The Elephant in the Room

The Elephant in the Room

I read in the local newspaper this morning that another of my high school classmates had passed away. She was 61 years old.

I can't remember her.

I even pulled out the old, dusty senior yearbook and looked for her picture. I looked at it hard after I found it and tried to remember her. Still no memory of the girl. That's not conclusive evidence that I never knew her. When I attend class reunions, I don't remember LOTS of people and a lot of them remember me. Go figure. But maybe I had her in a class or two? Maybe not. More than likely I passed her in the hallways from time to time on our way to and from classes. Maybe we even smiled and nodded to each other. Or had mutual friends? I know I didn't date her. I definitely remember all the girls I dated!

As I recall there were a number of semi-formal groups or cliques in the high school where I attended. There were the brainiacs, the jocks, the wienies, the theater bunch, the semi-normals and the criminals and criminal wannabes. Maybe a couple others that I don't remember. Homemakers? Farmers? I'll let you try to guess what group I belonged to. I wonder what group the deceased girl belonged to?

I graduated with a large class of seniors in the mid-'60's. That was over 40 years ago, if you're counting. I remember a year later, when I was only 19, and the shock I felt when one of the first of my classmates died. That one I did know – not closely, but I definitely did know him. We went to grade school together for a few years, then four years of high school. He could probably come up with my name if he saw me. I know I could his. He was killed in Vietnam in 1966, if my memory is correct. Killed dead half-way around the world. He was the first of three classmates who lost their lives in that conflict. I knew two of them fairly well. Their names are engraved on the war memorial wall at the local cemetery. The hero's memorial.

I think about him and about the girl who just passed. At least she was given some years to hang a life upon. She was gifted with 43 more years to work with after high school, to build a career, to marry and to love a spouse, to have children and even grandchildren. To make a mark and to accomplish something or at least to have the chance to accomplish something. Some would call it a long life. I wouldn't use that adjective. She's the same age as I am and I don't consider myself old, but that sort of judgment is, of course, purely subjective. When I was a kid, someone of my present age I'd have considered ancient. I surely wouldn't now. But when I compare her years to the miserly one year after high school that the other fellow was given, there's really no comparison. She had a life. He didn't.

I find myself, in my daily life, performing some of the same actions I recall my father doing at somewhat the same time in his life. One of them is to check the obituaries on the front page of the newspaper as one of my morning tasks. To look at the names and the ages. To look for familiar names and to look at similar ages to my own.

To do a little quiet math.

It's a morbid activity but it has become a habit that I'm not willing to give up. It seems so odd, too, reading of fellow travelers on this earth of my age passing away from – apparently – natural causes! Spooky stuff. Because when I look at the world I feel very much the young man who graduated with his high school class those long years ago. The reflection in the mirror tells me a different story, however. I don't know where that ol' codger came from, but he's been hanging around for a while and I'm growing used to his face, I guess.

Most of my parent's generation are gone and the ones who are left are definitely getting quite long in the tooth and thin on the ground. I guess it's my classmates and I who have inherited the distinction of being the “mature” generation at the present time. Us baby-boomers are now the movers and shakers of the world. What a disconcerting thought.

I don't think I've ever moved or shaken anything.

I experienced something a few weeks ago that demonstrated to me that I had slipped into the “older” generation in the short period of time while I hadn't been looking. I was having a discussion with some workmates at the office. An old friend of mine of similar age and I were discoursing on something that had happened to us “a few years ago”. The incident was fresh in our minds and seemed, at least to us, to have happened “only a couple of years ago”although, in our hearts, we knew it'd been a bit longer than that. Then, out of the blue, another workmate – a younger lady who was listening intently to the conversation, said innocently, “Wow, listening to you guys is just like listening to the History Channel!”

My friend and I looked at each other and suddenly realized that our “recent” memory was of an experience that had probably happened before she had been born! It was funny and we all laughed, but the fact of our advanced years had suddenly become the proverbial “elephant in the room that no one talks about”.

