As I Was Saying…

We did it! Although our efforts weren’t broadcast, we sang the national anthem and “God Bless America” at the Red Sox game yesterday. The adrenaline rush was beyond description, and I am still basking in the memory of 35,000+ cheering fans.

The fact that they weren’t necessarily cheering for us is pretty much beside the point. Red Sox fans love to cheer, and they gave us everything they had. When we sang to them, we did our best to return the favor.

When I finally crashed last night, it was as if someone had dropped a brick on my head. I slept like a stone, but I’ve still been tired today. The truth is that I’ve spent most of the day in a state somewhere between coma and outright death.

Red Sox home games are rich with tradition and ritual, a lot of it musical. Since shortly after 9/11, for example, live performers have sung a verse of “God Bless America” at every game during the seventh inning stretch. Since 2002, fans have sung along with Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” before the bottom of the eighth inning. “Sweet Caroline,” in fact, has evolved into a sort of performance art piece where audience participation is necessary to complete the song. In some ways it reminded me of the audience participation material that has developed and evolved in midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Baseball being what it is, of course, the antics at Fenway are a whole lot more wholesome.

But not necessarily more sanitary. The way vendors sell hot dogs in the stands, for example, was enough to turn my stomach. Here’s the deal: If you’re sitting in a middle of a row in the grandstands and you want a hot dog, the vendor takes the hot dog and bun and wraps a single cheap paper napkin around it. Both ends of the bun are completely uncovered. The vendor gives the hot dog and bun to the person at the end of the row who then passes it to the person beside him. And so it goes. Hand to hand to hand, until it reaches the customer. The customer then sends money back to the vendor, hand to hand to hand. Change, if any, then goes back to the customer, hand to hand to hand.

A young couple with two little boys sat at the end of our row. As we passed hot dogs and money back and forth, I said to her, “Isn’t it fortunate that all the people in in this row just washed and sanitized their hands.” The little boys looked puzzled. The young mother blanched.

The boys did not get vendor hot dogs, and neither did I. Make no mistake. If the Red Sox ask, we’ll go back to sing at Fenway Park again in a heartbeat, but if I want a hot dog I’ll go to the concession stand.

If all goes according to plan, The Grateful Dads (the quartet in which I am privileged to sing lead) will offer up the national anthem and a rendition of “God Bless America” at the Red Sox-Braves interleague game in Fenway Park on Sunday, as the Red Sox observe Maine Day and Fathers Day simultaneously. MPBN Radio, prompted by the first press release I’ve written since 2001, interviewed me yesterday. The interview now resides on the MPBN website with the headline Local Barbershop Quartet Lands Gig of a Lifetime.

This being New England, however, the potential fly in the ointment is the weather. The forecast for Sunday afternoon changes frequently, but it’s been nothing but variations on the theme of rain, rain, and more rain. As I write this, the forecast reads, “Cloudy with a 50 percent chance of showers.” Until I got the telephone call from the Red Sox on Tuesday afternoon, I didn’t care at all what Sunday’s weather might be. Ah, but what a difference an appeal to my vanity has made!

As an old fart with eight or ten treasured stories that friends and family are sick of hearing, I can set up a blog and hold forth at will without drawing much attention and without causing any harm at all. I like to think that’s at least partly because I have some sense of what’s appropriate.

The real reason, of course, may be a matter of demographics. White dudes over 60 don’t attract much attention unless filthy rich (see Warren Buffett), particularly grotesque (see Donald Trump – also rich) or otherwise infamous (see Dick Cheney – also rich and grotesque). Well over 90% of Americans, after all, are not white, male and over 60.

Apparently it’s an altogether different situation for young women. A recent story in the Chicago Tribune reports on a blog devoted to the grief of a woman whose baby supposedly died. The problem is that none of it happened. This left those who had supported her feeling like fools. There were thousands of them, and they resented being tricked.

