or: Gain a technology, lose a skill.

Back in the ancient past, when I was young, there was a quaint tradition that we followed in our family. It was called “supper.” Mom, Dad and kids would sit at the kitchen table and eat, and talk. The telephone hung on the wall, and if it rang during dinner, we wouldn’t answer it. “If it’s important, they’ll call back,” Mom would say. We didn’t even know who called if we didn’t answer the phone. There was no such thing as Caller ID back then. We would talk about what happened in school, and I would push my lima beans around the plate, hoping that I could somehow erase them. (To be fair, Mom knew I didn’t like them, she didn’t serve them all the time, and always gave me a small helping.)

There were always things to talk about, questions to ask, subjects we weren’t learning about at school. My Dad’s go-to answer was: “We have a book on the subject.”

And we did. There were illustrated books on fish, insects, birds, trees, dinosaurs, gardening, construction, cookbooks, encyclopedias (world Book and Britannica), in addition to all sorts of fiction.

So much has changed in the eight decades I have been alive. Nowadays, when you go into the average house, there’s nary a bookshelf or a book in sight. The living room wall will be dominated by a TV screen the size of a highway billboard. Instead of a phone on the wall, it’s in someone’s face all the time. If you want to learn about something there’s Google and You Tube. “We have a book on the subject” has been replaced with: “There’s an app for that.”

The computer has been a tremendous agent of change. I worked for twenty years in the printing business, and I saw so many things change. Phototypesetting and paste-up gave way to desktop publishing. So many jobs went away: the stat camera operator, the stripper, the plate burner, all went the way of the dodo. It was always a precarious business, and sometimes the technology changed overnight. I had to adapt, and for a long time, I did. I started using digital cameras for work in the mid-Nineties. I worked for a printer that produced grocery store flyers. When they needed a picture of a can of beans, I was the go-to guy. When they started out, the cameras were pretty crude, but I found ways to work around their shortcomings. I would shoot on bright overcast days, and if the package was a light color, I’d put a black piece of cardboard behind it, to make the colors stand out, and a dark package called for a white background. I was, in a limited way, a professional photographer, but not in the Ansel Adams sense. I didn’t have to trouble myself with f-stops and shutter speed, depth of field or ASA numbers. The camera did it all, to a certain limited extent. I also didn’t have to bother with enlargers, developer, stop bath, fixer, cropping, enlarging, dodging and burning, cutting and pasting. Photoshop did all that.

But…I had to learn Photoshop. And I did. Not to say that I became some kind of expert, but I knew enough to do what I needed to do with it. Essentially. I learned to use the program that took the place of all the tasks that had, up until then, been done by hand.

In the twenty-some years of desperate lateral moves that I laughingly refer to as my career, the longest time I ever spent working in one place was 8 years, and that gig ended very suddenly. One day I found myself standing in the parking lot of my soon to be former workplace with all of my co-workers, looking at a locked door with the bosses AWOL. It was downhill from then on. Work in my field became sporadic, and eventually I found myself lagging behind the technology curve to the point that there was really no way on.

I had a side job at the time, driving a limo, so that became my full-time job. My wife used to say that that was her dream job, because she liked driving and liked to travel. She started working for the limo company about a year before I did. This was before the days of GPS and smart phones. She acquired a collection of Hagstrom road atlases. We had one for New York City, and one for each of the counties in New Jersey. Every evening, the boss would send a fax of our assignments for the next day, and we would dig out the maps, search the coordinates for the town and then the street, and write up a simple set of turn-by-turn directions on the back of our assignment sheet. R meant right, L meant left, an octagon meant a stop sign, and three little vertical circles meant a traffic light. It had to be simple and big enough to read while driving. It was kind of a crude system, but it worked.

Around 2005, GPS systems for cars became available, and the boss got TomToms for us to use. They were very versatile, with programs for different languages and different voices, you could change the map colors, see a demonstration of your route. All you had to do was type out the state, the town, the street and the house number, and the route was laid out for you. Most of the time, it worked really well, though once in a while, it would put you on a road that didn’t quite connect to the next road you needed, or it would insist on a route that wasn’t as good as one you already knew was better. Some of the destinations we would go to frequently, like airports, we would know how to get to, but we would still need it to reach the pickup point. One of the best features of the GPS was the ETA (estimated time of arrival). One time I had a new customer that lived near where we lived who was going to Newark Airport. Once I had him in the car, I set the GPS for Newark Airport. He asked me if I didn’t know how to get there. I told him that I knew how to get there, but I wanted to have a good idea of when we would get there. At that moment, he said something that stuck with me: “Gain a technology, lose a skill.”

Navigating with a map does require some skills. You have to know where you are symbolically on the map, where you are supposed to end up, and figure out which road(s) are the best ones to get you there.

When I think about the difference between a GPS suction-cupped to the windshield, and a map in the lap of the passenger riding shotgun, it’s like the difference between a digital clock and an analog clock. A digital clock can only tell you what time it is now. It is always stuck in the eternal now. You can look at an analog clock, and you can see past, present and future time at a glance. The GPS will show you where you are, a small patch of the road ahead, and tell you when you will arrive at your destination. Of course, you have to learn to program the GPS, but it’s not difficult to use at all.

Another example of gain a technology, lose a skill is the electronic calculator. When they first appeared, they were just a little smaller than the adding machine that they replaced, but they were priced out of the reach of most people. As time went on, they got smaller and cheaper, to the point that they could be almost given away. This has created generations of people who can’t do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication or division in their heads, or even with paper and pencil. For many of them, it seems almost like a point of pride not to be good at math

When I think about this topic, one of the major places where technology has displaced skill is the automobile. I grew up learning to drive stick. Nowadays, a manual transmission is the most effective anti-theft device you can have. My wife rented a car a few weeks ago, and there was quite a learning curve involved with using the devices that made it so easy to drive. It had something called adaptive cruise control, which eliminated the need to adjust or cancel the cruise control when conditions changed. Another feature it had was a little alarm that would go off when it decided you weren’t staying in your lane, and it even went so far as to correct your steering if you strayed too far off course. I’m sure that in a few years, self-driving cars will be perfected. That’s like the future that the pop-sci magazines were predicting for the ’70s back when the ’70s were the future.

