fit in among other guys.  Both types of beer commercials, the ones that take these guys’ lusts seriously and the ones that make fun of them, recognize that the real point isn’t to get laid but to share a beer with the guys and both recognize that women are other to that experience.  Women are either accessories to the beer sharing experience or a threat to it.

In the second type of ad it’s often implied that the guys, either the ones in the ads or the ones watching at home, are relieved when they’re shot down.  I don’t know if this has to do with performance anxiety or fear that success would lead to their being driven from the pack.

It didn’t make sense to me that there were guys who preferred the beer-drinking company of other guys to breakfast with a girl.  It still doesn’t.  And I can’t help thinking that guys like the driver of that pick-up want to learn.

If they do, my first lesson would be this.

One semester back in college I had an idiot roommate who decorated the wall above his bed with centerfolds from Hustler.  Not Playboy.  Not even Penthouse.  Hustler!

The wall above my bed was decorated with New Yorker covers and cartoons.

Yeah, I was a pretentious little snot back then.

But guess which one of us had more company for breakfast.

______________________

For the record.  I do not mean any disrespect to pick-up trucks of any size or to their drivers.  I still want a pick-up truck of my own.

Simple pleasures

Looking at the items the woman ahead of me at the convenience store has put on the counter, I’m thinking, “You know, there are times when I wish all it took to make my day a good one was a pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull.”

Then, thinking over what I’m thinking, I think, “God, what kind of life is it when the making of your day is a pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull?”

Then, thinking that over, I think, “Remember, Lance.  Some days all it took to make your grandmother happy was a pack of Winstons and a glass of Genessee Cream Ale.”

The moral of this little tale I take to be, “Pay for your gas and your loaf of bread and go on about your business and leave other people to go on about theirs."

The embarrassment of the middle-aged lover

I’m in the drug store.  I don’t like this drug store.  Its layout makes no sense to me.  I get lost as if in a labyrinth.  Takes me several circuits to find two items that usually turn out to be across from each other in the same aisle.  Tonight, I’m wandering around in there, looking for this and that, and on one of my circuits I nearly run into a woman---I’d put her around forty---who has just stepped back in shock from the condom display.

She turned to me with a hopeless, pleading look and for a second I was terrified she was about to ask me for a recommendation.  There are, after all, a lot of choices.  But she said, “When did they get so expensive?”

To which I fortunately did not reply, “The price of everything keeps going up and up, doesn’t it?”

I said something like, “Mumble, um, mumble, uh, yeah, mumble, oh, are the toothbrushes over there?”

Because I’m suave that way.

I’m guessing she hadn’t been shopping for condoms in a while.  I’ll leave it for you to decide for yourselves why she was doing it tonight and if it was just the cost that had her reeling.

I continued my search for greeting cards and vitamins which meant that a few minutes later I swung back around to that aisle and when I did she was still there only she had moved down one display to the lubricants.  Which she stood stock still before, with her arms out at her side, her whole attitude begging, “Dear God, just kill me now!”

I hope they’re having a nice night.

My beautiful deathbed conversion

Wide awake at four o’clock this morning trying to read myself back to sleep by reading about people who, wide awake at four o’clock in the morning, heard the voice of God calling to them.

One of them doesn’t think the voice he heard was God’s, exactly.  He believes it was the voice of “the mind” of the universe.  It’s the mind we all share in.  It’s what the the “mind” speaking to us in our heads draws its voice from.  I think he means something like Emerson’s Over-soul.  But it might as well be God.

The other didn’t hear an actual voice speaking but he believes God was calling him nevertheless. 

The first person is a fairly ordinary guy, except that he has spent nearly forty-five years thinking about what the voice said to him and what it means and what he and everybody else is supposed to do about it.  The voice made him a philosopher.  Although he never pursued formal training or held a teaching position and in fact continued at his job as a brick mason until he retired, over the years he has donated what extra money he has been able to spare to funding university-sponsored essay contests in which entrants are asked to answer the big questions about life, the universe, and everything.

The second is a scientist.  Not just a scientist.  This scientist.  Dr Collins had been struggling with---or against---a dawning religious conversion when God spoke to him.

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance.  As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over.  The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. 

God had called on him to become an Evangelical Christian.

Obviously, and not incidentally, God did not call upon him to give up being a scientist.  He went on with his chosen career and not as one of those quack scientists oil company apologists in Congress call upon to “debunk” global warming or creationists trot out to support intelligent design.  Collins is a creationist’s nightmare, an Evangelical who believes that evolution happens to be how God did it.

Both these men’s stories are versions of one of my nightmares.

I am terrified that some night---or early morning---I will wake up hearing the voice of God and that I will listen to it.

I don’t believe in God anymore.  That anymore is the key part of that statement.  Giving up my belief hasn’t made me feel smarter.  It’s made me feel robbed.  I miss it.  I can still feel it sometimes too, the way an amputee can still feel a missing limb or a grieving person will feel the company of a loved one or friend who has died.  But when I try to stand on it or reach out to embrace it, it vanishes and that leaves me sad and frustrated and…lonely.

It also leaves me feeling relieved.

See, much as I miss it, I don’t want it back because I don’t, well, believe that if I start believing again I will actually believe.  I’m convinced that if my belief returns it will only be a desperate subconscious attempt to fool myself into believing so that I have a defense against fear, despair, sadness, or loneliness or all of the above. 

In other words, I’m scared that I will believe because I’m scared.

Consequently, I’m on guard all the time against any thoughts that might indicate I’m starting to believe again.  This means that if God ever does decide to talk to me, he’s going to have his work cut out for him.

There’s not much of a point to this post, but it does let me tell one of my favorite anecdotes.

I had a friend, an English professor and poet, who was as unapologetic an atheist as an atheist can be.  One of his favorite things to say, which he usually said after hearing of some good, kind, noble, or decent thing someone had done, was, “Too bad there’s no such place as heaven.”

One day he pulled this in front a of a colleague, another poet who was not only a believer, but as unapologetic a believer as a believer can be.  He was also a touch flamboyant and had a way of delivering the simplest statements in such a grand, gushing, and utterly charming manner that you wanted him to be right even if he was in effect calling you an ass just for the aesthetic beauty of it.  And when my friend delivered his favorite line, the poet threw him a great big beatific smile and said, “Oh, Jim, you are going to have such a beautiful deathbed conversion!”

Jim threw a book at him.

I hope it was one of the second poet’s own books.

Anyway, that’s my fear for the day, a beautiful deathbed conversion.

This morning, though, at four o’clock, the only voices I heard were the birds’.  They were beautiful in their own right and God kept his majesty out of it.

____________________

Apparently, Collins causes fits in atheists too.

By the way, the book I was reading didn’t help me go back to sleep because it’s too interesting:  The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer.  I’m going to be reviewing it here within the next week or so.  Next up for review, though, is T.C. Boyle’s newest novel, When the Killing's Done.  Not that I’m assigning homework.

Oh, and in case you missed it, Friday I reviewed Boneheads: My Search for T. Rex by Richard Polsky.

The Art of Democracy

Yesterday, Young Ken Mannion had a painting exhibited up in Albany as part of the New York State Legislative Student Art Show.  His painting was a dual portrait of Obi-wan Kenobi, the young, active Obi-wan from Revenge of the Sith in the foreground with a ghostly old Ben Kenobi from the original Star Wars looking over his shoulder.

When asked to explain how he had come to choose his subject, Ken said simply, “I wanted to paint a character from my novel, but nobody would have known who it was, which defeats the purpose of painting a portrait.”

An artist with his own vision but who is mindful of his audience is off to a good start.

 Ken was asked the question at a reception for the artists and their families.  All the student artists were invited up to the podium to say a few words about themselves and their exhibited work.  The students came from all over the state and ranged in age from first graders to high school seniors, which meant that when they stepped up to the microphone some of the artists couldn’t be seen over the podium, while one, Ken, the only six foot three incher among them, had to bend nearly double to speak into the mic.

