Happy birthday

I am not proud of the fact that I’m from Saint Louis, nor am I proud of the fact that my ancestors are from Ireland. I’m not proud of those facts because I had no say in either matter and therefore cannot take the credit pride implies. But if I were the sort of person who throws the word “proud” around haphazardly, I would say that I’m very proud of the fact that Tina Turner and I came of age in the same city. For reasons I cannot explain, I have always been completely enthralled by Tina Turner. I don’t know if it’s the voice, or the story, or the fact that even though she was born into abject poverty as a sharecropper’s daughter, she appears to have more class than the most aristocratic. Even though I recoil at the tell-all books that are routinely pimped on the talkies, when it comes to Tina Turner I make an exception. She came out with her life story long before releasing a book was an item on the to-do list of celebrityhood. In 1985, when I was 19, I saw Tina Turner for the first time and it’s an experience I’ll never forget. There was plenty of flash, of course. The hair was intriguing, the costumes, the rawness of a performance delivered by a woman rumored to be in her late 40s, which at that time seemed impossibly old. But nothing compared to her voice, and I don’t mean her singing voice: the way she speaks, or growls, even though she lives in Europe, is so North Saint Louis that to my ears it’s very much a love song. If you ever hear Tina Turner speak pay attention to the way she says “everything.” To hear her say that word is to find yourself somewhere on a road called Natural Bridge, or Lucas and Hunt, or McPherson, or hundreds of others. When she speaks, her voice conjures forth yellowish street lights and broken brick sidewalks and smoky railroad yards. I was appalled that Tina Turner felt compelled to perform with one of the foulest entertainers of our time a couple of years ago, but I suppose that when you’re in the business you have to yield to reality. On the other hand, I thought the “statement” she issued after Ike died was exemplary: We haven’t spoken since our separation. That was it. I wasn’t invited to help Tina Turner celebrate her birthday, which is tomorrow, but that’s a party there’s not much I wouldn’t do to attend. I really wonder what she looks like when she’s not on stage. I picture her with a head that’s all but shaved. Most of all, I wonder about her name. Ike is the one who came up with Tina, which I think is one of the trashiest names possible (apologies to anyone named Tina). She had the last laugh on that one, of course, but I wonder if her friends and relatives – she has a sister, and grandchildren – know her by her real name. I wonder if Tina Turner is something she puts on, along with the outfits and the hair, and if the woman who sits down for coffee in the morning goes by the name she was given 70 years ago tomorrow, which is Anna Mae.

My missing record collection

Not long ago I went to a friend’s storage facility to help him cram some more of his stuff into it. I’ve driven past hundreds of those places, of course, but I’d never been inside one, and I thought it was interesting. Like an apartment building, there was a keypad out front, onto which my friend entered a four-digit code in order to open the gate. Inside, the building was like a maze, with long, fluorescent-lit hallways shooting off in directions that didn’t quite square with what the building looked like from the outside. The floors were concrete and uneven. The unit itself wasn’t much in terms of square footage, but the ceiling was so high that a ladder was required to reach the top third of the shelving that lined the back wall. My friend, who knows storage, brought his own ladder. Like a motel where guests bring their own pillows, the storage facility didn’t have ladders for its tenants. I was surprised by how narrow the corridors were.

One of the most satisfying things I’m aware of is getting rid of things. Clutter debilitates me, and although I have a few going at the moment, piles strike me as a symptom of hopelessness. Unless I was living in another state or country, I imagine that having to rent storage for my stuff would feel like defeat. I’m not a clean freak: I just like rooms more empty than full. Off and on for a year or two, I fretted over a storage chest and a table that did not fit anywhere in my house and that I didn’t particularly like. I could have hauled them to Goodwill in a borrowed pick up. I could have called the place in Portland that picks up furniture for families in need, but they’re very particular, and the table did need a bit of repairing. I could have put a post on craigslist and waited for the freak show to begin. Finally, over the summer, a friend of mine and I carried the two pieces to the curb in front of the house. I taped a piece of cardboard on which I’d scrawled “FREE” and taped it to the table, and in just over two hours both were gone. I’ve lived in my house for seven years, and the thing that pleases me most is that I’ve resisted the temptation to stack stuff I don’t know what else to do with in the basement. There are two things in my basement: laundry equipment and empty boxes, a few of which are now in my office, where they are waiting for me to fill them with books I plan to donate. I love my books, but sitting on my shelves keeps them from serving their purpose, which is to be read. Plus, they take up an entire wall, and we’ve moved in and out of several apartments together, my books and I, and across a few state lines. The time for them to go out on their own has come. Finally, even though I have no plans to move, I somehow feel better knowing that I could load up and ship out in an afternoon.