All of these newfangled devices are pretty nice to have, and I don’t hesitate to use them. But at the same time, I enjoy reading maps, I can drive a car with a stick shift, and I usually do as much as possible of the simple math I need to do in my head or on paper. I like to know how to do things, even if it’s just for the sake of knowing how to do things. Sometimes, civilization proves to be fragile. We’ve seen the utter devastation that has occurred in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and West Virginia. The people in some of those areas have been pretty much put back into the Stone Age. They’re using mules to bring food to people in isolated areas, camping in the snow in tents, working with whatever materials are at hand to rebuild their roads and bridges. Ultimately they will survive and prosper, but it won’t be because there’s an app for that.

In June of 2014, I had the pleasure of taking a trip to Berlin, Germany. My wife Doris spent much of her young adult life there and had started a Facebook group, Memories of Berlin, which became very popular with Cold War veterans and quite a few native Berliners whom she knew from her time there. She set up a reunion in Berlin for members of the group. It was my first ever trip to Europe, and only my third visit to a foreign country, the others being Canada and the Bahamas.

Visiting a foreign country is always quite an educational experience. Even the smallest details hold a fascination for me. The magpies (“elster” in Deutsch), much like our American crows, but with orange, yellow and brown feathers on their backs and wings. The little cars, about the size of a dining room table, zipping by, crammed with passengers. The busy hum of city life, in one of the most important cities in the world, all quite different from my small-town boy perspective.

Berlin, of course, was a place where, to steal a line from a Christmas carol: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” A tense standoff between freedom and tyranny took place there, and it lasted 28 years. The Berlin Wall snaked through neighborhoods and even through houses, dividing the city in what seemed like a completely arbitrary fashion. The Soviets claimed the eastern side of the city, and the Americans, British and French held sectors on the western side. All this in a country that was itself divided, with Berlin surrounded by (the DDR/GDR, also known as the German Democratic Republic,) East Germany. The Wall itself came down in 1989, but sections of it, and the path it took through the city, still stand.

Of all the strange sights and sounds of a distant foreign place, what fascinated me most about Berlin was the Wall. Here’s an entry about my trip that I posted in Facebook:

“Hola from Berlin! Another day of sightseeing, ate a late lunch at Burger King(!), bought batteries
for my camera because my second set of rechargeable batteries were dead, saw a piece of the wall down the road a few miles from the hostel where we are staying. The wall still casts a shadow on lives here in a way that’s hard to understand without experiencing it.
On the pieces still extant, you’ll see one side painted with flowers, cartoons and colorful graffiti,
and the other side is dull ugly gray. The Berliners who are old enough to remember the wall before it fell are very grateful to the Americans, British and French who helped protect them during the cold war. All I keep thinking is that the fight against tyranny never ends; the names change, the faces change, but there’s some sort of virus in humanity that keeps popping up.
It’s basic symptom is the desire to control what others do. It’s a rare disease, and it needs help to flourish, but it has never been eradicated. I’m hoping that someday it will be.”

I am reminded of my trip to Berlin, and my Facebook post, because I think we are facing a similar kind of standoff between freedom and tyranny now. I’m pretty sure there won’t be tanks rumbling through the streets and people throwing Molotov cocktails at them. That’s so old school, so 50 years ago.

This time the tyranny virus has manifested in a much more subtle fashion. And its method of control is, ironically enough, a virus.

Okay, we all know about COVID-19. The government told everyone to stay at home for two weeks to “flatten the curve,” which had the effect of making the curve shallower, but longer. This year, we will be celebrating the 2nd anniversary of flattening the curve. Businesses were shut down, with the exception of large retail chains, which for some reason were not considered a place where large numbers of people would congregate and spread the deadly infection. “Nonessential” workers were made to stay home. For a while, I worked at a government warehouse and was considered essential, and I had to carry papers to prove that I had some reason to be driving somewhere. At the forefront of the government’s response was a world-renowned infectious disease expert. He knew that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to handle the truth about this deadly disease, so he dispensed as little of it as he could get away with. He advised people to wear surgical masks, stand six feet apart, and get vaccinated against the deadly virus. The six-foot “social distancing” rule was scientifically based on a number drawn out of a hat, or something. The masks were not made to be impenetrable by viruses, and the packaging they came in even said as much. The vaccines have so far not prevented anyone from getting sick, or from transmitting the disease to others. There were all sorts of other silly rules, like having to wear a mask when entering a restaurant, but being permitted to take it off when you sit at your table. Dangling sheets of plexiglass hung on chains at checkout counters everywhere. Viruses are easily fooled by plexiglass. They don’t see it and splat right into it and die. Science, you know.

Meanwhile, the TV news was tallying up the numbers of people who died from COVID. The hospitals and the Center for Disease Control saw to it that no one died of anything else: if you had any trace of the virus, even if you had a gaping gunshot wound or a massive heart attack, you were counted as having died from COVID, as opposed to having died with COVID.

The result of all this was that people pretty much stopped thinking for themselves. It wasn’t an uncommon sight to see someone in their car with the windows closed, wearing a mask so they wouldn’t infect…who? Instead of herd immunity, people developed herd mentality. Anyone not wearing a mask was shunned and ridiculed with the kind of contempt and derision usually reserved for child molesters. People who didn’t want to rebreathe their own exhaust were labeled selfish, genocidal germ spreaders.

The illness IS real. I know it is; my wife came down with it in March of 2020. It was no fun. It took her five weeks to recover. I quit the job I had to take care of her. Somehow, I managed to avoid getting sick in the process. But there is a distinction to be made between the illness and its effects and the response to the illness and its effects.

I know it wasn’t just me. At some point it has occurred to a lot of people: maybe this whole COVID response was some kind of twisted social experiment. Could it be an exercise to see who would obey and who would rebel? What if having everyone wear masks was a strategy to foster fear and distrust of others? What if “social distancing” was simply a way to keep people from talking to each other? How much freedom would the masses give up for a (false) promise of safety? COVID was a perfect excuse for petty tyrants in government and NGO alphabet agencies to indulge their love of petty tyranny. Mandatory lockdowns, mandatory masks, mandatory vaccines, mandatory social distancing, mandatory vaccine passports, mandatory this, mandatory that, mandatory mandates. All for a disease that not everyone will get, and 99.8% of those who do get it survive, and those that don’t survive tend to be people struggling with other medical issues. And let’s not get into the side effects that many people experience after getting vaccinated.

COVID will never be eradicated. It will most likely follow the pattern of other viruses, becoming milder and easier to spread as it evolves. But what we have to be most concerned about is our response to it. It’s like the flu; it’s like a cold; it’s a virus. We will survive it. What I’m more concerned about is the other virus: the one that makes some people want to control every aspect of everybody’s life. The wall is being built, gradually, in almost imperceptible ways, but it is being built. And when it’s finshed it’s going to be a dull ugly gray.