The exhibit and reception were held in the Well of the Legislative Office Building, a large open space beneath the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, home of New York’s government and attendant bureaucracy, a giant marble complex of office buildings anchored the state museum and punctuated just off-center by the architecturally hilarious but somehow magnificent performing arts center known affectionately as the Egg.  The well is connected to the concourse that runs beneath the whole of the complex, essentially a mall complete with food court and indoor farmer’s market for people who work in the state government but which most people coming to the Plaza on business or as tourists use to get from here to there because up top it’s kind of a manmade open plain with similar weather---it bakes in the summer and the winds tear through you and carry off dogs and small children in the winter.

Yesterday was Lobby Day so the Concourse was busy with the comings and goings of various lobbying groups and activists there to make their money or their voices heard by the governor and state legislators.  And while the high school students were lining up at the mic one of these groups paraded in from the Concourse and marched through the Well, waving signs and chanting loudly.

They were protesting proposed cuts to medical care aid and they chanted things like, “Help the Needy not the Greedy!” and “Tax the Rich not the Poor!”

Governor Andrew Cuomo has submitted a budget that slashes everything right and left but, surprise, surprise, doesn’t raise taxes on millionaires even a dime.

As they entered the Well, though, the protesters’ chant had changed to something closer to a song, “Show me what Democracy looks like!  This is what Democracy looks like!”

I’m not sure but I think that one was meant as a response to Right Wingers’ whining about the “thugs” up in Wisconsin.

Under other circumstances, the protesters might have had the undiluted sympathy of most of the people at the reception, including some of the Republican politicians who were there for photo ops with future voters.  But interrupting children speaking is not a good way to put a crowd on your side.  And I’d bet even those of us who were most with them in spirit were irked.

After the protesters had marched through and the Well grew relatively quiet again, the coordinator of the exhibit who was emceeing things stepped up to the mic herself to call the proceedings back to order.  She led off by saying, mildly but pointedly, “With all due respect, this is what Democracy looks like.”

Wild cheering and applause.

Which was nice, but…

What exactly were we cheering and applauding?

I don’t know what the chair meant by that, exactly.  What was “this” and how did it look like Democracy? 

Probably everybody in the place who cheered and applauded took it to mean something different.

But, since I cheered and applauded, I think I should tell you what I took it mean.

“This” can’t be just the fact of a student art show.

They have student art shows in China.  They had them in the old Soviet Union.  They had them in Hitler’s Germany.  The Nazis were big on art.  Just their sort of art.

That, of course, is a big difference.  Student art shows in totalitarian states are meant to celebrate and glorify the state.  That’s the purpose of all state-sanctioned art, even in Democracies.  Those great Depression Era murals by artists working for the WPA were in their way works of propaganda.  They were politically subversive in that in celebrating the common man and woman at work and play they were challenging the idea that the nation existed to serve the interests of the Rich.  But that was the whole political thrust of the New Deal. 

WPA artists weren’t forced to include the message in their work and when they did how they did was entirely up to them.  An artist’s individual vision was allowed to trump the government’s vision of itself.

Which made those state-sponsored works of art democratic.  Art in a democracy is free to express an individual’s vision.  Ideally, then, state-sponsored art in a Democracy would be indistinguishable from art produced for private and personal reasons.

Which is what was going on in the Well of the Legislative Office Building.

The show was partially sponsored and funded by the state, but the show was not about the state.  It was about the student artists.  It was a celebration of over a hundred unique visions, over a hundred unique selves.

But that’s not all that made it democratic.

In addition to being asked to say something about their own work, the students were asked what was their favorite work by another artist and why.

This was a way of letting the students themselves know that while the show celebrated them and their unique visions, it wasn’t just about them.  They were expected to recognize, celebrate, and pay attention to the unique visions of others.

This is what democracy looks to do, to recognize and balance individuality and commonality.

In a democracy, in our democracy, we are a nation of millions of unique individuals each celebrating, expressing, and defending our own visions, or own self, and at the same time a nation of neighbors all looking out for each other and putting others’ needs if not ahead of our own at least on the same level of importance as our own.

It’s all about me and all about us at the same time.

Tricky.

And messy.

But what does it look like when it’s working?

This.  The art show.

By the way, all that wild cheering and applause?

When the protesters had marched through the reception area they had reached the end of their parade route.  There was nowhere for them to go but back the way they came, which they didn’t do.

What they did was gather, quietly and respectfully, at the back of the Well, behind the rows of chairs set up for the student artists and their families, and wait.

So they were right there when the coordinator stepped up to the microphone and said, “This is what democracy looks like!”

And they cheered and applauded the loudest and happiest.

Deer Year

For my brother Larry Mannion.

Couple weeks back, I was driving down our street on my way home from a late night milk run and as I neared our house seven deer stepped over the mounds of snow at the foot of our front yard and out into the road.

I stopped.

They stopped.

The eight of us waited.

And waited some more.

We waited long enough for me to wonder if we might be waiting there all night.

I thought about giving the horn a quick tap.

I thought about turning off the headlights.

I thought about the fact that there had just been seven deer in my front yard.

That’s a lot of deer for one small yard.

I thought about how I wished I’d come home sooner so I could have seen them there crowding the yard.  Possibly nibbling on the holly bushes outside the bedroom window.

I thought about how often they might visit our yard, how many nights they’d been out there without my knowing it.

I thought about what it would have been like to lift the blinds some night and find a deer or two or three or seven looking in at me.

I don’t know what the deer thought about.

Not much, I’m guessing.

I’ve never had the impression that deer, despite being ruminants, ruminate about much.

Deer are not among nature’s deep thinkers.

I suspect most species of birds are smarter.

Deer evolved to help wolves work up an appetite before dinner.

So a lot of their brains are given over to strategies for giving wolves a run for their money.

Simple strategies.

Like, “Maybe if I go that way very fast…”

There are no wolves around here.

Consequently, the local white tails don’t have much to occupy their minds.

Whatever these deer were thinking, it wasn’t getting out of my way.

At least not in a hurry.

I didn’t check it on the clock on the dashboard.  I’m sure our standoff in the road didn’t last very long.  What seemed like minutes probably wasn’t even one.  But it was one of those moments when time seems to stop.

One of those encounters with eternity poets make a fuss about.

People will say, “It felt like an eternity,” trying to describe an experience that went on and on and on, time dragging, boredom and irritation and frustration growing.

But an eternity isn’t too much time.  It’s no time.  It’s outside the concept of time.  To enter an eternity is to escape time.  It’s to live forever.

If only for the half a minute or so it takes for it to dawn upon deer that you can’t browse on asphalt.

One of the deer turned away from the car and trotted off.  The other six watched that one leaving and then as a group trotted after it.  They headed down the hill at the end of the street towards the woods and fields below.

When I got inside I went to report the encounter to the blonde.

She was asleep.

So were my sons.

I went online and reported it into cyberspace.

I got a message back from my brother Larry.

“Seven deer?” he typed.  “Maybe it was a sign.”

“Yes,” I replied, “A sign the snow in the woods is deep and the deer have to range farther to find food that isn’t buried.”

Last night, around ten, driving home from work I encountered more deer.

Just one this time.

I hit him.

I think it’s more accurate to say he hit me.

I saw him in time.  He was standing in the middle of the road, probably coming slowly to the realization that you can’t browse on asphalt.  I hit the brakes.

I had the car down to less than twenty miles an hour and would have had it stopped with no harm or foul to either deer or car if he hadn’t suddenly decided to call upon the strategies his ancient ancestors had developed to escape from wolves.

“Maybe if I go that way very fast…”

He dashed forward and threw himself at my bumper.

I clipped him in the hip.

He took out my right front headlights and put a dent in the hood.

He left behind a clump of stiff white hair but no blood.

I didn’t get a good look at what happened to him.

My impression is that he rolled up on the hood and off and landed on his feet and ran for it.

I pulled over, got out, and walked back up the road a bit.  There was no sign of him.

I’m thinking he’s all right.  Probably limping about with a sore leg.  Probably with only a vague memory of how he got the sore leg so that tonight he’ll be back out on the road, looking for grass growing up through the asphalt, not looking out for another car.

I returned to my car and drove home.

Slowly.

Thinking.

“Maybe it was a sign,” I said to myself.

“Yes,” I said.  “A sign you were lucky he didn’t make his charge sooner when you were still going forty-five and total himself and the car or roll up the hood at a different angle and come through the windshield.

“It’s a sign you’re not out more than the cost of a new headlamp.