After that incident I took a look around the office I work at. The man I work my normal shift with was born the year I got married. The other folks in my immediate office area averaged 10 to almost 30 years younger. My boss is that same age as my younger brother. I'm the old man in the office! When the hell had that happened? Then I relax and enjoy the position. As I always am wont to say, “Getting old sure as hell beats the alternative!”

So I more or less ignore the passing years. I still enjoy a crisp fall day, a thick and juicy steak, fresh strawberries and the sight of pretty girls everywhere I look. I still look forward to summer vacations, playing with my dogs, watching a new movie and returning home to my wife after a busy night at work.

I guess as long as the heart still beats, the aches and pains are bearable and my mind remains as clear and impressionable as the 18-year-old high school graduate that still resides inside this more “mature” body, I'll try to forget the years that accumulate and the gray hairs that multiply.

But I'll still do my little math problems with the newspaper every morning and I'll still give thanks for being around to read it.

Gizmo

Gizmo

I drive a lot.

Maybe not as much as a truck driver or a salesman on a motor route, but enough that I spend an hour and a half to two hours on the road most work days. The place where I work is a county away from where I live and the route to work goes through a number of small towns, so I can't get there very fast. The drive can get lonely, too. All those solitary hours staring at the highway. So I turn on the radio and listen to this and that. I'm not a huge music fan, so a lot of the time I'm tuning around for talk shows. During my hours of travel, which are afternoons heading to work and after midnight on my way home, the choices are few in this part of Ohio. I've discounted a few I can't stand to listen to and that leaves two stations that I gravitate toward. On the way to work in the mid-afternoons I usually start out with a Cleveland sports and news station who's host at that time of day is entertaining and infuriating by turns. Some days he's quite interesting and I enjoy listening to him. Other days he is, quite simply, difficult to stomach. On those particular days he's so annoyingly opinionated that he makes my skin crawl. Or he's off on a rant deprecating his radio staff unmercifully, calling them idiots, fat slobs, incompetents. I marvel at how they maintain their loyalty to him. I don't believe I could ever work for him. I know it's probably just an act but it feels real. So on those annoying days I flip to my alternative station. The host there is a nationally-known right-wing drum-beater.

No, not Rush. Another one.

Most of the time he's a one-note Charley. Attack the left, attack anything that might have the terrible word LIBERAL attached to it, attack, attack, attack. I think I could do his show most of the time in my sleep. He repeats himself a lot. He plays clips of his hated political foe's words over and over again until they've sunk into your subconscious and you begin to believe them unthinkingly. I guess that's probably his goal. His attack-dog mantras are interesting in a bad-accident-on-the-road-ahead-don't-look kind of way. You wonder what new misquote from the political left he's going to latch onto next. But his rants soon grow old and I grow impatient for more interesting material. Or more sinisterly, I find myself nodding my head in full agreement with him. He is very good at what he does. Even as a most-of-the-time-conservative I usually grow disenchanted with him after a while and start pitying his targets of the day. And switch the radio.

I feel like a tennis ball sometimes, going back and forth from the one yo-yo to the another. Sometimes I even give up and listen to music.

On the way home, after midnight, the choices are even more interesting. One station airs a well-known “alternative” radio show. It has ghosts, aliens, demons, lots of conspiracy-theorists, monsters, various flavors of apocalypse scenarios and other “psychic” material as its subject most nights. I find this quite interesting, at least most of the time, being a wierdo at heart, listening to the “experts” in the particular oddball field of the night converse with the always-pleasant and always-interested nice guy host. The numer of earnest nutters on this earth seems to be inexhaustible. But when they open up the phone lines to the public for their questions I find myself growing annoyed. The amount of dumb people with telephones who can hear this program and are up in the dead of the night is incredible! I'd sure like to think a lot of the calls are put-ons or fakers, but its pretty apparent that they're real and it's quite obvious that most of the caller's family's gene pool is really shallow. I can listen to this program quite contentedly some nights and others, either from subject matter or the incredible stupidity of the callers, I can't handle for a minute. Occasionally it's just too creepy to listen to while I travel the dark highways heading home. Usually it's just too dumb. On those nights I flip to the other station and listen to yet another conservative talk show guy. He's much easier on the ears than the afternoon attack dog. But that station is difficult to hear after dark most evenings, so I have to crank it up and listen to a lot of static to enjoy it. Some nights it's not worth the aggravation. So its back to music again.