The only parallel I can imagine is if I had spun a tale in the CaringBridge account of Marge’s cancer struggle—if I had told the story I told when she didn’t really have cancer, or if my actual response to her cancer had been to go all John Edwards on her.

You can gossip over the back fence without much in the way of real consequences. You can sit on a barstool and tell lies (isn’t practically everything said on a barstool a lie?) but blogging is somehow different. Blogging can feel anonymous on the writer’s end of things, but it is intimate on the reader’s end. If you tell your blog readers that your heart is broken, it better damned well be broken.

Since 1987, my wife Marge has taught at Portland High School, one of the most diverse schools in the country. For the last 15 years or so, she has read the names at graduation. It’s a formidable task because each graduating class includes students from every corner of the world. A typical class includes Bosnian, Cambodian, Chinese, Congolese, Croatian, Ethiopian, Hispanic, Polish, Russian, Rwandan, Serbian, Somali, Sudanese and Vietnamese names, along with the more familiar French, Irish and Italian. It’s a United Nations of names, and this year’s class was no exception.

As an added complication, some families, after being in the U.S. for a while,  have partly or completely Americanized their names. This is why Marge spends hours and hours in preparation. Last year a Cambodian girl whose first name was Touch (pronounced Tooch in Khmer) corrected Marge. “Nah,” she said, “it’s just Tuch, like ‘don’t touch that’.”

This year, however, a Cambodian girl with the same name wanted it pronounced Tooch. The class also included a student from a Polish family named Dziedzic. Marge consulted with a colleague who speaks Polish and learned how to say the name more or less in Polish, something like DJUH-djeetz. “Nice try with the Polish,” the smiling student said at graduation rehearsal, “but we just say DEEZ-ick.”

During Marge’s fierce battle with ovarian cancer through the winter, one of her goals was to be able to return to school in time to read the names at graduation. Pretty much everyone at the school was rooting for her because of who she is and also because there really isn’t anyone else in the school willing or able to tackle those names.

Just before Marge returned to school this spring, the principal met with a group of teachers to discuss scholarship recipients. In identifying the students, he apparently mangled many of the names. He later reported to Marge that after the meeting about five concerned teachers each approached him privately with the same urgent question: “Is Marge going to be back in time for graduation?”

…they came unto a land
In which it seeméd always afternoon.

—Tennyson, The Lotos-eaters

On Sunday, we attended a surprise anniversary party for our friends Craig and Ethel. They own and operate a summer resort known as The Cape on a lake not far from here.

We hadn’t visited the place for a long time. During the 80’s, however, we spent a week or two of nearly every summer at The Cape. In 1983, the year Elizabeth was three, we stayed in the Honeymoon Cottage. That’s where I took this picture on Sunday, and the sight and sound and smell of the place carried me back to that long ago summer.

The Honeymoon Cottage dates from a time when it was possible to build right on the water. The cottage is triangular and its narrow point actually extends over the water. The doorway shown in the picture opens to a small porch. Sitting on the porch is like being in a boat.

In the picture, the late afternoon sun streams through the windows, and that’s how I remember both the lake and the Honeymoon Cottage. No radio, no television, no telephone, no newspaper. We spent our days on the beach, or reading in the shade, walking in the woods or paddling a canoe along the shore.  There were long conversations, afternoon naps, and intimate evening meals with family and friends. At night we fell asleep to the sound of the lake lapping against the dock. In the morning, we lingered on the deck with cups of coffee.

When it was time to go home, we were never ready to leave.

Just when I think it’s safe to stop hating cellphone carriers, a story like this one comes along.

Seems a guy in Ohio had a sort of breakdown, perhaps including attempted suicide, and took off after swallowing a whole lot of pills. Responding to an emergency call, the local sheriff figured he could use the GPS feature of the guy’s cellphone to locate him.

But no. Verizon’s customer service rep said no dice because the guy was behind in his cellphone payments! The sheriff had to agree to pay $20 of the back balance to get Verizon to cooperate! By this time, the guy was almost dead. Fortunately for him, he was located in time by other searchers.