I love the feeling of getting rid of things, but the strangest thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I woke up to a very gray, chilled and drizzly Saturday morning. Having no obligations, I burrowed in under the covers and lingered for a couple of hours in that odd state where you’re suspended between sleeping and being fully awake. So there I was, enveloped in soft grayness, wondering where the hell my record collection is. It’s in Wisconsin somewhere, at least that’s where it was when I saw it last, sitting in a record holder one of my brothers built for me in shop class decades ago. I left it with a woman I haven’t spoken to since 1994, and while the collection isn’t anything impressive – I remember very little of its particulars, to be honest – for a few very odd and unexplainable hours, I wanted nothing more than to have it in my house.

Absolutely not

I take hopefulness wherever I can find it, and this week I am hopeful about breast cancer. For me, it began on Monday evening, when Katie Couric reported on the recommendations put forward by a group of government-appointed doctors. I’m no expert on breast cancer, but I am sufficiently paranoid, so when I heard the news that mammograms and self exams aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be, I immediately wondered what the insurance companies were up to. My second thought was about women in general. I think we’re still a little uncomfortable with women who are powerful and capable of making things happen. Unfortunately, some of the biggest chauvinist pigs I know are physicians, and I think they’re a little uncomfortable with having to share the country club that is the medical profession. I know for a fact that in the world of medical research, some diseases get more attention – and more funding – than others, and when that happens, the competition becomes ferocious. With that in mind, it doesn’t really surprise me that a group of physicians would get together and throw stones at the breast cancer machine (I use the word “machine” only because I don’t want to use “community”).

What did surprise me, in a very pleasant way, was the speed and conviction with which people I routinely ridicule told the doctors to go straight to hell, on national television no less. I'm no breast cancer expert, but I seriously doubt the numbers that went along with the recommendation that women not worry about mammograms before the age of 40, and then only every two years, and the statement that self exams are pointless, really. I find it hard to believe that only one in 1,400 women successfully battle breast cancer as a result of early detection thanks to a mammogram when I personally know a number of women who are living today because of a mammogram. I’m also curious to know how this commission defines “successful.” I know that when you switch from health insurance through COBRA to a private plan, you’re eligible to buy individual coverage for 63 days after the COBRA expires. I realize that’s totally unrelated, but my question is, if some commission can arrive at 63 days, what sort of hocus pocus have the experts injected into the formula used to determine what “successful” means when it comes to treating breast cancer? Anything’s possible, I believe. The government paid for this week’s bit of wisdom, but who paid the government? Is some company with lots of money and lots of influence getting ready to introduce some new “innovation” that will “revolutionize” the way breast cancer is treated? Relatively speaking, mammograms are pretty affordable, so maybe it’s time to up the ante. Despite their affordability, maybe the volume has driven the insurance companies to look for any excuse to stop covering them. Is a new drug about to be put on the market? Is it a coincidence that these recommendations were released almost in perfect synchronicity with one senator’s declaration of war – his words, not mine – on healthcare reform?

For all I know, mammograms may be the biggest PR stunt of our time. For all I know, mammograms may actually poison the women who have them. Having never had one, I cannot say for sure. But I can say for sure that it made for more hopeful television than I’ve seen in a long while. Robin Roberts, who has battled breast cancer herself, snapped out of her usual schmaltz mode and took the very boorish doctor she was interviewing to task over the numbers. Katie Couric interrupted one of the experts to ask how many women were involved in the recommendations. And best of all, one of the network’s medical correspondents, when asked if she planned to advise her own patients to follow the new recommendations, said, “No, absolutely not.”

91 words

It is shockingly easy to write long, rambling pieces about one thing and another. If you doubt this, just have a look at a random sampling of marketing materials or this blog. What is really difficult, and what I strive for, is to write short, succinct series of sentences that cover an astonishing amount of territory with very few, very carefully chosen words. When I find evidence that that art form is alive and well, I cut it out and save it. So imagine my delight on Friday afternoon, when I came across this paragraph, written by Paul Elie in an article called “The Velvet Reformation,” published in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic:

There are now more Muslims than practicing Anglicans in Britain, and the Church of England’s reason for being is under review. Nominally, its head is the monarch, but Prince Charles’s civil marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles poses a problem: the church that Henry VIII founded because Rome would not let him remarry still officially opposes divorce and remarriage. So when Queen Elizabeth dies—she is 82—the church will have to justify its claim as England’s “established” church, and its preeminence in the Anglican Communion, as never before in its history.

Personally, I don’t care at all about the monarchy, or the church, or the racial composition of the U.K. What I do care about is that someone can convey so much with so little: this paragraph is a grand total of 91 words, and all but three of them are three syllables or less. Read this paragraph a couple of times if you’re so inclined. Draw a diagram of this paragraph as a historical timetable. It swoops through the past, acknowledges the future and is firmly grounded in the present – all in 91 words. This paragraph does what the television does not: it explains. And in my opinion it does so with such grace – if you don’t believe me, read it out loud. If I ever wrote a paragraph like this I’d turn my computer off and go get a job at the grocery store, deeply satisfied that I’d achieved a level of talent never again to be realized.

But for now I’m pretty happy just trying. And I’m very happy that when I read writing like this, I’m enough of an old lady to take the time to cut it out and tuck it into a notebook or a file folder. Then, months later, when I come across something I’ve cut out, I get to enjoy being seduced all over again, as if for the first time. I’m selfish that way.