So I was ready for another diversion to help my through my miles and my hours on the road. And I found one a few weeks ago.

I am on my home computer pretty much every day. One morning my cousin sent me an email and told me about a website called WOOT. This website appears to be one of the standard shopping sites, but they have a twist. They advertise only ONE thing per day for sale. It might be a computer, a set of speakers, a pair of ear buds, a coffee maker, a DVD recorder or maybe an MP3 player. It's usually something electronic or some sort of gadget. They have an unknown (to you) amount of these items for sale each day and when that amount is gone, they mark it “sold out” and you have to wait until midnight to see what the next new item for sale might be. It's a neat concept, their prices are very reasonable and I've almost bought any number of items.

A couple weeks ago I took the plunge and placed an order through WOOT.

For sale was one of those GPS gizmos that attach to your car's windshield and show you how to get from where you are to where you want to go. It was a refurbished Navigon 2100 and had a very reasonable price attached to it. I had been kinda looking at these things for a year or so and had decided they were too expensive – especially for what was, in essence, a toy. But this price was way reasonable, my queries on the Internet on the quality of this particular device were fairly positive, so I took a chance and bought it.

I remember the first time I used it. I'd received it one day and soon finished doing the setup on the unit as the directions showed. I carried it out to my car and attached it to the windshield and plugged it into the cigarette lighter socket. Then I turned it on.

And it knew where I was! How cool was that! A little map popped up and showed me that I was... at home! Wow!

I entered the address of the office where I work and, bingo, my route was displayed. I started my drive and the pleasant lady's voice began directing my turns and what streets and roads I should travel to get to my destination. Some of her ideas on how to get to work were quite amusing that first day. She needed a bit of tweaking. But after I did that, she was right on! I tried Miss Gizmo on a few other destinations and took some imaginative routes and she still got me where I was going quite handily. And as I would drive along I could glance over at her and... there I was! Traveling down the highway on my way to wherever.

I've had her for a few weeks now and enjoy her company on my drives. She is companionable and knows how to keep her mouth shut unless I start losing my way. Then she takes me by the hand (figuratively, of course) and leads me in the right direction. She always knows where I am, my speed, my direction, my elevation and how far I have to go to achieve my goal.

Sometimes I wish my wife were as informative!

So I'm enjoying Miss Gizmo's company for the time being. I'm sure one day she'll become commonplace and she'll be relegated to riding in my glove box instead of my windshield. She'll sit there quietly, waiting for the times when I need a hand navigating my way through life. And when I do she'll be my pal again, sitting happily on my windshield, pointing the way.

A Cool Story

A COOL STORY

Very close to seven years ago, in July of the year 2001, I was in my cubicle at work and had just started my first cup of morning coffee when I was tapped on the shoulder by a female supervisor.

“Got a minute?” she asked.

I replied, “Sure,” and followed her to a small vacant office out in the main the hallway. There was a strange man sitting at the desk in the almost empty room and another, higher-level supervisor standing in front of the desk with a folder in her hand facing me. They both had serious looks on their faces. My heart rose into my throat as I realized the man sitting behind the desk was one of the corporate “axemen” and I immediately knew what was coming. I was informed by this dour duo that I had been “downsized” that morning and my services with the company would no longer be needed.

Needless to say it was quite a shock. Maybe not as huge a shock as it could have been, as rumors had been flying around during the previous weeks that a “purge” was imminent and no one was immune. I had been a loyal employee with this large telecommunications firm for over 19 years, had been a survivor of a few previous employment downsizings and had been feeling pretty safe. Needless to say I was living in a dream world.