“It’s a sign you could have been dead and you’re not.”

__________________

Just heard from Larry.  He’s thinking last night’s deer was a sign, a sign I could have hit the first seven.  The deer was a gift.  He threw himself at my car so that, his self-sacrifice projecting backwards through time, those seven deer stepped out of the front yard soon enough for me to see them.

“The quantum universe strikes again.”

A clean, well-lighted video store

Updated. Scroll down below Lulu.

Our soon-to-be-out-of-business local video store. The lack of customers is due to the time of night, a few minutes before closing on a weeknight. Normally, as regular readers know, the place is full of people, which is part of the point of this post.

God forgive me, but I love living in the 21st Century!

I mean this is in the narrowest and most self-centered way, as in “Gee whiz, what would I do without a cell phone?” and “No, my netbook isn’t actually Gorilla Glued to my hand,” and not as if there’s no such place as Darfur and we’re living in a Paradise on Earth and all the poor people here don’t know lucky they are to have high-definition TV.

I mean very simply there are a lot of things---and I mean literally things, as in devices, gadgets, high tech toys for lucky grown-ups---that make my life a lot more fun than it would be without them and that didn’t exist for the greater part of my life I spent in the 20th Century.

And one of those things is Netflix streaming video.

One Mannion Family Movie Night not too long ago, the feature was Superman and afterwards young Ken and I felt like enjoying more adventures of the Man of Steel.  Thanks to Netflix, we did.  We streamed the Fleischer cartoons from the 1940s.

Last fall, when Tony Curtis died, in his honor, I streamed a double-feature of Beachhead and Sex and the Single Girl.

When I’m in a certain mood, needing to enjoy both virtual travel and vicarious gluttony, I stream selected episodes of Man v. Food.

Adam is my hero.

This week’s movie for Family Movie Night is Roxanne.

Guess how we’re going to watch it.

One thing I feel a little guilty about.

Apparently I’m contributing the demise of video stores.

People are losing their jobs because of me.

Almost as sad, other people are losing some clean, well-lighted places to go for company and other attendant pleasures, spiritual and physical, of living in the analog world.

Here in Mannionville, we have the most basic cable.  We don’t subscribe to any of the premium channels.  We’ve never watched on demand, never Tivo-ed.  There’s no satellite dish attached to our house.  We haven’t needed them.  We’ve had Netflix.  I don’t understand why our Netflix habit hasn’t contributed to the demise of cable companies, HBO, DirectTV, or TiVo.  We’ve only been bad for business for video stores.

What’s more, I don’t understand why video stores weren’t wiped out by any of those alternative delivery systems before the rise of Netflix or why video stores, which post-date cable, came into existence to begin with.

Maybe they were too busy ganging up together to close all the movie theaters. 

I seem to recall that going out to the movies was about to become a thing of the past at least three times since the advent of cable.  I’m old but not old enough to remember when television all on its three network lonesome was going to do the job.  I do remember when cable and VCRs were the future of motion picture entertainment.  After all, who was going to spend three dollars to go sit in the dark with strangers when you could wait a few months and watch the same movie for free, or essentially free, in the comfort of your own home with a bowl of gourmet popcorn you’d microwaved yourself in your lap?  That was just about the time of the rise of the multiplexes.

At any rate, I’m sorry our local video store’s closing, sorrier still if it’s really at all my fault, me and my reckless Netflix streaming.

It’s a nice store.  Clean, neatly kept, with a staff that’s friendly, helpful, and fairly knowledgeable---there’s never been anyone working there that I know of you could compare Antonini or Bergman films with.  But one twenty year old clerk could tell you anything and everything you’d want to know about the comedies of the 1980s and there used to be an assistant manager who made it her job to let customers know how bad every new horror film was and exactly what made each one bad---she’d watch them all before putting them out to rent, out of a combination of a sense of duty and compulsion.

And almost all the rest of the clerks you’d ever deal with kept up with what movies were coming out in the theaters and on DVD, who starred in what, which director made this or that, who and what had been nominated for the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, and what was being posted at Rotten Tomatoes, so customers who with no idea what movie they’re looking for except that they saw an ad for it on TV the other night and it seemed to be about sailing and one of the stars was that young actor all the kids like these days could walk out of there happily with a copy of Charlie St Cloud in hand.

And, whenever I’ve been in, most of the other customers have been cheerful, friendly, polite, and sociable.

The store is---was---what all stores should be.  Not just a building in which to spend money on things but a place where we can enjoy the company of other people while we are spending money on those things.  We’ve all been in stores that aren’t places.  They’re just boxes full of things.  A place has an identity and a spirit.  People live in places.  They come alive in places.  In the boxes the other carbon-based life forms wandering about with us are either obstacles to our getting to the things or essentially extensions of the cash registers into which we put the money to pay for the things.  But the people we meet in places where we happen to need to go to buy things help make those things part of living and enjoying a life and not the point of living a life.

We need more places.

Blockbuster, the corporation, has been in trouble for a long time.  Netflix didn’t cause that trouble, it’s just been one of the reasons Blockbuster hasn’t been able to get itself out of trouble.  They had a CEO during the early years of the last decade who was an empire builder.  Blockbuster over-expanded and then the economy soured.  The empty aisles in so many of their stores weren’t due to regular customers switching to Netflix as much as there just not being enough regular customers with money to spend on renting DVDs anymore and Blockbuster suddenly couldn’t pay the rent, literally and figuratively.

So I’m not surprised our local video store’s closing.  But I am sad. I won’t miss out on watching movies, but that’s not the point. I’ll miss having it as a place to go for company.

Back in September, when Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11, I read an article that dismissed going in to a store to rent DVDs as “old-fashioned.”  And back in August, when a Blockbuster store in Washington DC put up its Going Out of Business sign I read this little bit of reportorial narcissism in article about the closing in the DCist:

To be honest, though, this kind of feels like writing about about the eight-track or laserdiscs or Pogs. At this point, is there really anyone who would have frequented a Blockbuster store who isn't already subscribed to Netflix -- or even Blockbuster's own DVD-by-mail service?

Now, you can buy groceries online, and that makes shopping at a supermarket or the corner bodega old-fashioned too.  So is actually going to a movie theater to watch a movie on a big screen, for that matter, and in fact it’s been the old-fashioned way to watch a movie for over sixty years.  Shopping for anything in a store is old-fashioned, as people have been doing it for millennia.

As for who isn’t already subscribed to Netflix or Blockbuster’s own online service, well, not everybody’s like the reporter and his friends.  Lots of people don’t go online to get their movies and don’t want to or can’t.

People without a computer or broadband.  People without a credit card.  People who don’t have significant amounts of free time to spend staring at a computer screen, scrolling through the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, following all the links from You May Also Like.

People who want to have a movie or a TV show to pop into the DVD player as soon as they get home or right after supper.

People who are looking for some company.  People who need to see a friendly face.  People who still think that one of the nice things about living in the world is the presence of other people.

People who don’t see others as a colorful backdrop to their lives but the very stuff of living.

“Guess who I ran into the other day!” isn’t just something to say so the family doesn’t have to eat in silence.  It’s a testimony of connection to the world, to a life outside. 

Somebody saw me.  Somebody heard my voice.  Somebody felt my existence.

And I felt theirs.

For twenty or thirty seconds, for half an hour, for the whole afternoon, we felt alive together.

We felt…

Human.

They want to be able to ask a clerk, “Is this good?”  They want to be able to say, “There was a movie came out a few years ago, I think it starred Nicolas Cage.  He played a weather man?” and they want to be able to say, if the clerk has been polite and cheerful and helpful, “The Weather Man!  Duh!”  They want to be able to turn to someone browsing the aisle along with them and say, “Have you seen this one?”  They want someone to turn to them and say, “You think my kids will like this?”

Bookstore, video store, hardware store, grocery store, doesn’t matter, they want to be surprised somewhere along the way and have to respond to the surprise by saying something along the lines of, “Well, fancy meeting you here!”