I’ve been thinking about this topic, mulling it over in my head for a long time, about 40 years now. It started when I got my driver’s license at 17. The idea of driving, and the freedom and mobility it would provide, was something I had longed for for a large part of my life. Ironically, I got my first car at the same time as the Saudis turned off the oil spigot. I dealt with $2 gas limits, odd and even day fill-ups, and in times of desperation, draining hoses at closed gas stations at night, and the occasional siphoning excursion. When it was all over, gas had gone from about 25 cents a gallon to about 60 cents a gallon. And from then on, every so often gas prices would take these inexplicable price jumps, then fall back down. Somehow, they never went back down to where they started; it was usually a case of 3 steps up, 2 steps back.

Whenever these price rises would occur, the TV news would have some oil industry expert on to explain these price rises. I can’t tell you specifically when or where I heard it, but usually the explanation would consist of the contention that “Oil prices have been stable, when adjusted for inflation.”

The problem with this statement is that it not an explanation. It is, in logical terms, a tautology. From Merriam Webster Dictionary: “a statement that is true by virtue of its logical form alone.” It’s like saying: “Until I met my wife, she was a stranger to me.” It can’t help but be true. If you think about it, the price of any commodity you can think of is stable, once you adjust for inflation, because inflation is the factor of instability that affects the price of any commodity. The other problem with that statement is that since almost everything is either made with oil or some derivative of oil, and/or carried to market by oil, the escalating price of oil would be a major factor driving inflation.

At some point, we have all listened to stock market reports and other economic news, or watched it on TV. I’ve noticed something surprisingly consistent: whatever the outcome, it’s always different from what was expected. “Unexpected 3rd quarter earnings sent stock prices higher in heavy trading.” “An unexpected rise in first time unemployment claims combined with sales of Acme Widgets failing to meet projected estimates sent the Dow tumbling.” You would think that people who watch, track and study market activities, and presumably get paid well to do it, would be a little better at it than they seem to be.

One of the major factors driving the economy has always been the Federal Reserve. I remember often hearing the Fed Chairman Allan Greenspan making oracular enigmatic statements that would cause the stock market to rise or fall, depending on how what he said was interpreted. Economy wise, he appeared to be the most important figure in the world, and he relished the role. People hung on his every word, even if they didn’t have a clue what he meant.

And don’t get me started on meteorologists.

The problem is, nobody can know everything, so we have to rely on others to inform us on subjects we don’t understand. That’s why we listen to people who have expertise we lack. And generally we believe what they tell us. After all, they’re experts, and we’re not.

I know I’m a fairly intelligent guy, and I was raised by very intelligent parents. But my knowledge tends to be miles wide and inches deep. I’m not real specialized in what I know, but I’m pretty good at figuring things out.  Still, if I don’t know something, I have to listen to the experts. But when I do, I always ask myself: Does that make sense?

Right now, the world and the country are in the midst of the COVID-ID-19, aka the Coronavirus, aka the Kung Flu. For a while, President Trump held daily press briefings, with the help of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. They have been hailed as world-renowned medical experts in the field of epidemiology.

Relying on the advice of these experts, businesses shut down, restaurants closed their dining rooms, doctors’ and dentists’ offices closed, beaches were declared off-limits; economic life ground to a halt. The experts told us people should stay inside at home. Some people could be asymptomatic and could unknowingly pass the illness to others. We should be wearing masks to protect other people if we are sick. “Flattening the curve” became an overused cliche.

Drawing on my miles wide and inches deep knowledge of geometry, it seemed that flattening the curve would also lengthen it, meaning that more people would be getting sick over a longer period of time. Also, I have always heard that the human immune system has to be exposed to something in order to become immune to it.

I have become skeptical of all this expertise. If you’re asymptomatic, how bad can the illness be? And if you’re asymptomatic, how likely are you to be coughing and sneezing and spreading your illness with airborne germs? And if you do feel sick, you should do what you always do when you feel sick: stay home and act sick. That means stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids, keep to yourself, let your body take care of itself.

So far, Dr. Fauci has been on every side of every aspect of this pandemic. He has advocated for and against masks, for and against quarantines, and for and against the economic shutdown. He and Dr. Birx  have relied on computer models projecting huge numbers of deaths. When the numbers fell short, they padded them by counting people who died WITH Coronavirus as people who died OF Coronavirus. This led people on social media to create some very funny memes: “Man Eaten by Shark Dies from Coronavirus,” for example.

As all this has been going on, the question that I have to ask is : What makes a person an expert? The answer seems to be education. In order to be an expert, you have to have a college degree, and not just any old Bachelor’s degree. That won’t get you a gig at Starbucks anymore. No siree, you have to have a PhD, known in some circles as: Piled higher and Deeper.

I’m not against education; knowledge is good, and it should be shared. But it’s not enough. Knowledge is not the same as intelligence, and an education doesn’t imply and cannot confer intelligence. It’s also no substitute for experience. And lately it seems that, in the realm of expertdom, education has completely displaced common sense, critical thinking and logic.

Here’s an example: Vaccinations. All kids need to be vaccinated against childhood diseases, because if they aren’t all vaccinated, the unvaccinated kids will put all the others at risk. What? Wouldn’t the vaccination protect them? I mean, that’s the whole point of being vaccinated. It makes no sense. But that’s what the experts say.

We learn a lot of what we think we are learning from experts on television. With its swirling background graphics, frequent white frame flashes, the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, and the practiced speaking cadence of the reporters and the polished rhetoric of the guests, it’s easy to be hypnotized into accepting everything you hear, whether or not it makes any sense or lines up with your own experiences. Under those circumstances a lot of illogical stupidity can slip under the radar.

Nowadays I take everything I hear, read or see with a grain of salt. It has to make sense, it has to not contradict my experience, and it has to be expressed simply. I’m wary of experts. They have certain characteristics that make them easy to spot. They have somehow earned a reputation. They often represent some organization that has “The Center for____” as part of its name. They are never unsure, but often wrong. They like fancy words (Dr. Fauci often uses the word “penetrance”; I don’t know if I’m spelling it right, because I’ve never had occasion to use it, or see it written.) Despite their proclivity for arcane phraseology, there are certain phrases which elude them, phrases such as “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.”

