Shopping for Parking

~ Lee Swanson ~ 7 Comments

I went to Costco the other day. That’s not the news here. I have been to Costco before. I have been coming to Costco since before it was Costco.

A man named Sol Price opened a membership warehouse wholesale place in San Diego in 1976. He called it Price Club, because he could. It was in a huge old former airplane hangar. Price Club was originally intended for gas station marts and mom and pop convenience stores to be able to buy in bulk at wholesale prices. In time it opened up to individuals, but you had to work for a non-profit, be a teacher or qualify in some other way to get the chance to buy the twenty-five-dollar membership.

Price Club expanded to several other cities and was very successful, selling items in bulk, when the executive vice president of merchandising moved to Seattle and took the idea with him. He and another guy opened a warehouse store they called Costco, because they could. They were very successful too, and in the nineties merged with Price Club and eventually bought them out. Because they could.

Now they will sell a membership to anyone and it will serve your needs from cradle to grave. Literally. You can buy cradles, and you can buy caskets at Costco. Of course, you have to buy three caskets at a time, because they are shrink-wrapped together. So that’s kind of a downside.

And good luck dropping the casket off at a cemetery and expecting it to be buried. There are laws and regulations about that sort of thing. Unless you happen to own some big piece of property like your very own golf course. Then your ex-wife and your secret documents and who knows what else can be buried wherever you like, apparently.

Anyway, I went to Costco the other day.

I just needed to pick up a couple of things. Cheryl advised me to go early, when there would be parking available in the same ZIP code. ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan, but that’s for another blog on another day.

So, Costco. I always take Cheryl’s advice, particularly about Costco. She is a seasoned Costco shopper.

The warehouse opens at 9:45, though it’s supposed to open at 10:00. No one knows why. Literally no one knows why. But if you are one of the first ones, if you time it just right, if you get there precisely fifteen minutes early, and the doors open up in front of you…there is no real advantage.

I drove in, took a prime spot in the nearly empty parking lot, and read my emails. In a few minutes I became aware that people were clattering about so I sprung from my car to see what was the matter. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but elderly shoppers scurrying to be among the first 95 people in the door.

I thought this was odd. What was the rush?  It wasn’t like Costco was going to run out of whatever they had come here to buy. It’s a warehouse. If it’s not on the shelf it’s on the fifteen pallets above the shelf. Settle down.

“But I want to get the very first broasted chicken of the day.” Sure.

The only point in getting there early is to park close to the door. These folks accomplished that goal, and then they walked halfway to Tijuana to get to the back of the line and then had to walk all the way forward, past their own car to get to the front where the shopping carts are welded together.

And then I saw the shoppers who got there early to park close to the door and took the opportunity to walk several laps around the 200-acre parking lot. Walking and stretching, bending, and pumping their arms. Once again people, it is about being lazy and parking close, it’s not about getting your 10,000 steps in before breakfast.

I leaned on my fender and thumbed through the phone until the line reached me. Once it settled, I walked in, picked up the stuff I wanted and walked out eleven minutes later.

As Cheryl had warned me, the parking lot was now full. Cars were zigzagging up one lane and down the next looking for the first open spot. Mind you, this was post-Christmas. It’s just another day at Costco. As I got to my car, two 18-passenger SUVs were jockeying for position to drive in the instant I backed out. (How can it be a “sports” utility vehicle when it’s as big as a house, you ask? Because it can carry the entire team and all their equipment). I didn’t wait to see what would happen to my poor beleaguered compact car parking spot. But I did exclaim, ere I drove out of sight, “Good luck to you all, you should have parked overnight.”  

An October Story

~ Lee Swanson ~ 9 Comments

I was at one of those interminable management workshops where the “facilitator” decided it would be a great icebreaker to reveal “something people don’t know about you.” It apparently had not dawned on her that there may be a reason to want to keep certain things to yourself. So, I shuffled those to the side, and just said my dad was a mortician. One woman blurted out, “well that explains a lot.” (I still don’t know what she meant by that). Someone else asked if it had changed my attitude toward death. I said I didn’t think so, since it was only attitude I had ever had. But I guess the ice was broken.

“What did your dad do?” is an innocent enough question. But my answer is guaranteed to get a reaction. Some laugh, some shudder, some raise an eyebrow. But all my life, when someone asked, I knew what was coming.

The truth is, I never thought there was anything weird or spooky or unusual about his profession. He was just my dad. Sitting around at the chapel while he was working wasn’t any different for me than if it had been a grocery store or a law office. I was just waiting for a ride home. When I turned sixteen, I started helping him on calls when someone died. Unfortunately for me — and of course the person who died — it was often the middle of the night. The phone would ring and wake him up. He’d sit up on the edge of the bed with his glasses on, a pen in his hand and answer it before the third ring. There was no voicemail, no answering machine and you couldn’t let the call go unanswered even if there had been. He was always on call.

I went with him often, it was my summer job, my weekend job, and my overnight job. I remember one early Sunday morning in October in particular. I was twenty and a senior at the University of Minnesota. I happened to be home for the weekend so I got the wake-up call rather than one of the men he would normally call. It was one of those gray, chilly October Minnesota mornings that remind you that winter will be setting in soon. We drove to the chapel, took the hearse out into the country and stopped at a farmhouse where the farmer lay dead in his bed. We lifted the body on to a gurney and wheeled it into the hearse. I waited in the car while he talked with the family for a while and then we drove back to the funeral chapel. While he embalmed the body I sat on a stool in the corner, and we talked about school. Minneapolis was an hour drive away, and sometime that afternoon, I would catch a ride with another guy who had come home that weekend and had a car.

Once he was done and we were home, we changed clothes and he and Mom and I went to the Catholic church in a nearby little farm burg for their annual fall bazaar. The church was just about the only thing still standing there. The school had been closed and the kids bused into town, and there was a post office grocery store across the street. But the church still drew a crowd. They served a family style chicken dinner in the basement, with mashed potatoes, gravy, canned peas and carrots, fresh baked dinner rolls and pumpkin pie. We weren’t Catholic. We weren’t anything, religion-wise, but he thought it was a good idea to come to functions like this, and we went every year. Not that he advertised. He didn’t need to. His was the only funeral chapel in the town, the only one until the next actual town, ten miles away. No one would think of doing business in that town if you lived in ours, whether it was the funeral home or the hardware store. It was just that kind of hometown.

It wasn’t a lot more than a dot on the map, almost halfway between Minneapolis and Duluth, on old Highway 61, (not to be confused with the Dylan album). It was the county seat and according to the sign at the city limits, home to 2,172 people, with a lake on the east end and a river running through it. It was Minnesota after all; wherever you are, there’s a lake only a skipping stone’s throw away. One of those little Midwest towns with just one stoplight, and a root beer stand at the end of town. Main Street still lived up to its name. The freeway that skirted town had only been completed for a few years, and there was no Walmart. Yet.