The other night, I’m in the video store, and in the drama aisle I meet a guy looking for one of his all-time favorite movies.  He’s in his 50s, pushing 60, maybe, with a long gray ponytail under his battered bill cap, a graying brown mustache, a black t-shirt, the sleeves tight on his biceps, jeans, motorcycle boots.  His arms are heavily and intricately tattooed.  Tattoos peak up from under the collar of his t-shirt.  His voice is deep and raspy, the voice of someone who’s smoked a lot, who’s had to yell a lot over the sound of machinery.  He’s elated when he finds his movie.

To Sir, With Love.

“Great movie,” I say.

“Have you seen Lulu lately?  She looks terrific.  You know, older, but in shape, slim.”

“She still singing?”

“Oh yeah.  I saw her on TV not that long ago.”

I can stream To Sir With Love for myself right now.

Where am I going to go to find someone to talk about Lulu with?

_____________________

In this New Yorker article from October 2010, James Surowiecki predicts the coming demise of Netflix.

Late update with no late fees:

Film prof, author, and blogger Chuck Tryon has written a thoughtful follow-up to my post.

Chuck’s book is called Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence.

Netflix beware?  Redbox plans to get into online streaming.

You say ‘entitlement’ like it’s a dirty word

So, yesterday morning this column by Paul Krugman appears in our local paper.  Eat the Future.  And Krugman’s point is:

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

Last night, I’m in our local video store, which is closing, by the way, but I’m going to deal with that in another post, and I get to talking about it with another disappointed loyal customer.  Guy around my age.  Naturally, the conversation turns to the economy.  We agree it stinks and it’s going to continue to stink for a long time to come.  Turns out, though, he knows how it could be fixed overnight.

Congress could make it all better if they’d just balance the budget.

He also knows exactly how the budget can be balanced overnight.

“Cut all that foreign aid.”

If I’d had my wits about me I’d have seen an Uma Thurman movie down the aisle I just had to go check out.

Oh, look, My Super Ex-Girlfriend! Time to watch that one again!

Instead, I said, reflexively, “You know what per cent of the federal budget goes for foreign aid?”

I expected him to come back with a wildly exaggerated figure.  Possibly the around 24 per cent this poll says most Americans guess.

Proving he’s not your average Tea Party type or other model of Right Wing Republican, he asks.

“How much?”

“Around one per cent.”

This stat is unfair to throw at people until you know what they mean when they say “foreign aid.”  Foreign aid is what we give to the United Nations but, loosely speaking, it’s also the money we spend propping up dictators like Hosni Mubarak.  The money for both come out of different lines in the budget.  So do they mean military aid, money spent on spies, UNICEF, or anything that has us paying for something going on there instead of here?

If they mean the last one then they are talking about a chunk of change significantly larger than that one percent of the budget the government itself classifies as foreign aid.

Generally, however, people use the term foreign aid like it’s a dirty word and they mean pretty much what they mean when they use other dirty words like welfare, and earmarks, and entitlements---money spent on undeserving poor people who look nothing like them or their neighbors.

This guy didn’t give me time to figure out what he meant.  But I could guess by what he followed right up with.

“And entitlements.  We need to cut way back on those.”

“Depends on what you mean by entitlements,” I said.

He knew where I was going.

“I don’t consider Social Security an entitlement,” he said quickly, “I paid into that.”

“You may not.  But the deficit hawks down in Washington do.  That’s what they’re talking about.  And Medicare.”

“Medicare’s another one we pay for,” he said, “I’m talking about things like food stamps, and those college grants for poor kids…”

“Look,” I said, “My Super Ex-Girlfriend! Time to watch that one again!”

Ok. I didn’t really say that. I did change the subject back to how we’re both going to miss coming to the store when it closes, because I didn’t think it would be polite to start shouting at a stranger in public about how I don’t want to hear anybody’s idea on how to balance the budget unless it involves raising their own taxes or cutting their own services.

The notion that if only the government would stop spending money that creates jobs jobs would be created defies logic, math, and history with the boldness of a madman who has decided he can fly and you’d think that two seconds of thought would kill it in the minds of any practical and reasonably intelligent people.  But people don’t give it two seconds’ thought, or even one.

Pushing the notion serves the interests of the rich who don’t want to pay any more in taxes---who don’t want to pay any taxes---and don’t give a damn how many other people are put out of work or who actually like the idea of putting lots of people out of work because it increases the pool of desperate would-be employees who will take any job no matter how low the pay or how few the benefits.

But it also flatters the prejudices of too many people who want to think that everything and anything that’s wrong with the world is the fault of other people.

Krugman blames Reagan---

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs…

---I blame Reagan too.  But he was encouraging and exploiting a not particularly noble but all too common side of human nature, our reflexive and relentless need to believe that we can have our cake and eat it too, if only other people would quit being so mean and selfish.

There’s a school district near here that’s like just about every other school district in the United States these days, hurting for money.  The school board sees no way out of the mess except to make some deep cuts and one of the things the board has voted to cut is an elementary school.

There are only 150 students attending this school.  The other elementary school will be able to take them in without too much trouble and pain.  Some of the teachers and staff will have jobs at the other school too.

Parents aren’t happy.  They rallied to save their kids’ school, organized, and drew up an alternative budget that, to their credit, would have raised their own taxes, but the board didn’t think it would do the trick.

Here’s the thing.

This school district is in a Congressional district that flipped from Democratic to Republican last November.  The relatively liberal John Hall has been replaced by the more than relatively conservative Nan Hayworth who isn’t one of the Tea Party’s own but she’s smart enough to know what voters are running the Republican show these days and presents herself as a militant budget cutter.

And, as it happens, one of the reasons the school district is in trouble is that federal stimulus money it had relied on is going to run out.  One of the reasons it’s not in worse trouble at the moment is that it’s still getting some stimulus money.

According to the Times Herald-Record:

A one-time injection of roughly $850,000 in stimulus funds will maintain full-day kindergarten and the agriculture program — which will grow with the help of the local farming community — and keep two elementary library media specialists.

What this means is that the school district is now represented by someone who, if she’d been sent to Congress in 2008, would have voted against the stimulus and therefore, effectively, for putting the school district in the position it’s now in two years earlier.

I don’t know if many or any of the parents who tried to save the school voted for Hayworth.  But that part of the Congressional district went heavily for Republicans up and down the ballot, so it’s a good bet not a few of them did.

Some of those who did were expressing their general dissatisfaction.  Others thought they were voting for job creation and not necessarily based on the belief that the way to create jobs is for the government to put people out of work, just based on their frustration at the obvious fact that whatever the Democrats and the President were doing, it wasn’t enough.  It’s likely, however, that many of them voted for Hayworth  expecting that she would make sure that the only cuts would be to other people’s “entitlements.”

Whatever their reasons, they effectively voted to put themselves in the position they are in without any hope of more federal money coming their way to save their school district any time soon.

Unless, of course, the Republicans succeed in cutting that twenty-four percent of federal spending being wasted on foreign aid.

__________________

Read all of Alyssa Sunkin’s story on the school closing in the Times Herald-Record.

Follow the link to read the PBS NewsHour story on the foreign aid poll.

And don’t skip Krugman’s column, Eat the Future.

What’s a medal worth?

When young Ken Mannion was really young Ken Mannion, six years old and a Tiger Cub, his car won second place in the Pinewood Derby. It would have come in first but it took the bump at the end of the ramp hard and spun out just before reaching the finish line.  He was happy with having won all the preliminaries, though, and very proud of his second place medal which came on a red ribbon he could wear around his neck.

Not too long after that, we watched October Sky for one of our early family movie nights.  I’m not giving anything away by telling you that at the end of the movie Jake Gyllenhaal’s character wins a science fair and is awarded a medal for it.  After the movie ended, Young Ken hurried up to his bedroom, fished his Pinewood Derby medal out of his dresser drawer, and looped the ribbon around his neck.  He wore it for the rest of the night and it was only because he was too sleepy to protest that he let us take it off him before he went to bed.

Medals don’t mean much in themselves anymore.

Ken was given the one above at his karate tournament yesterday.  He was told it’s for being a first runner-up, but it’s more or less a medal for good sportsmanship.  Last year Ken took home the second place trophy for sparring.  This year he was eliminated in his first bout.  It was a tight contest with a tough opponent and finished with the score 2-3, with three no decision calls along the way, one of which could have gone Ken’s way, as two of the judges scored the round for him while the other three saw it as a draw.