 

 

 

 

The alarm clock was set for 4:00 am. I woke up at 3:45.  Not out of gleeful anticipation, not that I’m especially disciplined. Back when I was a limousine driver, occasionally I would have to wake up at some insanely early hour, and when that happened, I could never sleep deeply, out of fear I would sleep through the alarm. This was one of those kind of days. I had a 5:30 bus to catch, going to Richmond for Lobby Day.

Lobby Day is when the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) goes to the state capitol to lobby for their Second Amendment rights, which are now under attack from a barrage of new gun control laws. The State Legislature in now in the hands of democrats, and they are all promoting new measures ostensibly to make us all safe from gun-toting criminals. Of course the flaw in this argument is the same flaw it has always had: criminals, by definition, don’t obey or respect the law, and they won’t obey or respect additional laws.

I won’t go into what the new laws consist of, that information is available elsewhere. I will say that they go against both the United States Constitution and the Virginia State Constitution. What’s going on in Virginia it seems, is a test run to see how well these new restrictions will be received and tolerated. So far it hasn’t gone well. Most of Virginia’s counties have been declared “2nd Amendment Sanctuary counties” by their respective sheriffs. These work along similar principles to the illegal immigrant sanctuary cities and counties and states, except that they would be in obedience to the law rather than in defiance of it.

I’ve been to a few protests in my time. Every once in a while, it’s important to remind the Government that they work for us, not the other way around. I’ve always figured tyranny is something that is easier to prevent than to overcome. The Lobby Day event was heavily promoted on social media, and even the national news media were aware of it. The Governor of Virginia had declared a “State of Emergency”.  A fenced in area was had been set up near the Capitol Building entrance as a “gun-free zone.” Cable news promoted the theme of hordes of armed right-wing white supremacists terrorizing the streets of Richmond. Antifa was supposed to show up and march in support of  2nd Amendment rights. Crisis actors were being recruited. Rumors were flying.

With all of this as background, I admit I was a little nervous about attending. Still it seemed like the right thing to do in spite of my fears. So I went.

My bus was one of three coming from Hampton. We got into Richmond just as it was getting light out. I thought I had dressed properly for the occasion, but it was surprisingly cold that morning. This is only my second winter in VA, and I still don’t know what to expect from the weather. Last year at about this time, I saw a young lady on Buckroe Beach clad in a a bikini.  But yesterday was definitely not bikini weather.

It didn’t take long for the streets to fill. The  area in front of the State Capitol Building was inaccessible, so many people had congregated there.  I gave up trying to get close and stayed on Main street and tried to catch as much sun as possible.

Here’s an interesting fact about Richmond: their storm sewers don’t have grates, the pavement just slopes down to the opening. I found this out when, with the sun in my eyes, I stepped off a curb, and my right leg fell knee deep into one.  I fell, hard. Hard enough to get a bruise on the heel of my right hand. A couple of very nice “gun-toting racist white supremacists” helped me up. Today, the limp is a little less pronounced.

After the storm sewer incident, I had to limit my walking. In any event, at that point walking had become much more difficult. There were rivers of people everywhere, and it seemed like most of them were carrying. There was enough firepower there that if those carrying were so inclined, they could have easily overthrown the government that day. Somehow, that didn’t happen.

What else didn’t happen? Well, no shots were fired. The Antifa pantywaists didn’t show up to cause trouble. There were no mass arrests, no massacres. The police and sheriffs were treated with respect and they responded in kind. Strangers hung out together talking like old friends.  People of all ethnic backgrounds, colors and sexual orientations got along just fine. They even picked up what little litter there was on the streets. Law abiding gun owners showed the strength of their numbers and their character. It turned out there was nothing to be afraid of, after all.

It occurred to me later on that there were probably some people who were disappointed by the events (or lack thereof) of the day. Before I went, I had mental pictures of “agent provocateurs” goading others into bad decisions, justifying mass police action, and proving the gun control activists right.  I expected there could be a false flag action, with a group pretending to be 2nd Amendment supporters opening fire, starting something to make the others look bad. I can’t help but think Governor Northam, (who decided to take the day off) and the TV news would have really liked to see some of these scenarios play out. Like they say: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Maybe the governor thought they would, and that’s why he took the day off.

As it turned out none of these things came to pass and my fears were unfounded. “Racist gun-toting white supremacists” of all colors and creeds met as strangers and left as friends, sang the national anthem together, and chanted “U S A, U S A.” I’ll say it again: There was enough firepower there that if those carrying were so inclined, they could have easily overthrown the government that day. Aching all over from the fall and chilled to the bone, I still had a wonderful day.

 

 

I have just gotten back this morning from a two-week trip to Germany. It’s probably going to take longer than that to recover from it. This was my second trip there, and likely my last.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with Germany; my wife is from there, as are a lot of my ancestors (my funny little last name is the German word for “corner”). The problem is simply the method I would have to use to get there.  I have made a vow that I will never fly again.

The whole thing started well enough. My wife, Doris has a group on Facebook involving people who have some connection to Berlin, some citizens, some Cold War veterans, and some who are both.  She had arranged a small reunion there in 2014, and that was my first trip overseas. Through her activities, she connected to a similar group that planned a reunion in the city this year.  She also wanted to spend time with her sister Rosi, who lives near Dusseldorf, so she set up our itinerary: ten days in Berlin, and 4 days in Ratingen, and then home.

Very wisely, she started booking the travel arrangements early this year, knowing that the sooner you set up your flight schedule, the cheaper it is. One of the things you learn when you do this is that not every airline goes everywhere, from everywhere. And, things can change, at the drop of a hat. In fact, she ended up having to set up the whole trip twice, when one of the airlines we were using changed the schedule, which meant that we would have to spend a day in Stockholm, which, as I understand it, is a pretty long way from Berlin. A whole ‘nother country, as a matter of fact. It was bad enough having to set up the travel schedule twice, but to add insult to injury, we had to pay for it twice, and hope (and wait) for a refund for the trip we ended up not taking. I eventually did get refunded, but that gamble made for a pretty tense week.

We live in coastal Virginia, so our voyage started in Norfolk. We would drive there, leave our car in long-term parking, since our revised schedule had us arriving back in the middle of the night. From Norfolk, we would fly to JFK in New York, and from there to Berlin. After Berlin, the next stop was Düsseldorf, then back to Berlin, back to JFK, back to Norfolk, then back home. Nothin’ to it.

