Category Society

Give Till It Doesn’t Hurt

Michael 6 Comments

Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday. I would hope that enough people are mature enough to be able to donate time, talent, and/or money to worthy causes without a special day to remind us to donate to worthy causes. But if you aren’t and you do, then somebody can benefit from your generosity at least once a year. (That’s the generic you, not the you who is reading this.) (Surely.)

It’s odd they would stick such an altruistic day right after the excesses of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Saturday, and Cyber Monday. Then again, maybe it is the perfect day for it. Any change you have left isn’t enough to do you any good so you might as well give it away.

GTHeartIf you are a little strapped either from the holiday excess or just because you’re a little strapped, I have some giving ideas that aren’t economically painful.

Remember those homeless people you wanted to help by volunteering at the shelters with Thanksgiving dinner? They are still hungry and most of those shelters don’t have so many volunteers they can turn away an extra hand on a not so random Tuesday.

For almost every Christian sect in the world, Advent begins this weekend. Churches and chapels are decorating their spaces for Christmas this week. I never met a church with enough hands that they would turn away an extra pair not tied up at the homeless shelter serving lunch. Most of those churches can use help throughout the year also, so while you’re there ask about those needs also.

Are you still fighting leftovers? While you’re rummaging through your recipe files for yet another way to prepare a turkey casserole, pull one out for something you can make to bring to your local fire station, emergency medical service, police or sheriff department. They made a choice to give back to their communities for a lifetime. You can choose to give to them for a day. (Pick something fresh and leave the leftovers to the kids.)

Hospitals, nursing homes, health centers, schools, day cares, libraries, Meals on Wheels, senior agencies, and other assorted services want help over the entire year. Make Giving Tuesday your start date to apply to volunteer on a regular basis to a worthy cause.

And finally, if you still want to give back and really can’t spare more than about an hour, donate blood. You’ll even get a cookie when you’re done. You can give and get all at the same time!

 

 

A Prayer for Thanksgiving

Michael 2 Comments

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. It was or will be likewise around the world. Everybody is thankful for something and most nations have managed to work in a holiday to legitimize the feeling.

I don’t know how others do it but Americans have been managing to delegitimize feelings quite efficiently lately. We’ll tout our tolerance and claim to accept all and then slur anyone who doesn’t feel the same and blur want for welcome. We support everything and everyone as long as it or they support us in the manner to which we think we should be accustomed. Our gratitude for what we have is matched by our appetite for what we don’t.

Sometime today while I think of all that I am thankful for I’ll manage to miss most of them. So will everyone else. Mostly we’re not bad people as much as clueless ones. Clueless to the differences between our reality and the one that’s really out there. And clueless to how much we rely on what we don’t even know is happening.

So when you give your thanks today that hopefully you won’t restrict to just today I offer you the prayer I started today with.

Heavenly Father, this is the day set aside to give thanks for Your surpassing goodness to human beings. Let me give proper thanks for my blessings  –  those I am aware of as well as those that I habitually take for granted. And let me use them according to Your will.

Happy Thanksgiving today and every day you think to be thankful.

All Downhill from Here

Michael 10 Comments

I know I haven’t lived the most exemplary life, but even by my standards, this just isn’t fair. It’s because I still read the paper.

Yesterday’s Sunday paper, the big one for the week, the one with all the features and ads that get in your way of finding Saturday’s scores and the comics. That one. The one that published this year’s first ski report. Yeah. It’s skiing time.

I guess that shouldn’t be so shocking. It was only 14 degrees Friday night. (That’s in Fahrenheit here. Using my handy dandy conversion calculator I make it that would be -10 Celsius. Oh, that sounds even colder.) Plenty cold enough for either the natural or manufactured variety of ski powder, and there were both in the mountains. Not shocking nor unfair.

The shocking part…the price of lift tickets. Here a weekend ticket is going for better than $200. That’s not close to a weekend at say St. Regis but a far cry from the $49 that is cost when I was half my current age. But the reality is that a Big Mac has gone up over 200% in 30 years also. So, shocking but not not fair.

skier

Image by Lakeshore Learning via Pinterest

The unfair part is the discounts. I don’t mind seeing the young ones getting their 20% or so off the adult prices and that kids under 5 ski free. I applaud that they recognize that seniors might still want to tackle the slopes and give them a full half off the regular prices. That’s very fair. Especially as one pending seniordom I relish on finally collecting the perks. The unfair part is that I can’t yet and won’t for years! Why? Because their idea of senior doesn’t start at 55 with one’s newly acquired AARP card. It’s not at 60, a nice round number, or at 62 which seems to have become the new standard for discounts announced right about the time I turned 60. It’s not even 65 which is what most places will consider reasonable for a senior discount right around the time I’ll turn 62. Nope, their idea of senior is 70. Yes, if you are between 70 and 79, you can ski at any of the area ski resorts for 50% off the regular adult rate.

