Strange Land on the Horizon

[NO PHOTOS WITH THIS POST!]

As a young woman, say, back in my twenties and beyond, I tried to hide my impatience when old people expressed astonishment at being old. How could they be surprised? Hadn’t they looked around since childhood and realized that anyone who didn’t die young became old in time? Aging hardly made a newsworthy story: “Woman Lives On and Becomes Old!” Really, why the astonishment?

And then people die. My grandparents went first. (Actually, two of that generation known to me were step-grandparents, as my father’s mother had died when my father was still a boy, long before I was born, while my mother’s biological father was someone our family never knew except for tantalizing story fragments.) For grandparents to go first was not surprising. My only senior cousin’s death, however, came out of season, years before aunts and uncles started dropping off the family tree. Then years after that, and after my father and his older brother and a younger aunt by marriage were pruned from the living family tree, my mother remained the last of her generation. Now she is gone. And now I, the oldest remaining cousin on both sides, am #1 lemming at cliff’s edge, staring into the abyss, the generations gone before me having vanished from sight, the crush from behind increasing every year.

And I tell you, it is astonishing. Not only being the oldest but the whole business of being old. 

The year I had my first vegetable garden out at the farm, before we had moved from Leland to the old farmhouse we’ve now occupied for almost two decades (is that really possible?), summer was a season of drought and the new well we needed before we could live there yet in the future. My solution was to carry buckets, two at a time for balance and efficiency, repeatedly downhill to the little willow-bordered, no-name stream and back up to the garden. I was learning my home ground back then, and water-carrying during the drought taught me that the little stream, while it never went completely dry, sometimes ducked underground for long stretches, so that fetching water could sometimes mean searching for it first. Downhill, uphill, over and over, not counting the trips. The job did not feel easy, even back then: my realization today is that it was then possible. 

One afternoon following a tremendous thunderstorm the little no-name stream became a raging torrent, its usually soft, burbling voice the thunder of a cataract. Amazed and intrigued, we followed its course upstream, against the current, and into the edge of the woods, where a waterfall had appeared to cascade into a deep, dark pool. All that noise, depth, and energy! All temporary….

“Everything is temporary!” a character in one of my favorite movies memorably exclaims — a truth that did not remain for the 20th century (now past!) to discover. Socrates believed in eternal, unchanging essences he called Forms, but Heraclitus before him saw a world of continuous change. Many of the enormous old willows have lost large branches in storms or even fallen to ground themselves, pushed down by winds off nearby Lake Michigan. There is no path remaining downhill to the stream, and the accumulation of obstacles would put old ankle, knee, and leg bones at risk, were I to attempt to repeat that old après-storm exploration or even my former daily water-carrying expeditions.

And how can certain dear friends be dead and gone forever? Grandparents, yes, but how is it possible that contemporaries can have vanished, when they are so present to our thoughts on a daily basis? The unfairness of it, the unreality, is staggering! As if the stream were one day to disappear completely. But no, it is more as if the neglected garden were to go back, as it has done, to grass and violets, only rhubarb at one end and giant herbs at the other remaining as witnesses to the past.

In reality, youth and vigor, like the raging high waters following the storm, are the aspects of life most strikingly and obviously temporary. — And yet, strangely, it is the insults of age that we experience as if they should be transient. In our hearts and minds, we remain young — if not sixteen, then at most fifty — and surely this aching creakiness upon rising in the morning will pass eventually, will it not? Like a bad case of the flu? All these conversations focused on illness, weakness, surgeries, and medications are not really about us, are they? Isn’t this all no more than a patch of rough weather we just have to get through with good grace and humor? Go away for half the year, and when you come back you see that friends have aged perceptibly. Then catch sight of your reflection when you aren’t expecting it, and you see yourself as those friends see you and realize that your appearance too has changed. Year by year, you are growing older, and then one year you realize you are old. Astonishing!

Along comes another crop of high school graduates, another flood of college graduates, wave after wave of weddings and babies (and weren’t we just yesterday in the midst of all that?), and the crowd behind us gains increasing magnitude, while ahead of us the group thins out until we are — that is, I am — looking over the edge, into the abyss, knowing our, my, turn to be pushed off the cliff will come next. 

Here we are, old. Astonishing! Well, now I get it!

---

Postscript after receiving a comment on Facebook (from a younger person in the family) to the effect that "nobody is pushing anyone off a cliff." I should have made it clear that the "pushing" isn't personal -- I didn't mean that at all. It's just Time hustling each generation in turn off the stage to make way for the next.