He was disappointed, but he sincerely believes the guy who beat him was better and he learned a few tricks from sparring with a more skilled opponent.  One of the masters running the tournament hung the medal around his neck but Ken took it off as soon as he walked off the gym floor and handed it off to his mother to put in her purse.

What he wore with pride, and took home with him and took to heart, was the praise he received afterwards from two of his teachers from his dojo.

One told him that she was very impressed by some of his moves during his kata demonstration.  The other said he had never seen Ken spar as well as he did yesterday and that includes last year’s tournament.

And, in addition, he had fun and there was pizza in the cafeteria for all comers.

All in all, a good day.

For the Mannionville Daily Gazette’s blow by blow live sports report, see my Twitter feed.

Yesterday was a big day for Ken.  Today’s a big day for his brother.  It’s Oliver Mannion’s 15th Birthday!

“Plenty of seats outside.”

Just back from picking up some light bulbs.  Nice to have an excuse to go to the hardware store that isn’t to buy tools, parts, or supplies for a major repair job.

Sun’s out.  No wind.  Pretty day.  But cold.  Stopped in at the coffee shop to refuel and warm up.  Owners’ daughter had a text book open on the counter.  Biology.

“Pre-med?” I ask.

“Nursing,” she says brightly.

“Good,” I say, “The world needs more nurses.”

She agrees.

That settled, I take my coffee over to a table and sit down.

“Who let him in here?”

New customer has come in the door.  Older guy, in his sixties, but big and hearty, with a full head of white and gray hair.  I don’t know him but for a second I think he knows me.

“I’m not sure I want to stick around, not with him here.”

But him is not me.  Him’s another customer, who has been so quiet and still I forgot him was here.  Another older guy, older than the first older guy.  Seventy or so.  He’s sitting at two tables pulled together with yesterday’s newspaper spread out across them.  He’s wearing his hat, a red plaid woolen bill cap, the kind I thought was old-fashioned when my grandfather wore them.  He doesn’t look up from his paper or, as far as I can tell, acknowledge the first older guy at all.

The first man doesn’t press it.  He goes to the sideboard to pour himself a coffee and then steps up to the counter to pay.  Notices the owners’ daughter’s text book.  He reads the caption on an illustration.

“Duo-do-odd-and-em?”

I suspect him of mispronouncing it on purpose to be funny, but the owner’s daughter corrects him with a smile that’s going to make her future patients pushing the call buttons by their bed every chance they get, even if it means she comes running with a needle.

“Duodenum.”

He tries again.  Comes closer.  “Duo-odd-den-um.”  They both laugh.  He says.  “Even if I could say it, I couldn’t tell you what it is.  My wife and my son talk about this stuff all the time and I’m lost.  You’d think by now I’d have picked up some of it.”

He guesses what she wants to ask.

“My son’s a doctor.”

“Oh!  What’s his specialty?”

The man has to think.  He knows but doesn’t know, that is, he knows what his son studied in med school but isn’t sure what to call it or how to explain it.  “D.O.?  Something?  Osto…osteo…?”

“Osteopathy?”

“Sounds like it.  He works mainly in the ER these days though.”

“That’s what I want to do!”

“What kind of doctor are you going to be?”

“I’m in nursing.”

He nods.  Asks her if she’s ever heard of a Doctor So-and-so?  She shakes her head.  He seems surprised.  “Very famous.  One of the best in the country.  My son was working in the hospital morgue one time.  Some terrible multiple murder had happened and they had the bodies in there, taking the organs out, trying to figure out what happened.  This doctor breezes in, takes over, sizes everything up at a glance, delivers his opinion off the cuff, which turns out to be right, breezes out.  Nurse asks my son if he knows who that was.  My son says no.  The nurse says it’s Doctor So-and-so.”

The owners’ daughter waits politely for the point, punchline, or moral.  There doesn’t appear to be one.

“I don’t know how he does it.” Man means his son. “There’s only once he admitted it got to him.  Woman backed her car over her baby.”

The owners’ daughter winces.  I wince.  The second older guy keeps reading his paper.

The first man continues, “When it’s an adult or an old person, that’s one thing.  But a baby!  You wonder, you know?”

He abruptly decides it’s time for him to take his coffee and sit down.  He says, “Excuse me.  I think it’s time I go bother this fellow for a while.”  Half-turns towards the other man in the plaid cap.  “You know you’re reading yesterday’s paper, don’t you?”

The other man doesn’t look up.  Says, “Expected to see you Saturday night.”

“Saturday.  What was Saturday?”

“Pancake supper.”

“Saturday?  I can’t go out on Saturday night.  Saturday’s date night.  I have to stay home and keep the wife happy.”

The man in the cap doesn’t react.  The first man continues to lean on his elbow on the counter, taking sips from his coffee.  The owners’ daughter has gone back to studying.  The first man gets tired of waiting for the man in the cap to react to the date night joke.  He says, “No.  Saturday we couldn’t go out.  We were both two sheets under the table.”

That’s what he said.  Not three sheets to the wind.  Two sheets under the table.  But he didn’t mean three sheets to the wind anyway.  He and his wife weren’t drunk.  They were sick. 

“We had the green apple two-step.”

The man in the cap responds in the same way he’s responded to everything else the first man has said, by not responding.

The first man says, “You ever had the green apple two-step?”

Again, nothing from the man in the cap.

“You ever eat a green apple?”

The man in the cap says, without looking up, of course, “Only ones supposed to be green.”

“Green apples give you such a belly ache,” the first man says, for the benefit of the owners’ daughter, “When we were kids we used to fill up on them.  Man, were we sorry.  That’s what it was like for the wife and me.  The green apple two-step.”

The man in the cap doesn’t offer any sympathy.  “So, what about next week?”

“What about it?”

“Oyster dinner.”

“Is that next week?”

“The Nineteenth.”

“Probably all the tickets are pre-sold by now.”

“I hear there are some left.”

The first man pushes himself away from the counter.  “You know what?  I’m going to sit down here with you now.”

The man in the cap doesn’t make any moves to clear some space.

The first man says, “Not that I want to sit with a miserable old cuss like you.  There’s just no other place to set down.”

The man in the cap says, “Plenty of seats outside.”

And he doesn’t look up.

Guess what the other hand was doing

Got the face today.

You know the face.  The one other drivers give you when they think you’re doing something stupid.

Got the hand along with it.  The hand that says, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you moron?”

I was pulling out from a side street here in town onto the main road when I got the face and the hand from a woman whizzing by in a sporty green Subaru.

I gave her a face and hand back.  Both said, “I’m stopping dead halfway into the road to avoid being T-boned by a green Subaru that came zipping around a blind curve and barreling through an intersection at fifty miles an hour.”

I don’t think she was persuaded by either my face or hand.  Probably she figured her face and hand made the better case.

But guess what she was doing while she was giving me the face and the hand.

Weather Report. February 2, 2011: Evolutionary fail

Cold enough for you?

Starting to think this whole adaptability thing humans have going on is over-rated.

Read a book once that argued that the upward course of human intelligence was driven by adaptations to the Ice Age.

Really, it’s that as a species we’re too stupid to come in out of the snow.

Just getting light.  I’m afraid to look outside.  All I hear is an icy splattering against the windows.

Editor’s choice: There were drifts up to the rooftops

Originally posted February 10, 2010.

On the way to the post office.  Around ten this morning.  Wednesday, February 10, 2010. Click to enlarge.

At the library the other day, talking with the librarians and another patron about the predicted storm on the way.  A whole foot, maybe two might get dumped on us.  The eldest librarian laughed.

“Two feet?  That’s nothing,” she said.

The other patron, a man I judged to be nearing eighty, agreed.

“Not like when I was a kid,” he said.  “I remember snowstorms, my father had to climb out the bedroom window and let himself down from the porch roof so he could shovel a path to the front door.  The snow was that high.”

The librarian is well into her sixties.  She remembered similar snowstorms from when she was a girl and a young woman.  She remembered her children jumping off the roof of the neighbor’s garage into the drifts below.  The drop wasn’t more than a few feet.