Oh, what happens after 79? I’m glad you asked. At 80, you can ski free. Really. If you can manage to remember where you put your skis you can use them to your hearts content. Or its stoppage, whichever comes first.

Pantsing Around

Michael 6 Comments

The last couple of days here have been the cold, rainy, dreary, generally not the kind of weather you want to go outside in unless you have to type of days you find when fall really turns into prep days for winter. So I’ve been practicing sitting around and relaxing since most of my days include “don’t go outside unless you have to” on the to do list.

Mostly I’ll read, write, or puzzle something out to bide my time on those inside days. Every so often I’ll turn on the television and see what I might have missed in prime time over the past few years by watching whatever new has hit the late afternoon/early evening syndication runs. I’ve discovered that I’m much too overdressed to be properly relaxed. Apparently the All-American male cannot relax with pants on. I missed that somewhere along the way.

In every sitcom on television today, there is a male character who barely crosses the threshold of his house before taking his pants off. These males range from youngster at the cusp of teendom, to teenager, to young adult, to middle aged parent, to grandfather. They are from struggling, middle class, well to do, and outright rich families from New York across America to California, of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Their only common denominators are male-ism and being pantsless at home.

This concerns me. I never ran across this behavior in my personal experiences. I have often been in what I would otherwise consider a relaxing situation and I have always kept my pants on. I have observed other men from my own, older, and younger generations, and have never seen any of them kicked back on the sofa in boxers or briefs. Yet our television role models are dropping trou before they clear the front door. And not just in solitude. They do it and stay that way in front of wives, mothers, siblings, offspring, and on several occasions, delivery persons.

Don’t say that they’re only sitcom males and I shouldn’t be taking them seriously. Sitcoms are America. We may want to think that the hour long dramas are where Americans are really at but they aren’t. The dramas may be what we want to believe us to be. We want to be that deep, that inclusive, that concerned with the environment, current causes, and family. But we aren’t. As much as we want to be the Pearsons, deep down we know we’re really the Hecks.

Clearly I’ve been doing it wrong for a lifetime. And I’m afraid that as I’ve gotten this far in my life I’m too old to change and will continue relaxing with all of my clothes on. I know, I’m bucking convention here but I can’t see myself any other way. And I sincerely hope it doesn’t offend any of you to know that as I’m typing this, I’m wearing pants.

 

…making all his nowhere plans…

Michael 4 Comments

Recently a friend asked me what I think of when I go to bed. An odd question not quite in the same category as what’s your sign and certainly more thought provoking than what’s your favorite color.

Since I go to bed alone I most often think alone thoughts. You know, “sigh, another night alone.” Now alone isn’t necessarily alone in bed. I much more often think of being alone as being the only one in the apartment than of being the only one in the bed. Of course it’s nice to have somebody care so much that they share their whole body with you but it’s nicer when somebody shares their whole person. But that’s the philosophical me. It took a while to learn that and I’m ok with it even if the bodily me would like to feel another body next to it sometimes. But I think not having someone in the same house is a more profound kind of alone.

They say there’s a big difference between being alone and being lonely. I’m pretty sure those people were never really alone for any length of time. You can talk to someone every day, you can see people during all the waking hours, you can have someone nearby, but those will never take the place of sharing space. When you go through days of going to bed at night never having another person to check in on, never having someone to say goodnight to, knowing if something happened nobody is there to say “it’s going to be ok,” that’s being alone. And if you don’t think that’s also being lonely, you haven’t not had someone to say goodnight to on a regular basis.

I can’t imagine anybody who lives alone who hasn’t thought about what happens if something happens. Is that just part of being alone? Or lonely?

Oh well.

And I Helped

Michael 2 Comments

A little boy was playing in his yard when he tripped and cut his knee. His sister heard him crying and ran out to him where she started crying too. Their mother, hearing the commotion, goes out to check on them and finds both of them wailing but only he seems to be hurt.

She picks him up and tells him, “We’ll just go inside and clean you up and put a bandage on that and you’ll be good as new.” She turns to her daughter and asks, “And what happened to you?”

“Nothing Mom. I’m just helping him cry.”

