Category Life

Troubled Waters

Michael Leave a comment

Perhaps the almost constant news of Hurricane Matthew got me thinking about water and oceans and being safe. Being about 350 miles away from the Atlantic, my personal experiences with hurricanes have been mostly rainy days and newscasts. The last time I remember a hurricane making a direct impact on my town was Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

I can never figure out why American journalists have decided that the best time to go to the beach is when a hurricane is due to hit land. While the news anchors are exhorting the public to move inland, the field reporters stand on a dock somewhere in the wind and rain with boats jostling on the waves behind them telling those who tuned into the newscast that they are on a dock somewhere in high winds and heavy rain battering the boats left behind by their evacuating owners. The boats will be fine, fellas. How about spending some time with the boat owners and everyone else hunkered down in a shelter fearing for their lives and loved ones.

Something completely unrelated then got me thinking about ships at sea. I’ve never been on a ship at sea. The only times I’ve been on any boat larger than one you can pull behind your SUV was a ferry from Long Beach to Catalina (a once was enough experience), a sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico (a once in a lifetime experience), and a fishing boat on Lake Erie (a perennial favorite). In yesterday’s paper there was an article about some guy who posted a video of a ghost ship sighted on Lake Superior near Marquette, Michigan. Experts said it probably was a lighthouse that appeared to be moving because of visual illusions due to water vapor and mist. The article wrapped up saying that between 6,000 and 30,000 ships have been lost on the Great Lakes.     le-griffon

Wait a minute. Between 6,000 and 30,000 ships have been lost on the Great Lakes? That’s a heck of range. Because I have that kind of time (as you by now undoubtedly know) I thought I’d do some research. I found about 150 documented shipwrecks on Lake Erie alone. (I started there since if it ever should come to it, that’s the body of water that would probably do me in.) In all, I found documentation for 302 ships that sunk in the Great Lakes since the “Le Griffon” went down in a storm on Lake Huron in 1679. That’s a far cry from 30,000 but that’s still a bunch of boats. How would that compare to an ocean, say the Atlantic Ocean with its annual 6 month hurricane window?

Again, because I still have the time, I did some research. As near as I have been able to put together, beginning in 1600 (so we can compare oranges to oranges) I found 310 ships going down – excluding warships during times of war – in the Atlantic and her contiguous seas. The cynic in me thought with the size, scope, and weather on an open sea that there would have been more. The good guy in me appreciates the lives spared on all the thousands of ships that stayed afloat. Although many wrecks were attributed to weather conditions, I was only able to determine that five went down in hurricanes. The most recent was the freighter “el Faro” that was lost in Hurricane Joaquin last year.

I’m not sure how I got from hurricanes to Lake Huron nor from there back to hurricanes. If you do, you probably understand my mind better than I. And that is truly something to be scared of.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

(Image of “Le-Griffon” By Father Louis Hennepin, via Wikimedia Commons, PD)

 

Picture Perfect

Michael Leave a comment

I was watching an old TV show yesterday when it was noted that the then most popular hobby was photography. Then was in the mid-1960s.

In mid-60 I was still measuring my age in single digits and picture taking was a natural extension of any structured family gathering – birthdays, Christmas, opening pitch at the local little league. After the pictures were taken the film was developed and the printed pictures camerabecame the center of attention for an evening. They were passed around among the family, mounted in (or at least stuck between the covers of) one of the many family picture albums, and that’s where there seemed to rest until happily ever after.

Fast forward 50 years. That’s when my father passed away. I don’t know when the custom began or if it was/is even a custom but then it was a thing to display pictures on French memory boards and scatter about during the viewings. My mother and sisters spent hours going through albums and boxes and envelopes to select the images that represented as many of the 8 plus decades my father walked the earth. Pictures I remembered from those family “picture shows” were there and there were also pictures from milestone events since and not so milestone events before. Faces of relatives who had died before I was born shared space with the one of a much younger father. While we were occupied fitting remembered names to forgotten visages we became caught up in remembering lives lived rather than one so recently lost.

The interesting thing was that after the funeral and things returned to their normal paces and places, those pictures didn’t. Every time I stopped by at my mother’s house a new old picture found its way into a frame on a wall, a spot on the mantel, a corner of a mirror. “Who is that,” was answered with who, when, where, what was happening, what happened next, what everyone else in and not in the picture thought about it, turning a simple question into a wonderful story.