Thundering through Washington

Well, I may need to revise my opinion of Harry Reid. I cringe every time he comes on the television and starts babbling in his uniquely clumsy way about healthcare, the economy, the virtues of bipartisanship. Given the chance, I’d nominate Harry Reid as poster boy for why Democrats cannot accomplish much, even when they’re in the majority.

But that all changed Friday night thanks to a Harvard law professor named Elizabeth Warren. A few months ago, Bill Moyers had her on to talk about the truly criminal implications – she’s a law professor, after all – of the federal bailout. My impression of Elizabeth Warren was not objective. I liked the fact that she wasn’t slick. I liked the fact that there was a hint of the South and the Midwest in her voice. In the midst of the three- or four-month period where anyone speaking on behalf of the people losing homes and jobs and credit was dismissed by the pundits as “populist” – remember that? – the first time I saw Elizabeth Warren a little piece of me fell in love with her. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, of course, but she looked directly into Bill Moyers’ face and said, The financial system in this country is the biggest crock of shit ever, and that’s exactly what it smells like. The banks are bending the rules as far as they possibly can, freezing credit, raising interest rates, paying themselves outrageous salaries and even more outrageous bonuses while the people truly in need of assistance lose everything. I looked her up and read her faculty profile, but it didn’t say much about her except her teaching schedule and publishing history.

Friday night she was on the PBS program NOW, which I watch only because it bridges the half-hour gap between Gwen Ifil and Bill Moyers. It’s not a bad show, but squeezed between those two, even the most compelling programming is diminished. The theme of the program was how the billions and billions of dollars in bailout money aren’t exactly bailing out those of us who live closer to the bottom of the flow chart than the top. And there was Elizabeth Warren, talking, not just as a Harvard law professor, but as the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, to which she was appointed by none other than Harry Reid. I realize it’s been busy the past several months, with that child in the balloon, and Jon and Kate, and Michael Jackson, and many other stories, but how did I miss the news that Elizabeth Warren is now not only teaching law but wearing a badge of sorts as well?

Perhaps she’d already been appointed the first time I saw her and I missed the chronology because I was fixated on her words. Perhaps in comparison to all the churning that goes into passing laws, an oversight panel isn’t that big of a deal. I don’t know.

Personally, I’ll take Elizabeth Warren’s dry commentary over the snide hype spewed forth by the know-it-alls any day. On Friday, the NOW host asked why she hates credit cards. Elizabeth Warren does not hate credit cards. She has two, and she loves having them, but she cannot understand why the terms cannot be clearly stated in a page and a half, in print that doesn’t require a magnifying glass. And she doesn’t understand why credit card companies can legally raise interest rates on debt accumulated under different terms. I don’t, either. Isn’t it socialism for the government to regulate pay for private sector executives? Sort of. But the banks aren’t strangers to socialist concepts: they are backed up even when we’re not having an economic crisis by that two-word, trillion-dollar phrase “federally guaranteed.” That’s socialism for rich people, she said. Of most concern to Elizabeth Warren, not surprisingly, are the laws that supposedly govern the banking class in this country. The time to take a long, hard look at those laws is now, she said, not only because it would be wise to fix the leaks before the pipes burst again, but because of the lobbyists. “The lobbyists,” she said, “are thundering through Washington in greater numbers than we’ve ever seen before.” Sadly, for all of us, I think, the network news programs in this country aren’t interested in people like Elizabeth Warren, which explains why populist people like me don’t hear much thunder.

My flawed approach

For the past couple of weeks I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve been dismayed by the particulars of running my own business. Toward the end of last week, I decided to do something about it and fired a client. This may sound simple enough, but when your survival depends on keeping a steady stream of clients and projects coming in the door while an equally steady stream of invoices is going out the door, bidding a client farewell is terrifying.

For several months now I’ve been working with a guy who tries to manage the development of case studies for a small company in the Midwest. The only problem is that all the customers I’ve been assigned to write case studies about thus far are not happy with their purchase. That’s a problem, obviously. “We use the product because we’re forced to,” does not make a compelling customer quote. Rather than confront that, though, the client sends me very detailed notes about how to draft mail to customers, how to draft mail to the salespeople I speak with before contacting the customer, how to address the customer so that he doesn’t feel like I’m requesting his participation in the case study but that I’m calling or e-mailing to confirm an appointment already made. Two weeks ago, this client called another freelance writer with whom I collaborate on many projects – including his – and who is a very good friend of mine, to ask her to keep an eye on me because my communication style is wasting his salespeople’s time. Which is funny, because the salespeople have said the same thing to me about him, which is awkward.