At the church, he joked with the priest and greeted several of the parishioners. Everyone knows everyone in a town that size. He poked his head in the kitchen to thank the ladies for the meal and we made our way out through the line of people who were still waiting to get in. We didn’t stay for the raffle.

No one could imagine that four hours later, Dad would be dead.

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He grew up on a farm just outside of town, and until he started school his parents spoke Swedish at home, so he did too. His folks could speak English and they gave up Swedish for the sake of the education of him and his younger sister. But he always said that if it hadn’t been for Johnny Troleen from the neighboring farm who translated for him, he would still be in first grade.

He never intended to stay on the farm. He knew early on what he wanted. A boy in school had died when he was a kid, and Dad was one of the pallbearers. He watched the mortician all through the funeral and decided that is what he wanted to do. He had little idea of what the job really was all about, but his mind was made up. As a high school student, he pumped gas and saved his money to go to college. Everything was looking up. Except, it was 1929. The Great Depression set in, the bank closed and he lost every dime of his savings.

He kept working and graduated from high school in 1931. With what little he had scraped together he went to the university anyway. He got a job at one of the funeral homes in Minneapolis answering the phone on nights and weekends, doing janitorial work and anything else they told him to do. It hardly paid anything, but that barely mattered. There was an apartment above the funeral home where he could stay and that was worth a lot.

Mortuary science was the last “short course” offered at the university. He went to school six days a week, ten hours a day and didn’t study anything but mortuary science. That included a lot of the prerequisites for medical school — biology, anatomy, chemistry, physiology, that sort of thing — but none of the language and sociology of a liberal arts education. There was psychology, but it was part of his curriculum, psychology for mourners.

Ten months after his first class, he was a 19-year-old college graduate, and still needed to do an internship for a year. A funeral home up near Duluth took him on, but even after he had completed his year, he couldn’t get a state license because he wasn’t yet 21. So he stayed. As he had done all through his college year and beyond, he answered the phones and worked weekends and nights, except now he did some of the actual work he had prepared for.

Even after he got his license, he stayed on. It was 1934 and there were no jobs. His parents and sister came to visit but he couldn’t leave his little room above the funeral home. He was on call. They went out to a restaurant and brought food back to him and sat and talked until it was time for them to go home. On the drive home, his dad had made up his mind. “We have to get him out of there. He’s a goddamn prisoner.” Little did any of them realize, that’s what he had signed up for.

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His father negotiated the rent on a vacant building in town and they brought him home to start his own funeral chapel. The world was still in the throes of the Depression. Plus, there was already another funeral home in town. But he had some of that hometown loyalty and he was getting by. Then, as macabre as it may seem, opportunity struck. A popular high school girl was killed in a terrible car accident. It hit at the heart of the town, and it seemed as though no one talked about anything else.

For whatever reason, fate or happenstance, the family chose him to handle the funeral. The young girl was horribly disfigured in the accident. He called upon everything he had learned and virtually reconstructed her face. The girl’s father looked at her and thought it was a miracle. The funeral was held at the high school auditorium and the casket was open. For the longest time after that, people talked about that funeral.

The other mortician in the town stayed in business another six months but never got another case. He moved away and for nearly forty more years, my dad was the town mortician.

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Mom grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, close to North Dakota and after college taught home economics. She came to town to work for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency. Her job was to teach farm wives to use new kitchen appliances. Pressure cookers were a new invention then, and she introduced dozens of housewives to that new-fangled appliance, and others. She and dad met on a blind date at the ballroom on the east side of the lake. I never saw them dance, but I guess they did, at least once.

Dad’s business did well. In time he was able to buy a vacant lot a couple of blocks off Main Street. Mom drew up plans and they got his own funeral chapel built. The same building, with very few modifications, still stands on that corner and still bears our name. Year in and year out, he averaged seventy funerals a year. Enough that he could handle alone and provide for the family. Mom gave up the pressure cooker lessons, got a funeral director’s license and worked with him in the business, helping to conduct funerals. In 1948 my brother was born, and three and a half years later, I came along. By then, they were both inching toward forty years old and that was old to be having a child.

When my brother started school, Dad ran for the school board and won easily. At the first meeting he was chosen to be chairman, and he kept getting elected and kept getting appointed chairman until I graduated. He and the superintendent lobbied a state legislative committee for a vocational school in our town. The committee agreed, the legislature agreed, the governor signed off on it, and it was built when I was in high school.

He apparently made an impression. When there was an opening in the state legislature both the Republican and Democratic county chairmen came to ask him to run and promised not to let anyone run against him. It was flattering, but he had a business to run and couldn’t leave it.

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One of the paradoxes of his job was that, largely because of the vehicle he owned, he also ran the area ambulance service. The hearse could be easily reconfigured into an ambulance and he both rushed people to hospitals to help save their lives and also took dead bodies away.

Even though it was his life’s work, and it was the only thing he ever wanted to do, the job was hard as hell. He told me one day that if it weren’t for the sense that he was helping people when their world was crashing down on them, the morbidity of the job would have driven him crazy. There’s no question that the dead bodies and the embalming were the easy parts of the job. Helping families through the tragedy was what it was all about.

Even though I worked with him when I was in high school and college, and I was at the funerals, I only ever once really saw what he did, because I wasn’t there for most of it. It was when his uncle Carl died. Dad had lived with Uncle Carl for a couple of years during high school and they stayed close. Carl was a district judge, and he and Aunt Em lived about forty miles away. Dad was really shaken by his death. I knew that, but I didn’t think anything of it. We drove to their house the day before the funeral. The whole family was gathered there. On the drive over, Dad didn’t say more than three words. He was inside himself. He was beside himself. He was hurting like the rest of Carl’s family.

When he parked the car, I could literally see him put his own sorrows aside as he walked to the front porch and squared his shoulders, quickened his step and went to work. He greeted everyone, he forced a little smile, hugged, shook hands and without seemingly doing anything special, let everyone feel that they were going to be okay. It was all right to cry, to grieve, and it would take time, but it was going to be all right. There wasn’t any religion to it; that was someone else’s job. And he was the last person to bring that up anyway. I don’t know how he did it, but I saw it happen in front of me, and I didn’t really see anything at all. It just happened.

And that is what his profession was really all about. He dealt with the dead, but he took care of the living. And that day I understood, he was damn good at it.

He kept office hours, mostly just to be available if someone wanted to know how to handle some of the endless paperwork that comes when a family member dies. People knew they could count on him for that. It wasn’t part of the job; it was part of what he did because they needed help.