So there I was, in my mid-50's and looking for a job. It was a scary and humbling experience, as it had been a very long time since I had last been unemployed. My now-previous employer did allow the group of us who had been downsized that day to attend an 8-hour seminar on job seeking and I took advantage of it. My last corporate benefit. One of the basic precepts given to us in the seminar was that your new job, from that day on, was job hunting, and we should endeavor to perform that work with as much diligence as we would a “real” job.

For the next 12 weeks I spent from 4 to 6 hours a day job hunting. I personally visited every job procuring agency and headhunter within an hour's drive in all directions, talked to them all and phoned them regularly for updates. I registered at all appropriate web sites that could conceivably help me find a job. I networked with everyone I could think of who might possibly be instrumental in hiring me or might know of an employer looking for someone. I also went to the local library every day, read all the job want-ads in a half-dozen papers from nearby towns and cities and mailed resumes and cover letters to all of them that were even remotely applicable to any of my skill sets.

And did that five days a week.

One day, three months into my search, I received my first invitation to interview for a job I'd applied for in a town about 25 miles away. I accepted the invitation and visited with them the following week. Apparently I had the necessary skills and experience necessary for the job and was hired shortly after. Since my long-term previous job entailed a 100-mile-a-day round trip commute, the new one at 50 miles seemed easy.

What's so cool about this story? Hang in there, gentle reader, the cool is coming.

Since the new job was with a county government, the new wages that I would be receiving were considerably less than what I had been collecting at the nationally known telecommunications company where I used to work. So I decided to retain my present auto and use it for my new commute. It was an older Toyota, still in good mechanical shape, got great mileage and I figured it would be fine for a few more years at least.

Last year, during the summer, I noticed that the air conditioner in the Toyota was not doing its job as well as it used to. It would cool, but the air coming out of the vents was only mildly cooler than the outside air. By the time this was starting to become an annoyance, the summer was pretty much over and the air conditioner was no longer needed. But the fact of the slow failure of the a/c remained in my mind throughout the winter and into the following spring.

When the days grew warmer this summer, the status of the air conditioner and its ability to perform its function again grew in importance. It just wasn't doing its job. Only vague cooling was reaching my sweaty brow and the commute was beginning to be a chore. I'd experienced a failed a/c in a previous car and, when I had that system examined, I was informed it would cost several hundred dollars to repair. Money I did not have at the time. Money I didn't have at the present, either. I feared the same would be the story with my old Toyota.

As luck would have it, I have a friend who works in the same department in the County building where I work who I knew was extremely knowledgeable about repairing things. He had been a Sear's repairman for decades and had become an expert in how to fix almost anything. When I explained my predicament and my concerns about the horrific expenses that might be needed to fix my difficulty, he suggested a possible solution.

“Stop by my house next weekend and I'll take a look. If it's what I think it might be, your fix might be simple and inexpensive.”

The two words “simple” and “inexpensive” were music to my ears, so I drove the two miles to his house the following Sunday and we took a look at the innards of my engine. He took one look at the hoses and pipes and other “stuff” in there and said, “Yep, it's just as I thought. Let's run up to Walmart. We'll get a can of refrigerant and see what happens.” We returned from the mega-store 20 minutes later with a can of auto refrigerant. He hooked it up to a hose and meter he retrieved from his garage and attached the hose to a fitting on another hose in my motor. He handed it to me and said, “Press the trigger and gently wiggle the can as it fills.” I pressed the trigger, wiggled the can and watched as the cooling “stuff” flowed down the hose and into my car. In a matter of 5 minutes the process was complete and I removed the hose from the fitting.

I could reach in the open window of the car and feel the air streaming from the vents in the passenger compartment. Cold air!

It was fixed!

I thanked my friend profusely and drove home – washed in cool, refreshing air.

The total cost of the refrigerant was under $8. The time involved was, including the trip to Walmart, under a half hour.