I had my own memories to add, of wading through snow drifts up to my waist, of the mountain of snow the plows built at the foot of our front yard after every snow storm because we were at the bottom of a cul de sac, of snow forts with walls high enough to stop invasions of Mongol hordes, with several rooms inside connected by long and perfectly rounded tunnels, of falling backwards into the snow to make snow angels and sinking so deep that the world around me was lost from view and all I could see was the gray sky straight overhead and the blue walls of my outline.

But I didn’t add them.  I was stopped by the sudden doubt that those memories were real or that they were even mine.

My memories of those mountains of snow in our yard, they look suspiciously like a snapshot in our family album.  And the snow forts as I remember them are impossibly elaborate and the tunnels go on forever with more branches than a gold mine in a Western.  And how did I make any headway through snow that was up to my waist?  I’d have had to have been a little steam engine.

And what specific snowstorms did I think I was remembering?  Was it just one that I’ve let fill in for all the storms that blew through the winters of my childhood?  Was it a combination of the best memories of all those winters?  Was what I was picturing in my head a work of art, images created and re-created out of things I had been told, read, seen in photographs and home movies?

I kept quiet because I was so full of self-doubt that the only thing I was sure of was that whatever I said would probably be a lie or as good as one.

It snowed when I was a kid.  I had a good time when it did.  That’s all I knew for certain.  Didn’t seem like it would do much to improve the conversation.

I shut my mouth and just listened to the old man and the librarian move on to stories of sledding down streets emptied of cars by the snow.

We’re having some snow today.  Nowhere near what was forecast, so far.  Maybe four inches, and it’s tapering off.  There’ll be no jumping off any roofs into the drifts.

But maybe I’ll go out and make a snow angel.

_______________

The old black dog comes in one evening
with the first few snowflakes on his back
and falls asleep, throwing his bad leg out
at our excitement. This is the night
when one of us gets to say, as if it were news,
that no two snowflakes are ever alike;
the night when each of us remembers something
snowier. The kitchen is a kindergarten
steamy with stories. The dog gets stiffly up
and limps away, seeking a quiet spot
at the heart of the house. Outside,
in silence, with diamonds in his fur,
the winter night curls round the legs of the trees,
sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes.

---First Snow by Ted Kooser

______________

M.A. Peel has found an eyewitness account of a long-ago blizzard.  Warning: a sock to the gut and a tear in the eye at the end.

Click on the link to see the comments on the original post.

A clean, well-caffeinated place

There’s cold, the kind that takes hold of you from the outside then eats its way to your core, taking over every last neuron along the way, leaving your whole body incapable of feeling or remembering any other sensation but the freezing misery of the moment.  And there’s cold, the kind that is friendly and jolly, practically company, with no other object than to put you in the best mood and most appreciative spirit to get warm again, as if in fact it’s doing you a favor in icing you up to make it feel that much more delicious when you finally get inside somewhere and start to thaw out.

The second kind of cold is often much colder than the first, but it’s usually dryer and works without wind and is often featured with clear skies, sunshine or a bright moon, and fresh snow.

Today it’s the second kind of cold.

Stopped in at the local coffee shop on my way home this morning.  In just the few yards from the parking lot to the door, the cold did its work.

The shop is small, ten paces from the door to the counter at most and maybe that wide from side windows to cupboards.  The ceiling is low.  The floors are bare wood.  The walls are wood too.  The owners keep the place neat and well-swept.  What’s brass gleams.  What’s chrome or silver winks.  What’s wood and can be polished is polished to a glow.  There isn’t a table or a corner or a length of shelf that couldn’t be photographed and put in the dictionary to illustrate the definitions of snug, cozy, homey, and---today---warm.

There were no other customers when I arrived.  The only other person there was the owners’ pretty college-aged daughter.  She had taken over two tables in the middle of the shop that she had pulled together and over which she had spread out her text books and notebooks.  She was wearing a bulky and oversized gray woolen shirt with red window pane plaid as a sweater and she looked…warm.

I thought, jealously, there’s the life, to be young and in school and pulling your weight by running the family business between classes and to have as your job and main responsibility to make iced-up strangers feel warm and at home for a few minutes while they drink a cup of coffee.

The world we’ve paved

Young Ken Mannion shovels out the family homestead.  Ten o’clock this morning.  Monday.  December 27, 2010.

Suited up and launched myself out the airlock at eleven-thirty last night to shovel out the mother ship.  Snow was over my boot tops but light enough that if I wasn’t morally opposed to leaf blowers and owned one and I wasn’t also morally opposed to waking up my neighbors in the dead of night I could have blown the driveway clear.

This morning around six-thirty the blonde rolled over in bed to find a triple-sweatered and parka-ed husband rooting through his sock drawer for a pair of heavy winter socks.

“What’s the snow situation?” she asked sleepily.

“Not as bad as it would have been if I hadn’t gone out last night and shoveled.”

“Lance,” she said, in her You foolish old man, you want to kill yourself voice, “What did you do that for?”

“So I wouldn’t have to shovel twice as much now.”

When I looked out at first light I saw as much snow in the driveway as I’d removed last night.  Plus a two-foot high, three-foot thick wall the plows had built sometime between then and dawn.

I cleared a path down to the wall and dug out a breachway wide enough for a circus clown car to pass through.  I started in from the other side, intending to expand the opening until there was room to back our clownless car out so I could go out and buy the milk I’d foolishly neglected to go out and buy yesterday before the storm hit.

Then I remembered.

I have teenaged sons.

“Screw this,” I said and stabbed the shovel into the nearest drift.

The snow had stopped falling.  The shoveling could wait until those teenaged sons woke up and got their butts in gear.  We still needed milk for breakfast though.

I’ve written many times how glad I am to live in a place where I can walk to get almost everything we might need in a pinch.

I can walk to pick up milk.  Walk to the bank.  Walk to the hardware store.  Walk to the post office.  Walk to the library.  Walk to the drug store.  Walk to the Chinese restaurant for take-out, although I never think to do this until after I’ve pulled up to the curb outside China Palace.  When the boys were in grade school and junior high they walked to school.  They could walk to their high school if the school day for high school students didn’t start in the dark, and Young Ken routinely walks home from school, usually taking the long way so he can stop off at the library.  Oliver takes the bus because he has to get home in time for his “job,” which he walks to, it’s at the reformed church, which if we ever get religion again, we’d walk to on Sundays.

We have to drive to get groceries for the week, but there’s a new little market in town we can dash to to grab something for dinner on nights we have nothing in or don’t feel like eating what we do have in.

There’s a liquor store, but we aren’t regular customers at any liquor store.  But it’s there if we ever need to make an emergency run. 

There’s no doctor in town, but our dentist has his office just a few blocks away.  We could get our hair cut in town, but I like the woman who cuts my hair at a place near where I work and the blonde goes to a stylist near where she works.

We can walk to get about everything.  Except paid.

We both have to drive to work. 

Forty miles round trip in her case.  Twenty-four in mine.

No public transit option available for either of us.

Having to drive in the snow to work ruined winter for me.

Twenty-four miles round trip is nothing.  Once upon a time, for a period of four years I did 180.

Amazingly, not once in those four years did I do any one-eighties doing those 180.

There are two ways of looking at this.

One is that thanks to cars and decent highways, people can live and work in places they wouldn’t have been able to had they been born a couple of generations earlier. 

You had to live near where you worked or you had to work near where you lived.  A new job in a not all that distant town meant you had to move.

We enjoy opportunities and a certain degree of freedom we would not have if we didn’t have cars and well-paved and maintained roads to drive them, that people who do not have cars don’t enjoy.

Another way to look at it is that we’ve added hours to our work days while docking ourselves exorbitant amounts of money to pay for gas, insurance, car repairs, and property taxes since one of the opportunities people with cars take advantage of is the opportunity to live in a too big house in a too pricy suburb far removed from the places they need to get to on an almost daily basis.

And those of us who live in parts of the country where it snows regularly throughout the winter have added the pleasure of having to get out of bed hours early on the most miserable days of the year to clear our driveways so we can climb into our big metal boxes and send them hurtling down frozen roads drifting over with snow and whited-out by wind to get to work where most every other day of the year our employers are happy to remind us we aren’t necessary, we can be replaced at the drop of a hat, but where during blizzards nothing can be accomplished without our presence and contribution, so get your ass in here, now, you weather wimp!