I realize it must be unpleasant when people say your products are crap, but when the finger pointing begins, my sympathy for those in unpleasant circumstances evaporates very quickly. In my experience, finger pointing is always a sure sign that someone is trying to cover up his own mistakes. Reading this, you have to take it on good faith when I say that I am open to criticism about my work. Some projects go better than others. Sometimes I don’t deliver the best I am capable of. Sometimes I miss really significant aspects of a business story because I’m lazy. Sometimes I take the easy way out and rely on the cliché clutch rather than taking the time to find out what someone really means when they say they’ve increased productivity. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ll make more mistakes, and I’m happy to talk about them and hopefully learn from them.

What I’m not willing to do, I discovered last week, is play pointless parlor games that ignore the fact that the customers are unhappy and instead revolve around “the approach” I take in e-mail. That’s like blaming a building’s collapse on the type of handles on the kitchen cabinets while ignoring the fact that the foundation was rotten.

Anyhow, all of this got me thinking about the advice I’d offer my former client, if only we worked in a more honest business, including but not limited to:

· Assume that the freelance PR people you hire because they’ve worked in the field for many years are as familiar with the dirty tricks of the trade as you are.
· Assume that the freelance people you hire because they’ve worked in the field for many years find those dirty tricks so distasteful that they started their own businesses, which they love for the most part.
· Assume that when one freelancer refers another, they probably know each other fairly well, and they may even be good friends who compare notes after speaking with you, especially when you tell lots of lies.
· Assume that state-to-state calls can be easily made.
· Assume the present tense will end in five minutes, and then everything will shift.
· Assume that the guy who owns the company you now work for is a former colleague of one or more of the vendors and that a nice friendship may have developed over the years.
· Assume that sooner or later your name will come up in a conversation between the guy who owns the company you now work for and your freelancers.

So Friday morning, when I received this guy’s e-mail requesting a status update, which he sends weekly, I wrote him back and told him I couldn’t continue working on case studies that never get off the ground. My colleague and friend wrote her reply on top of that, saying essentially the same thing. I was very professional and courteous in my e-mail, as was my friend, but I do so look forward to accepting his invitation to “connect on Linkedin” when he launches his job search.

The soup is a bit heavy

It’s impossible to not celebrate the arrival of soup season. Once it’s necessary to turn the light on when I make coffee in the morning, once the shorts and short sleeves are put back in the bottom bureau drawers, once I’ve retired the window fan for the season and my feet once again feel so at home in my slippers that I rarely remove them, I get the sharp knives out and start chopping.

All of my soups are basically the same in terms of ingredients. I sauté chopped onion, then I add meat of some sort. I normally use pepper bacon, three or four slices, but lately I’ve been veering toward sausage for some reason. Then I put in soaked lentils, or navy or kidney beans, or black-eyed peas (the quietly surprising child in the bean family, I think), then broth or water, enough to submerge everything. Then I chop some more, potatoes and carrots and sometimes celery, although I’ve wondered about the purpose of celery lately. I add a large can of tomatoes and move the pot to the back burner, where it sits simmering for hours. I put spices in at the end. My soups are often accidental: Last winter, I meant to add chili powder to the French lentils, but I mistakenly grabbed the jar of cinnamon. It was very good, I thought.

I don’t follow recipes, but the secret to the best pots of soup I’ve ever made is the chopping. And it’s not the method of chopping – it’s the mood I’m in when I do it. There is something so peaceful about diligently chopping onions and potatoes, slicing them into long rows, and then cubes that stack up gently along one side of the cutting board. I only add vegetables to my soup pot by hand. I don’t do that business of tilting the cutting board so that it’s vertical and then scraping downward with the flat slide of the knife as if I were emptying a dump truck. If I’m rushed during the chopping, if I’m impatient about it, and if – especially if – I’m focused on something – anything, or anyone – unpleasant, I guarantee you that whatever ingredients I’m using that day will not soften sufficiently, regardless of how long the pot simmers.

I am not particularly religious, or spiritual even, but I do listen to the food. And a couple of weeks ago the season’s first batch of soup – split pea and sausage – spoke to me quite directly. I pulled a muscle in my lower back not by swinging upside down from a chandelier, or trying out anything too naughty to mention here, but by standing in front of the open refrigerator, pot in hand, and bending over to put the soup on the bottom shelf because there wasn’t room on top. The instant my hands let go of the pot and I began the lean back that precedes the return to standing up straight, something went wrong near the base of my spine. It felt like bark, still fresh and green in places, being ripped roughly from its branch.

I hobbled around for a few days and took lots of aspirin, but it scared me in the way most wake-up calls do if you’re paying attention. I have to stop spending so much time sitting at my computer, and on the couch and in bed. I’ve been walking more, and during the day I make a point of stretching in the living room or the kitchen, rooms where the computer cannot see me. But I need to get back on a bike, because I think it’s where my body and me belong.

My return policy

The men in my family lose things. My father lost sunglasses constantly. One of my brothers cannot hang on to his fingernail clippers. He clips his nails constantly, so it’s a problem when his tools go missing. My father’s solution to his sunglasses issue was to simply buy more. And my brother, he owns many, many clipping devices. I’ve seen a few of them: one is so dainty and delicate I’m kind of surprised my very butch brother will use it, and a couple are so bulky that my guess is they were designed for toenails.