Today the most popular hobby is, depending on what site you pluck out of the 2 million or so that a search returns, either gardening or fishing. Photography is still pretty high on all the lists. A quick peek at Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or any other social site confirms that. Hopefully some of those images will last for 50 years so when today’s generation fast forwards the next mid-60s they will turn into their own stories. And rest happily ever after.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

 

The Road Un-Traveled

Michael Leave a comment

Boy the United States is a big place. I realized that when it hit me that the farthest I have ever traveled to get somewhere didn’t even get me out of the country. In fact, I had traveled farther more times when I hadn’t left the country than when I had gotten outside its borders. That’s a big place.

Becauseworld I have that kind of time, I took a few minutes over the weekend to figure this out. The greatest distance I’ve traveled from home to somewhere is a few miles over 2,500. That didn’t even get me completely across the country

I’m not complaining about any of this. I think Americans sometimes forget how close other countries can be to each other and how much of a challenge that might sometimes be. We can go pretty far and still be in a part of the  world where people speak the same language, eat the same food, and respect the same routines. We may have come from different places but we have a sameness that is quite comforting. If you live in the middle of the United States you have a long way to go before you leave home. But if you live in the middle of Europe, you’re never more than a day away from a different world, often from several different worlds.

Sometimes I envy a European version of me who can step across borders and immerse himself in other cultures as easily as I travel from state to state seeing few changes other than the colors of the license plates. While we take pride in our backgrounds and traditions it’s very likely the customs we observe in our families and friends may be our only exposure to different cultures. From generation to generation our ways of life mingle and meld becoming even less different. Other times I recognize how wonderful it is that I can sample fairly authentic foods and dances, customs and costumes of so many nationalities just by visiting nearby nationality days celebrations.

Yep, the US is a big place. It’s not the only one of course. Canada, Russia, China, India, Australia, and Brazil are all big with lots of space from end to end. Iceland isn’t so big but it’s so isolated that it’s still a trip to get anywhere else. And then Greenland is big and isolated.

I suppose this like many other things in my life if I could change I probably wouldn’t. I may not get to see a different country every time I want to take a trip somewhere but then I haven’t had to add any pages to my passport.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

And now, the start of the story…

Michael 4 Comments

Let me start right out of the gate and say this post is going to be a little different. Not much humor, useless trivia, or sarcasm in this one. Depending on how long you’ve been following this story you might know that a couple of years ago life was interrupted by a bout with cancer. It seems that for so many today, cancer is just an interruption. Cancer strikes this celebrity, that athlete, or this actor and they recover, return to their former lives with an even greater performance, voice, or achievement.  For me, cancer was maybe more than an interruption. But one thing it was for sure, it was inevitable.

Fifteen years ago I was diagnosed with one of the rarer immune system abnormalities. Not one of the many rheumatoid conditions that today have so many wonderful drugs advertised on TV so you can get back to golf, fancy restaurants, delightful carnivals, volunteer work, or unashamed workouts from high energy spin classes to meditative yoga. Nope, the one I got wasn’t even in researchers’ microscopes looking for a sometime-in-the-future remedy. Treatment for me meant high doses of prednisone and immunosuppressive agents once used in the early fight against cancer. I knew from the start that over several years the treatments themselves could cause problems like renal failure, heart failure, liver failure, or the cancers they were initially developed to treat. I also knew from the start that left untreated, over several months my condition could cause problems like death and dying.

I chose Door Number One.

Then three years ago I found out I had cancer. I knew that I most likely wouldn’t come out of it with an even greater performance, voice, or achievement. For me it wasn’t that one thing I had to overcome. It was just another thing in the yet increasing number of things that had happened, and will continue to happen to me.

Over the years I’ve had so many pieces of me removed, replaced, or rebuilt that I could give Lee Majors a strong run for the Six Million Dollar Man title role.  Over the years it’s gotten harder to say if the latest ache, pain, or procedure is due to the condition or the cure. Last week I spent a day in an outpatient surgery unit having an artery and vein in my right arm tied together to form an entry and exit site necessary for dialysis. It was inevitable and got me thinking about that cancer diagnosis from three years ago.

By then I had already been given about a dozen extra years since choosing Door Number One. In those 12 years I had gotten to see my daughter graduate high school and college and discovered the difference between being a father and being Dad. I had met new people who I would never forget who before I could never have ever imagined. I had earned national recognition in a field that itself is rarely recognized. I had earned about a million dollars, spent about a million and a half, and probably would do it the same way all over again.