We parked Doris’s car in the long term parking at Norfolk, decided we only need one set of car and house keys, so I kept mine, and we locked her set in the car.  We flew Delta for the two legs of the trip out. Norfolk to JFK was in a small commuter plane, two seats on each side with a center aisle. Luckily it was only about a 90-minute trip, because at 6′ 3″, I am not built for those seats.

I haven’t spent a lot of time flying, so I’m not jaded. I still enjoy getting pressed into the seat during takeoff, and watching the runway fall away, and seeing houses and cars and fields and lakes shrink as the plane climbs. I love watching  cloud shadows on the patchworks of fields and woods. I love the topography of the clouds themselves, as the plane rises. I always try (and fail) to recognize landmarks I know from the ground. Flying  still makes me a wonder-filled little kid.

Anyway, the trip to JFK went well, our bags were checked through.  And then, the dreaded security.  Stand in line, empty your pockets, stand in the phone booth, follow directions. get felt up and down, okay, move along. Wait. Board the plane.  Cram my 6’3″ into a seat about the size of the back seat of a Camaro. Wait. Watch the safety spiel. Finally, the takeoff.

The less said about the flight across the Atlantic, the better. Long, boring, contorted, impossible to sleep. When we arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in Berlin, I stretched out on the bed to check the mattress. According to Doris, I said: “We should…” and immediately fell asleep.

I was kind of an outsider in our merry band, not having served in the military, and having only memories of Berlin from my last visit 5 years ago, but I met a lot of great people, and I did enjoy their stories and the sights and sounds and smells of the city. I also knew from experience that I loved Doener Kebaps.

Each day seemed long, packed with places to see and things to do, but the ten days went by quickly, and soon we found ourselves back at Tegel Airport, on our way to Düsseldorf. We spent 4 days there with Rosi and Andreas, her significant other, in their house in Ratingen. They had a magnificent backyard garden that they were justifiably proud of, with a large koi pond, tomatoes, apple and pear trees, cucumbers, pumpkins, squashes and all manner of flowers.

We left Ratingen early in the morning. We had a flight to Berlin at 6:30 am. We set our alarm that morning for 3:00 am, to leave by 4:00 am,  because they tell you to get there an hour and a half before flight time.  That kind of eliminates the speed advantage flying has over driving, at least for short distances, but them’s the rules. We got there at 4:30 am, and that’s when everything started to unravel.

We walked into the main terminal to the Eurowings check-in. For such an early hour, the place was surprisingly crowded. The check-in line wasn’t even a line, it was a swarm.  It took us nearly two hours to reach the check-in counter.  The woman there told us to set our luggage down in a cordoned off area on the main terminal floor. Then we had to reach the pre-flight check. We followed the signs leading us there, only to realize that the signs had led us 300 degrees around a circle, and we ended up about 100 feet from the check-in desk. There we were crammed in another swarm of passengers. It seems the Eurowings baggage conveyor had broken down, and that’s what had caused the delays.  Another 15 minutes in pre-flight, then an endless rope line leading  to security. Finally we were through, and we hurried down to our gate, which seemed to be in a different zip code, just in time to find out our plane had already left.

Back to the Eurowings ticket counter we went.  All we knew was we had to get to Tegel for our flight to New York. The woman at the counter booked us on a flight at 8:30 am. We found our luggage from the logjam and went back to check-in. Re-check our bags. The woman at the counter put a green tag on the handle that said “Through Transfer to New York.” I thought to myself, finally something was going right.  Then pre-flight again, security again, and a mad race to the gate. We made it with just minutes to spare. We were tired, stressed and hot,  but at least we were on our way.  I consoled myself with the thought that our luggage would be at JFK when we got there, and everything would go like clockwork from here on out. Right.

The flight to Berlin went well, until we landed. It seemed like the pilot wanted to give us a tour of the whole airport before he throttled down and stopped in the most remote location he could find. We disembarked onto the tarmac to a waiting bus. The bus driver had evidently gone to the “Vin Diesel” driving school and was determined to show us all how abruptly he could stop and turn. He didn’t seem to need the air conditioner, though I can’t say the same for us. Rattled and hot, we entered the terminal. Our luggage wasn’t at baggage claim, but I told myself it would be waiting for us in New York.

The next leg of the trip was on Delta. We went to the check-in desk, and were told that we couldn’t check in without our luggage. We explained what had happened at Düsseldorf, and were told to go to “Lost and Found.” We got there, and our luggage wasn’t there. The person there suggested we go to Baggage Service.  It took us a few tries to find it, but the luggage wasn’t there either. I filled out a loss report and we went back to Delta.  We checked in with our printed out loss report, which we had to go to yet another location to get. Then we had to go through our third security check of the day, and it was barely noon!

We sat in the departure gate waiting room,waiting to depart. As we sat in the crowded little room, waiting to board, the departure time changed. Dawson, a Delta representative, announced that there was a leak in one of the hydraulic lines on the landing gear, and they were working to locate it and fix it. Half an hour later, they were still working on it.  Ultimately, the flight was cancelled, and Delta graciously set us passengers up with rooms and meals at a nearby hotel, and shuttle buses to get there. We filed out of the departure gate, and I went back to Baggage Services, in the vain hope that our luggage might have magically appeared. Nope.

We spent the night at the Mercure Hotel, on the outskirts of Tegel Airport. We took showers,  hand-washed some of our clothes, and dried them with the blow dryer provided by the hotel. ‘Adapt and overcome.’ For me, the whole situation had lost its humorous aspect. But dinner was quite good, and we fell into a coma shortly after eating. Dawson suggested we get to the airport about 10:00 the next day for the new flight to New York. We decided to go earlier, just in case something went wrong. I was thinking that there was only one more thing that could go wrong: so far we hadn’t crash landed yet. >(sugg. to mention it’s a satire joke)<

We took the shuttle to the airport, got there about 8:00 am.  Still entertaining fading hopes of happy endings, I went to “Baggage Service” with my reference number and bag tags, thinking that maybe I would finally get our luggage. No such luck! On my way back from “Baggage Service,” which could be aptly abbreviated as BS, I met Eric, one of the guys we spent time with in Berlin. We had time to kill, so we went to a coffee shop. Afterwards, Eric left to board his flight home.