While he seemed well suited for it, it was stressful, and he dealt with it, sometimes with a glass or two of brandy at night. He wasn’t so much the prisoner his father saw as he was a slave to the telephone. There were no pagers, certainly no cell phones. If he wanted to relax and go fishing, he would take the boat out on the river and circle back within view of the house every half hour or so. If there had been a phone call of a death, my brother and I would run out and hang a white flag — an old pillowcase on a stick — from the dock and he would come in and go to work.

The phone setup we had was pretty sophisticated for the 50’s and 60’s. The phone company installed a bell on the outside of the house, and both the house phone and the chapel phone rang at home. They each had their own ringtone. If we were all outside, somebody had to stay close enough to the house to be able to run in and answer the chapel phone if it rang.

In his life, they took three vacations. He and Mom drove to Florida with another couple when my brother and I were small and could stay with a neighbor. Every night when they stopped, he would call his counterpart from the next town who was covering for him, to see if he was needed. If the answer had been “yes” he would have come home. Vacation over. As luck would have it, they got to be away for ten days. About half of that was the drive down and back.

When I was in second grade, we went to California during what used to be called Easter vacation. It was the first plane trip any of us had taken, and the only one we would ever take together. We got seats that faced each other, and after the initial excitement wore off, I’m told I slept on the floor most of the way. Those were the days when you dressed up to get on a plane. We flew first to San Francisco, where my brother developed an affinity for shrimp cocktail on Fisherman’s Wharf; then Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, Marineland of the Pacific. It was all amazing to us. A few years later, he bought a brand-new Oldsmobile and we drove to Washington DC and New York. There was the same nightly phone call. We kids held our breaths, and then we went on.

The job was hard on Mom, though she didn’t let on to the family, and rarely to him. It was what it was.

For all of that, we had a good life. They bought a small two-bedroom house that looked out on the river and the lake, on a large lot with a garden and detached garage. There was a boathouse for the fishing boat. In the winter he would clear the snow off the ice, and it was an instant skating rink. My brother and several of the neighborhood kids took advantage of that. I stayed in the house. It was cold out there for godsake; I wanted no part of it.

My brother was four and I was a baby when they added to the house to expand the living room. Now there was a big picture window facing the water. The laundry was in the basement, along with a “rec room” with a full-size slate pool table.

We kept growing and they knew we were each going to need our own room. Mom drew up a plan and they called a carpenter and decided to add a bedroom and bathroom. We finally didn’t have to go into the basement to shower. Our little house by the river was suddenly one of the larger houses that people would point out to visitors when they went by in their boats.

We didn’t think it was anything special. It was just our house. But he saw to it that if Mom wanted something, they bought the best they could afford. One day she said something offhandedly about the drapes looking old. The next day there were books of samples and swatches on the dining room table. She was more frugal that he was, and it got to where she wouldn’t mention wanting anything. He did tell us often it would have been good for us to go through the Depression because we’d learn the value of a dollar. On the other hand, he gave us money pretty much any time we asked, and sometimes when we didn’t.

One Sunday, we went to Minneapolis for the Aquatennial Boat Show. We ran around crawling all over the speedboats and pretending we were zooming across the lake. By the time we left he had replaced the fishing boat with a ski boat. He figured we would like that. And he could still fish from it.

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The new bedroom addition didn’t have a basement. It had a crawl space about three feet deep. You had to climb through a small window to get in there. Dad was down in that space, in the afternoon on Halloween in 1961, and was stacking some lumber when his chest started to feel like a load of bricks was piled on it. He knew what was happening and used all his strength to climb out the window and lie in the grass. Mom found him there and called his ambulance drivers. His life was on the line.

When he woke up in the hospital, his doctor was standing beside the bed. The first thing Dad did was look over to him and ask, “got a cigarette Ralph?” “No more cigarettes for you.” He had had a massive heart attack and would need weeks to recover.

We turned to Mom, and she held the family together, kept us and the business going while he recovered.

And he did. He was back at work and seemed to be doing fine. But he still had some chest pains and one day was lying in bed and moaning in pain so loudly I retreated to the basement to get away from the agony. But there was no escaping it. The doctor came to the house and on Christmas Eve, Mom called the ambulance drivers again and they rushed him to a hospital in Minneapolis. Ralph thought his chest was full of blood and had a heart surgeon waiting for their arrival. The neighbor couple came over and we picked at our dinner. So much for Christmas. Mom stayed for several days and then drove back and forth two or three times a week.

It turned out his heart had not sprung a leak and there was no surgery but doctors there couldn’t figure out what it was and after lying in bed for a whole month and getting no answers, he grabbed one of them by the shirt cuff as he came in to see him.
“What’s wrong? Do you have any idea?”
“We have a team of doctors, and we think we’re making good progress. “
“That wasn’t the question. Cut the bullshit. Am I going to live or am I going to die?”
“As I say, we’re making progress.”

He and Mom decided to call Ralph and get him into Mayo.

His ambulance drove him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and at the end of the first full day there they told him they knew what the problem was, and they would have him home and behind his desk in a week. And he was.

Not long after he was home, he went to the village council and told them he was getting out of the ambulance business. He didn’t need the stress. If they wanted an ambulance in town, they were going to have to figure out another way. He kept at it until they got an alternative in place.

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His heart problem never really went away. The sac that protects the heart had swollen and filled with fluid. The doctors at Mayo treated it with cortisone. But that, his weakened heart and probably clogged arteries left him pretty much disabled. They couldn’t do anything about the arteries in those days other than put him on a low cholesterol diet. It came probably twenty-five years too late. He carried nitroglycerine tablets for chest pain, and he went through a lot of them. The stress of the job never let up. Our next-door neighbor died, and it hit Dad so hard he landed back in the hospital for two days.

One day, just kind of out of the blue when it seemed everything was pretty much back to normal, he mentioned that someday the phone would ring, and we would be told that he was driving home, had a heart attack and died. He was surprisingly nonchalant about it, but it’s not the kind of thing you forget.

It wasn’t by any means all tragedy and sadness around our house. Far from it. We had a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor and loved to kid around with my friends when they would come over. And he would sometimes come home with a story. My favorite was from a time when he had been particularly busy. One evening, a woman came to the chapel to pay her respects to a friend who had died. She signed the book and came back to his desk to say hello.
“You certainly have been busy Mr. Swanson.”
“Yes, we have lately.”
“I just don’t understand it. People are dying now who have never died before.”

I’ve told that story a lot of times, and to this day, when my closest friend and I talk on the phone, one of us finds a way to work that line into the conversation.

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Our little town had a nine-hole golf course and after I graduated from high school, I decided I wanted to learn to play. It was one of those coming-of-age decisions, along with learning chess (which I abandoned when I was told it involved math) and driving a stick shift. I borrowed some clubs from a friend, got a little bit of advice and sort of taught myself. Even though I was horrible at it, I was hooked on the game. Still am. Horrible, and hooked. Dad had played a little bit when he was a kid, so he bought some clubs. Because of his heart condition, and because the course didn’t have any, he also bought a golf cart. He rarely did anything halfway.