“We Want Tick Shots! We Want Tick Shots!”

Mine is no scientific hypothesis. I’m not a scientist. Maybe it’s nothing but a hare-brained notion? Bear with me. (Or don’t.)

Start with what seems to be a rising incidence of Alzheimer and Alzheimer-like dementia in the U.S. Add the fact that ticks are at work enlarging their continental territory. Now turn to an article on ticks and tick-borne diseases in the July 2018 issue of Consumer Reports, where we see that symptoms of Lyme disease can include mental confusion and memory problems. 

“Most of the time,” the article notes, “Lyme symptoms resolve after a short course of antibiotics.” 

Often, however, the tick victim is unaware of the bite — or perhaps aware of being bitten, but then no rash appears — and in either case, Lyme disease may occur but not be diagnosed, let alone treated. 

Now you see where I’m going with this. 

The article concludes with the terrifying statement that “we still haven’t even begun to grasp the extent of the [tick[ problem” (given that the tick’s ability to spread allergy has only recently been discovered). Far-from-simple-or-inexpensive measures may offer hope in the future by reducing deer and mouse populations, editing tick genes, etc. What made me exclaim out loud in disbelief and frustration, however, was this parenthetical (can you believe it?) paragraph: 

(A previous vaccine was discontinued because of a lack of demand and reports of side effects such as arthritis, though research showed that arthritis wasn’t in fact more common in people who had been vaccinated.) 

Did you read that paragraph carefully? You might, possibly, have developed arthritis after having had this vaccine, but you would have been just as likely to develop arthritis without the vaccine! Was it reports of arthritis that led to “lack of demand” (as specious claims linking autism to childhood immunizations kicked off a wave of childhood vaccination-avoidance among impressionable parents), or did the Lyme vaccine simply come out before the spread of disease-bearing ticks (and accompanying tick anxiety) reached levels high enough to generate demand? Because I ask you, who would not want a vaccine against Lyme disease?

I realize I’ve strayed from my original idea about a possible connection between ticks and dementia. Forgive me. Tick-phobia makes me a little crazy here in the “Upper Midwest,” one of the regions noted for spreading tick-borne diseases. But can we start a movement now? 

“We want tick shots! We want tick shots!” 

Let me through, please, to the head of the line!

Go With the Flow! Or, Why So Stuffy, Old Lady?

Something I’ve noticed in American discourse in recent years, from statements by scientists to speeches by politicians and penetrating news media and commercial messages, is a decided shift away from formality, not only with reference to the citizens of the United States but also with reference to residents and citizens of countries world-wide. In statements by scientists (and reports of same to the public), “humans” or “human beings” have become “people.” A certain substance, for example, may be “toxic to both domestic pets and people.” Formerly, we would have been told the substance was “toxic to humans.” Does “people” sound more immediate, more personal?

At the same time, in other contexts, “people” have morphed into “folks.” We are still “the American people,” but when the national adjective is dropped, and especially when reference is made to groups of citizens, we become “folks.” A more casual, folksier term? Does “Folks are hurting” bring the pain into sharper focus than “People are hurting”?

What do you think? 

(The increasing informality in public utterances was preceded by a long trend toward familiarity in other situations. Bank tellers and receptionists in medical offices have been addressing customers and patients by first names, regardless of age, for quite a while now, although I’ve noticed that the more wealthy depositors sometimes escape familiarity. As for the disrespect some of us feel in our doctors’ offices (in general, doctors still expect to be called “Doctor”), that is often explained away by confidentiality requirements — supposedly, calling us by our first names protects our privacy in the waiting room better than if we were addressed more formally — but which came first, HIPAA or first-name-calling? And how would our privacy be threatened if we are called Mr. or Mrs. in the examining room? Waiters and waitresses don’t usually know the first names of diners, unless they are regulars, and in restaurants it is staff, not customers, who are reduced to their first names. “I’m Wendy, and I’ll be your server.” Are we still kings and queens, with personal servants, when we go out to eat? Is that how we’re supposed to feel?)

Does the general trend in public statements signal some underlying intent? If so, what could it be? 

Are we supposed to feel that science and government are not distant powers but groups of “people”/“folks" close to us, wanting to work with us? Is the newer language an attempt to bridge a gap in trust? 

Or, on a darker interpretation, are we being talked down to, made smaller, when we are called “folks”? Is an attempt being made to control us better?  