Now, in fairness to all concerned, there is probably more than this to the story. But here’s the statement from Verizon Wireless:

Verizon Wireless apologizes for our mistake. This particular issue has now been resolved. We will work to ensure our exemplary service to our nations first responders is on track, and we remind law enforcement to use our 24-7 hotline for public safety needs.

I’ve written enough press releases in my life to offer this rough translation of the above:

We did absolutely nothing wrong, but if a meaninglessly generalized apology will keep us from getting sued, then we’re willing to say we’re sorry.

 

“This particular issue” means cases involving guys in Carroll County, Ohio who have the exact plan this guy had and who need rescuing because they are nut cases.

 

“We will work to ensure” means that as soon as we get around to it we’ll consider creating a company task force charged with formulating, as time permits, recommendations about how we might head off bad press the next time we’re caught in a sh*t storm like this one.

 

We say we offer “exemplary service” whether you think so or not. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. This episode gives us the chance to make that claim, and we aren’t about to pass it up.

 

Here’s the take-home: if the stupid cop had called the right department, this whole thing wouldn’t have happened. Why isn’t the cop’s ass on fire here instead of ours?

Part of the problem is that there really aren’t enough standards in the cellphone industry. Every cellphone is its own universe. Imagine having to learn to drive all over again every time you bought a new car! In addition, every carrier offers a smorgasbord of plans carefully designed so as to be impossible to compare with plans offered by other carriers. The plans also bundle features you want with those you don’t want.

Our Verizon Wireless plan, for example, gives me 400 text messages per month (I use maybe 6). We have to pay for the 400 in order to get the family plan that will include my mother-in-law, who lives with us.

But maybe I’ve talked myself out of changing carriers here. I used to be an AT&T customer. I got over that when we were caught in a power blackout in NYC a few summers ago. The AT&T cell network went down. Verizon Wireless customers kept talking.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for their next advertising campaign: “Verizon Wireless. Possibly less inadequate in some ways than the competition.”

Years and years ago, I taught technical writing at the University of Tulsa. I wore out my students by telling them again and again that they should aim for voiceless writing. What I meant was writing that didn’t hint at the person behind the writing.  “Imagine yourself as the reader,” I would say. “When you’re trying to follow the instructions to put a gas grill together, you want the manual to be about the gas grill, not the person who wrote the manual.”

It’s sound advice for aspiring tech writers, easy to give but sometimes more difficult to follow. Voiceless, for example, is not the same thing as nonhuman! Consider this gem selected more or less at random from the instructions for IRS Form 1040:

If your economic stimulus payment was directly deposited to a tax-favored account and you withdraw the payment by the due date of your return (including extensions), the amount withdrawn will not be taxed and no additional tax or penalty will apply. For a Coverdell education savings account, the withdrawal can be made by the later of the above date or June 1, 2009. See the instructions for lines 15a and 15b, 21, and 59.

All those passive verbs invite me to imagine faceless drones swarming in a glass and steel hive. For all I know, of course, tax form instructions may really be machine generated. The IRS as The Borg.

At the other extreme, the writer becomes fully visible on the page. I sometimes like it when it’s done deliberately. In a professional journal I edited for several years, the author of a particularly complex article added a footnote about three quarters of the way through that said something like “If you’re still with me here, please let me know and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee!”

The problem I tried to warn my students about, however, was more subtle.  Last Christmas, for example, I was given a new alarm clock that has features the manufacturer is pretty excited about. The writer of the owner’s manual pretty obviously was charged with emphasizing these features, particularly the fact that the clock sets itself. Here’s what the manual says:

We all know how annoying it is to wake up in the morning and see the dreaded flashing “12:00” display on our clocks or clock radios. This means that your power was interrupted some time during the night while you were sleeping and your clock doesn’t know what time it is anymore. Unfortunately, it probably also means that you are late for work, or for school, again.