Not to get preaching or anything but we could learn a lot from those two. Like the sister, we’re always willing to join in and help out when disaster strikes. We only need to look at 3 hurricanes and a wildfire in a little over a month to confirm that.

But just like those young siblings, unless we see blood we’re more likely to push, shove, pinch, and otherwise cause the pain of our brothers and sisters. We only need to look at any morning’s headlines to confirm that.

Nuclear testing is back in the news after a 40 year hiatus. Casting couches are indeed as stereotypical as we were led to believe 50 years ago. Trump haters are still hating Trump supporters and Trump supporters are still hating Trump haters. Boyfriends with PFAs are killing girlfriends. Parents are killing children, presumably after bandaging their cut knees. A new record for mass killings was set. Football players want to become social compasses. Football owners want to be richer. A young police officer was shot in an ambush in New Orleans. Almost nobody outside of New Orleans knew a young police officer was shot in an ambush in New Orleans.

On the environmental front, the Yellowstone super volcano may erupt soon. It could mean the end of the world.(Really, check out the article at Country Living.) But if it doesn’t destroy life as we know it, maybe we could take this opportunity to be nice to each other before a disaster happens.

 

Every Day Is a Great Day

Michael 4 Comments
Hockey season started yesterday. I was there for it. In my seat, the one I’ve occupied for the past couple of years. It’s not a bad seat. Over the years I’ve sat in several spots around the arena. Lower bowl, upper bowl, center ice, behind the net, on the dots. In the old arena. In the new arena. None are bad seats. Amidst a handful of people in my little section amidst the 19,000 or so seats all occupied by people in their little sections we sat in not bad seats there just to see a hockey game. No other agenda, hidden, assumed, obvious, or imagined. Just hockey.
But before the game we stopped to pay respects to those who lost lives and loved ones in Las Vegas and all 19,000 were silent. Every one. Silent. Then we paid respects to the flag and all 19,000 sang. Every one. Singing. And I thought how once again all I know about being a gentleman I learned from hockey and how I was once so moved by that realization that I posted my thoughts on it right here. And I thought, just as “Badger” Bob Johnson knew every day is a great day for hockey, that every day is a great day to learn from hockey.
So I’m doing today something I’ve never done before. I’m reprinting “Everything I Know About Being a Gentleman I Learned From Hockey.”

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EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BEING A GENTLEMAN I LEARNED FROM HOCKEY

Originally posted November 26, 2016

When I was at the hockey game this weekend I got to thinking how much as a society we can learn from hockey. Yes, the sport that is the butt of the joke “I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out,” is the same sport that can be our pattern for good behavior.

Stay with me for a minute or two and think about this. It started at the singing of the national anthem. I’ve been to many hockey, baseball, football, and soccer games. Only at the hockey games have I ever been in an arena filled with people actually singing along. Only at the hockey games are all of the players reverent to the tradition of honoring the country where they just happen to be playing even though they come from around the world – Canada, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Finland, even a few Americans.

A decent dose of nationalism notwithstanding, hockey has much to offer the gentility. Even those fights. Or rather any infraction. If a player breaks the rules he is personally penalized for it. Ground isn’t given or relinquished like on a battlefield, free throws or kicks aren’t awarded to the aggrieved party like victors in a tort battle. Nope, if you do something wrong you pay the consequences and are removed from play for a specified period in segregation from the rest of your teammates. No challenges, no arguments, no time off for good behavior. Do the crime. Pay the time. In the penalty box. Try doing that to a school child who bullies and you’ll have some civil liberty group claiming you’re hurting the bully by singling him out.

Hockey is good at singling out people but in a good way. At last Saturday’s game the opposing team has two members who had previously played for the home team. During a short break in the action a short montage of those two players was shown on the scoreboard screens and they were welcomed back by the PA announcer. And were cheered and applauded by the fans in attendance. There weren’t seen as “the enemy.” Rather they were friends who had moved away to take another job and were greeted as friends back for a day.

While play is going on in a hockey game play goes on in a hockey game. Only if the puck is shot outside the playing ice, at a rules infraction, or after a goal is scored does play stop. Otherwise, the clock keeps moving and play continues. Much like life. If you’re lucky you might get to ask for one time out but mostly you’re at the mercy of the march of time. Play begins. After a while play ends. If you play well between them, you’ll be ok.

The point of hockey is to score goals. Sometimes goals are scored ridiculously easily, sometimes goals seem to be scored only because of divine intervention. Most times, goals are a result of working together, paying attention to details, and wanting to score more than the opposing team wants to stop you from scoring. There is no rule that says after one team scores the other team gets to try. It all goes back to center ice and starts out with a new drop of the puck. If the team that just scored controls the puck and immediately scores again, oh well.

Since we’re talking about scoring, the rules of hockey recognize that it takes more than an individual to score goals. Hockey is the only sport where players are equally recognized not just for scoring goals but for assisting others who score goals. Maybe you should remember that the next time someone at work says you’ve done a good job.

handshakeThe ultimate good job is winning the championship. The NHL hockey championship tournament is a grueling event. After an 82 game regular season, the top 16 teams (8 from each conference) play a four round best of seven elimination tournament. It takes twenty winning games to win the championship. That’s nearly 25% as long as the regular season. It could take as long as 28 games to play to the finish. That’s like playing another third of a season. After each round only one team moves on. And for each round, every year, for as many years as the tournament has ever been played, and for as many years as the tournament will ever be played, when that one team wins that fourth game and is ready to move on, they and the team whose season has ended meet at center ice and every player on each team shakes the hand of his opponent player and coach, wishing them well as they move on and thanking them for a game well played. No gloating. No whining. No whimpering. Only accepting.

So you go to a fight and a hockey game breaks out. It could be a lot worse.

—–

So there you go. Everything you need to know about being a gentleman, or a lady. Courtesy of the folks who brought you hockey. They’re not bad lessons if I say so myself. And I think even Badger Bob would agree.

 

Speak for Yourself

Michael 4 Comments

America’s Got Talent wrapped up its most recent season last night. I hadn’t seen any of America’s Got Talent. Had I known there was a ventriloquist on I might have watched. I suppose I could say the same thing for the last every one of that show since there seems to always be a ventriloquist at least starting out on it. And with good reason. Ventriloquists are good entertainment. Puppeteering in general is good stuff. At least it was for my generation. If you missed out on watching professionals play with puppets, you missed out on a lot. Really. I’m serious. Really. Again.

ShariLewisLet’s look at some of the ventriloquists I grew up with. Shari Lewis was the first ventriloquist I have any memory of. Shari hit the national stage with Captain Kangaroo in 1956 which was when I was hitting the stage for the first time also. Granted, my stage was in home movies but hey, all the world’s a stage, right? I loved Shari Lewis as a child (when I was a child, not her) (maybe I would have loved her as a child too, I dunno) (her as a child, not me) (maybe both of us as a child) (children). Shari played on stage with Lamb Chop, Hush Puppy, Charlie Horse, and Wing Ding. She and her puppets might have been more popular than even I realized because now that I think about it, I recall my own daughter playing with a Lamb Chop puppet when she was a baby 30 years after I put my puppets into cold storage. And I seem to also recall that her Lamb Chop was new.

When we hit the new century, ventriloquists were still hitting the stage but none hit it as hard as Jeff Dunham. Dunham and his crew say what we all have wanted to say but were afraid it would end up on Facebook the next day with 450,000 comments about how rude and undiverse we are being. (You’ve made up words too!) I like Jeff Dunham but I’d probably like Jeff Dunham even without the dummies. (Is it undiverse to call them that? Perhaps they should be life-challenged?)

Ventriloquists weren’t the only puppeteers that shaped a generation. In a modern take to the marionette, Jim Henson created a neighborhood full of puppets that began with Kermit in 1955. By the early 1960s he (Jim, not Kermit, although I suppose you could say they) met up with puppeteer Frank Oz and writer Jerry Juhl and the Muppets were off and running.

MrRogersHand puppets, though the least techy of puppets (although exactly what Lamb Chop and friends were) had the biggest impact on me as a developing mental genius. (It’s my blog, I can call myself whatever I want.) In particular, King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday, and X the Owl, the puppets of the Neighborhood of Make Believe in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was a force in puppeteering and all things educational for children. From his earliest days with the Canadian Broadcast Company’s “Children’s Corner” he introduced children to his own childhood make believe characters. But it was in 1966 from WQED in Pittsburgh, the nation’s first public-owned broadcast company, that Mr. Rogers, his puppets, and his live neighbors swept a nation, and a generation.

So maybe the next time someone accuses you of just being a puppet, you might take solace in that you’re in some pretty good company and prepare yourself to mold the mind of some future mental genius.

Edible Portmanteau

Michael 3 Comments

We were at a buffet brunch yesterday. There was a time in the 90s when you couldn’t escape to a buffet brunch offering on any a Sunday. Then brunches fizzled. The local “family dining” restaurant option continued the buffet offering. It gave them something to do with the salad bar setup that would have otherwise gone untouched. Otherwise, you couldn’t buy an egg anywhere outside a grocery store after 11:00 for all the bacon you brought home last week. Then McDonald’s said breakfast is good all day and soon the Sunday brunch was back. Sort of.

About 6 years ago brunches reappeared on the local high end dining scene as carefully selected menu selections. You could purchase Eggs Benedict and a fruit cup but your $17.99 was going to get you just that. A poached egg and some pre-cut melon. Still, it was another option for an after church repast.

Yesterday we discovered the return of the all you can eat Sunday Brunch. Omelets to order, sausages, baked fish, donuts, and a Caesar salad all on one plate! Permission to stuff your face with as much as you want for as long as you want (up to 2pm) in exchange for one twenty dollar bill. Only in America! (Actually I’m assuming that. I haven’t ever had a weekend, mid-morning buffet in another country but then my international travel is somewhat limited.)

While I was munching away at my bacon topped salmon cake I allowed my mind to do what it does best when dining with my family. Wander. And it was off and running.

The word “brunch” is one of the most recognizable portmanteau, the words breakfast and lunch combined into a new, accepted contraction. We do this all the time with English. Smog. Dumbfound. Modem. Portmanteau itself is a portmanteau, a small case used to carry outwear. (porter = carry, manteau = cape)

At buffet brunches every serving vessel or station is clearly marked with their, sometimes quite disparate, contents. Baked Salmon/Chicken Parmesan. Fresh Fruits/Baked Desserts. Green Beans Almondine/Potatoes au Gratin. And the ever popular Omelet and Carving Station. How much easier it would be to read and recognize these offerings, while minimizing decision making and thus maximizing eating time, if one didn’t have to read and digest all those letters? But why stop at just renaming the stations when we can reinvent the very offering. And so I began devising the list of Edible Portmanteau.

Hash Brown Potatoes and Pancakes become Hashcakes, a light and fluffy griddle cooked cake made of shredded potatoes and onions served with maple syrup and applesauce. Bourbon Glazed Salmon and Chicken Veronique morph into Salmonique, a patty of ground fish and poultry of indeterminate origin covered with a sauce of orange marmalade, green grapes, and Jim Beam. The ever popular omelet and carving station relieves the low man on the cooks totem pole assigned there from running end to end trying to keep omelets from over cooking while slicing slabs of rare roast beef, redirecting his or her energy into scrambled eggs cooked with spinach, mushroom, horse radish and Steak’Ums at the new Carvlet Station.

I don’t know about you but I think I’m on to something here. I have to go make some calls. This could be the start of the newest breakfast offering since the McGriddle. The Sunday Brunch Buffet, or as I like to call it, The SubRay!

In Labor

Michael Leave a comment

If you are reading this from outside the United States, boy, are you lucky! Here it is Labor Day. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the holiday. I just hate its placement in the calendar. It’s so close to the actual end of summer that everybody wants to make it the end of the season. When they started doing that a month ago I expressed my displeasure at rushing through summer. (See “Strike Up the Grill,” Aug. 27, 2017.) Well, they’re at it again!

Yesterday, a whole day before this fictitious end of summer, I received 7 e-mails, 4 tweets, and a text message touting extra special, lowest prices of the year, super savings packed “End of Summer Sales!” But, as much as I want to criticize the marketing world for keeping us 4 to 6 weeks ahead of any actual event you can think of, I have to admit that this weekend, even I was doing some preparation for the arrival of autumn.

Although I would never think of putting it into storage this early, I did some fall prep work on the little convertible. I conditioned its top and got a good wax to cover its paint, taking advantage of the coolish weekend weather knowing neither conditioner nor wax would dry prematurely in blazing sun and heat making me work less enthusiastically on an already heartbreaking time when the garage door will be closed for good. Or at least for 4 or 5 months.

And even though I didn’t put the walking shorts and the tropical print shirts away, they got shuffled to the back of the closet and the more cool weather practical khakis and polos took their spots on the lower closet bar. Save for one pair that I hope to use later today during the pool’s last operating hours of the year, the swimwear has been laundered and folded and stowed in their bin, hoisted onto the top shelf where room was made in the space formerly occupied by [shudder] sweaters.

In the dining room, the baby blue and yellow and white napery was swapped for navy and orange and ivory linens. The tablescape now sports sunflowers instead of pansies.

So there you have it. A share of my shame. As much as I decry hastening the loss of the season, I too was swept up in the American fixation of making Labor Day the end of summer. Now I don’t know what I’ll do in three weeks when fall actually makes its entrance.

Sept2017