The more I think of it, the more I think how lucky I am to have gotten to that cancer diagnosis. I got to hear a doctor tell me that I had a potentially terminal condition long before I had cancer. By the time I heard a doctor tell me “You have cancer,” (though more delicately than that) I had 12 years that I wouldn’t have had if I had chosen the path that didn’t include the possibility that treatment might cause cancer.

I wish everyone who ever has to hear a doctor say “You have cancer,” (hopefully more delicately than that) all the best things that life has in store for you. And although I can’t argue that having cancer is ever one of the best things that life has in store for you, there really are some things worse than having cancer. Sometimes, even not having it can be worse.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Bridge for Sale

Michael Leave a comment

Labor Day has come and gone and you know what that means. No more white shoes or Seersucker! Uh, no. It’s the start of a new season. I don’t mean the change from unofficial summer to unofficial fall. What with meteorological autumn and astronomical autumn and autumnal equinox and the fall TVseason the last thing we need is any unofficial season. No, the period after Labor Day is the beginning of a new festival season.

Ok, those of you who have always suspected that I’m closing in on batty it’s probably official – or maybe even unofficial. I’ve been marking the seasons by the changes of festivals for years. Winter heralds holiday festivals, spring brings my beloved maple festivals, summer is the season for arts festivals, and fall is the time for covered bridge festivals. This should be nothing new for regular readers of RRSB. I’ve brought up the local covered bridge festival before. (See “Passages of Fall,” September 15, 2014.) (Come on, give me a little break. I’ve been doing this for almost five years. We’re going to revisit some things every now and then.)bridgeforsale

But let’s digress here for just a moment. Festivals have morphed terribly from the traditional definition. That is, “a day or time of religious or other celebration, marked by feasting, ceremonies, or other observances.” Modern festivals often include feasting, otherwise the corndog and kettle corn industries would be in shambles, but around here they’re known more for jamming as many hand-made and/or ersatz hand-made crafts, foods, clothes, and furniture into any open field and for the greatest concentration of the Square point of sale app per vendor per acre.

And that’s what I love about them! You can buy anything at a festival – and I have. Chain sawn eagle yard ornament? Bought one. Framed, numbered, signed pencil sketch? Bought one. Metal sculpted snowman family. Bought one. Commemorative newspaper front page parodying offspring’s eccentricity? Bought one. Hand-hammered silver jewelry ensemble featuring recycled place settings? Bought one.  Hand-made left-handed wooden kitchen utensil set? Bought one. Full scale carved wooden Jack-o-lantern? Bought two!

Oh sure, you can buy maple syrup at the maple festivals and real art at the arts festivals and traditional Christmas decorations at the holiday festivals. But you can get that stuff at lots of places. But where else can you find a four foot, hand carved, wading flamingo carrying a surfboard under its wing? What can I say? I live for kitsch.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Man At Work

Michael Leave a comment

Happy Labor Day America. That wonderful holiday when we celebrate the people who work by making people work so others who aren’t working can take advantage of another day, weekend, or month of sales. A day when the people who aren’t working complain that they might as well be at work because it will be twice as busy on Tuesday when they get back and a day when the people who are working complain that they are working while collecting twice their normal pay. You gotta love those holidays.

There are a handful of people who are working today who aren’t complaining about it. They will get tomorrow off. Actually they’ll get every tomorrow off from their current position. Those are the people at the Bangor, Maine Howard Johnson Restaurant. So why are they special? When they close there will be only one Howard Johnson Restaurant left in the country where once it was the largest hospitality chain with over 1,000 restaurants and 500 motor lodges.

I remember eating in several Howard Johnson’s but one in particular still pops into my head now and then. In 1925, Howard Johnson (yes, there really was a Howard Johnson) borrowed $2,000 and bought a pharmacy in Quincy, Mass. There he installed a soda fountain and brought enough business in to open a sit down restaurant by 1929. In 1940 the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened using the abandoned South Pennsylvania Railway tunnels and rights of way connecting Irwin in the west with Carlisle in central Pennsylvania. Eventually the turnpike mainline was completed from the Ohio to the New Jersey borders through the southern part of the state. Why are these two things related?