The walk down and back to the convenience store was actually fun.  The snow had stopped falling.  The wind had died.  The temperature’s climbing and I worked up a real sweat.  None of the sidewalks along the way had been cleared yet so I had to walk in the road and for long minutes at a time I had the road to myself.  But I still had to keep an eye out so I didn’t get clipped.  There were cars on the road.  Not all those cars were driven by people who understood what it meant to have snow under their tires.

Both the blonde and I happened to have today off.  We had been planning to be out of town.  We were out of town.  But we left Mom and Pop Mannions’ yesterday morning when we heard the storm was brewing.  My parents wanted us to stay until it blew through and head home Wednesday but we had to be back Tuesday for work.  Probably our bosses would have understood if we’d called in to say we were stranded up North.  Probably.

I hope all the cars that weren’t on the road belong to people whose bosses understood when they called in this morning.  I hope most of them belonged to people whose bosses called them to tell them to stay home.  I hope all the cars that were on the road were being driven by people who had to go to work because other people’s lives depend on their work.  A car with Jersey plates drove by me, its wheels spinning a bit as it tried to climb the small hill up from the center of town.  The lettering on the door panel identified it as belonging to a Biotech lab.  Somebody’s blood or tissue samples had to be picked up and delivered no matter what the weather.

But some of those cars were driven by people on their way to jobs that do the world very little good and pay them too little to do it.  They could have stayed home and no harm would be done.  Some customers at the mall who were too stupid to stay off the roads themselves might complain because there were only two registers open.  Some sales calls that wouldn’t be answered anyway because the person being called had had sense enough to stay off the roads wouldn’t get made.

When I got home with the milk, the blonde was up and had a fresh pot of coffee waiting.

“Paper arrive?” I asked.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“But it’s eight o’clock!  It should’ve…”

I caught myself.

Half the problem with winter is people who think that driving in winter is no problem---for other people.

____________________

Incoming Weather Bulletin:  Carl, of Simply Left Behind, known around these parts as actor212, lives down New York City-way where they had it a tad bit worse than we did.

What’s the going rate for babysitting these days?

Because somebody’s mother or father owes me for an hour’s worth of watching their out of control seven or eight year old twins who were determined to find a table to fall off of, a set of stairs to tumble down, or a railing to climb over and to send themselves plunging from the gallery at the dojo where my son has his karate lessons to the gym floor below.

Somebody else’s parents owe the woman trying to read her newspaper at the table next to mine for making sure another out of control second grader didn’t lose the same challenges to gravity.

The parents of the little girls who were running around with those three little boys get a pass because they didn’t climb on anything and they were stirred up by the wildness of the little boys.

But still, those girls were up in the gallery unsupervised.  I assume their parents were just downstairs, gabbing with other parents while they watched their older kid or kids working out on the floor, and they were keeping one ear open for screams of pain, anger, frustration, or impatience from above.

I don’t know how comfortable I’d have been leaving kids that young out of my sight for an hour because I don’t think I ever did it when the guys were that age.  I wasn’t worried about whether or not they’d be safe.  I was worried they’d get into trouble.  But maybe their parents know that, usually, their darlings will behave when left up there and play quietly with the toys over in the corner.  That’s what they were doing before the boys charged in. 

The parents of these little boys have to know, though, that their kids won’t behave, because they never do.

I’ve seen them there before.

Last night they were calm to the point of appearing sedated compared to the way they’ve behaved on other occasions.

The dojo is not a mall or a supermarket or some other public place full of strangers and with lots of doors small, inquisitive, and adventurous children can wander in and out of.  It’s a confined space, crowded with people who know each other by sight if not by name.  The one door in and out is always blocked by knots of adults who can’t be budged come hell or high water.  Believe me.  I have to try to budge them at the end of class every Thursday night.

What is it about doorways that attract people who need to hold long, involved, intense, personal conversations in public?  Isn’t that what corners are for?

That’s a question for another post.

The question for this post is what is it with some parents that they think it’s ok to let their children run loose and unsupervised in public?

The dojo isn’t a mall.  But it isn’t a playground either.  It’s a school.  Given how respectful the instructors and students are to the traditions of their particular style of karate, the place sometimes feels a little bit like a church.  Is this how these parents let their kids act in church?

Dumb question.

The backs and basements of many churches are teaming with children whose parents can’t divide their attention between the sermon and their kids, whose devotions to their prayers are such that they can’t be disturbed by bored and squirming children in the pews beside them and so those kids are set free to terrorize all the tax-collectors whose humility has them kneeling at the back of the temple instead of standing up front and boasting of their goodness with the Pharisees.

And ask any librarian, store clerk, waiter or waitress, or responsible parent or guardian keeping  a watchful eye on their own charges at the playground.  They’ll tell you.  There are many parents who think the world is full of free babysitting and taking advantage of it every chance they get.

When Oliver and Young Ken were little, it used to surprise the blonde and me when waitresses and store clerks would compliment us effusively on how well-behaved the boys were. 

We never thought they’d been exceptionally well-behaved.  We just thought, with relief, that they’d behaved themselves properly.  And we never felt comfortable accepting a compliment when it seemed more directed at us than at the guys themselves, because we didn’t feel that we’d done anything particularly deserving of it.  We just felt lucky that we had a couple of kids who enjoyed being taken out to restaurants and stores and had temperaments that kept them patient, polite, quiet, and in their chairs or at our sides.

If they’d been the sort of kids who couldn’t behave when we took them out, we wouldn’t have taken them out.

The only thing I can remember ever doing that might have influenced their thinking about how to not to act up is making it clear at times when they were on the verge of acting up that we’d be out of wherever we were in a flash if they did act up.

Young Ken has loved going to Barnes and Noble since he was the youngest Ken he ever was.  And the staff at the Barnes and Noble in Syracuse loved him.  One day when he was about two he got cranky while I was trying to pick out a book.  He wouldn’t sit still in my arms and he wouldn’t stay put when I set him down and whenever I picked him up or pulled him back he got angry and he let me know it.  He let everybody in the store know it.  And one of the assistant managers, a woman about my age but not a parent herself, came bustling over.  She was another one of Ken’s fans, but she knew what had to be done.

“Take him out,” she said firmly but not with anger or recrimination.  “Take him out right now or you’re going to have this problem every time you come in here.”

Up to that point I was still thinking I could reason with the kid.  I almost told her that I didn’t think it would be necessary to take him out, he’d calm down as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to get his way, and then I realized that we were long past the point when he should have realized it if he was going to realize it.  He was two years old, for Pete’s sake.  How reasonable could I expect him to be.  So I thanked the assistant manager for her advice and said to Ken, “Sorry, buster, but we’re out of here.”

He stopped squawking and gave me a cynical look.  You wouldn’t think a two-year old had a look that crafty and mean in his repertoire. It was the look Mark Twain must have had in mind for Injun Joe when Tom told him he didn’t know where the gold was.  It was a look that should have been followed by Ken’s taking the straw out of his mouth and spitting sideways before saying, “Yeah, right, old timer.  Pull the other one.”

I’d set him down again at this point and he took advantage.  He made a bee line for the children’s section…

…and found himself strapped into his car seat, whizzing home, with a fuming father refusing to look back at him from the driver’s seat while he yowled and cried and said, “Take me back!  Take me back right now!  I’ll be good!  Take me back!”

I did.

About two weeks later.

That’s the last time I remember pulling that on him.  That’s the last time I remember needing to.  And I don’t remember ever having to pull it on his little brother.

But I must have, and I must have had to pull it on both of them more than a few times.

Little kids are little kids.  They have only so much patience, understanding, and self-control.

But it could be that because of the problems Ken had dealing with crowds and big, open, noisy places that when he was overwhelmed and had to be scooped up and whisked out of there and we thought he was relieved he was actually feeling remorseful, thinking he was being punished instead of rescued.  And it could be that Oliver, watching from his perspective of three years behind, only understood what was happening as Ken’s punishment for acting up and he took it as a warning.

I don’t know.  They don’t remember.  However it worked out, the blonde and I never thought of ourselves as particularly wise and effective parents because we were able to go out to restaurants and the grocery stores confident that the kids would not disturb the peace of other diners and shoppers.

