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Baggage

A full life

After my wife died, I spent a brief time on an Internet dating site. It worked out for me, but not before a couple of things worth noting.

The first is sick/funny. The very first woman who noticed me (I was kind of passive, letting others take the lead) sent a “flirt”. I responded nicely, mentioning my status as a widower, and she replied in more detail. Here, for your horror and enjoyment is the first sentence of her note:

“At least the person you loved is dead.”

Word for word; I’m not lying. She went on to rant about her husband of 27 years who was now running around making a fool of himself with a younger woman.

The other thing is related – baggage. Either people had none or they wanted none. “I come without baggage” and “No baggage, please” are constant refrains in profiles. Why? When did empty-handed become an asset?

Here is my belief – we are our baggage. No baggage means you’ve led a pretty empty life and probably don’t bring a lot to the party. If you show up without baggage, I have to provide everything.

I’m full of baggage. Successes and failures; joys and regrets; fun and woe; health and illness; happy and sad. Without it, I’m really not much except an eating machine.

Baggage is the source of our memories, and as I once wrote, there comes a time in your life when remembering the past becomes more rewarding than imagining the future. When that happens, I hope your baggage is full.

I Love the Lottery

Pick the winner and serve it with dinner

Everyone knows the odds of winning a mega-millions lottery jackpot – virtually non-existent. If you take a 56,000 acre cornfield, one stalk gets the prize. I took the time to research that and figure it out.

People buy the tickets anyway. The most common rationale is, “someone has to win.”

The most common reason is hope.

The lottery is fueled primarily by the people who are least able to afford the gamble. They are the same people most in need of lotteries primary service – giving hope.

Hope doesn’t have a unit of measure. I can’t say I have three pounds of hope today. So one lottery ticket gives me all the hope I need; two tickets aren’t really necessary.

There was a time in the life of my family when hope was even more important than normal. Troubles abounded, living in a cardboard box kinds of troubles, and there seemed to be no way out. During this time, I would buy one lottery ticket every week. It didn’t matter if the jackpot was $1 million or $100 million, it gave me some hope.

I could already be ...

I wouldn’t check the number after the drawing. I am an analytical man, and I knew I hadn’t won. But as long as I didn’t check, the possibility existed, and hope survived. I could wake each morning and think the Publisher’s Clearing House motto, “you may already be a millionaire,” sustaining that hope until I learned from the news that a winner had come forward. By that time I had another ticket or two in my wallet, and could wake each morning with that same thought.

The actual odds didn’t matter. Winning didn’t even matter. It mattered that I got up each day and worked hard and persisted, eventually succeeding by the old-fashioned way – by earning it.

What mattered was my family, and it was my responsibility to see to their well-being. And the thing that got me vertical on many mornings, that got me to work and helped me to persevere, was the thought, “you might already be a millionaire.”

I love the lottery.

Television

I stopped watching television over two years ago. I didn’t set out to stop, there was no intellectual imperative to raise my consciousness or make me somehow better than everyone else. I wasn’t worried about my brain turning to yogurt like in the Hulu ads. (By the way – Alec Baldwin being an alien explains a lot. I wonder if Kim Basinger knew it all along?)

Did Kim know?

It was much simpler than that – life took my TV away. (Another by the way – did you notice that right at the beginning of my no TV rant, I reference a TV ad? Paradoxical, huh?)

What would you do if everything you saw on TV was absolutely real to you? Was happening at that moment, live, in your home? The war footage on the news – would you duck and run for cover? The medical dilemma – would you cry for the patient? The comedy sketch – would you think it funny, or cringe?

That’s what happened to my wife, Anne. A rare neurological disease took away her ability to differentiate real from pretend. The disease was progressive, and so was my weaning from TV. At first, we just had to avoid violence. And then any drama. We eventually reached the food channel and QVC as the only available channels. We lost the food channel to reality competitions – the losers broke her heart. I thought QVC would go on forever. Who isn’t happy there? But then one day the host asked the buyer if the purchase was for her husband, and she said, “No. Henry passed away last year,” and Anne went into profound mourning. Henry might as well have been her father.