— Or is neither of these conclusions correct? Do both read too much into simple changes in language?

Whatever the original intent, if original intent there was (and how would we ever know?), I suspect the spread of the new usages is a simple matter of human beings/people/folks following trend leaders. We hear the new way of speaking over and over and gradually, without reflection, adopt it in our own speech. 

What do you think? Have you noticed the trend? Do you read anything at all into it? 

Not Enough. Nowhere Near Enough.

November 6. Next Tuesday. It’s not that far away. 

Vote! Get others out to vote! We need to vote! It’s a rare prescription, one on which the majority of Americans agree. The bad news is that all the votes cast from Atlantic to Pacific and from Alaska to Hawaii won’t be enough to make our country better without a whole lot of ongoing effort, over a very long time, in other parts of our lives. 

There is a two-pronged concept in philosophy, that of the necessary and the sufficient. If your car has a gasoline-powered or diesel-fueled engine, it won’t start and run without the proper fuel. Empty tank means no-car-go. You gotta have fuel. Fuel is necessary. 

Fuel all by itself, however, is not sufficient. 

Suppose the fuel line is blocked or the battery dead or the ignition switch has gone bad. Then your car may have plenty of fuel and still not start. And that, unfortunately, is the situation we’re in in these presently Disunited States. Every eligible voter in the country could turn out and vote, and no matter which party came out on top, we would still be not just a country divided but a country at each other’s throats. We’ve been moving away from each other for a long time, our national moral battery is just about dead, and our public communication — political speech, social media posts — has gone from bad to worse.

“Milton, thou shouldest be living at this hour! England hath need of thee!” 

Well, we aren’t England, and it isn’t Milton we need, and it isn’t enough for good men and women merely to be alive. We need good people of integrity, maturity, and wisdom — more of them, that is; there are a few here and there already — in leadership positions in government. We need officials and public servants with the courage of their convictions and the temperamental ability to abstain from name-calling and shouting. We need leaders willing and able to focus on real issues, on what needs to be done, women and men who can put personal issues aside and move forward, rather than bogging down in endless ego battles. 

And the change really needs — this is really the Gordian knot of the present moment — to be top-down, because that’s what leadership is. Leadership is not whining and blaming and taking cheap shots and encouraging the intensification of hatred and intolerance. Leadership isn’t tapping into irrational fears that keep people from seeing or thinking straight. It’s calling on a nation’s strengths, on people’s better selves. And if the man at the very top cannot lead, those whose job it is to advise him — that would be Congress first and foremost — need to grow spines (to put it in polite terms) and start standing up to him and for our country’s future. But clearly, most of them are not going to do it if we let them get away with shirking their duty and prancing around like movie stars, so while it has to come from the top eventually, it may have to begin at the bottom.

So we cannot stop with casting a ballot. At the personal and local level, we need to listen to and talk to one another, both one-on-one and in groups. On social media and in other public arenas, we need to remain civil. Remain? Maybe more like return to or initiate and practice civility. But we must also continue to urge our elected officials to keep civil tongues in their mouths, focus on practical matters of government, listen to all their constituents, and not sell their souls for short-term financial gain or temporary political career advancement. (People will remember, Mr. and Ms. Candidate. Keep that well in mind.) We cannot rest secure by electing people and then turning them loose on trust to look out for us. We have to watch them like hawks, every minute, and not let them forget for a minute that we’re watching. 

There are a lot of us, though, so we can take turns. Once we’ve established the habit. Once our fevered brains have a chance to recall that we’re all in this together, sink or swim. That’s the good news. It can be done. We can pull together. We can treat one another decently, with respect. And we have everything to gain.

The question is, will we get it together in time? Vote on Tuesday! But don't expect voting to produce a miracle. It's just not that fast or easy.

Mom and Pop Go For a Picnic They Hadn't Planned

At the beginning of summer, for us not-retired people who make our livings in this one season or not at all, life speeds up and up and up with each passing week, and we run as fast as we can to keep pace. Grass needs to be mowed almost every day, the calendar overflows with commitments, and daily life piles on additional demands. Fourth of July arrives: summer’s peak, we think — and then as it retreats in our mental rearview mirrors we congratulate ourselves for a few minutes on having survived, but summer has only now truly begun. We forgot. Resolutely now, clearer-eyed, we soldier on (some days like automatons, wondering how long we can last). 