When I was growing up, we never played ball, or any sports. By the time I was old enough for any of that, he was pushing fifty and had a faulty heart. We had a basket hanging on the garage, and I went out on the driveway and fantasized about being a basketball player. I was horrible at that too. But golf was something we could be bad at together, and we were, often, and we had a good time. The golf season is pretty short in Minnesota, as you might imagine. The golfing days were about to give way to sledding, so after the Catholic church bazaar, while I packed the laundry Mom had done for me and waited for my ride, he called his brother-in-law and arranged to go out to the golf course.

After they finished playing, my uncle went into the clubhouse to get a cup of coffee and Dad went to park his golf cart in the shed. He never came out.

As he had warned us they would, someone called Mom to say he had a heart attack and he was dead.

Seems like yesterday.

But it was fifty years ago. Today.

October 8, 2022

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Time For a Change

~ Lee Swanson ~ 5 Comments

I will have to admit I haven’t been here for a while. That’s all right; you haven’t been here for a while either. But I was moved to come here today to solve a problem. Like most things that bother me, it’s not a problem for most people.

This problem deals with the telephone.

First, a little background. Alexander Graham Bell got the first U.S. patent for a telephone in 1876. People give him a lot of credit for making the first phone. That was nice and everything, but it wasn’t as important as making the second phone.

It’s widely reported that the first phone call was to Bell’s assistant Mr. Watson in the next room. That’s not accurate. The first call was from someone telling Bell that the warranty on his buggy had expired.

I am not old enough to remember those phones, but I do remember that the phones in my little hometown in Minnesota did not have dials. You picked up the phone and the operator asked who you wanted to call. The number at our house was 199-J. The number at my dad’s office was 241. I remember those numbers, even though I was too young to use the phone. I am old enough to use the phone now, but I cannot tell you the phone number of a single person I know.

Sixty-five year old obsolete phone number, no problem. Number I call twice a week, not a clue.

We eventually got phones with dials, sometime after most of the rest of the nation already had them. For those of you unfamiliar, it had numbers on the surface and a plastic or metal round dial above it, with a hole over each number. Those antiques are now called rotary phones. We called them phones. To make a call, you put your index finger (usually) in the hole above the first digit of the number you wanted to call, and spun it around clockwise until it stopped, then you did the same for every other digit until you had finished all the numbers for whoever you were calling. That is why, to this day, people talk about dialing the phone. No one dials a phone any more, and hasn’t since some time in the 70’s, but no one has come up with a good term to explain how to call someone. Push button the phone? No. Tap the phone? That’s something else altogether. People still dial the phone, even though they don’t.

(We also still roll down the windows in a car. Explain that to your granddaughter some time.)

So anyway, in the 70’s, dials were replaced by push buttons. These were called touch tone phones. It’s pretty much like what you see on a phone now, especially if you have seen one on the desk at an office. They haven’t changed all that much. Cell phones have that same rectangular layout of numbers, though they are rarely used as phones.

The numbers are arranged 1, 2 and 3 on the top row, 4, 5, and 6 in the middle, then 7, 8, 9 and finally *, 0 and # on the bottom. Letters of the alphabet are paired with the numbers so  businesses can advertise that you should call 1-800-PLUMBER or 1-213-CARPETS and be annoyed as you try to spell-by-number.

I know what you’re thinking. What the hell is my point? What’s this problem I’m bitching about.

OK. Comes now the calculator. Actually, comes first the calculator. Adding machines came before calculators, and calculators came before touch tone phones. And because calculators are used by accountants, they saw some logic in putting the numbers sideways. 7, 8 and 9 on the top, 4, 5, and 6 still in the middle, and 1, 2, 3 on the bottom, with 0 below that. After all, doesn’t everyone look at a page of numbers and start with 7? Apparently, to get out of accountant school you have to learn to count 7 8, 9, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 0. That explains a lot about government budget deficits. The number arrangement seemed logical to accountants. Need I say more?  

Now, somebody in the comments is bound to say that the reason the phone keypad is not laid out the same as the calculator is because accountants are so fast with a calculator, and that the phone couldn’t register the numbers that fast. The buttons on the phone put out a tone that sends a signal that connects the number. If you’re too fast, the tones don’t make the connection. And that’s a popular theory. It might even be true, if it were not the first time in recorded history that anybody cared what an accountant said.

You can just imagine the meeting:

“We have to reverse the keypad, because the accountants can’t get their calls to connect.”

“Who?”

Regardless, the phone keypad remains 1, 2, 3… and the calculator is 7, 8, 9…

This also explains why accountants never return your calls. They constantly dial wrong numbers. If your phone rings and the caller claims to be an accountant, hang up. It’s a scam.

For the rest of us who call people sometimes, and do some subtraction now and then, we have to double check what keypad we’re using. It’s a particular problem as you switch between the phone and the calculator on your mobile device (a euphemism for phone). Because there is no little notch on the 5, even accountants are not fast with those.  They should be the same. And they should be in the order they are in on a phone. That’s why it’s called numerical order. If we rise up and demand it, politely of course, maybe we can get that done.

And when that day comes, they can take the numbers off above the letters on the keyboard. Come on, that’s just stupid.

Home Moaning

~ Lee Swanson ~ 6 Comments

As the temperatures here have dipped into the frigid upper fifties, the furnace has kicked in. But the heat hasn’t seemed to be reaching the family room, dining room and living room. The bedrooms and bathrooms are warm, but those are the rooms where the heat is least necessary. Those are rooms with down comforters and hot water. It’s the rooms we live in where the heat was lacking.  

The logical conclusion was that there was something wrong.  

All indications pointed to ducts, or what the professionals call the air duct system. It followed that someone had to go into the attic, and that someone was going to be me. 

The access to the attic is through the ceiling (no surprise there) of the coat closet in the hall. That means removing everything in the closet to be able to get the step ladder in. And since there’s nothing stored in the attic, and there is no basement, calling it a coat closet is something of a misnomer. Emptying the closet filled the living room. You know Parkinson’s Law; that work expands to fill the time allotted? The same is true of closets, with space instead of time. That is Prichett’s Law.  

Now, I have not been in the attic in several years. I mean several, like twelve or fifteen years. On what may have been the last occasion I was stringing new coax cable from the TV jacks around the house, back to where the cable comes into the house. In trying to feed the cable down the wall, I got a bit too close to where the roof meets the eave, and located a roofing nail with my scalp.  Coming back down the ladder with my blood-soaked t-shirt wrapped around my head, was not a pretty sight. Fortunately, not much damage was done to the cable, the roof, or my head. 