So the TV went off, and Enya CD’s in constant rotation became our background noise.

And here’s what I learned – my life is better without TV. Not that TV in any way harmed me, or diminished me intellectually or psychologically or emotionally. Note that I said my life, not yours. TV may fit your life very well, and you are welcome to it without any judgment from me.

TV doesn’t fit my life any more. Here’s why – for me TV is the road to becoming the Unabomber.

I live alone, now. I am naturally something of a loner. TV is a sedative to me, the pill that would let me sit inside and never interact with real people and real places and real events again. And sooner or later, I would start planting bombs. Maybe not literal ones, but explosions aren’t the only way to destroy things.

So, how do I know the Hulu ads? Because I do interact with people, and those people do watch TV, and I am not so presumptuous as to force my will on them. TV is only dangerous when I’m alone.

Those occasions where I do watch it only reinforces my decision not to. A rerun of Scrubs or Two and a Half Men I can enjoy. Even an episode of House, as long as I take him in small doses. But Rock the Love Bus? Parental Control? These and others of that genre are designed to humiliate people for entertainment. I don’t enjoy that.

Walter Cronkite 2009?

One last thought – The Daily Show. I used to think it sad that many young people got their news from a comedian. Then my son sent me a link to the episode of the debate between Jon Stewart and whoever that CNN financial lunatic is, and now I’d rather watch Stewart than O’Reilly or Blitzer.

But I’d really rather watch no TV at all. All the news I need now I can get by looking out my window or picking up my phone.

My Friends

I am an avid reader. Surprise. I added it all up once and estimate I’ve read maybe 5,000 books in my life, going all the way back to The Little Train That Could. Now that was a well-crafted book. A good story, strongly plotted, with a very sympathetic character living a clear story arc.

Anyway, I love history, and that means I love biography because history is simply the aggregation of lots of biographies, with an occasional natural disaster thrown in. But the only biographies you can buy are all about famous people. Is fame a prerequisite for leading an interesting life? For contributing your piece to the aggregation that is history?

No.

I have this non-fiction book outlined, and I plan to write it right after my third novel. I figure by then I’ll have either totally failed, or I’ll have the leverage to get something different published. Yeah, I know, I’m an optimist.

The Book is called My Friends, and it consists of six short biographies, maybe 100 pages each. Biographies of the six of my best friends at various stages of my life. Their lives are unique and amazing, and I had the good fortune of being part of them, if only for a while. Here they are.

Pat Fogarty.

Growing up in Hillcrest, NY, just outside Binghamton, Pat was my best friend. Pat was a smart as anyone I’ve ever known. Top of his class starting in the 1st Grade and keeping it up all the way through Harvard. He was also a major-league geek, complete with big black glasses and a plastic pocket liner. And one of the co-founders of the radical anti-war Weatherman movement. After Harvard, Pat joined the peace corps and died in a truck accident in some nasty part of Africa.

Lee Willis.

Lee and I were best friends in high school and after. We went to Europe together and toured for three months on motorcycles, living in a tiny two-man tent. We went off to different colleges, and while I studied beer and girls, Lee dropped out, joined the Marines and volunteered for Viet Nam. In retrospect, a gallant thing to do. Lee commanded an armored personnel carrier. He was the guy you see from the waist up out the top of some hatch. In Lee’s case, he got shot while doing that. A bullet slipped inside his Kevlar and tracked across his back, leaving the biggest scar I’ve ever seen. Medevac saved his physical life in Viet Nam, and Debbie finished the job emotionally when he got back. They’re still together today, I am very happy to report.

Nicki Schall

Nicki was the first girl I loved. We started dating senior year of high school (she attended a Catholic girl’s school called The Convent, and I was at a boy’s military prep school – we were a pair), and continued to for the rest of her life. She was the daughter of an Army top-sergeant who considered me just this side of bacteria. Nicki went to Skidmore College, and freshman year, I called her at school to go there for the weekend. I learned from her roommate that she was in the hospital back home in Syracuse. I went there and, seated away from the hostile glare of her father, I overheard her doctor tell her parents she had Hodgkin’s Disease, and there was no cure. Against my better judgment, they swore me to secrecy and never told her she was dying. She learned about it when she worked a summer job for GE and saw a doctor’s report in her file. When she found out I knew and didn’t tell her, she didn’t speak to me for two years. We got together briefly junior year, but she died the following summer.