What do we know about the writer here? I think the story is mostly told in that final again.  The writer is someone who has no chance of waking up on time without an alarm, perhaps as a result of staying up too late. It’s also someone who has tried the “my alarm didn’t go off” excuse a few too many times. When I consider this in combination with the sloppy and abrupt pronoun switch from we to you after the first sentence, I get a pretty clear picture of the writer:  habitually running late, lacking focus, desperately striving to please but unwilling or unable to give the work the final edit it needs.

This is someone I would probably find exhausting to have around, and that’s a thought I shouldn’t be having at all as I read the manual. After all, I’m just trying to figure how to use my new clock! I don’t want to hear about roommate troubles, sleep issues, the saga of a psycho ex, and so on.

And that’s why all those years ago at TU, I used to sound like a broken record: “Get the information on the page, kids. Keep yourself off the page.”

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

 

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

 

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

—A.E. Housman

I wish I had had this little poem handy when I turned 25. That was the only time in my life that I really felt old. The phrase “quarter century” echoed in my mind and kept me more or less depressed for weeks.

Worse, I felt self-conscious about feeling bad. When I thought about it, I knew that twenty-five is not old, damn it, by any definition. Yet I felt ancient, and I felt stupid about feeling ancient. It was a losing proposition from every angle.

In 12 short lines, Housman seems to capture a similar phenomenon without self-consciousness as the ”I” in the poem realizes he has “only” 50 of the biblical three score and ten left to live. There I was at 25, with “only” 45 left!

If the three score and ten is accurate, as of next month I’ll have only seven left; yet I feel younger than I did at 25.

As of today, I’m making a real effort to revive this blog.

I know, I know. I’ve said the same thing a dozen times before, but maybe this time is different. Here’s the deal:

• My caregiver responsibilities are mostly met, and Marge has gone back to work.
• The longest damn winter I remember is finally over.
• I’ve filed for Social Security and am now officially retired.

Among the things I’ve been doing is spending more time with the news. As I expected, however, this is a mixed blessing. For one thing, there is the vicious, nonstop logorrhea of the Cheneys. Today, for example, cnn.com reports daughter Liz Cheney making the brainless claim that the Obama administration is “siding with the terrorists” by releasing some details about “enhanced interrogation” during the Bush years. She says it doesn’t tell “the whole story.”

While it may be true that we still don’t have the whole story, the material being released will tell a whole lot more of the story than the Bushies ever did. Liz, like her Dad, seems to be much, much more concerned about appearances than about reality. So, now that some of the story is coming out, Cheney fille starts complaining about incomplete disclosure.

Not, you understand, that she would like complete disclosure either. Like her father, she doesn’t want any disclosure at all! None. Zero. The apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree.

By virtue of what I’ve written here, of course, I open myself to the Bush/Cheney Right’s usual hectoring condescension. In their view I somehow hate America and, worse, am “naive.” The implication is that it’s asking too much to expect POTUS (and VPOTUS) actually to live up to those cherished American ideals we hear so much about.

I beg to differ. Even Dick Nixon didn’t try to justify torturing people!

On the other hand, maybe I have been naive. So I’m done trying to be open-minded about the Cheneys. Cheney père says he prefers Rush Limbaugh (a talk radio gasbag with a drug conviction) to Colin Powell (a decorated military hero with a decades-long record of public service) as a Republican leader.

And there you have it. You are known, Mr. Cheney, by the company you keep.

Did you ever wonder about that expression, “the greatest thing since sliced bread”?

No? Neither did I, but that all changed when I received an e-mail from Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Here’s what Prof. Bobrow-Strain had to say:

I am working on a book about the history America’s long love-hate relationship with sliced white bread—a story about how and why consumers get emotionally attached to processed foods. As part of this, I’m collecting stories and memories, particularly from Baby Boomers (or earlier generations), about white bread.