That was the most recent misadventure in the attic. There is, after all, nothing in the attic, except attic. At that time, it had the requisite Southern California paper-thin layer of insulation between the rafters. Since then, we had looked into increasing that layer to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and were convinced to have insulation blown-in. I had not seen the results. 

Shining a light ahead of me, I poked my head into the attic and must have looked like Sid in Ice Age. A blizzard had happened. All it lacked was a chairlift to have been Lake Placid. This should have been my first clue.  

If memory serves, there is a sheet of plywood in the attic, which was apparently placed there either before there was a ceiling or before there was a roof. I couldn’t see it now, but reckoned it was somewhere in the vicinity of the 90-meter jump. As I made my way toward said plywood, creeping on hands and knees from rafter to rafter, moving a table lamp along with me, I tried to figure out where I was. It was easier when I could actually see and locate ceiling light fixtures and the like. Now, it all seemed much smaller than I remembered. (The opposite of many of my memories). And it was just snow wherever I looked. 

Not exactly snow of course. It wasn’t cold and it didn’t melt. Those were the assets. The drawbacks, in addition to covering everything about a foot and a half deep, was that I couldn’t breathe. I never thought I would say this, and I don’t mean it the way it sounds, but thank you coronavirus. With a supply of KN95 masks at the ready, I was able to crawl around the attic without contracting fiberglasstosis, or whatever it’s called, if that’s a thing.   

Anyway, about four feet farther than I thought it should be, I located the plywood and shortly after that, a glimpse of a duct. I followed the duct across the plywood and in due course found the problem. Somehow, though it had been untouched for 30-some years, the duct had become separated. The portion coming from the furnace was a good foot from the next section, which led to the family room vent. How this happens, I have no idea, but it meant that if there was any heat at all getting to the family room, it was purely a coincidence.  

The next step in the Bob Vila handbook after locating the problem, is to fix it. All I had to do was pull the two parts back together and secure them in place. This is, of course, the part where Bob steps back and says “Richard, how are you going to handle this?” and Richard mumbles some nonsense about humidity and air velocity before recommending hiring an expert. Well, I was already up here. How hard could it be?  

It seems the break in the line was beyond the end of the plywood and in a section where the rafters were no longer evenly spaced because, well, who knows why. But my reach challenged my balance and vice versa, meaning I was now in the ice arena part of the building and on two occasions, dangerously close to doing a triple Lutz through the ceiling. And while it appeared that they had come apart quite neatly, the two pieces of pipe didn’t want to go back together as easily. Or at all.  

I struggled with it until I exhausted my entire profanity vocabulary, got the two pieces somewhat assembled, and then adopted the “any change is an improvement” philosophy, before retreating back toward the ski lodge. We checked the vent and while the heat was not pouring out, it was recognizable as heat. And was better than it had been. Chalk one up.  

The living room and dining room will have to wait for the next foray. Or, we’ll use them only in the summer. Who uses their living room anyway? There’s no TV in there.  

Over the years, I have patched air mattresses and inflatable pool floats, secured the wiring of a broken radio antenna inside the trunk of a 1995 Honda, and wrapped the occasional Christmas present, but this is the first, and likely the last time I have used duct tape on an actual duct.  

The Box

~ Lee Swanson ~ 9 Comments

At last count, I have moved 15 times since graduating from college. Some were from street to street in the same city; one, from South Carolina to California, was literally across the country. Fifteen moves in 46 years, or about once every three years. But since we have lived in this house for 27 years, it’s actually fifteen moves in 19 years. That’s what life in television news was like.

I used to say that every time my driver license, checkbook and Time magazine subscription had the same address, I moved. And it was pretty close to true. I worked in South Dakota for two years, and moved three times.

That’s a lot of packing, and unpacking. Most, I packed and unpacked myself. I got pretty good at it, I guess. At least not very much was broken.

When we bought our house, the move was only one mile away. We could have walked the stuff down the street, except for the beds and the piano. And part of it was slightly uphill, so we rented a truck. Boxed things up and moved. Then opened boxes and found a place for everything.

Almost.

There’s a box in the closet in what we call the computer room that I haven’t opened since I left Portland in 1989. It’s not a big box. It’s what moving companies call a book box.

I know some people who say they have come upon a box they haven’t opened in a move and they have thrown it out. They reason that if they haven’t needed whatever it is after some time, they don’t need it at all, and they pitch it, unopened and unexamined.

But I know exactly what’s in The Box. It’s my records. Not tax records, or criminal or employment. More valuable than that, to me. Vinyl records. Albums. All in good condition. One has never been played. Still wrapped in its original cellophane, last I knew. Another has only been played once, on one side. All of them were cleaned every time they were played and every time they were put away. The paper sleeve is turned perpendicular to the opening in the jacket so the record has never fallen out. It is part of the ritual of having a vinyl record collection.

It’s an eclectic little collection of 1960s and 70s music. My musical tastes tended toward 1970 college dormitory and haven’t progressed much since then. I’ve obviously not bought anything new. There’s some Simon and Garfunkel, some Beatles of course. Grateful Dead, Chicago, James Taylor, Credence Clearwater, CSNY, Willie Nelson’s “Red Headed Stranger”, a smattering of Windham Hill albums – George Winston, Michael Hedges, William Ackerman. Moody Blues. My friend Tom and I decided one day in the dorm that if you listened to everything the Moody Blues had recorded, start to finish, in order, you would understand the meaning of the universe. Hence, I am enlightened. Or I was at the time. It may have worn off some. I have the Bee Gees Odessa album, long before disco. Michael Johnson. Not Jackson, Johnson. And then, there’s the stuff that I used to play a lot. Have you ever heard of Jesse Winchester? Do you know Leo Kottke? I have pretty much everything they’ve ever recorded, at least up until The Box was sealed. I could take it to a collector’s shop and sell it all for a dollar or two, or just give it away. If anyone would take it.

Now, I don’t procrastinate. It’s just that sometimes it takes me a long time to get something done. The turntable never made the move. I plan to buy one that I could connect to a USB cable and upload my treasured collection. I haven’t gotten to it yet. There are also ancient upright typewriters in the room and I plan to refurbish them, one day.

Like the sweatshirts from the Oscars, jackets and sweaters from golf tournaments I attended, few of which I ever wear, afraid that they will tatter and lose their meaning, and the assemblage of coffee mugs from travels and events largely forgotten, The Box sits in the closet. It’s all here, for no particular reason, except that it’s part of me.  

I also have half of my mother’s Hummel figurine collection. She really liked them, and they have some value. But they have more value to me. I have the key to my dad’s golf cart. He died on the golf course, just after he finished playing. I like to think that key was the last thing he held in his hand.

I suspect The Box will remain unopened in the closet for someone else to open and puzzle over, then probably throw it out. I know its worth. In fact, only I know its worth. But just maybe, there will be something else laying around here—maybe a ticket stub from the 1984 Olympics, an autographed book, or Brownie, my childhood teddy bear—that someone will pick up and decide to keep. Just because.

That is the way I see life everlasting.

Metric, Schmetric

~ Lee Swanson ~ 3 Comments

People have been arguing since the French Revolution that the United States ought to adopt the metric system. It’s logical, they say. It’s all based on decimals, they say. Pshaw, I say. They just use decimals as an excuse. The meter, from which the system gets its name, is 1/10,000,000 of the distance of the meridian passing through Paris, from the North Pole to the equator.

And how, in 1790, did they know the distance of the meridian passing through Paris from the North Pole to the equator, you ask? I presume they stepped it off, and the number they got was in feet, which they divided by 10,000,000 to get 39.37 inches. Not satisfied to round it off to a yard, they had to call it a meter.

You see, the metric system really is based on the English system which is now pretty much the American system, give or take a stone.

Having settled on the meter, some ninny came up with a bunch of prefixes for things that were longer or shorter, and forced people to memorize them. Ten meters is a decameter, 10 decameters is a hectometer, 10 hectometers is a kilometer Then megameter for a million of the damned things, gigameter is a billion meters, and a trillion meters is a hell of a long ways.

Going the other direction, a tenth of a meter is 3.937 inches. Or, in French, a decimeter. 1/100th of a meter is centimeter, 1/1,000 a millimeter, a millionth of a meter is a micrometer, which is really a gauge for measuring stuff. Then a nanometer is a billionth of a meter and a picometer is just a speck.

So that took care of distance, at least from the North Pole to the equator. Except they eventually weren’t happy with that, because, well, the French. Now a meter is determined to be 1/299,792,458th of the distance light travels in a second. It seemed so logical, so why not. It’s still 39.37 inches, but the math is a whole hell of a lot more impressive.

But what about stuff? For that, there is the gram. It’s pretty small, so mostly there’s the kilogram. And those other prefixes too.

 Now hang on. Thankfully they didn’t mess with time; there’s still seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. None of it based on decimals, until you get to decades and centuries. But who wants a ten-day week anyway?

Apparently, while they were at the North Pole, they decided to mess with temperature, and invented Celsius. Now, if you know the Fahrenheit temperature, which you will because it’s on your thermometer and your phone and everywhere, and you want to know what that is in Celsius, (but, why?) you simply subtract 32 and multiply by 5/9.

 There’s more. Liter, radian, joule, coulomb, farad, lux, and becquerel–really. A becquerel is “one reciprocal second” (there is no explaining what a reciprocal second might be). Then a sievert, and a katal.

They took perfectly good words and co-opted them into some metric mumbo-jumbo. A mole, which is a snitch, is also a metric unit of amount of substance, exactly 6.02214076 x 1023 particles.

Hertz is not a metric rental car, but, like becquerel, is a reciprocal second, because you might forget where you left your keys.

  • Newton
  • Pascal
  • Watt
  • Volt – one joule per coulomb.
  • Weber – not the grill, a weber is one volt second; see volt
  • Tesla – not related at all to hertz, it’s one weber per square meter, which is about how much room a Weber takes up.
  • Ohm
  • Siemens
  • Lumen, and
  • Gray – one joule per kilogram, a joule being one newton meter and a newton is one kilogram-meter per second squared. Hence the term “gray area.”

The English system, on the other hand, is much more straightforward. It starts with the foot. Everyone knows what a foot is. If you only have a foot and a half, that’s a cubit. A cubit is also the distance from the fingertips to the elbow. Cubit hasn’t really been heard of since the Old Testament. Maybe because they’re not sure whose arm to measure.

If you have three feet, you are not only peculiar, you have a yard. 

An ell, on the other hand, is the distance from that other hand outstretched to the opposite shoulder. It’s equal to twenty nails, (we’ll get there) or one and a fourth yards. (And all this time you thought an ell was an elevated subway. An elevated subway, however, is an oxymoron).

Fathom, the distance between arms outstretched, from fingertip to fingertip, or six feet.

A rod is 16 and a half feet, or five yards and a cubit. There are four rods in a chain and one hundred links in a chain.

A furlong is the distance a team of plow horses can furrow without taking a break, which of course we know to be 40 rods, because plow horses had a strong union.

A mile, with which you might be familiar, comes from walking 1,000 paces in someone else’s moccasins, and is 8 furlongs.

So, you see now how simple this is.

And if you have something that’s less than a foot – the English system has you covered there too.

A span is the width of the outstretched hand, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger. It’s 9 inches. (see inch below, but I’d really rather you didn’t skip ahead)

If you don’t stretch out your fingers, but stick out your thumb, you’ve got a shaftment, which is either 6 inches or a hitchhiker. Those of you measuring a shaftment as six inches in any other way are going to have to stay after class.

A hand is four inches, and a palm is three inches.

A nail is 3 digits or 1/16 of a yard.

An inch, for which you’ve been waiting patiently, is three barleycorns. That means, obviously, there are 36 barleycorns in a foot and 36 inches or 1,296 108 barleycorns in a yard.

A finger is 7/8 of an inch. If you give someone the finger, it’s only two and five-eighths barleycorns. Really not all that much.

A digit is ¾ inch.

A barleycorn is 1/3 of an inch. That’s not a lot of help since an inch is 3 barleycorns, but if you’ve got a ruler in the drawer, you know what an inch is anyway.

A line is ¼ of a barleycorn, and the shortest distance between two points.

A poppyseed is 1/5 of a barleycorn.

We could go on into things like perch (a square rod), rood (forty square rods) and acre which is one chain wide and one furlong in length, or about the size of a football field. If you happen to have an ox and a plow (or plough) you know that in a year that ox could plough a bovate, which is 15 acres or one-eighth of a carucate, which would require eight oxen. But where would you keep them?

Now, let’s get back to detail work.

A poppyseed is a 15th of an inch, which doesn’t show up on your ruler, and isn’t really very small at all, it turns out. So you need to know, for instance that a tad is larger than a dash and a dash is larger than a drop. There are 24 dashes in a tablespoon. None of that helps if you’re hanging a mirror and are told it needs to go just a tad to the right. In that case, a tad is pretty good size. It’s twice as big as a smidgen and three times the size of skosh. A tad, it turns out is the exact same size as a little bit.

Occasionally, we all need to deal in very precise measurement, for which you need to know that a jot and a tittle together are of course larger than a jot; a tittle being the dot over an i or a j. (See picometer, speck) That makes a tittle a hair’s breadth; often misspelled and mispronounced as hair’s breath, which not only makes no sense, but just pisses me off a tad.

And that is why the English system is so much better. Try being pissed off a deci-something.