At 11:00 am, we got in the check in line for the flight to New York. As we approached the counter, a man from “Baggage Service” came up to us and spoke to Doris in German. Her face lit up, and she told me our luggage had been found and they had it at “Baggage Services!” Again, with tags in hand, I ran back there. This time it was crowded and I had to wait in line. I explained to the woman at the counter that I had been told my luggage was there and I needed to pick it up for my flight home.  She asked me who told me my baggage was here, I said I don’t know. What was his name? I don’t know. What did he tell you? I don’t know, he spoke to my wife in German. I told her I had to board in 15 minutes, and she reluctantly agreed to look for it. Of course, she didn’t find them! Grrrr!!

By now, our situation was anything but funny! I went back to check in empty handed. Not only had Eurowings lost our luggage, they had lied about finding it. The man at the check in counter asked if we had any baggage, and I had to fight the urge to punch him out!! Another trip through security, and another late departure.. it gets old after a while.

My spirits lifted a bit when the plane took off. At least I would be in a place where I spoke the language, and still I thought maybe we would be reunited with our stuff once we got to New York. At Düsseldorf, they had put a green band on our suitcase handles that said: “Transfer through to New York.” Hope springs eternal, and hope was all we had at this moment..

The flight back to the States wasn’t that crowded, and the flight attendant found us seats with a little more legroom. We landed in New York, and waited half an hour for an available gate. Then we had to walk what seemed like 4 miles to Customs/Immigration. I waited at the baggage carousel in the vain hope that our stuff would show up. Guess what didn’t happen?

At least we had plenty of time before the 9:45 pm flight to Norfolk. We walked another half-mile to the departure gate and waited. And Waited. The 9:45 departure time became10:15 pm, then 10:35 pm, then 10:55 pm, then 11:05 pm, then 11:35 pm, then 12:05 am, then 6:00 am. ‘Murphy’s Law’ was in full effect. The unfortunate woman at the boarding counter found blankets and pillows, and everyone there bedded down on hard airport benches. Doris and I got about two hours sleep each. There were a half dozen other flights nearby also delayed. Problem was not enough gates available to Delta, we were told.

So far, something had gone wrong with every flight. But I must put in a good word for the Delta personnel. They were professional, patient and went above and beyond to make the best of bad situations. They had to deal with a lot of angry, stressed out people, and problems that they weren’t responsible for. They were all top-notch. Operations, however, leave a lot to be desired.

We boarded the 6:00 am flight to Norfolk about 6:45 am. All I wanted to do was go home, take a shower, shave, change my clothes, and sleep in my own bed! The flight went well enough, Norfolk didn’t have our luggage, but I expected that. The man in “Lost and Found” gave me a phone number for a locksmith to open the car.

Never in my life did I feel as happy as I did leaving the airport in our car. A car is a wonderful mode of transportation. Nobody tells you to empty your pockets and stand in a booth with your hands over your head before you get in it. If it arrives late somewhere, it’s your own damn fault. It works on your schedule and you don’t have to show up in your driveway an hour and a half before you want to go.  If you need to bring some things with you they can be put in the trunk.

Doris and I have decided that we will never go anywhere again that can’t be reached by car.

I have to admit it, I am a bit of a Luddite. I haven’t always seen the point of new inventions when they first came out. Often, they seem to be answers to questions that no one asked, meeting needs that no one has expressed yet. I can picture what I might have been like in the early part of the 20th century, railing against the absurdity of the horseless carriage, those loud, smoky and slow devices whose only function seemed to be to scare the horses and crash into each other.

By the time I was born, cars had improved greatly , and horses had become a rather expensive and snobbish hobby, and by the time I was able to drive a car, that was about the only thing I wanted to do.

I remember when computers went from punchcards to floppy disks, from taking up whole rooms to fitting on a desk.  I worked for a time for a small personal computer store chain, and it seemed the manufacturers of computers had to really go out of their way to find uses for them. “You can use it to store recipes and telephone numbers, you can balance your checkbook.” Right. As if people who had trouble balancing their checkbook would be able to read a 300-page manual written in some language that vaguely resembled English in some ways in order to learn to teach the computer how to do what you didn’t know how to do to begin with. My reasoning was simple. If you can balance your checkbook, you don’t need a computer to do it for you. And if you can’t balance your checkbook, a computer won’t help.

It took about 15 years, but now nothing happens without one. In those 15 years, they became cheaper and more powerful and easier to use, and everyone ended up with one.

I worked in printing, and I watched as they took over so many of the steps involved in the printing process. The paste-up, the stat camera (and the stat camera operator),the stripper, and the plate maker, all ended up by the wayside.

I held out as long as I could before I got my own computer. I had taken a college course in Fortran programming, at which I was an abject failure. I simply couldn’t get the logic of  “Let X=X+1.” So I was kind of gun shy for a long time. But I learned to use a Macintosh at work and I had to have one of my own.

Now, I can’t imagine life without one. The internet is a vast, gigantic library, with what seems like all the information that ever existed, all there for you for the right keystrokes. ANd as oftenas I make mistakes and typos when the sentences are pilling up in my head, waiting impatiently for me to type them, a typrwriter simply doesn’t cut it anymore.  No. I am completely sold on the personal computer.

Another modern invention that I resisted bravely for a long time was the cell phone. I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the cell phone age in 2011. I think I was one of the last holdouts, at least in my demographic group. I would see people walking in the produce section of the Shop-Rite, talking to someone, telling whoever was on the other end that they were walking around in the produce section of the Shop-Rite. Suddenly it seemed like everywhere I went, I would see people walking around, even groups of people walking around, all talking to people they weren’t with. I figured it was some kind of fad, a status symbol, a proof of one’s place in the grand scheme of things: I must be reachable at all times, because, dammit, I Am Important. No matter where you went, you couldn’t avoid someone hearing a loud conversation, or hear half of it anyway. I always figured if I ever became Important, I would simply hire someone to answer the phone for me, and that way, I could eat my lunch or do my grocery shopping in peace, apart from all the other people talking loudly to someone they weren’t with. to prove how Important they are.

The first cell phone I had was what is often referred to as a “flip phone.” Some of you old-timers might remember them. You had to open it up to dial or talk. I used it for work. I drove a limousine, and I used it to call the airline to find out how late my flight was going to be, or to call my customers to let them know I was ready, or running late, or in a fiery crash somewhere. It had buttons you could actually push to make calls, and  you could find the last call you made easily. This was important to me because I could check repeatedly on my flights on the way to the airport, almost without looking at it.