Rick Marsi & Michael Barclay

Rick and Michael were my best friends at Colgate. I’ve intertwined them here for brevity, but each of their lives bears illuminating.

Michael bought my Gibson acoustic guitar from me freshman year and despite our relentless abuse, taught himself to play and has been a professional musician all his life (The Michael Barclay Blues Band, (http://sonic.net/~michaelb/). Making a living playing the blues is a challenge, and Michael’s solution was to get his PhD in Psychology and work with children in the California Penal System.

Rick joined the Peace Corps out of college and went to India. After he returned, he went to Penn and got his Master’s in Indian Studies and became an accomplished sitarist, although he plays the drums and sings lead in the world’s oldest garage band. (The band isn’t the oldest – it’s members are.) Rick became a naturalist (http://www.rickmarsi.com/) and adventure tour guide to some of the most interesting places on earth, including the Andes in Argentina and rural Russia. He has written a number of books, and his study of the city of Borovichi is a wondrous read.

John Ritchie

John Ritchie became my best adult friend when we worked together. An Okie made good, John was one of the first formally-trained radiation safety professionals and went on to co-found several companies. When that wasn’t challenging enough, he took his old Corvette and emigrated to Europe for 16 years, where he met and married a lovely Swedish woman. He’s lived in an historic cottage in England, a spectacular old farm in Normandy, condos in Sweden and Finland, a house on stilts in the Florida Keys, and now a beautiful home in Tucson. And soon a condo-in-the-sky in Panama. There are stories to match each location.

The point here is that celebrity doesn’t make you interesting. And obscurity doesn’t mean you’re not a good story.

Poetry

“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious; so sweet and so cold.”

Two sentences that could have come from some generic romance novel or a post-it note on the refrigerator. And yet when a famous author/poet fragments them, seemingly at random, they become, arguably, one of the most famous modern short poems.

This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

You can get different meanings out of this, ones that you believe are important or insightful, because there were none put in. There are no guidelines, no clues, no limitations. You’re just making up the meaning.

You can see where this originated. He ate the damn plums and felt guilty about it and wrote an apology. It is our expectations that there is more to this, some deeper truth, that make it meaningful, not the author’s content.

He was greedy, guilty, and then contrite.

My own opinion, in absolute seriousness, is that this Ogden Nash ditty is in fact the most important short poem.

Candy is dandy
but liquor is quicker.

Think about that for a few moments. In just seven words, two rhymes, he exposes and examines one of the most important human conditions – the relationship of men and women.

“Candy is dandy”. Yes it is. A thoughtful gift, obtained with effort and offered with affection, a token of feelings, and the result is hoped to be intimacy.

“But liquor is quicker”. Why bother? Get the bitch drunk and have your way. And then you’re outta there.

William Carlos could learn from this.

The Upside of Dying

I used to think about dying young. I don’t anymore, mostly because it’s too late for that. At best, I can die before my time, and there are some who would argue that.

I am actually quite at peace with death, and with life.

I have always lived life beyond my means – economically, emotionally, physically. I’ve spent whatever money I’ve made; my late wife made co-dependency desirable; and when you’re tall, you can hide a lot of cupcakes. It’s like I’ve charged a better life than I deserve on some cosmic credit card.

Dying young before my time is declaring bankruptcy and screwing the lender. You get the good life, and none of the indignities and agonies of old age. That’s the upside of dying.

The downside, quite obviously, is that you’re dead.

I’ve got one or two things to say before that happens, and this will be one of the forums I use. There are others, and I’ve linked them all somewhere in an effort to make sure I am heard, even if by just a few friends and acquaintances.

“He Was Fun While He Lasted” is my epitaph. I intend to live up to it.