I strive to be as unlike the male members of my family as possible, so the sunglasses and nail trimmer situation is a point of great pride. I found my sunglasses – my one and only pair – buried beneath sand and crushed beer cans at the beach at least a decade ago. And my nail clippers sit on the eye-level shelf in my kitchen cabinet, right in front of the cereal bowls. They’re always there for me, faithfully. When it comes to nail maintenance and retina protection, I’m bucking the genetics, and I feel good about that.

What I do not feel so good about is my inability to keep a pair of gloves for more than one winter. I lose them. And since I do not want to become an accessory hoarder, I buy only one pair at a time. Last month I found a perfect solution: a pair of gloves at a yard sale. They were gray with blue piping and fit perfectly. The price was hard to beat: 50 Cts, marked in thick black ink on a lime-green sticker about the size of a quarter. At the sale, a few blocks from my house, I browsed through the books and CDs strewn across a folding metal table. Then I found a quarter, a dime and three nickels in my pocket and bought the gloves. I can afford $5.99 for a pair of gloves at Target or Fred Meyer, but I was very pleased to buy them used instead. If just 33 percent of the male population in Portland loses gloves the way I do, there are plenty of barely worn pairs to go around. With statistics like that, why buy new?

But someone always has to be a jackass and mess it up for everyone. I’d offered to help someone move over the weekend, which was turning out to be cold and wet. So I took the gloves from the drawer where I’d put them, pealed the tag off and went on my way. As I was carrying part of a bed frame from the storage shed to the moving van, I noticed a fleck on my right glove. It was small, and tan, and once the bed part was crammed in place I took the glove off my left hand and, with my index finger, scraped at the fleck to remove it. And that’s when I discovered that it wasn’t a fleck at all but my skin, visible through a tiny hole that I would have noticed immediately had it not been covered by the price tag.

It’s not a big deal. I kind of like sewing projects, and mending the hole together wouldn’t have taken more than five minutes, and it’s not like I’ve lost lots of money, but the callousness of that sort of crap infuriates me. So on Sunday evening, right after it got dark and started raining in earnest, I wrote “Nice Try!” on a pale yellow Post-It note and added a smiley face. I put the gloves and my communiqué in a plastic bag from Safeway and set off into the evening. I was going to just toss the bag into the front yard of the house where the sale was, but instead I wedged it in among the shrubbery that runs along the side yard until I was satisfied that it wouldn’t blow away in a gust of wind and end up on someone else’s sale table next year.

I can't access the network

Oddly enough, there’s very little I hate more than talking about computers. I do not mean talking about computer problems, which is a different conversation entirely. I mean talking about computers. My job was once to interview people about how technology has impacted their lives and then turn their stories into things like articles, case studies and press releases. Over the past couple of weeks, it has become very clear to me that my real job, my main job, is to have very long and painful conversations about computers. File formats, software versions, meetings held over the computer, internal and external networks, spreadsheets, access cards, read-only saving settings. When I am part of these conversations – and I often am – my skin hurts, my blood flows differently and my breathing shifts. I am not kidding: I react to it, and not in a good way. By mid-morning Monday I found myself on the verge of tears so I turned the computer off and left the house.

“It’s all I can do to resist the temptation to blow my brains out,” said the woman seated at the table at the front of the room. I never drank in moderation, but I do employ that approach when it comes to AA meetings. The woman continued: she couldn’t tell if her daughter really had stopped using heroine, or if that had been yet another ploy. She was exhausted, she explained, from shifting from feeling responsible – and guilty – for her daughter’s addiction to feeling rage toward her daughter for lying and then back to guilt.

I was elated, just listening to her. I was so relieved to hear someone speak about being human that I was hardly tempted to blow my brains out. The temptation I had to resist was to jump up and give the woman a hug. A big one, and I am not a huggy person.

I came home to a number of confused and confusing e-mail messages, most of them about computers. Can this template be uploaded at 12:01 AM? Is there a system for that? Can we post a video file? Jane Doe is building a slide deck for the shared drive. Joe Schmo will circle back with us EOD – for now, he’s synching content.

I left the house again and went to the monthly neighborhood association meeting. The meetings are interesting, and I’m friendly with a few of the people. It’s through the neighborhood association that I learned about the group planning a food co-op, which is something I’m now involved in. The cops show up and give a crime update, and the prostitution advisory group usually has something to share. It’s only a couple of blocks from my house, so it doesn’t require much effort, physically.