Unfortunately, much like automobiles and computers, there’s that phenomenon known as planned obsolescence.  A newer model comes along eventually that surpasses the old one. This happens especially with cars, since they move and they rust, they crash and they wear out, and ultimately have to be replaced. Computers keep becoming more powerful and easy to use. They don’t have a lot in the way of moving parts, so they rarely wear out, but every few years, you have to get a new one. If nothing breaks or wears out, then you have to get a new one because your operating system becomes obsolete.

The same thing happens with cellphones, too. Every 83 seconds or so, a new better, sleeker sexier version comes out. For some, the latest phone is some kind of status symbol, like having the latest BMW might be for a car buff. I was perfectly happy with my flip phone. I didn’t care if it didn’t impress anybody. I used it to call people or have them call me. But then one day my service provider stopped supporting it, and I was forced to get a “smartphone.”

The girl at the phone store spent much time trying to convince me how much better it was than that steam-powered antedeluvian doorstop I was carrying around. You see, It’s not just a phone. It’s a computer! Well, I have one at home, with a real keyboard and a much bigger screen. And it’s a camera too!  Well, I’ve been taking digital pictures since 1994, about when digital cameras came on the market. I have two of them already. But you can text with it! Here’s where my Luddite tendencies flare up.

When I worked as a limo driver, I was supposed to send a text to my passenger when I got to the airport, to let them know I was available to pick them up when they were ready to go. I’d send the text, and they would respond, letting me know where they were, which level, which door. When that text came, I would send a short message: On my way. Invariably,  once I started driving, I would get a text from my passenger asking when I would get to them. Of course, I couldn’t respond, because I was driving. And texting while driving is not only illegal, stupid and dangerous, it’s damn near impossible, at least for me.  The thing that really frustrated me when this happened was that it was often done by Verizon executives, people you’d expect to know better.

Here’s an example of an especially stupid exchange I had once with a client, a high-ranking phone company executive. “_______ , please let me know when you are ready to go thank you Bill”

“I am here.”

“Where are you?”

“Terminal A level 1 door 2”

“Ok On my way”  A minute later:

“How soon will you be here?” I pull over, text: “2 mins” I get back on the road, get another text: “I don’t see you” I ignore this one. I pull up by the door and the phone lights up again: “Where are you?” At that moment, I’m 3 feet away, and I want to lean on the horn and see if  I can make her jump out of her skin.

At some point I realized why these high-powered executive types like to text instead of talk on the phone: It’s a one-way communication, no interaction required. For my purposes, it’s time consuming. If I don’t know the client, I need to have some idea of what they look like, what they’re wearing, and they need to know what my car looks like. This can be worked out in seconds with a phone conversation, but takes much longer with texting.

Back in the day, when people wanted to communicate with someone far away, they sent a letter in the mail. Then along came the telephone. It didn’t replace the letter, but it certainly was faster, easier and more convenient. Now, we use our telephones to write letters. Does that make any sense at all? Especially when you have a tiny picture of a keyboard to write with. And since the keyboard is so tiny and difficult to use, the “smart” phone speeds things up by figuring out what you want to say and writing out the word you want, whether or not it really is the word you want. To me this is just as irritating as having a conversation with someone who thinks they know what you are going to say and interrupts you to say it. They’re usually right about 1/2 the time, much like the “smart” phone.

Nowadays, I see that a lot of people are using their smartphones when they write on social media. And it’s a rare thing for anyone to even look at what they wrote once they write it. It makes for a lot of semi-coherent comments and responses, and many misspellings. Quite often, the phone will put in the word it thinks you are starting to spell, and get the word wrong, but spell the wrong word right. When I see people writing things like “should of”, that tells me they didn’t spend as much time reading as they should’ve. I get the feeling that the generations ahead of mine grew up without books as a part of their life, which is too bad.

The thing that really bothers me the most about texting is what it has done to the English language. Because it was obscenely expensive at the beginning, people made up short forms of words and ideas, skipping vowels or using “u” for “you,” “4” for “for” and things like that. Prince might have had a hand in it too. Even though the cost of texting has come down, people still do this, and I find I have 2 transl8 these wordoids and phraseoids back into English in order to understand what I’m reading. I feel sorry for anybody who’s trying to learn English from texts and social media. I fear we’re raising generations of almost-literate people, which saddens me because I am one of the biggest fans of the English language.

And that’s y I h8 txtng

 

 

 

It’s starting to sink in now that I am no longer really on vacation.  Between meeting with Terrye and her partner Jay, signing various documents, being walked (more like hand-held) through the process of buying a house, talks with my brother and sister, calling my boss and giving informal notice, the long-into-the-night talks with Doris,  and the fact that it rained incessantly for the rest of the week, our camping trip was not turning out anything like I expected.

Since tent camping for more than day in the rain is no fun, we rented a cabin for the rest of the week, paid the difference in price. At least we would be dry.  We only went to the beach once, never even got to swim in the ocean.  At night, we started making lists of what we would have to do to be out of our house by mid-July. I talked about the mix of anxiety and excitement I felt at the prospect of leaving my old life behind, and realizing something that had only been a dream, a fantasy that had never before had a how or when attached to it.

The next six weeks were a blur. I kept working, and when I wasn’t working, I packed, donated stuff, threw stuff out. Everything I wasn’t using regularly ended up in the garbage or in boxes in the basement or the kitchen. Doris did an amazing job of organizing, setting up accounts for electricity and gas, internet and phone, and health insurance. We rented a U-Haul truck and a trailer to put my car on. We bought packing supplies. We hired a crew to help us pack the truck in New Jersey, and another to help us unpack the truck in Virginia. We bought a big pet crate to transport the cats in.

During this time, I had to keep telling myself: this too shall pass. The feeling I had had for so long of not living at home  intensified with each new stack of boxes. This wasn’t the first time I ever moved, but I had never moved to another state before, and I had never owned so much stuff as now. I’d lived there for 20 years, gone through two floods, outlasted three owners, and now it was all coming to an end. Not just living in that house, but also living in New Jersey. Stepping out of my comfort zone (which had ceased to be comfortable anyway), and into the unknown. This too shall pass. This too shall pass.

The part I feared most was driving the truck. I had driven trucks before, but never one that big, and I had never pulled a trailer. I was told only two things about driving with a trailer: Make wide turns, and don’t back up. They didn’t tell me that once I drove the car onto the trailer, that I wouldn’t be able to open the door to get out of the car. I found that out pretty quickly, though. Turns out the fenders on the trailer were about 4 inches from the driver’s door, and the only way to get out was to roll down the passenger side window, slide my butt to the right hand seat, work my legs over the center console, and worm out through the window.