Although only 360 miles from east to west (or west to east, even), a distance that can be travelled comfortably in a less than a single workday today (if you felt like working on Labor Day), in the 1960s the trip just halfway across the state was far from a comfortable day’s drive. In the western part of the state the mountains made for slow climbs, challenging twisty downhill runs, and constant stoppages while new tunnels were being blasted through the Allegheny Mountains. I know because I was then a back seat passenger with two sisters while the parents rode up front each summer on our trek from Western PA to Eastern MD. A high point of the turnpike portion of the journey was the Howard Johnson Restaurants at the turnpike service plazas.  After lunch we would be allowed to splurge on dessert and have one of the famous 28 flavors of ice cream. For some reason I always picked chocolate.

Howard Johnson’s were fixtures on the Pennsylvania Turnpike from its opening in 1940 until the 1980s when the full service restaurants began to be replaced by fast food chains and their familiar counter service. The PA turnpike restaurant was the first restaurant the Howard Johnson Company would open on its way to becoming the largest restaurant chain along American toll roads.  In 1979 the Howard Johnson Company was sold and eventually many of the familiar orange roofed restaurants on and off the turnpikes were converted into other brands. By 1986 all of the former company owned Howard Johnson Restaurants were closed or rebranded and only the franchised restaurants remained open. The motor lodge business was divested entirely in 1990.

Today, where I once was served my hamburger on a plate at a Howard Johnson Restaurant along the Pennsylvania Turnpike I have a choice of picking up a pizza or a Whopper and carrying it back to a plastic table in a reconstructed service plaza holding two fast-food restaurants, an ice cream stand, a coffee counter, a gift shop, and a dirty bathroom. Elsewhere there are only two Howard Johnson Restaurants serving comfort food and comfortable memories. Tomorrow there will be only one.

Labor Day had already been celebrated for 3 years before Howard Deering Johnson was born in 1897. When Howard opened that first store in 1925 the Mount Rushmore site was dedicated before construction began on the mountain which would be completed in 1941. That was just in time for Howard Johnson to start opening restaurants along highways that would be packed with hungry families on holiday weekends.

That must be why I always manage to have a quart of chocolate ice cream in the freezer on Labor Day.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

(If you want to see the last remaining Howard Johnson Restaurant you have to get to Lake George, New York. You should hurry. It already closed once in 2012 and reopened just last year. Rumor has it that Rachel Ray worked there as a teenager. No word on if she still stops in.)

 

You have the right. . .

Michael Leave a comment

I don’t listen to satellite radio often, but when I do I prefer the commercial free channels. The funny thing about satellite radio is that on the channels that are not commercial free, a great many of the ads are for credit repair, an unusual sponsor for a service that charges hundreds of dollars a year in subscription fees. Or maybe not. One in particular caught my ear lately.

It began, “You have the right to reduce your debt.” My first thought was, no you have an obligation to reduce your debt and it’s called bill paying. Actually, my first thought was to switch channels but I fought that off, not because I need to reduce my debt but that once upon a time I was so heavily in debt that your average homeless person had a higher credit score than I. I reduced my debt by stopping indiscriminate buying, selling off assets, paying off creditors, and closing credit cards. I was pretty sure the fellow espousing my rights to un-indebtedness didn’t have those notions in mind.

I’m sure there are many reasonable ways to reduce debt. Just because most governments haven’t figured out a way to do it doesn’t mean that we have lower ourselves to their levels. Especially on this weekend – Labor Day weekend. Huh? The thing is, you don’t want to reduce debt that’s going to cost people their jobs. Huh?

It doesn’t matter if a business is a 12 seat diner owned by the guy down the street or a multi-national banking business run by a bazillionaire. If you take money away from them they will work out a way of making it up. Either that means raising prices or lowering expenses – and the biggest expense of any business is its human resource.

Yes, you have a right to reduce your debt. It’s not right up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But then again, maybe it is. If it makes you happy, you should reduce. You also have a responsibility to reduce honorably. When you sign an agreement to accept the terms of credit it includes the expectation of repayment. It’s what the people who lend you money deserve.  And it’s what the people who are paid their salary based on the money you pay them deserve.

Back to that ad – while most of it was playing I was mentally drifting thinking about most of what you just read. But I came back to earth in time to hear the tag line – “Don’t let the credit card companies trick you into thinking that you have to pay them what you owe.” Huh?

Happy Labor Day.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

The Ultimate Participation Award

Michael Leave a comment

Anybody who has ever been at a youth sporting event medal ceremony knows they can be longer than the event. With that in mind, it’s a good thing they don’t have participation medals at the Olympics. Sort of.

There were over 11,000 athletes at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. As it was, there were over 900 medals awarded in 306 events. Since there were several multiple medal winners that means that quite fewer than 1% of the athletes who participated in the games went home with an award.