One of the people who spoke on Monday night is a man who’s probably in his late 50s or early 60s. I’ve noticed him before. He’s tall and appears to have steered clear of the slump and slouch. His slenderness probably makes his ears appear larger than they are, as well as his hands. I like it when he says something because he is awkwardly unscripted and at times hard to follow. When he speaks, it seems to me that he’s thinking at the same time. He’s the chair of some committee on neighborhood planning, so Monday night he got up in front of the room and rambled through a few topics, one of which was an update on citizen involvement in developing a new master plan for the city of Portland. He read a list of attributes the city planners would like to be associated with neighborhoods. “These planners, they’re good, the planners are,” he said, and rattled off a few more phrases, openly scoffing at a couple of them. “They have a lot of words, a lot of words. What they’re getting at though, now,” he said, the grasping visible on his face. “Now, I’m an engineer, and I like things clear and really up front right away.” He looked to the ceiling, as if for divine guidance. “Everyone should live within 20 minutes of everything they need. That’s what we’re talking about.” The man entertained a few pointless questions, the last of which was from someone who asked, very politely, if he would post his update to the association’s listserv. The man, to whom I plan to introduce myself at next month’s meeting, was silent for a second and a half or so, before saying, simply and beautifully, “No.” He returned to his seat and the meeting continued.

The fine print

For some reason, I have listened to my father more since he died last year than I ever did when he was living. My father came of age during the 1930s. As the story goes, he sold eggs door to door as a boy and later, before signing up and heading for Europe in uniform, as a young man. “Those housewives,” he told me once, “were always very happy to see me.” In addition to growing into a very healthy sex drive, to which I owe my life, literally, a childhood spent in the 1930s instilled in my father a life-long, profound and complete mistrust of the banks. Goddamned thieves, I heard him say to my mother one night as they balanced the Boatman’s account, the cucumber green, perforated statements stacked neatly across the dining room table. It’s foolish to trust the banks with your money, we were told frequently, my brothers and sisters and I. They will screw you.

Over the summer the one company I have a credit card with sent me a letter to tell me that changes were being made to the fee structure in the near future. I would be charged for new things, in other words, in new ways. It was a beautiful afternoon when the envelope arrived, sunny and clear, cool enough for comfort but warm enough for shorts and flip flops. The absence of my father has been the strangest thing ever for me. Most times he feels more present in death than he did in life, but on that particular day I wanted to call him to see what he thought of AIG, whose latest outrageousness had made headlines that morning. I couldn’t call him, so I decided to read the entire letter from the credit card people instead.

If you want to try this at home, I have a few words of advice. Start reading at the very end, where the fonts are impossibly tiny. Generally, the smaller the type, the truer the words. The easily readable print, conversely, is reserved for the PR people. In large type, I learned that I am being “empowered” by the credit card company, but in the tiny print section I learned that there would be new, higher penalties for late payments and a new charge for foreign transactions. I got fixated on that. I assumed that “foreign” meant outside of the U.S., but the term “transaction” puzzled me. When I tried to check in at a hotel in Hong Kong in 2006 with my credit card, the instant my card was swiped the account was frozen. I spent the better part of two days trying to reach the fraud squad in Nebraska to assure them that it was indeed me, that I was indeed in Hong Kong, that I did indeed intend to use my credit card to pay for the hotel. That was a foreign transaction, and fees were added accordingly to cover the cost, I presume, of freezing and then thawing my account.

That’s one thing. Buying a pair of jeans at the mall less than three miles from the front door is quite another. As a result of the work I’ve done, I happen to know that the processing of credit card purchases for many companies – ones we’ve all heard of, ones that can be found as “anchors” in any mall – are managed in other countries. This is called a number of things, “smart shoring” being the most colorful I’ve heard thus far. This is a great way, we’ve been told, to contain costs. And there are all kinds of computer programs that can manage the entire process “end-to-end” seamlessly, efficiently, affordably. Until, that is, the credit card company decides to start adding 2 percent of the total transaction to the bill when the purchase is made from a company that has smart shored. I called the credit card company and eventually connected with a very pleasant woman. I asked her if this 2 percent would be added to the bill based not on the country where the purchase was made, but the country where the purchase was processed. “Yes,” she said bashfully. I have not conducted a survey, but I’d bet lots of money that very few people who run the cash registers have any idea what country the work is being done in when they swipe the customer’s card, hand the keypad over and ask for the PIN. Why would they? And why would most people think to say to the cashier, “Excuse me, is your processing handled in the U.S. or elsewhere?”

Were the retailers obligated to let their customers know that their customers would be stuck with a 2 percent foreign transaction fee? The woman from the credit card company said she couldn’t speak on behalf of the retailers. I thanked her for her time and we wished one another a pleasant afternoon. I can’t speak on their behalf either, but I’m going to anyhow. I have very little respect for businesses that have sent thousands upon thousands of jobs to other countries for the sake of cheap labor and the very short-term prospect of “increasing shareholder value.” I think expecting them to let customers know that they’re going to pay a little extra because of the location of the money computers makes about as much sense as expecting bank executives to be humble about their own bonuses, especially during years when their palms are wide open when the rescue money is being handed out.

Thoughts and prayers

In addition to the fact that it happened in the first place, there were a number of aspects of the shooting spree at a military post in Texas last week that I think are very disturbing.