I’m hoping that you might be able to help this effort, either by contributing your own tales, or by helping me reach a broader audience with this request. I would appreciate any help you can offer.

What I’m interested in deals with questions like these:

• When was white bread served in your home?
• Who ate it and how much?
• Did your family like it, hate it, other?
• Who chose what kind of bread to get and how was this decision made?
• Do you have any particular memories about white bread’s place in your family?

Thank you in advance

Well. In my family “bread” meant “white bread.” I may have been in college before I ever saw any other kind of bread. I was certainly in college before I ever actually tasted any other kind of bread.

Overall, my mother was an indifferent cook. Part of the reason for this, I’m sure, was that she really couldn’t tell the difference between excellent food and mediocre food. The result was that a lot of wretched meals were served up at our house with a fair amount of pride. My father judged food solely on the basis of quantity. If there was a lot of something, then it was good.

But there was one notable surprise about my mother’s cooking: she baked superb white bread and dinner rolls. The reason for this was that she had been taught how to do it by the chef in a summer resort hotel where she had worked as a waitress before she and my father were married. As I understand the story, she had passed diners’ compliments along to the chef about the excellent bread and rolls he prepared. He asked my mother if she would like to learn how to do it, and she said yes—more likely because she liked the attention than from any interest in food preparation.

She was, however, always a good student. The chef taught her to understand bread at a deeper level than she could explain. She didn’t even bother with a written recipe. In anyone’s kitchen and with any oven, her bread always came out the same, and it was always fabulous.

Family and friends were always asking her to bake it, and she was usually happy to accommodate them (she liked the attention). Her own lack of discrimination, however, meant that we got a lot less of her bread at home. Instead we got Wonder Bread and Sunbeam Batter-Whipped Bread and their store-brand equivalents. This was the stuff that my friend Bill would squeeze into gummy balls for use as fish bait.

I know for a fact that Mom was the one who bought the Wonder Bread. My parents were rigorously conventional in many ways: Dad brought home his paycheck, and Mom ran the household. She was the one who did all of the grocery shopping and who made every single decision about what food was in the house.

One day about ten years before she died, I asked Mom to explain to me how she made bread. I hoped to be able to write a recipe that would produce a reasonable facsimile of her bread. My idea was that while she made bread and talked about what she was doing, I would write down what she said and did. I thought the recipe would emerge naturally (and definitively) from the notes I took, but I was doomed to failure.

For one thing, her process absolutely defied quantification. She started with two cakes of yeast, a cup of water and a cup of scalded milk. Happily I wrote:

• 2 cakes yeast, softened in ¼c. (?) warm water
• 1 c. warm water
• 1 c. scalded whole milk

but no other measurable quantities were involved. She added salt and sugar by pouring them into her hand and considering how the quantity appeared.

• 1-3 tsp. (?) salt
• ¼ c. (???) sugar

She added flour by the scoop until there was “enough.”

“How,” I asked, “do you know when there is ‘enough’?”

“It’s easy,” she answered, holding up the dough. “You add flour until the dough falls off your hand, just so… Then you knead it.”

“Um…”

• 4-7 c. flour (?)

“OK,” I said, “How hot should the oven be?”

“Here,” she said, opening the oven. “Roll up your sleeve and hold your forearm here by the oven. That’s the way it should feel when the oven is right.” I looked at the oven dial and guessed 375°.

• Preheat oven to 350°-400°.

“So, how long should it bake?”

“Bake it until it’s a nice golden brown,” she explained. “Be careful not to overcook it.”

On that particular day, with those particular loaves and that particular oven, the bread came out in about 30 minutes.

• Bake 20-40 min. until golden brown.

I worked up a recipe from what I had seen and heard and actually produced acceptable bread—but it was nothing like hers. Of course it was nothing like hers. I was trying to duplicate art by converting it first to science, then back to art. That much I now understand.

To this day, however, I puzzle over how it was that the woman with bread magic in her hand and eye thought Wonder Bread was just as good.