Cancer in the Year of COVID

~ Lee Swanson ~ 18 Comments

I don’t get out much.

I haven’t been more than walking distance away from the house in a month. And that was to see the accountant and pick up our taxes. If I had known it was our last “outing” until who-knows-when, we may have chosen something else.

We do go for a walk nearly every day, down the street and around the neighborhood. We’ve lived in the same house nearly 27 years, and yet it’s surprising what you notice in your own neighborhood when you’re not driving by. There are some hills up and down the street that we walk for cardio. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I came out of all this in better health?

Cheryl has gone grocery shopping once in this past month, with gloves and mask. Her daughter Sara delivers a few things if we run out. Otherwise, no one comes in. As Benjamin King said, there’s nowhere to go but out, and nowhere to come but back. So we stay home. This suits me, to be honest. I’m an introvert.

But today, I am venturing out. This isn’t a long drive; just three exits north on I-5. The University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center. I have been in contact with my doctor several times. Should I keep this appointment? Yes, probably. A few days later, do you still think I should keep this appointment? Yes, the benefits outweigh the risks.

I am struck that there is no traffic. 8:30 in the morning on a Wednesday and freeway is 75 miles an hour in both directions.

I have been coming here a long time. This time, I am a bit worried about it. Scared even. The only other time I was scared to be here was January 2008, my first chemotherapy appointment. I survived that. Thrived even. I’ll survive this one. I think.

Moores is not physically connected to the hospitals. It even has its own parking structure. Even so, this time, no one could just walk in.

I was met outside the door, told to stand on the “x” and asked the screening questions. No travel, no fever, no cough, no contact with anyone who might have COVID-19. Just cancer. OK, go on in.

I make it a point to wear bright colors and try to be cheerful when I come here. Cheerful is not my natural state. I’m determined to project the image of a healthy guy while I’m here. A lot of these people are really sick. We’ve all got the Big C. The one that isn’t in the news these days.

The waiting room isn’t as busy as usual. It’s common to see couples here, or family members or caregivers. But not today. Only patients are allowed in. Every other chair is marked off so there’s anti-social distance between us all. That suits me too.

I’m here for my intravenous immunoglobulin infusion. Not a big deal. Every fourth Wednesday at 9 a.m. Without fail. When I was working, I came Saturday mornings. Now I’m retired and it’s Wednesday mornings. It’s not a coincidence that our cleaning lady comes every other Wednesday morning. She’s not coming to the house these days, but, still, here I am.

I started these eight years ago. Every four weeks. Never missed one. 13 times a year, 104 appointments, and counting. There’s no end in sight.

But this appointment is different. Everyone is wearing a mask. Everyone. The chair is wiped down and disinfected before I sit down. There are precautions everywhere you look.

Here’s the deal. My immune system sucks. Part of that is just a fact of life with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.* Part of it is the chemotherapy that I was afraid of back in 2008 raised hell with my bone marrow and even when they can’t find leukemia cells in my blood, my marrow isn’t doing its job.

Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) is immunities drawn from the plasma of about a thousand blood donors. It’s intended to boost my immune system, protect me from things like pneumonia and the flu and even just a cold. And then along comes COVID-19. IVIG won’t do squat to fight that off because blood donors don’t have COVID-19 immunities to donate. Even so, this should help with other respiratory problems and a variety of diseases, should I need it. So, hook me up.

It used to be in a bag, like most IV infusions. Nowadays, it’s a glass bottle. Looks a little like something left over from an episode of M*A*S*H.

 I’ve seen the bill; these infusions cost somewhere around ten thousand dollars, each. (Don’t drop the bottle). I don’t pay anything. Let’s hear it for insurance. Let’s get it for everyone.

I’m a pro at this. I joke with the nurses that I’ve been doing this long enough they could go on a break and I would do it myself. But I’d need a third arm, at least. And, that uncanny ability to rub my arm and find a vein. I can, however, point out where to look for the best veins.

I sit down and the nurse gets started. “Ready? Little poke.” She draws a few vials of blood, starts the pump and I get out my laptop, read, do some crosswords, and, well, write this. It’s quieter here than normal. I guess that’s because everyone is here alone. Two and a half hours later, I’m done.

I’m glad to get out, get back to the car, and go straight home.

I’ll be back in four weeks. Four weeks ago, there were none of these special precautions. Just the regular precautions and I didn’t think twice about whether I should be there. Who knows what the next four weeks will bring.

I can’t imagine.

* For any other CLL nerds who might be reading this, I was diagnosed in 2007 after a physical exam. Had FCR in 2008 and got a complete response. Was enrolled in the Murano trial in late 2014. (Murano trial was Venetoclax and Rituxan. Why they named it after a Nissan SUV, I’ve no idea.) Came out of the trial MRD-Negative. It’s been just over three years with no treatment. It’s starting to show up again. My ALC is 5.5. I get IVIG because my IGA and IGM are both less than 5.

A Dog’s Life

~ Lee Swanson ~ 14 Comments

She wasn’t one of those dogs whose name comes easily to them. Some people can decide their dog is “Rex” or “Lady” at first glance. Not her. She bounded about the house for several days before it occurred to us that she is Ginger. Ironically, over the years, she would gain several names – Gin-gin, Gin-gee, Gin, Ginger Sparkle, Little Dog, and for formal occasions, of course, Virginia. But in truth she has only ever been Ginger.

Her mother was a Poodle, her father half Poodle and half Bischon Frise. She took after the Bischon side of the family, at least in appearance. We were looking for a female dog when we found the ad that she was available. It was an easy choice. There were four in the littler, two males and two females. While we chose her, her brother Rudy chose us. He nearly leapt out of the enclosure and melted into our arms. And, unlike her, we knew instantly he was a Rudy. (Unlike any other Rudy, of any species, you may have ever heard of, he bears no resemblance to any of them, in any way whatsoever). And so, they both became ours, inseparable from birth.

Ginger

We don’t know exactly when they were born. If the breeder told us, we were too busy being happy to pay much attention. But they came to us around Thanksgiving and were about seven weeks old, so we decided they were born October first.

Sara was living at home at the time, working on her Masters degree. In between studies she got them housebroken. And they would curl up and sleep on her desk. I don’t know if that had a positive effect on her studies.

When they first came home, they spent nights in a crate together and we would give them a treat to entice them to go to bed. She would later take over the crate as her own and he wasn’t allowed in it any more. But from then on, when she thought a treat was warranted, desired or imminent, she would run to the crate and sit waiting. She always got the treat she wanted. She had trained us well.

In the evening, after her walk, she would jump up on my lap, curl up and go to sleep. He was relegated to the footstool, without any argument. In time, they both claimed residence on our bed at night, and if he ventured into her portion of the mattress there might be a snarling, angry little spat, that ended as quickly as it began and for just as much reason.

Ginger was always the smartest little dog. She learned to heel at the first lesson, to sit, lie down, scratch at the door when she wanted to go out, and would have learned more if we had taught her. She was in charge, and both she and Rudy knew it. When they both went to the door, he would stand aside and let her go out first. It might have been gallantry on his part, but it was more likely the air of domination that she exuded.

The normal dog pursuits of chasing balls and barking at nothing in particular were beneath her. In fact, it was a month or more before she barked at all, and then, the noise surprised even her. She ran when she felt like it, and she would go after a tennis ball, but only if it was rolled down the hallway indoors. Outdoor sports were left to the boy dog. They walked, morning and evening, and because she would heel without being told, she led the walk from behind. When she decided she had gone far enough, she would stop and no amount of tugging, begging or coercing could convince her otherwise. She was twelve pounds of obstinance when she wanted to be.

But Ginger was always at the door when it opened, wagging, bouncing happily, and, I will swear, smiling when we came home. I would pick her up and rub her belly and she licked my nose. She was the sweetest little dog.

Ginger started to fail this spring, and had two major seizures in the summer. Each time, we thought she would not survive. But she bounced back and kept on going. The walks were much shorter, and slower, and she still determined when enough was enough. Medicated, the seizures were seemingly under control, but she lost weight and slept even more than a dog might sleep. When she woke up, she would slip and fall until she got her bearings.

There wasn’t really anything else we could do for her. The assumption was she had a tumor, but treating it would have been fatal. Still, she soldiered on. When walking on a leash became too difficult, she would walk in the back yard, or move around the house, from one room to the next. It seemed as though she knew she had to keep up her strength. Cheryl took to feeding her by hand. She had lost about a third of her weight, and you could count her ribs and the discs in her spine. She wandered and wobbled more than she walked, and everything seemed to be a chore.

It was time.

We got the last appointment of the day at her veterinarian’s office. Dr. Michael had cared for her as long as we had. He was kind and we talked to her, gave her one more treat, petted her and let her know we loved her for the very last time. Even then, we stood in the small exam room for several more minutes, and I kept petting her, though she wasn’t there any longer. I just didn’t want to stop.

She had devoted her entire life to us. She has only ever been Ginger and there will never be another.

October 1-ish, 2003 – December 26, 2019

Reunion

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

August 1, 2019

Reunion Committee, Class of 1969
Pine City High School
Pine City, Minnesota 55063

Re: Lee Swanson

Dear Committee:

An inquiry has been forwarded to this office regarding a person who is believed by your committee to have been a classmate.

At this time, I am unable to confirm or deny any knowledge of the whereabouts of a Mr. or Ms. Lee Swanson, nor is there information as to the last known address of said person.

I further cannot confirm that there may or may not have been a significant criminal incident on July 30, 1975 in Detroit, Michigan to which your presumed classmate may or may not have been a material witness and may or may not have been relocated to San Diego, California under a new identity as a precautionary protective measure.

This office has conducted a thorough search of government records and offices on your behalf and has found no record – even in Google — which would indicate the existence of a Lee Swanson formerly of Pine City, Minnesota.

While we are unable to assist in your search, we wish you an enjoyable reunion.

Sincerely,

Whit Ness, Esq.

WN/ls

It Has Come to My Attention

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

There are still a few places in this country where you can buy one gasket, three nails, or two washers. Those places are becoming fewer and farther between. Consequently, I have bags of washers and packages of screws from which I’ve taken one.

If you’re anything like we are, once in a while you look down at the floor and find a screw or a little odd-shaped something-or-else and have no idea where it came from, what it is or what to do with it.

Stuff

If I were well-adjusted, I would throw out those bags of screws and misplaced gaskets and what-nots. After all, the odds of finding where that thing came from are not good. And the odds of ever needing another one the same size as the two I had to have so badly I bought twenty, are even worse. As are the chances of finding where I put them should I need them. But I am anything but well-adjusted.

I save that stuff in a little box in the garage, and once in a while, when we go to someone’s house, I put a few in my pocket and drop a metal screw behind the refrigerator when no one is looking. Or maybe a washer under the bathroom sink. A piece left over from an Ikea cabinet might find its way behind someone’s sofa.

I won’t be there when they find it, weeks or months later while sweeping or vacuuming. But I know it will drive them nuts trying to figure out where it belongs. And that gives me a certain satisfaction.

-0-

Baseball season started recently; I’m told. (I’m not a fan). I do remember when it was called America’s Pastime. Now that claim goes to “Wheel of Fortune.” Baseball lost the title without a chance to as much as turn a letter, simply by putting a team in Montreal.

-0-

Speaking of seasons, we are hurling into another political season where people of all stages of sex, age, experience, philosophy and photogenicism will be the front runner for something or other at some time or another. Apropos of nothing, I learned when protesting the Vietnam War at the University of Minnesota that “radical student politics” is the only phrase in our language that contradicts itself three times.

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I have a closet full of almost perfect clothes I have almost never worn. I think some of it should only be worn when it’s appropriate, so I save it for those eventualities. I don’t wear a pinstripe suit to work in the yard, for instance. (However, given the occasions I have to wear a pinstripe suit any more, I may as well).  

But I also have a too-large collection of sweaters, polo shirts, windbreakers and sweatshirts from various events and rarely, if ever, worn. I have sweatshirts from the 67th through 76th Oscars®, none I’ve worn more than six times. This year was the 91st Oscars® which tends to only point out how outdated my wardrobe is. Why am I hanging on to a 24-year-old sweatshirt in mint condition that may be worth upwards of $1.75 on eBay? It’s embarrassing to wear a sweatshirt in public that has an old, and large, logo. But, like the pinstripe suit, I can’t bring myself to wear it when pulling weeds, nor can I throw it away. If you know anyone who wants them, or sweaters from the 1982, 1991, 1992, 2002 and 2008 U.S. Open golf championships, send them my way. Marie Kondo will thank you.

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(With apologies to Johnny Cash) I punched a kid in fifth grade just to watch him cry. He was new to our little school and there was just something about him that struck me the wrong way. So, I struck him the wrong way. It’s bothered me ever since and while I doubt I will ever see him again, I think he owes me an apology.

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I have only recently realized that there are some people who don’t drink every day. I don’t know why they don’t. I’ve decided I might try that, though I don’t know what I will do instead

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A few years ago, I was sitting, bored, at a staff meeting and mentioned that Hemingway is widely thought to have suggested that one should write drunk and edit sober. The officious director of the department, admonished that no one had better be writing drunk in her department. By jingo.

Once I realized she was serious, I allowed as how I felt it was really about pouring your thoughts and emotions out on to the page and writing without reservation, then letting it simmer and refining it later. And if that’s the case, it’s good advice.

Besides, it wasn’t Hemingway.