On the trip home from getting the trailer, I found myself remembering, too late, the advice I’d been given.  I came to a right turn at a traffic light, and nearly tore it down. MAKE WIDE TURNS. Riding shotgun, Doris had to jump out and guide me to safety.  I backed up carefully, steering the truck in the wrong direction. DON’T BACK UP. I have a new-found respect for people that drive and pull trailers. Backing up in a car is one thing; backing up with a trailer is something else entirely. You have to do the opposite of what you think you should do. Your body fights your brain. Your brain fights your body. I think it took about ten minutes before the traffic light was out of danger. The rest of the way home, I repeated to myself: make wide turns, don’t back up. Then once I got home, I had to detach the trailer so I could load the truck.

The closing on the new house was scheduled for Monday, July 16. The plan was to leave the Saturday before, get a motel room (Doris had made reservations) and spend Sunday relaxing. But the owner of the house had very kindly agreed to keep the electricity and gas connected until Monday, and meet us at the house with the key, so we canceled our reservation and decided to go straight to the house. We picked up the truck on Friday the 13th, which might explain the incident with the traffic light. Doris’s son Benny helped me load a lot of the boxes in so we could have a good head start.  The movers came Saturday morning and loaded all of the bigger boxes and furniture, I reattached the trailer, and we said our goodbyes. Doris loaded the cats into the crate and put a small litter box in the footwell of her car, and off we went.

We were going to stop at my mom’s house on the way and pick up a few more items. We left at noon on Saturday from Manville and reached my mom’s house about 2:30. I was speed limited to 55 mph with the trailer, and I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I violated that rule.  Doris got ahead of me but stopped at the scenic overlook on I-295, and I met her there.  She told me that the cats were fairly calm, and she decided that she would let them out of the crate and at least give them free run of the car, so they would feel less confined.

The 20-foot U-Haul truck with trailer was clumsy, noisy, slow and underpowered. I drove very cautiously, mindful of the incident with the traffic light.   Every muscle in m body was sore from loading the truck, and now they were taking turns cramping up on me. My fingers would lock on the steering wheel; then my right foot would point straight out; then my arms or legs would lock up in whatever position they were in. And all I could thing of was that I had a 400 mile drive ahead of me. This too shall pass.

It took two hours to get to my mom’s house, and two hours to detach the trailer again, back the truck up the driveway, load up, reattach the trailer, and be on our way again.  At 4:00 we still had a little over 300 miles to go. This too shall pass. At this point, I am soaked in sweat (I sweat copiously, let’s be honest, I spray, with the slightest exertion). every muscle in my body is aching or cramping or both, and all I can think is: nothing to do but get through it. Doris got ahead of me, and it would be another two hours before we met up again.  I found myself driving through the ghettos of Wilmington, Delaware, trying to stay on Route 13. I figured the most important thing was to get the cats to their new home. Cats, in my experience, generally don’t travel well. Sabby and Tabby surprised us though. Doris had let them out of the crate, and they settled in nicely, Tabby sitting on the center console armrest, and Sabby curled up on the front passenger seat.

We met up again on Route 13 outside of Smyrna, Delaware. Doris called me to tell me she had stopped at a gas station with an Arby’s attached to it. I found it without too much difficulty, and rolled into the parking lot. I even surprised myself by backing successfully into a parking space! We picked up sandwiches and fries and sodas, broke out two folding chairs, and had a picnic in the parking lot, so we could stay close to the cats, still confined in the car. At that point, my Magellan told me we had 192 miles to go; about halfway there.

Back on the road after dinner, we kept up a running conversation, Doris riding point letting me know about the road conditions. We stayed close together until I got stuck at a light and she kept going. Luckily rush hour was over by then, and we pretty much had the road to ourselves. That was fine with me; the less stopping and the less slowing down and the less changing lanes the better. I was no longer looking anxiously in the mirrors to make sure my car wasn’t sitting in the road behind me. I realized as the day was ending that I had been looking at my truck’s shadow frequently to confirm that the trailer and car were still attached. Night fell and the traffic thinned out. I started seeing signs for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and Norfolk. Getting closer. I counted the miles remaining on the GPS, checked the miles remaining on the truck’s computer, and decided I didn’t need to stop for gas.

I always liked driving to Virginia Beach by way of Route 13 because 1) I love driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, the only bridge that is worth the toll, and 2) Route 13 with its small, sometimes ramshackle houses, the little farms, the prefab steel buildings housing small businesses, the Tyson and Perdue factories that are the major economic lifeblood of the area is a reminder of how much of America lives.

Towns with names like Accomac, Pocomoke, Temperanceville, and Keller slide by in the night.  I try to time the lights. The Bay Bridge-Tunnel is now featured on the road signs. I’m getting closer.  Maybe another hour to go.

I call Doris as I pay the toll for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. She is a few miles ahead, battling fatigue, rolling down the windows and playing the radio loud. We’re on the home stretch.  It’s a lot cooler outside now, and I switch off the A/C until it gets too humid in the cab, then I turn it back on. The bay is calm, the lights of the bridge reflect on the water. Soon I will see the lights of the houses on the bay on the far side.

Back on land after 20 miles, I call Doris to make sure she is still awake. We have another bridge and tunnel to go through to get to Hampton. This one is shorter and toll free though. Once I get through the tunnel and over the bridge, it’s only another mile.

I turn onto my street, and realize that I have a problem. I’m facing the wrong direction, so if I park, I have to park in front of someone else’s house, and turning in my driveway is out of the question.  I drive on, hoping there is going to be some place to turn around. I have never gone past my house on that street before. Luckily, there is a high school at the end of the street, with a big empty parking lot. I have never wanted anything so much as I wanted to climb out of that truck. I turn around, park in front of the house. Doris has brought the cats in, and they are exploring the empty rooms. It’s 11:00 and we are bone tired. I drag a twin bed mattress out of the truck and set it down in the living room. We try sleeping on it together, but it’s not going to happen. The owner of the house left an office chair behind, so I try sleeping in that. I don’t sleep at all. Everything hurts, and I can’t find a comfortable position.  But, I am home.

 

 

 

Thanks for joining me! The plan here is to write about things that snag my interest, in the hope that they snag your interest too. I will also eventually include some of the newspaper columns that were written in the ’90’s under the title “in other words” for the millions of people who didn’t get the chance to see them the first time. Enjoy!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton