I started this article mainly because it’s spring planting season, but also because I like this Grant Wood painting. I hope you do too. In the United States, Arbor Day dates back to 1872, when an estimated million trees were planted in Nebraska.
Arbor Day was a big deal when I was a kid. It was a sweet way of involving kids with something that might last forever. People don’t seem to care much about it anymore.
The Arbor Day I remember was at Franklin School in East Orange. Our teacher told us about it, then took us out to the front lawn, where there was a tree sitting in a wheelbarrow, its roots wrapped in burlap. It was a spindly little tree, something like the one in the painting above that you have to look really hard to see. We took turns digging a hole, one shovelful for each kid. Then one of the janitors brought over a hose and we watered our tree.
I tried looking with Google Earth this week to see how our tree was doing, but it wasn’t there, the spot is just grass again. Maybe it spread out too wide and some dopey kid hanging on a branch fell off and got hurt and spoiled it for everyone. Or maybe it got taller than the school, so tall it drew lightning. That’s the one I want to believe.
That’s all I have to say. If you want to know more about Arbor Day, you can Google it.
My father was a Catholic, nominally. I don’t think he ever went to church as an adult. One of my aunts said when he did go to Mass as a child, he always managed to avoid the collection plate.
Similarly, my mother was a Protestant, nominally. I don’t think she ever went to church as an adult either. Her way of staying right with the Lord may have been simply to make sure I attended Sunday School. She accomplished this by finding neighbors who attended a nearby Protestant church and were willing to give me a ride each Sunday. She didn’t seem fussy about which flavor of Protestant services I attended; I remember Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist, depending on where we were living. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Eick, pronounced “Ike”, of Linwood Place, for giving me a weekly ride to the Washington Street Baptist Church in your rumble-seated car, and for sometimes treating me to a second breakfast if I showed up for my ride too early.
Full immersion baptism, Chestnut Mountain Church, Flowery Branch, Georgia
I was baptized a Catholic at the age of one month, so even if the rules about who gets into Heaven are as stringent as I’ve heard from some Catholic sources, I remain eligible. In the Baptist church, baptism (full-immersion, y’all, Acts 8:38, Mark 1:5) is reserved for those “able to make a mature confession of faith”; most baptisms I’ve seen were of people in their early teens or just a little younger; certainly old enough to decide.
Somehow, the Baptists never got around to baptizing me; that’s probably just as well, because there are some doctrinal problems with being baptized twice; your mileage may vary. The closest I have come to professing the Baptist faith openly was having “BAPTIST” stamped on my army dog tags, along with my blood type, “O”.
Soon after I opened my first checking account, a local radio station aired a feature story about an orphanage in Kearney (next to Newark) burning down, and soliciting contributions to rebuild. The fire sounded pretty devastating, and I had once written a book report on Oliver Twist, so I was ripe. I broke out my new checkbook and wrote Sacred Heart Orphanage of Kearney a check for something like five or ten dollars, not a trivial sum then. When my first bank statement arrived, I asked my mother to help me interpret it. As we reviewed the half-dozen or so cashed checks, we came to the one to Sacred Heart, and she said “What’s this?!” I relayed the whole burnt-down orphanage story, which only seemed to anger her. Raising her voice just a little, she said “The Pope doesn’t need your money.” End of discussion.
I married a girl who was raised Catholic; this never posed a problem, because, like me, she was not a churchgoer. Back when Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday, she ignored the rule; the only time it ever came up was once when we were out shopping – she said “It won’t feel right to eat meat on Good Friday”, and I said “Okay, let’s get fish then.” We started both our kids along the Catholic path of confirmation and first communion, because that way they can make up their own minds later on, right?
During a confirmation ceremony, the officiating bishop asks the candidates several questions from a list. The kids get advance coaching in the questions and the correct answers from adult volunteers; kids who have not attended parochial school find the questions and concepts more difficult. Despite my protests, I got volunteered into coaching my older son. To keep my own conscience clear while still following the study guide, my practice questions took the form “Now, if the bishop asks you ‘How does the Holy Spirit help us?’, what are you going to say?” On the day of the ceremony, I got some holy water sprinkled on me as the bishop’s procession entered the church. It didn’t burn, so I guess my approach was acceptable.
1947 Pontiac. Imagine this with seven more years of wear, green and much less shiny
One thing I did in high school was definitely a Bad Thing, religion-wise, as was confirmed by Miss Riley, our world history teacher. I had a ’47 Pontiac, and in the morning I might pick up a few friends, then, once at school, if I was not planning to go to classes, ask “Who’s going in?”. Those remaining in the car would cruise around with me for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for me to go to my afternoon job. I was not at all familiar with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and one Ash Wednesday my friends wanted to get their ashes applied before school.
I drove around under their direction, but the churches all had lines. Some of them decided to get out and get on line anyway, leaving just me and one passenger. Knowing that the only excuse to arrive late to school that day was to enter through the attendance office with ashes on our foreheads, I suggested using the ashes in the car’s ashtray. I don’t recall whether my passenger joined in or not, but I decorated my forehead with a smudge similar to those I had seen walking the streets all morning and entered the school without difficulty. I should have thought to wash off the ashes as soon as I got past the attendance office, but did not.
When I got to world history class later that day, Miss Riley, who had attended this very high school with my mother and knew her well, took one look at my smudge and squawked “YOU’RE NOT CATHOLIC!”. She didn’t know, of course, that my ashes were fake; that would have been so much worse. She was angry at my assumed (by her) decision to present myself to a priest as Catholic to obtain an excuse to be late to school. She told me I should be ashamed, and to wash my face and think very hard about what I’d done. I was ashamed, or at least I am now, for disrespecting someone else’s religion; I did wash my face; and I do continue to think about religion, although not so hard any more.
Thoughts
Back in the day, my wife and I liked to explore old cemeteries. While admiring the statuary and mausoleum architecture of a Catholic cemetery in Westchester, we noticed off at one side two rows of tiny headstones. There were maybe 30 or 40 in all, each very close to the next, and marked with numbers instead of names. We wondered what that was all about, and next day my wife called the office to ask. The woman who answered asked her in turn “Are you Catholic, dear?”. Getting a yes, she explained that section was the unconsecrated part of the cemetery, and those were graves of unbaptized babies and stillbirths. I don’t know what we expected, but that made us sad.
Church dogma at the time said the unborn and unbaptized were consigned to Limbo, which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “Limbo, in Roman Catholic theology, the border place between heaven and hell where dwell those souls who, though not condemned to punishment, are deprived of the joy of eternal existence with God in heaven.”
However, according to Wikipedia, “Recent Catholic theological speculation tends to stress the hope, although not the certainty, that these infants may attain heaven instead of the state of Limbo.” So there’s at least some hope.
The editor of the syndicated newspaper column The Ethicist once responded to a question from a lapsed-Catholic-gone-atheist reader who had been pressed into service as a pallbearer in a Catholic funeral. The main point of his response was “Your participation in the service was not hypocrisy; it was an act of compassion and affection for your family. To join in some parts of the service does not require you to join in every part.” I commented to the editor:
I liked what you wrote in your “pallbearer” segment. As a non-Catholic married into a large Catholic family, I have been in that situation several times. The trick when participating in any Catholic ceremony is to never sit in the first row. One can then take the cue from others to stand, sit, or slide forward in lieu of kneeling – without seeming disrespectful, and optionally without praying.
There is a bumper sticker that says “God is who, evolution is how”, an attractive simplification. The real truth may be so deep and complex that no human has yet imagined it.
My wife’s sister Marg went to parochial school at Saint Columba’s, just a couple of blocks from where we lived in Newark.
Marg’s friend Sandy was as innocent and bashful as any 16-year-old Catholic school girl could be. Her mother sent her to the butchers to get chicken breasts for dinner, but she was too embarrassed to say the word “breasts”, so she asked for “chicken chests” instead.
I was barely out of my own teens then, and I loved ferrying Marg and her girlfriends back and forth from their dances and other school events. It was like having a carload of ultra-cute nieces. Besides Sandy, the regular passengers I remember were Dolores, Geraldine, Loretta and Annette.
St. Columba’s class of about 6 years earlier, the only picture I could find
There was a Barbara, too, sometimes. She lived the furthest from the school, out by Ballantine’s brewery. I’ve always been partial to the name Barbara, so she was kind of my favorite; there’s just something about that name. I never had a girlfriend named Barbara, but I did have a cousin Barbara that I liked a lot when I was kid, so maybe that’s it.
School uniform models model school uniforms!
Writing this, I could picture one other girl, but couldn’t remember her name. I knew it sounded French and that I’d recognize it if I saw it. Google led me to a site promising “Top 1000 popular baby names in 1944”, the year Marg and probably most of the other girls were born. The site was babynames.it, the ‘.it’ meaning located in Italy. I began scanning the girls’ names column, stopping at times to recall a bit of life detail floated up by a familiar name. Eventually, at 307th in popularity, there it was, “Camille”.
Camille herself wasn’t French, though, she was Italian like most of the other girls. A few years later she stayed with Marg babysitting our kids when Mimi and I drove up to Expo 67. She was sort of a favorite too, and maybe a little more sophisticated than the rest. Later, she worked at Bamberger’s and let me use her employee discount to buy stereo gear, so that was nice.
Also at the baby names site, I learned how to pronounce the newly-popular girl’s name ‘Saoirse’, as in actress Saoirse Ronan. It’s properly pronounced SEER-sha, assuming we can trust the pronunciation of an unusual Irish girl’s name to an Italian web site. SEER-sha does sound like the way I’ve heard it, though.
I was working at the Foodland store in Elizabeth then, and companies like Heinz pickles and Sta-Puf fabric softener were always competing to get more shelf space for their products, usually by gifting store management with some thing of minor value. At Foodland, the definition of “management” was loose, extending all the way down to the bookkeeper, me.
Bobby Darin doing “Mack the Knife”
One company tried to curry Foodland favor with tickets to a concert by Bobby Darin, the teen heartthrob of the day — ‘Dream Lover’, ‘Beyond the Sea’, lots more. No one else was interested in going, so I collected their tickets and turned them over to Marg to pass along. I provided concert transportation too, but didn’t go inside.
Ball pen and record, a $2.78 value for only $1.39. Courtesy popsike.com vinyl records
One summer Mimi and I rented a house up at Lake Hopatcong for two weeks. I had just changed jobs, so I didn’t have enough seniority to take my vacation during the summer. I commuted daily from the lake to Newark on I-80, not finished yet but hosting light traffic. There were no police assigned to the stretch yet, so you could go as fast as you thought you’d still be able to stop for a deer, if that’s clear. Fortunately I never saw any deer; I think the new road and its shoulders were so wide the deer were afraid to venture into all that open space.
The house was right on the lake and we had lots of room, so Marg invited her girlfriends to stay, visiting in shifts. They were good kids, and we loved having them around.
When we lived in Newark in the 1970s, our neighbor Josie introduced us to her friend, a woman of about 50 that we already knew had won one of the first New Jersey lotteries, with a prize of a million dollars. Mimi said how wonderful that must be, but the woman seemed afraid we might ask her for some of it, and said a million dollars wasn’t really that much (although it was, in the 1970s), and went into a big explanation of why she and her husband were not quitting their jobs. They did not have great, interesting jobs you’d want to keep doing for the rest of your life; I think the husband was a school custodian.
Back then if you made $10,000 a year you were doing pretty well. I remember in the mid-1960s, the first year I ever made that much, how quietly proud it made me. By my ballpark estimate, if they took the cash-now prize option, after taxes they could have lived comfortably for another 40 years without working.
Maybe they just didn’t want to be together all day, and going to their jobs gave them a break from each other. Or maybe they wanted to leave it all to their kids or to the Church. The choice was theirs, but whatever the reason was, Mimi and I thought it was sad. When your ship comes in, you should get on it.
I meant to post this months ago when I finally accepted I couldn’t be part of normal society without getting vaccinated. I gave up, lined up, and got it done.
I’m now waiting the two weeks it takes after the second shot to be considered “vaccinated”. But it’s starting to look like we’ll be getting booster shots for the rest of our lives, like getting a regular oil change. Covid rules and regulations seem to be made up as we go along, so we’ll see.
There used to be a great donut shop, Hoffman’s, on a side street near the railroad station here . They made long, solid custard-filled donuts they called Hindenburgs, or maybe Heidelbergs or Hindemiths, something like that, even longer than the “Long John” model pictured below. Sadly, Hoffman’s closed years ago due to a family squabble.
Once I can go out into the world again, I’m looking forward to walking into the surviving local bakery and getting a dozen donuts (not Dunkin’, although Dunkin’ is okay in a pinch).
I’m also looking forward to seeing the nice lady who works the counter there. I like how quietly appreciative she is when someone leaves a tip that’s more than just the few coins they get back in their change. Some people don’t leave anything. I’m looking forward to leaving her a generous tip as much as I am to getting some donuts. After all, we’ve been separated for almost two years.
I don’t understand why some people think it’s okay to leave a cheap tip, or no tip at all. They’ve probably never worked a service job. I have a low opinion of cheap tippers like our Canadian neighbor in Florida. He was a CPA and owned his own accounting practice, so why so cheap? What does it take to leave a little extra?
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Here at the Jersey shore, we get a lot of Canadian tourists, and the locals have always considered the Quebec license-plate slogan “Je me souviens” to translate as “We don’t tip”.
In general I don’t like cheapskates, but I allow some leeway for girls. Girls don’t seem to consider what it’s like to work a crappy job like waiting tables or being a counterperson. Once I had lunch with two girls from work and we split the tab three ways. When we were leaving, I saw they had left lousy tips and I suggested they put more money down because we might want to go back there some day.
Mimi and I and some other couples from Insco went to a restaurant called “What’s Your Beef?”, where butchers help you pick out your own cut of meat from an old-fashioned butcher case. We agreed ahead of time we would split the tab. The bill was fairly stiff and I guess this one couple was economizing, because the husband (not the one that worked with us, the wife did) didn’t want to leave a tip. There wasn’t anything wrong with the service, it was fine, he just didn’t want to. We basically bullied/shamed him into leaving 15% on his share but he wasn’t happy about it. He said “let her dive for it” and dropped his tip into a half-full glass of water.
Well, I started out talking about donuts but ended up talking about tipping, sorry. Actually, I started out talking about the pandemic, but that was mostly a way to lead into talking about donuts and giving people decent tips for decent service.
“Long John” – custard filled, chocolate iced. Courtesy Prairie City Bakery, Vernon Hills IL
Oh, one more thing. Our government, that’s always giving money away to people we don’t know in other countries, says we should limit our mailman’s holiday tip to $25. Say what?! This is a guy who brings us our mail faithfully, never missing, six days a week, rain or shine, Try and keep me from giving him a decent tip. Merry Christmas, Henry!
I recently finished re-reading J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”. I first read it about a million years ago. It was published in 1951.
Salinger’s narrator is the anxious and depressed 16-year-old Holden Caulfield. Holden mentions that his parents are leaning toward having him “psychoanalyzed and all” because his “failure to apply himself” has flunked him out of a half-dozen private schools. Old Jerry admitted his book was “sort of” autobiographical.
There’s a part where Holden has been kicked out of his latest school after failing every subject except English, and is killing time waiting to meet his nine-year-old sister outside her midtown Manhattan grade school. While he’s there,
But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it.
Holden rubs the words off with his hand. Still killing time, at the Museum of Natural History he helps two little kids looking for the mummies.
“How come you two guys aren’t in school?” I said. “No school t’day,” the kid that did all the talking said. He was lying, sure as I’m alive, the little bastard. I didn’t have anything to do, though, till old Phoebe showed up, so I helped them find the place where the mummies were.
As they follow the narrow passage leading into the tomb, Holden describes the process by which the Egyptians could be “buried in their tombs for thousands of years and their faces wouldn’t rot or anything.” The kids get spooked and leave.
I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you’d never guess what I saw on the wall. Another “Fuck you.” It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones.
That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact.
Given what Jerry/Holden wrote above and the world we live in, it seemed to me that at least one fan would have marked up old Jerry’s tombstone since his death in 2010. If not, maybe it was something I should take on as a mission, in the sense of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” I know it’s crazy, but as a matter of fact sometimes I think of stuff like that. It’s almost like he’s asking for it. I wouldn’t really do it though.
Anyway, I was sure something like that would have made the news, and I googled
defaced “Salinger tombstone”
with the quotation marks just like that. I didn’t get any hits, so I tried other googles. I’m an incredibly fast typist, if you really want to know. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to get carpal tunnel from typing up the thousands of other articles here.
I tried just
“Salinger tombstone”
again with quotes around it. There were about a dozen hits but all the dead people were different Salingers.
Before I gave up, just for fun I tried
Salinger tombstone
no quotes this time. Of course that gave me a million hits, “about 333,000”. But the topmost one was Find A Grave Memorial, at findagrave.com; now we’re getting somewhere. Without any media mentions, the next step in finding out if old Jerry’s tombstone’s been defaced is knowing where he’s buried. Then maybe I could go there and see for myself.
It turns out Find A Grave has an excellent short biography of Salinger, but the jerks yank the rug right out from under my idea of a graveside visit, declaring “Cremated, location of ashes is unknown.” Old Jerry was a notoriously private person, and he has once again avoided his fans.
Jane is a good friend of mine. She never misses an opportunity to tell me about the upcoming Powerball jackpot, sending me email with teasing subject lines like “Hey! Tonight’s Powerball @ $325M!” or “WOW! Tonight’s Powerball @ $500M!”. I think Jane might be a robot.
After many weeks of the jackpot growing without a winner, not Jane but a local newspaper tells me that in the January 5th drawing two people, one in California and one in Wisconsin, had all six numbers. They will split the grand prize, $632 million, meaning $316 million each if they take the annuity payout, $225 million each if they take it in cash.
So, no giant jackpot for me this week, but a new contest has already begun, with a guaranteed $20 million prize, increasing by at least $2 million twice a week until there’s a winner — quite possibly me.
Always cooking in the back of my mind is what I’ll do with the money, but also cooking is the thought that first I’ll have to protect it, so I’ll need a good lawyer. I wrote about needing a lawyer last week, here.
About five years ago I paid a certified financial planner something like $350 to look over my handful of investments and tell me how to do better. She did tell me, and it was good advice, not good enough to make me rich of course, but when my ship comes in she’ll be the first person I call. I won’t tell the secretary anything about my “sudden wealth”, the term financial types use for coming into a lot of money. I’ll just ask for an appointment, and say “Let’s make it for a full hour this time.”
What Is Sudden Wealth Syndrome?
Sudden wealth syndrome (SWS) is a type of distress that afflicts individuals who suddenly come into large sums of money. Becoming suddenly wealthy can cause people to make decisions they might not have otherwise made. Sudden wealth syndrome symptoms include feeling isolated from former friends, feeling guilty about their good fortune, and extreme fear of losing their money. – Investopedia
When my ship comes in I’ll buy a nice house, but it will have to be all on one level because I’m getting older and stairs are becoming the enemy. But some houses now have elevators, real elevators, the kind you step inside and the doors close. I’d always have my phone with me in case the thing gets stuck or the power goes out, it’s probably best to keep your phone in one of those little holsters that hangs on your belt so you can never be caught without it.
I’ll hire a cook when my ship comes in, maybe a Mexican lady. I’ll tell her how much I love Mexican food, but not the hot kind, more like what they call Tex-Mex.
She should have at least a little English, but since I’ll also need to hire a housekeeper to keep the place organized and tidy, maybe I can find one who’s able to speak Spanish, that way the cook won’t feel lonely, and the housekeeper can translate for her whatever it is I’m talking about.
Sometimes on a television show the cook or the housekeeper or the gardener, that’s another person to hire, will have kids of their own and it just makes sense when my ship comes in they can live in my big house too, the more the merrier, but maybe they need to be in another wing or maybe a separate building next door in case the kids are noisy or they like loud music, they’re only kids, after all.
Here’s another idea I had, not to have a house at all, instead just live in a fancy hotel in New York City. I started thinking about living like that a few years ago when I was following the news about the scammer girl who was the fake German heiress.
Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, at her trial in 2019. Richard Drew / AP
It sounded like she was living a pretty good life, tipping the help with fifty dollar bills and the concierges with hundreds, while scamming Manhattan banks and making up excuses for not paying her rent. She was pretty and sexy and charming, although some people I know didn’t think she was pretty at all. The charming part meant lots of socialites wanted to be her friend and lend her money until her own ship, a fictitious delayed inheritance, came in, and pick up the check when the group went out for dinner, I guess whenever they got tired of hotel food.
Those stories made it sound like the concierges in a fancy hotel could find you anything you wanted. I like going to museums, but not alone, and I thought I would ask the concierge to ask around for a fine-arts major to keep me company and go with me to my favorite museums like the Cloisters at the north end of Manhattan, and maybe tell me a little extra about some of the paintings without making it a whole big lecture. Maybe in her 30s, early 40s would be fine too. She should be smart and pretty, but not so pretty that she looks like a model and people are going to look at us and think, ha, that’s not his daughter or his granddaughter or his niece I’m sure.
I like Italian girls; they’re fun and natural and nice to look at. It would be okay if my companion was born over there, in fact that might make her a better-natured person than the average American girl. She should be mature, I don’t mean physically, I mean mentally mature, but it would be okay for her to be a little silly too sometimes. She’d be there to go places with me and be a good companion. I wouldn’t expect any funny stuff, certainly not at first, but we’re only human, after all.
And oh yeah, saying the girl could be Italian made me remember one more thing for when my ship comes in, I’ll put it here, it’s to learn to speak Italian. I wrote in another article here that in freshman high school they put me in Italian class instead of Latin like I signed up for because my real name looks Italian, even though it isn’t, and how much I enjoyed being in Miss Mercurio’s class for a few days. By contrast, I think French would be hard to learn, their words are not spelled anything like the throaty, wet way they sound, but Italian is spelled pretty much the way it sounds. Then if my museum companion was Italian, we could talk in Italian while we’re looking at paintings. I would pay extra for her to help teach me Italian of course; I won’t care about how much things cost when my ship comes in.
Altarpiece, Robert Campin and workshop, Metropolitan Museum at the Cloisters
I want to go to other museums besides the ones in New York City of course; there’s a nice small museum out in one of the Hamptons, on the far end of Long Island, either 80 or 180 miles from the city, I forget which. That means I’ll need a car, but not a limousine where everyone’s going to say “Who’s that” when we go by, but something more low key. I saw somewhere that a Bentley is pretty much the same as a Rolls-Royce but without the wings on the radiator and all. There would need to be a chauffeur of course, that’s one more on the payroll. He probably should be a retired cop so he could be a bodyguard too. I guess when we stop to have a meal, he should be near us but probably not at the same table. That doesn’t sound quite right somehow, but things get complicated when your ship comes in. I’ll have to think about that part some more.
I’ve been cutting my own hair for over a year, not to save money but to avoid other people and the coronavirus. I’m assuming that when my ship comes in, Susan, who used to cut my hair here in town, will be available, triple vaxxed and maybe masked-up too if that’s the rule then. She’ll have to get some sort of a pass at the front desk to come up to the room, although I guess ‘suite’ or ‘floor’ would be a better word for it. I’ll leave her name at the desk and send a car, a nice car, not some random-brand Uber, down to the shore to bring her up to the city. I guess I should arrange with the concierge for a nice in-room lunch in case they hit a lot of traffic coming in. So it’s not awkward for her at lunch, she can bring along Tina, the receptionist at the hair parlour, to keep her company.
Something else I’ll do when my ship comes in is have a dinner for everybody I worked with at Insco, except for the few people I didn’t get along with, they know who they are. Or maybe a picnic outside would be better, then we could all just wander around and catch up. If it’s outside maybe no alcohol because of what happened with the cars at the softball game that time.
Getting back to all the people I’ll have working for me if I live in my own house instead of the hotel, I looked for books on how to be rich, meaning how to manage your life, where to buy things like good clothes and such, but the books all seemed to be about how to get rich, which of course won’t be an issue.
With all those people in the house, I guess I’ll have to hire some sort of manager to tell them how to do their jobs and write their paychecks. Maybe my financial planner will know someone. Or maybe I’d get a butler, a butler could manage them, like in one of those high-class English TV series like Upstairs, Downstairs or movies like The Remains of the Day. If the butler was a guy like Anthony Hopkins that would be great, we could have a drink together once in a while.
One thing I almost forgot, I’ll get my shoes made to order and not have to try on every pair of shoes in the store anymore. I have a narrow foot.
Pete and Trudy Campbell board the Learjet to Wichita. Courtesy AMC
If I want to go somewhere that’s not close after my ship comes in, I’ll fly there first class. Going places first class sounds nice, but I don’t really want to fly at all anymore, I haven’t been in a plane for 25 years. I can tell from the newspapers it’s different now – there’s all kinds of not-very-nice people flying now, even in first class. Maybe a better idea would be to just charter a small Learjet like the one that picked up Pete and his wife to bring them to Wichita in the final episode of Mad Men. If I’m not going very far, maybe just take the car, the chauffer and I can take turns driving.
KSWIN Industrial End Table, 18 inch Square Side Table with Storage Shelf, Sturdy Metal Frame, $66 USD at Amazon
My new monitor will be
of size 32 inches, much
bigger than the old one,
the old one hardly a monitor at all,
just a screen.
I’ll order my new monitor
when my ship comes in.
I’ll put it where the old one sat
for years, sort of half alongside
my comfy chair, the chair
also old, but still reliable.
My big new monitor will need
something substantial under it, the
table there now is much too small.
There is space enough for a bigger table,
but it has to be extra solid,
so if I happen to
bump against it when I stand up
it won’t wobble and
cause a tragedy.
When I buy electronics, I never buy the insurance, I think it’s a ripoff.
. . .
At Amazon, I look at side tables and
end tables and just-plain tables, looking for
something maybe 20 inches square,
but not too high –
I do my computer typing leaning
way back and slouched way down.
Here’s one that looks sturdy for sure –
it has an almost medieval quality,
with braces of strap iron,
like a Tennessee jail cell.
There are not many reviews,
so I read them all.
Overall, 4.5 stars out of 5.
The reviewers fall
into three classes:
– the majority love it
– pragmatic types say it’s adequate
– one single-star reviewer
is disappointed by the size.
Here’s what they said:
– Just what I needed
– Nice shape, nice size, and very pretty
– Sturdy little table
– Pretty little table
– KSWIN end table
– Worth the price…
– Easy to assemble
– Love it!
– Tables
– Awesome product!
– Worth it
– Great purchase
– Great table
– A lot smaller than I expected
– PERFECT
– Good
– So cute and sturdy!
– Mesita decorativa
– Easy to assemble and useable
– Nice table
After I order, it arrives in two days. As I bring the box into the house, I hear something bumping around inside. It’s the table in its own tight little box stamped with Chinese characters and bound in yards of transparent tape. It warns “Do not open with knife” and “Returns will only be accepted in original package”.
The table is packed flat of course, and must be assembled. The directions are simple and clear.
Included are two plastic bags of eight screws each, a bag of four adjustable feet, and an Allen wrench. The other parts are individually wrapped and packed tight together using precision-shaped Styrofoam bumpers.
IKEA has nothing on the KSWIN company – the parts fit together perfectly. It takes me about fifteen minutes, that long because I’m pretty methodical.
I never lived in California, but I visited there many times on business trips and came to love it. Here are a few things that stayed with me from those visits, arranged in no particular order. If I have some details wrong or backwards, apologies to my companions on those trips, who became my friends. Writing this, I couldn’t remember a lot of detail about the actual work we did as a team, and didn’t try. But I remember very well the good times we had on side trips sightseeing and exploring California—or just hanging out—when we were not working.
Cars make their way down Lombard Street
Most of my California trips were to San Francisco, Santa Clara or other towns in “Silicon Valley”, the hub of America’s high-tech computer business. On a different trip I got to visit Los Angeles, but only for a three-hour layover between planes. I was alone on that trip and took a walk from the terminal building down to the bottom of the main road in, where I sat on a low wall to catch some sun. Sitting there alone, I felt as if every person who turned onto the airport road that day was checking me out. That’s no credit to me – in California everyone is checking everyone else out all day long. It is the land of opportunity.
Job interview
My first California trip was for a job interview. After working for Continental Insurance/Insco for a few years, I was looking for a change. I saw an ad for VM programmers at the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, another Silicon Valley town. Amdahl was the new kid on the block then, making full-size mainframe computers and giving IBM a run for its money. I sent them a resume, we had a short interview over the phone, and before I knew it I was on a plane headed west.
The San Jose airport was so small that the entire rental car fleet sat right outside the terminal door. Japanese cars were just becoming popular, and the one I rented was the first I ever drove. I spent the evening getting a feel for California —just driving around the hilly green countryside, no other cars in sight. I forget what make it was, but it was peppy and fun to drive, and I gave it some exercise.
Fact sheet courtesy Wikipedia
The next morning I drove to Sunnyvale for my interview. First I met with the personnel manager and we had a nice, friendly conversation, mostly about California, its hot housing market, and our families. He seemed to be a happy person, but at one point surprised me by dropping “You’ll find that most people in California are very shallow” into the conversation.
Next I met with a pair of technical managers and told them about all the cool software modifications and tools I’d designed and added to Continental’s VM operating system. Unfortunately I got caught up in trying to show that I wasn’t just the usual inward-focused bit-jockey systems programmer, but also a team player and leader. I shot myself in the foot by injecting the words “we” and “my team” into the conversation too often. Free advice to job seekers everywhere: don’t be modest. I didn’t take enough credit for my own work that day, and I didn’t get the job.
Housing boom
On a different trip, I shared a taxi with a gent from back East who was headed to the same hotel. We were talking about the booming real estate market, and I mentioned a newspaper story that said many Californians were stretching to carry mortgages on second or even third houses, counting on big future profits. We were still shaking our heads over the madness of this when our driver, silent until then, said “I’ve got six.”
The project
For a while, Continental had a sort of flirtation with several computer companies to decide which could best replace the aging workstations in its 40 branch offices. Our team would test and evaluate proposed replacements.
I sometimes had my doubts about whether the project to find a replacement branch office machine was on the level. Our management was very conservative about choosing computers and computer gear, seeming to honor the adage “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” —meaning, if you chose IBM and it somehow didn’t work out, it was still a reasonable choice because IBM was the world standard. Any fault would be IBM’s, not yours.
IBM didn’t yet offer a suitable small machine, so maybe our management was stalling in hopes they would have one soon, solving the problem for everyone.
The team
Our first team trip will be to Convergent Technologies in Santa Clara. We’ll be testing their latest minicomputer. In a few weeks, we’ll do the same thing at Hewlett Packard.
There are four of us on the team, representing four different Continental departments. We don’t know each other yet. As team leader, I get to drive the rental and am generally deferred to. When our plane lands in California, it’s a sunny, pleasant day. Once we’re out of the airport and on our way to the hotel, I ask “Would it be a good idea to open the windows?” There is a happy chorus of YES PLEASE!
In the Castro
We have a free day before testing begins and decide to go to San Francisco. Looking for a place to have dinner, we wander into a busy neighborhood and get in line outside a restaurant that seems popular. We are three men and a young woman only two years out of college. She is pretty and sweet and smart, and by the end of the day each of the men is half in love with her.
A sign tells us we’re in the Castro District. She says “Oh, the Castro District! That’s the gay section!” Many of the people in line with us or passing by appear to be of the rainbow persuasion, some very much so. In an excited whisper, she asks “Do you think we’ll see any gay people?”
At Convergent Technologies
The Convergent people have set up a row of their workstation computers for us in one corner of their factory floor and we get started. Our hosts make us think of the Avis “We try harder” slogan – they are desperate for our business and it shows, sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. Spotting my half-empty cigarette pack on the table, one of them offers to go buy me another.
Convergent has a cafeteria, but a Mexican food truck visits our side of the factory several times a day and we come to favor the exotic food off the truck.
None of us has ever seen the Pacific Ocean, and one day after work we take a drive west to the nearest beach.
Not the same beach, but like it
The beach is wild and rocky, not at all like the friendly, flat beaches back home in New Jersey. No one will ever play in the surf here, or lie on a towel to work on their tan.
We roll up our pants legs, stow shoes and socks in the car, and walk into the chilly water. The ocean here is calm, with flattish boulders washed over by low, polite waves. As the tide goes out, tiny crabs and other marine life are stranded for a while in shallow pools on top of the boulders. If you put your hand into one it feels alive, and the salt water hot from the afternoon sun.
Free weekend
We’ll be testing at Convergent for two weeks, which gives us a weekend in between for sightseeing. Driving out of the city, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and continue north. We are like children, staring and pointing at things not to be seen in New Jersey. We drive into a touristy redwood forest, where we sit together on the colossal stump of a thousand-year-old redwood as we eat lunch and marvel at our surroundings. We follow signs that lead us to a winery tour, then wear out our welcome at its sampling bar. On our way back we shout out in unison a town name we see on a highway sign, “SNAVELY!”
Lombard Street
Another day we take our rental for a ride down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, known as “The Crookedest Street in the World”. Lombard Street got that way in the 1920s, when the city installed eight hairpin curves to reduce its dangerously steep downhill grade. Over the following years, taking a slow ride down Lombard Street became a favorite tourist thing to do, with the street eventually becoming so congested it created a quality-of-life issue for its homeowners.
When Lombard Street is not too crowded, it’s a fun, careful drive, offering scenic views of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the suspension bridges to Oakland. When we took that ride years ago, we enjoyed it so much we made our way back to the top and went again, drawing annoyed looks from a few homeowners who remembered us from our earlier pass.
On the fault line
A few weeks after finishing up at Convergent Technologies and writing our report, we return to California to run the same tests at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco.
Much of California is on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault. Map courtesy adobe.com
Hewlett Packard wants visitors to be aware its buildings in Palo Alto are on the San Andreas fault, the earthquake-prone sliding boundary between two of the Earth’s major tectonic plates. Hewlett takes earthquakes seriously and thinks visitors should too. Their buildings are low and stubby, and thus less likely to fall over. They are laid out around a central open quad with enough space for all employees to gather safely during a quake. If there’s not enough warning to get out into the quad, the next best thing is to crawl under a desk or other furniture. If that’s not possible, stand in one of the reinforced doorways.
Survival poster
I won’t detail the testing we did in the two weeks we were at Hewlett Packard because it wasn’t much different from what we did at Convergent. Nor will I detail any of the side trips or other fun we may have had outside work hours while at Hewlett. To any of my former management who might happen to have lived long enough to read this, rest assured that we all worked very hard and didn’t have anywhere near as much fun as it sounds.
What’s next for California?
I’m disgusted by the way California has gone downhill. The city I’m most familiar with, beautiful and livable San Francisco, is now often referred to as a third-world shithole. After following the news over recent years, I have to agree, and California is off the list of places I might ever want to live. Collectively, California’s problems seem unsolvable.
Smash-and-grab looting, consequence-free shoplifting, acts of violence against strangers (the knockout game). Release without bail of criminals with lengthy arrest records. Providing free drugs to addicts instead of forcing them into treatment. The criminal class has taken over, and the rule of law has ended.
Add uncontrolled wildfires, the end of standardized testing, the leftward tilt of the education system, the general failure of the schools to educate. I could go on and on.
I guess there’s always hope that something or someone will come along to fix California. Short of martial law or outright civil war, I don’t know what that might be. But I’m glad I got to enjoy California a bit before its destruction.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
— Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”, 1913
Do you remember driving down the Garden State Parkway years ago and there were all those ugly cellphone towers? Then a few years later there were all those ugly fake trees instead?
Well, today’s more modern fake trees have a name, and it’s clever and perfect and I think a credit to the English language. I found out about all this when I read about actor Richard Gere angering his neighbors in rural Bedford, NY by donating a piece of his land to erect a cell tower that would improve the town’s emergency vehicle response times. In a classic example of NIMBY, some of Gere’s wealthy and famous neighbors object to the tower because it would spoil their views of the Bedford countryside.
That cool new name for a fake tree is monopine. If you google “monopine”, wrapped up in double quotes just like that, you’ll see some good examples of cell towers that are not quite as ugly as they used to be.
The above lines from Trees make me think of my 7th-grade teacher Miss Barnett, who loved poetry and taught us kids how to love it too. Beyond Joyce Kilmer, she favored plainspoken, left-leaning poets like Carl Sandburg, but didn’t try to indoctrinate us, letting the words speak for themselves. She treated every one of us as though we were smart.
Arbor Day, Grant Wood 1932