On my commute to work Monday, which was a real scorcher, I had a hard time keeping the smile from my cool, dry, unsweating face. I was, once again, enjoying my daily drive.

I was again the owner of a cool ride!

A Parade Runs Through It

A PARADE RUNS THROUGH IT

Exactly fifty years ago my hometown celebrated its 150^th birthday – its sesquicentennial. I was an eleven year old boy and I remember it very well. Which is quite disconcerting. I mean, that's a half-century ago! Oh my!

Anyhow, a half-century ago my hometown had a celebration commemorating 150 years of existence. I remember that, during the months before the festivities, the men of the town were ordered to grow beards. I was never quite sure exactly why they had to do this. Were they honoring the pioneers? The town founders?

My father grew a wonderful, chestnut-colored beard. I can still picture him as he used butch wax on the tips of the mustache and then twirled the points of it into curls. He looked remarkably like Sir Walter Raleigh, at least to my pre-teen eyes. Some of the men in the town, for whatever reason, didn't want to grow the facial hair or their jobs required them to be beardless. Those gentlemen had to buy shaving permits and carry them on their persons for the privilege of going smooth-cheeked. Anyone caught beardless and without a permit had to serve a sentence in a old-time jail cell and had to call friends and relatives to bring bail to have him released. All in “fun” of course. At least for the jailers. Beards weren't very prevalent in the late '50's, so seeing so many of them on the streets was a treat for us kids.

The days when a lot of men wore beards were a decade or so in the future when the hippies started to make them popular.

Along with the beards that the men had to wear, there were proclamations from the mayor, extra fireworks for the 4^th of July celebration, a time capsule to be sealed and, of course, a big parade.

I remember the '58 parade. I remember the floats, the bands, the new and old cars. I remember the beauty queens although, at age 11, I wasn't quite sure why they were memorable. I can still see the politicians riding in their convertibles, the military units marching in their crisp uniforms, the police and sheriffs marching. And I remember all the equestrian units with their beautifully groomed horses, and bright, shiny saddles and reins. It was an exciting time for me.

Last Saturday I watched another parade as it wound it's way through my hometown. This one was celebrating its 200^th anniversary and it will be my last one of this sort. The next one will undoubtedly be held in 2058 and I would be 111 years old that year if I were still alive. Although 111 is an interesting number, I really doubt I'll see it. Hell, if I see next Wednesday I should be thankful. In any event, I was honored to be among the bystanders at this year's bicentennial parade.

I marveled as I watched at the similarities between the two parades. There were the floats, of course. Many of them commemorating the same things as before – 4H groups and their ongoing projects, churches demonstrating tenets of their faith, fraternal organizations in all their finery with feathers, swords and jewels of office around their necks, military auxiliaries and, of course, beauty queens. I appreciated the young ladies more this time around! Then there were the politicians waving and smiling to present and future constituents. The governor himself participated in this one, striding alongside his convertible and kibitzing with the crowds. The military units were present also. I noticed and participated in the enthusiastic applause as the United States Marines Color Guard marched proudly by in their dress blues. More old and new cars, more boy and girl scouts, more baton twirlers. And more beautiful horses either pulling historical wagons or being ridden by all manner of smiling horsemen and women.

Some things were new, however. Ronald McDonald on a Segway was new. Batman and Superman on a Cable Television Truck were definitely new. And the multitudes of children participating in the parade were new. They're the ones that will be sitting where I sat when the new '58 parade that will surely be brought forth at its appropriate time is kicked off.

This parade is now one for the history books. And I wonder what the one in fifty years will look like.

Perhaps it will feature flying cars! Astronauts who have walked on new worlds. Maybe the floats will actually float on anti-gravity devices. And perhaps some visitor from a distant star will join us by sitting in a convertible and waving to the crowds.

But I bet the horses will still be there. The military units will still march proudly down the main street. The firetrucks and the boy and girl scouts will surely be there. And the beauty queens?

You better believe they'll still be there!

The past is the future is the past.