The first, of course, is Good Morning America. On Thursday afternoon, as the story of the incident emerged over the radio, I wondered, almost immediately, what Diane Sawyer would have to say about it the following morning. If that does not make it painfully clear that I need to get my television addiction under control, I don’t know what does. And true to form, on Friday the madness began in earnest: Good Morning America opened the show with an impressive array of video of military personnel ravaged by panic, large, armed men jumping out of the back of trucks to restore order and lots of tears. This was all set to a soundtrack that would have been perfect for a suspense movie. I am not kidding: a soundtrack, on the news. Chris Cuomo had been dispatched to the site, where he offered his own unique brand of comfort to the people he interviewed, and Robin Roberts added, for some reason, that “military families are truly special.”

One of the strangest things about the coverage is something I have certainly seen and heard before but that didn’t really gel for me until late last week. When did it become standard operating procedure for news people – so called – to conclude their interviews with “Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family”? I do not object to that from the religious neutrality point of view; what I object to is the rampant insincerity. It would be bad enough if this sort of talk were confined to the morning shows, but it’s not: from her perch, Katie Couric sends out thoughts and prayers quite regularly. When I send or receive thoughts and good wishes, it’s a personal exchange, a personal participation in empathy and compassion, not a cheap ploy to stir what now passes as emotion among millions of television addicts like me. It must be noted that Jim Lehr, Gwen Ifil and Bill Moyers do not engage. When their interviews end, they wrap them up by thanking the guest for his or her time. Once a week, in fact, the News Hour runs the names and photos of soldiers recently fallen, which is preceded by Jim Lehr saying, “And now, in silence …” The “in silence” part is key to me: the way I was raised, when you wanted to show respect for someone recently departed, you keep your mouth shut.

Speaking of no silence, things weren’t much better locally. There is only so much NPR one can take, so in the afternoons I often tune in to the conservative entertainers. For the most part I do find them quite entertaining, and every now and then they make a point with which I actually agree, but late last week was stunning. One of the hostesses in Portland regularly brays about her devotion to all-things military as if it were a badge she’s earned. Which is why I was shocked – truly shocked – on Thursday afternoon when she didn’t even take a deep breath before launching into a tirade about Obama. How dare he speak about what happened at Ft. Hood, she asked her listeners, when he clearly doesn’t really like America? Rather than listen to her followers call in and agree with her, I switched to the jazz station, which kept me company for the remainder of the afternoon.

Peanuts and popcorn

I have a theory about money. I think that what we’re allocated is pretty much what we have. My theory is ridiculously over simplified, but it seems to me that you gain some here as you lose some there. As my favorite college professor once said, what you make on the popcorn you lose on the peanuts.

When I lived in an apartment, it seemed that every time I got a raise at work, my rent was raised accordingly. It was as if the payroll officials were in cahoots with the landlord. I shared this with one of my brothers, who told me I was being paranoid. Perhaps.

In 2002 I bought a car from a friend for $1,000. I bought the car because my office relocated to a suburb of Portland that doesn’t believe in public transportation, which includes, in their estimation, bike paths and sidewalks. It’s been a good car, overall. After years of calculating what to buy at the grocery store according to what would fit into a back pack, there was something liberating about loading a shopping cart up with big bottles of juice that happened to be on sale and insane amounts of toilet paper and laundry detergent.

It’s time for the car to go: for more than two years now I’ve worked from home, and my body is rebelling against the prolonged sitting. It’s the insurance, though, that’s my main motivator. I hadn’t owned a car since 1989, so I don’t know if it’s a sign of the times, or if the laws are different in Oregon, or if my tolerance has diminished, but I’ve paid for the car many times over in insurance payments, fully aware that my coverage would probably be cancelled the minute I made a claim for something as minor as being towed.

The insurance was weird from the start. When I called the agent, who works for a national company and was recommended by a friend, the first agenda item was being asked to prove that I had never driven the car prior to calling to have it insured. Of course I’d driven it, I explained. Prior to purchasing it, I took it for a test drive, and I took it to a mechanic to make sure there weren’t major problems. Who in his right mind would have a car insured before buying it? Then I wondered, how can an insurance company legally insure a car before the person being insured owns it? Adding to the absurdity, before issuing the policy she needed to inspect the car, which required me to drive it to the sidewalk-free suburb.

Two summers ago I called the insurance office and asked if I could opt for a lower level of coverage since I drove the car so rarely that I hadn’t bought gas in 11 months. Sure, I was told, they could lower the premium, although the reduction was so minimal it was laughable. But best of all, in order to get the lower rate I’d need to call the office on the days I planned to drive the car. Before the agent and I hung up, I answered one of her questions with, "Yes, Mommy." I just quit making the payments and started being even more careful when I drove, which was rare.

About a month ago I got the notice from the DMV that it was time to renew my plates. In Oregon, we don’t just pay a fee for plate renewal. In Oregon, we dutifully go to an emissions testing center, inevitably in the most far-flung location one can imagine. And even though we are very “green” here in Oregon, certain vehicles – large ones, from what I hear, not mine – are exempt from this process. If the vehicle passes the emissions test, you present your papers, pay the fee and attach new stickers, which are often stolen, to your license plates. It’s hard to take this test seriously: I failed once, so my mechanic just adjusted something under the hood, which took as much time and effort as turning a screw – once – and my car passed the emissions test beautifully.

Alas, I cannot renew my plates without presenting proof of insurance, so I’m donating the car. I’m going to start riding a bicycle regularly again, I’m going to walk more. I’m not going to pay for gas unless it’s to give someone gas money if I get a ride, and I’m not going to pay for repairs, or insurance. None of which makes any real difference, though, because Wednesday afternoon my health insurance company informed me – via a communiqué the size and weight of a telephone directory – that my monthly premiums are increasing by $52 per month starting December 1.

The conversation

I wanted to write something really thoughtful, something reasoned about the gay marriage issue, about how it pits people against one another, about how it divides neighborhoods and offices and even families. And about how we’ve thrown millions of dollars out the front door, not to fund a scholarship in someone’s memory, or to feed the hungry, or to help people struck by disasters get back on their feet again, but to make sure that two men or two women cannot say “I do” and have it recognized legally. On Tuesday the people of Maine voted to overturn their state legislature’s decision to allow couples to marry regardless of the gender composition. The day before that, the gay political group in Oregon announced that at some point in the future – perhaps as early as 2012 – we’re going to give it another go and see if we can’t overturn Measure 36, which was passed here in 2004 and declares that marriages in this state consist of one man and one woman. We’re going to do this, I read, by starting a conversation, by showing people who we really are.

I’m not.

Sorry if that sounds pouty, or stubborn, or whiney, but personally I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to audition for something so basic that straight people often do it more than once. If that many people in this country are so hell bent on excluding gay folk from their own little sanctuary, that’s fine with me. Like a lot of people I know – gay, straight and otherwise – I’m really sick of talking about it. It’s not that interesting when you get right down to it and it pales in comparison to other subjects we could be addressing with our time, money and energy. All I ask is that we adhere to a simple principle, one upon which I believe our country was founded. If I’m not allowed to sit at the adult table, I don’t expect to have to pay an adult fare. In other words, I want a tax break.

Halloween weirdness

Sadly, I’ve never had much flair for costumes. I believe this is rooted in my memory of going to Kindergarten on Halloween dressed up as Cinderella. Halloween had been explained to me as the one day you could dress up as someone you were not. I was not a princess, but I thought it would be fun to be one for a day. Imagine the surprises that awaited me on the playground.

These days, one of the surest signs that I’ve become a grumpy old man is my disdain for adult costume parties. I know people who plan them for months, painstakingly settling on a theme, tirelessly schlepping around town long before the first leaves begin to turn, searching for the perfect accessory. I know people for whom the year is divided into two halves, differentiated precisely by the day they stop talking about what they were for Halloween last year and start talking about what they’re going to be. Adults in costumes is just a bad idea, I think. The whole act of dressing up is a precursor for spouse swapping, or making out with your best friend or your brother-in-law, or the husband “accidentally” slipping into a pair of his wife’s undies once the lights are out for the night.

So rather than grouse about it I just stay home and hand out candy at the front door. I drop candy bars into plastic pumpkins or decorated shopping bags and then toss a bar or two to the adult who stands on the sidewalk. It’s usually quite festive in my neighborhood, an evening full of friendly banter with people I almost never see even though they live close by. This year, a group of teenagers showed up in a collective costume, a performance piece, you might say: they were dressed as The Recession. One of them held a cardboard sign that said I NEAD WORK. Another told me he’d just been released from the clinker. Later, two guys, late 20s, early 30s perhaps, thudded up onto the porch, each holding a baby, one of whom clenched a sippy cup and gazed at me expectantly. How sweet, I thought. “We’re just a couple of drunk uncles with babies,” one of them slurred. “Dude, the Ducks kicked ass today!” The Ducks are a college football team in Oregon. “Are you a Duck?” asked the other uncle. “Or are you a Beav?”

I gave the two uncles two candy bars each, not just because they were sexy but because it was getting late and I had a lot of candy left. I bought four bags of Hershey bars – they were only two bucks each at that quantity – and I had a lot left to give. It was mild in Portland over the weekend, and Saturday night was dry, but people freaked, I believe, about the swine flu. I don’t really blame them, given the hysteria. Every day last week, Halloween was used as a hook for the ongoing swine flu story. If this flu epidemic does indeed turn out to be the beginning of the end of humanity, I will never forgive myself for wishing the news people would stop injecting everyone with anxiety, which I think is deadlier than any virus. One of the network affiliates in Portland put the national news people to shame last week when it comes to testing the limits of my belief in freedom of the press. After an interview with a hospital administrator who explained that he’s looking into using vacant offices in case his facilities are overwhelmed with swine flu patients, the screen filled with footage of the New Orleans convention center overrun with the recently homeless shortly after Hurricane Katrina. We want to be on the safe side, the anchors explained, and secure extra space before it becomes a medical emergency. See the connection? We do not want something like that to happen here, and just the fantasy of the headlines we could write if something like that did happen here is far scarier than any costume party for adults I’ve ever missed.