Then one fine morning we seem to find our stride. August comes, with hot, dry weather. The grass barely needs mowing any more, and while gardens must be watered twice daily, the expenditure of time there is much less, and we pause and think gratefully of the nearness of September. Already for many in other states, for college and university students, school is beginning. A quiet Sunday in Northport gives the illusion that summer crowds have thinned, and in the evening we drive hopefully to another village for dinner. 

Crowds thinned? Not at all! Finding our familiar old gathering spot still filled to the rafters with strangers and ear-shattering noise, we walk to the grocery store to provision a picnic and there receive another shock, one that would have flattened Rip Van Winkle. What has happened to the little store we remember? It is now a giant, in area and in height, and feels like an emporium in some glamorous, distant, enormous city! We are overwhelmed! Dazed, we wander around and manage to find a deli sandwich and Greek salad to share, plus a cold drink — and then we flee! 

Surely there will be a quiet spot somewhere outdoors? Something familiar?

We seek out a certain bend in the river where we used to pull off the road to leave our vehicle and submerge our younger bodies in cold, flowing water. Now, however, we find a paved bicycle path and a parking lot with one way “Enter only” and another “Exit only” and the earth all beaten bare by the riverside and yet no picnic table or seating of any kind and “No parking at any time” beside the river. Farther downstream at another spot we used to pull off the road, logs have been dragged into place to prevent anyone’s driving in. 

Where is our world of forty years ago? Where are the quiet places? 

Finally we find another old pull-off place, this one still accessible, and though it is just off the main road and hardly hidden from traffic we are grateful to be able to park beside the river at last. Passenger side door open, we picnic in our car (not having brought chairs or a blanket) and reminisce. Days with children playing by the side of the river. Float trips and rowing trips in rubber raft, canoe, kayak. Upstream walks, wading against the current, with visiting friends. Leeches. A raccoon washing its dinner in the reeds. Hundreds of silent salmon around and beneath our boat in the fall.

Another car comes along and pulls off the road in front of us, and a man gets out and walks down to the water. He slips out of his sandals and wades in. He turns and waves to his wife to join him. She leaves her sandals next to his, gathers her summer dress up in one hand, and they wade knee-deep, first downstream, then up, against the current. They are from Ohio, I note from the license plate on their car, so it is probably their first time in this river. Watching them, we seem to be watching a movie of our own past.

The Word 'Wash'

After two winters spent in the high desert, the word immediately conjures up for me not an image of wet laundry on a clothesline but a dusty, river-shaped opening through scratchy mesquite. The dry wash. Arroyo. “There were mule deer down in the wash this morning.” On some maps, washes (each, like a river, with its own name) are called ‘canyons,’ but that word to me still means something larger and much grander. 

I do hang my washed clothing and table linens and towels out on a line in the backyard, and sometimes I recall years when I only  dreamed of being at home to do such a thing, but I did not then imagine doing it before the sun came up, as I must often do these busy days. I did imagine chickens pecking around in the grass at my feet, and those chickens’ presence I still have to imagine.

‘Wash’ makes me think also of watercolor, an art medium I will never attempt, content (and sufficiently challenged) as I am with pen or pencil. I am happy, though, that others dare the mystery and chance effects of a watercolor wash.

“Wash that man right outta my….” How I loved singing and acting out that “South Pacific” musical number! 

Dishwasher. I have never had one. Instead, I am one. On good days, washing dishes is a meditative activity, something my hands do while my mind is free to roam. 

‘Washed-up’ is not a good way to be, but treasures may be washed up on shore by the waves.

The sun washes over a field of green wheat, waves of grain rippling dark and light in the spring breeze.

Laver. Se laver. Lavar. Lavarse. Je me lave les mains. And in Spanish? It does not come as quickly, and I wonder if it ever will.

Washed away, carried away, swept away — gone from here but gone altogether or simply deposited somewhere else? Edith Piaf with her new love, sweeping (rather than washing) away the old. In another French song, however, waves wash away footprints in the sand: La mer efface sur la sable….  

Washable. Temporary. Evanescent. Mysterious.

I Changed One Way, My World Changed Another: Thoughts on American Business and Government

Confession: I used to be a libertarian. Really. It was a long time ago.

I met Ayn Rand in the pages of her novels and essays at the impressionable age of 17 and subsequently subscribed for several years to a magazine called Reason, with the catchy motto, "Consider the alternative." I bought it all — the idea that private enterprise is the solution to all social problems and any constraints on capitalism illegitimate and wrongful assaults on personal freedom. In a nutshell: profits good, taxes bad. Cities should be run like Disneyland, the writers of Reason argued. You want services? Those who do and can afford those services should pay for them, and others should be left alone with their money or their struggles.