All those participants in all those events and the only ones who stood on a podium and had gold, silver, or bronze draped over them were those who finished first, second, or third in their particular endeavor. And that’s the way it is. Only the top three contestants are awarded medals. Plus another twenty-one.

The Pierre de Coubertin Medal is a special award given to those who exemplify the true spirit of sportsmanship in the Olympics. Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee and introduced the modern games to the world. He felt the games were an opportunity to promote peace, unite people around the world, and celebrate the struggle of competition.

How special is this special award. Saturday it was awarded for only the eighteenth time. Maybe you saw when long distance runners Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand and American Abbey D’Agostino got tripped up during the women’s 5,000 meter preliminary event. Hamblin went down and D’Agostino stopped and urged her to get up to finish the race. They began running again and that’s when D’Agostino went down and it was Hamblin’s turn to stay with her.

The two women became the 20th and 21st people to have received the award which has been presented eighteen times since its introduction in 1964.

Even though neither was expected to medal in the event, both left Brazil with the ultimate participation award. Hamblin said of the incident, “You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose what you do about it.”  Words more precious than gold.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Down Two, Then Left

Michael Leave a comment

It’s not usual for me to miss such an important day. Particularly one of such personal significance. But somehow I did. Why weren’t you keeping an eye out for it for me? I know. You don’t have to tell me. It’s because it’s no big deal.

You can tell it’s no big deal because the world hasn’t paid a bit of attention to us since the dawn of man. Who are us? And what it is that isn’t such a big deal? We’re the left handers of the world and last Saturday was International Left Handers’ Day.

It’s clearly not a priority with the rest of the world. In this time of extreme tolerance and political correctness to every special interest, no such consideration is given to the left handed who often feel left out. We also feel fear, anger, and embarrassment probably because almost everything made for manual use is best used by the other hand.

Since we all have two hands available when deciding which hand will be handier, logic would seem to determine that they should be close to an even division of left and right handers. Since logic is usually associated more with right handedness you can see where that argument was going to go. In fact, only about 10 percent of the global population is left handed. I know as a child I had been “encouraged” by teachers to use my right hand since everything at school, and everywhere else I would eventually learn, was designed for right handers. I resisted but often wondered how many of the 90 percent who use their other hand were born tending to their left.

Here we may account for only 10 percent of the population but at one point our closest celestial neighbor boasted 100% left handed inhabitants when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in July 1969. (Michael Collins who continued to orbit the Moon while his fellow astronauts were doing their moon walks is also a left hander.) But then in November, William “Pete” Conrad became the first other hander to occupy the Moon. As best as I can tell it took until April 1972 when Charles Duke became the third and last left hander of the 12 men who had or would land on another world other than the world.

So if those guys were able to accomplish what they did, I guess I can manage with ball point pens and kitchen shears designed to be operated by a right hand. And I’ll be content in the knowledge that if our personal worlds are indeed controlled by a cross-wired brain, then I am undoubtedly in my right mind.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

GYM? I thought you said GIN!

Michael Leave a comment

The Olympics are here! The Olympics are here! Oh, wait, that’s how I began the last post. It still applies. I’ve noticed that since the Olympic coverage started on TV that the gym has been getting a real work out. (Yeah, I know. That was terrible. Sorry.) I may be wrong but I think the former definitely has something to do with the latter.

I remember as a young boy being taken by the Olympic spirit every 4 years. At least I was once or twice every 4 years before it settled in just how much work it took to land on the front of a Wheaties box. While the 1964 Olympic cycling events were being dominated by the Italians, this young Italian was pedaling his way through his own backyard qualifying heats. I didn’t fare much better than the 18 Americans who made it to Tokyo that October but my newspaper route never got delivered faster than during those two weeks.

How long have parents been trying to get their children outside for some physical activity – before the Pokémon Go craze even? For generations the Olympics gave parents a hand doing just that. Personally, I think it’s cool that the exercise bug is biting a slightly older crowd now.

Maybe we’re just getting to be a slightly more physical people and that’s why more folks are exercising. Or it could be that old drive to see oneself immortalized in breakfast food that is driving so many people to the fitness center. All I know is that where once I had my pick of machines I now have to arrive early lest I am forced to tackle my cycling on the outside on a bicycle that actually goes somewhere. I mean, sure, I have one of those but I haven’t seen my paper bag for years now.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?