I think this is how most parents teach their children, unconsciously or reflexively setting good examples, laying down rules and enforcing them, making sure that actions have consequences, making sure that their kids learn that there are such concepts as cause and effect.  They don’t deserve and don’t expect medals for this because it’s just what parents do.  It’s part of what you sign up for.  You change their diapers when they’re babies, you show up for their concerts and little league games, you teach them how to drive, hand them the keys, and wave goodbye as they set out to make their own way in the world, and all along the way you do what you can to teach them what you know about how best to do that, knowing that the only trophy you’re going to get is the mug that says World’s Best Dad or World’s Greatest Mom and which for several years, the ones between when they’re around thirteen and when they’re twenty-one, will be a source of ironic amusement, if not a taunt and a rebuke.

You teach them to control themselves when they’re out in public and mind their manners the way you teach how to brush their teeth and put away their clothes and their toys and pick up after themselves generally.

But there are parents---and by parents you know I mean guardians and caregivers of all types, right?---who seem to take it for granted that, whatever rules there are at home and however strictly they’re enforced there, once the kids get past the front door they are other people’s lookouts.

Those twin boys intent on learning that they can’t fly last night are not always that out of control.  But I’ve never seen them in control and I’ve never been able to connect them with any adults there whose job is to control them, which makes me think that they get dropped off at the dojo with only the big brother or sister, who is busy with the karate lesson, to keep an eye on them while their parent, parents, or guardians go off to do whatever it is they think they have to do that’s more important than minding their own kids.

But the other little boy, who is also always up to mischief and mayhem, is usually there with his grandfather who normally tries to keep him from running amok.  I’ve watched him try to help the kid with his homework some nights and I suspect the little boy has some problems that may require medication and counseling.  Last night, however, I guess he had no homework, because the grandfather brought him up to the gallery, where the twins were already dancing on the tabletops and testing the railings and exciting the little girls to run up and down the gallery with them when they weren’t climbing things, and left him there to “play” with the other children.

Before the grandfather disappeared downstairs, though, he spoke to the woman trying to read her newspaper and looking as though what she wanted to do was roll it up and start whacking away at anything she could reach under four feet tall.

“Are all these yours?” the grandfather asked her with a too jolly sympathy as if he was glad to find a fellow prisoner of the whims of small miscreants.

“No,” she replied pointedly, “None of them are.”

He didn’t say anything to that.  But in a few moments he was gone, having bid a fond farewell to his grandson whom I twice had to talk down from the railing he was leaning over so far that his legs stuck straight out behind him.  This was in between the several times when the woman with the newspaper had to haul him out from under her table where he apparently thought there was ample room for running and sliding.

I think he was imagining he was Anakin Skywalker landing his starfighter on the hanger deck of General Grievous’ battle cruiser.  At any rate, there were explosions from underneath that lifted the table several inches off the ground.

Part of not teaching kids how to behave in public is not teaching them to respect other adults.  No matter how many times the woman or I told the kids to simmer down, they just kept boiling away.  Most kids, when a strange adult scolds them, will go running to find the adults that brought them there for comfort and reassurance.  Not these kids.  They just stared at us blankly and then went back to work.  It got to the point where I was ready to grab the one kid by the seat of his pants and carry him downstairs to drop him in the lap of his grandfather.  But that was a scene I didn’t want to be a player in.

I think I know what I’m going to do next time.  But I’m taking advice.

What would you have done?

Besides charging their parents for the hour.

__________________

A tall drink of water orders a tall drink of hot chocolate:  Young Ken Mannion at a place he grew up in and where he’s always been on his best behavior.

Great Democrats

Made my third visit to Hyde Park in four years, this time to meet up with Mom and Pop Mannion, neither of whom had been to Franklin Roosevelt’s home and the museum and library there in decades.  They visited separately, with their families, when they were teenagers.  Mom Mannion was thirteen.  She didn’t go in.  She and her parents were driving along Route 9 and slowed down as they passed the grounds to  wonder at the crowd gathered at the entrance way.  It was August of 1945.  The War was over in Europe and Charles DeGaulle was at Hyde Park, finally able to come over to pay his respects at FDR’s grave.  Eleanor was probably with him but Mom could only make out DeGaulle, towering over the surrounding crowd.

Pop was eighteen when he visited Hyde Park.  That would have been 1950.  The thing that’s most vivid in his memory is a chess set.  One of the pieces was missing.  He thinks it was a rook.

The chess set wasn’t in sight today.  He asked a ranger if she knew what and if the missing piece had ever been found.  She said it was in a box in the family library.  She doubted the rook had ever turned up.  These days visitors take guided tours through house, led and watched by the rangers.  You can’t go into any of the rooms, you can only look in over glass gates and brass rails from the hallways.  Back in the day, the house was open all day for the public to wander through on their own.  “Things got stolen,” the ranger said.

It was a good visit.  A beautiful day to be out walking around too.  I posted some notes on Twitter.

I’ve written before how in Pop’s heart FDR is still the President and every occupant of the White House since has just been holding his coat.  So it was a pleasure for me to bring these two great Democrats together for an afternoon, at least in spirit.

Three great Democrats, I should say.

Generations talking past each other

At B & N yesterday afternoon.  Young woman, a little past college age, there with a group of friends, crowded together around a small table, all of them women, all of them college age or, like her, maybe a little older.  Lots of movement back and forth between the table and the counter as lattes, frapacinos, coffees, and desserts are ordered and then fetched.  This particular young woman stays put, though, because she’s in a conversation with a man at a table across the way.

Not that kind of conversation.

He’s a guy in his fifties, there with his wife.  Old enough to be her father, but not acting fatherly towards her.  Friend of her father, I’m guessing, someone who’s known her from way back and feels he can speak to her frankly, with I changed your diaper authority.  Smooth bald crown, jutting chin, sweatshirt with some college’s coat of arms.  I don’t like him.

“So,” the man’s saying, “What’s the new job?”

“Recruiter,” she says.

“Recruiter?” It’s as if she said she was a wheelwright or Chinese herbalist or a circus ringmaster.  His tone practically accuses her of making up a job to pull his leg.

"I’m a recruiter,” she says again, with a note of apology, as if she’s had to explain this before, “Not with the military!  I’m working for”  She names a financial services company.  “I recruit people for their tech department.”

“What does that involve?” the man asks imperatively.  Apparently there’s a right and a wrong answer to this question, at least in his mind.  I’m thinking, What are you, interviewing her?  You’ve got a better job you’re going to offer her?

“I go out and find people to write the programs they use to figure out their trades.”

“Programmers,” he says, like a science teacher providing a particularly slow student with the technical term for the red stuff that flows through people’s veins.

She giggles nervously.  “Yes.  We call them technologists though.”

“They’re called programmers,” he says.  “People who write programs are called programmers.  Or coders.  If they write code they’re called coders.”

At this point I wanted to jump in and tell him to stop raining on her parade.  Just congratulate her and shut up.  Sounds like a good job, a rare find in this economy, with what must be a good sized and growing company if they need that many “technologists” and someone in-house to help hire and keep track of them.  And I’m guessing those couple of years that separate her from her college graduation day were filled with some stretches of unemployment.  This is good news, be happy for her, and shut up.

Of course I don’t say any of that because it’s none of my business and if I put my oar in I’d be just like this guy, another middle-aged man treating her like a child.  She’s old enough to tell him to buzz off herself and she isn’t doing it either because she’s too polite or she knows him well enough she’s used to his bullying or she just doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.

But another guy, another middle-aged man, this one without my reluctance to butt in, at the home plate of the diamond our four collective tables form, turns to her and says, “Did you major in that in school?”

“No, I majored in psychology.”

“Psychology?”

“Psychology and philosophy,” she says brightly, “It was a dual major.”

“You sure put that degree to use then.”

If there were any justice in the world last night’s evening news would have included a story about a couple of middle-aged men who were chased out into a Barnes and Noble parking lot by a gang of twentysomething women and pantsed.

I’m glad there isn’t that kind of justice because I might have been included in the young women’s rampage on general principles.

Here we are, we aging Boomers, trying to “save” Social Security for ourselves by taking away those young women’s future benefits and forcing them to work into their old ages.

Guys like this make me wonder why they aren’t doing that to us.