What can I say? I was young. I got over it a long time ago. 

Many years after my attitude toward government and altruism had changed, however, I still found myself dreading the phone call to sign up for Medicare. I made fresh coffee and moved a comfortable chair over next to the phone, arming myself with pen and paper and anticipating being put on hold and shuffled from one office to another for an hour or more, but to my surprise it didn't work that way. An automated answering system asked me to leave my phone number so I could receive a callback when my turn came up to talk to someone. What a great system! When I was called back, the woman who called was pleasant and efficient, and getting signed up didn’t take long at all. I was happy and very impressed.

Much more recently I had to call AT&T on business and had a very different experience. I started out on hold (not a surprise) and was put on hold again repeatedly after finally reaching an AT&T representative. I do not, let me be clear, blame the young woman who took my call. I blame a company that has a crap system for taking calls and that clearly does not provide employees with the information they need or a quick way to access it. What should have been a simple transaction stretched out to forty-five L—O—N—G minutes. 

When I go to a local post office, whether in Northport, Leland, or Lake Leelanau, the federal employees who serve me are all pleasant, fast, and efficient. They have a good, solid system in place. Social Security and Medicare have systems that work well. Same for the Michigan Secretary of State's office in Suttons Bay. The Michigan Department of Treasury is not quite up there in the top ranks, but once you manage to reach a live person, they can generally take care of you.

— Then there is AT&T, a private, very large and successful company. A communications company, no less! Good grief! My question: Why can't that huge private, profitable enterprise do what so many ordinary government offices and agencies do so well?

Back in 1994 a visitor to my bookstore wanted me to join his national lobbying organization. The group represented, he told me, people in business who shared my views. He had never met me, but those were his words: “your views.” I asked what he thought my views were, as we had not yet exchanged a single opinion. "Well, you don't want government getting into business!" he said confidently. "If government gets involved, it will be a big mess like the post office!" At that point, I cried out as if stabbed, "I love the post office! The post office is great!" That little man turned and practically ran out the door -- with his pile of slickly packaged brochures, I might add, the very brochures that had first tipped me off that joining his organization would put money I could ill afford into the hands of people who already had way too much and probably weren’t doing very good things with it. 

Perhaps you disagree?

If you think government screws everything up and that private enterprise can and should take over the country — everything from elementary schools and universities to hospitals and prisons — please take another look. One of the main ways business increases profits, especially these days, is not by making better products or providing better services but by cutting costs. Payroll is a big expense. Cut payroll and you increase profits. Simple. More money for CEOs and stockholders. And if cutting payroll means that customer service goes out the window — the baby thrown out with the bathwater — well, Americans are getting more and more used to doing for themselves what the companies they pay used to do for them, aren’t they? 

Pump your own gas, book your own flight, print out your own ticket and boarding pass, check out your own groceries, etc. Do you save any money this way? Nope. Someone lost a job, and you’re now doing that job for free.

I’m curious. What are your recent experiences with big business, whether in a store, online, or by telephone or online? How often have you been able to reach a live human being to answer questions and/or solve a problem vs. the number of times you have been shunted endlessly (well, it seems endless) from one robotic voice to another, through an automated navigation system that never seems to reach an end, the robotic voice (pretending to be human) saying unhelpfully over and over, “I’m sorry — I didn’t understand your response” or, in a more positive scenario, “Just a minute while I look that up” (that bit of automated dialogue accompanied by what is supposed to sound like a person tapping away at a keyboard — and who is fooled by that bit of phoniness, I’d like to know?), with long stretches of waiting on hold, listening to canned music, periodically and far too frequently interrupted by a recorded voice repeating the unconvincing claim, “Your call is very important to us”?

Do you remember the days when service was more than an empty word, or are you part of a younger generation that never experienced those more leisurely and civilized times? How do you feel about it all? Just the way things are? The new normal? What choice do we have?

Disclaimer 1/24/2018: I must add that my remarks on the efficiency of government apply to agencies, not to the executive or legislative branches in Washington, D.C. I wonder if anyone in Congress has ever read Russian history — the party wars following the Revolution, the phony “trials,” the tortures, executions, and imprisonments. Is this where we’re heading? I suppose you could say that a country as large as the United States of America did well to last for over 200 years. But is that good enough for you?