Driving Down Memory Lane

I used to work in a record store on Sundays.



I made a little extra money, and to be truthful, it got me out of the house and allowed me to hone my interpersonal skills. When I was of such a mind, the occasional socialization with attractive women was another motivation.



I have exhibited hermit-like behavior in the past. When you don’t really have any money or anyplace to go, hermatism ensues. Part of me felt sorry for myself and another non-sorry part sort of exhibited my midlle finger to the rest of the human race: didn’t suffer fools gladly. Bastards! I was deflecting the slim possibility that if I put myself out there in society, I’d be rejected. Wow. Self-discovery.



I have always considered myself a non-conformist. The old home town was pretty conformy: everyone is a republican and a church goer. They are all slim and coiffed and rich. I was never any of those things. Never wanted to be. But being the opposite of all those things made me stick out like a democratic, heathen, chubby, disheveled, welfare recipient sore thumb.
So without veering off into some sort of epic, PhD in Psychology thesis, let me just point out that





I have mellowed a bit. But still…



The clientele at the record store would typically walk in the door and immediately ask me or an associate what was selling the most. This was information we had on hand. Whatever people were buying, they’d buy. If it was a recording of vomiting, and it was in the top 10, out came the gold AMEX card.



This flock mentality had always bothered me. It still bothers me.



When I was younger, back in the late 70s when my liver still had a chance and my muscles were visible through the flab and none of my joints ached, I made some observations. Everyone in my home town had one of two cars: a Volvo Station Wagon or a BMW 2002. Some families had the former for Mom and the latter for Dad, but I am not generalizing. If you walk down the main shopping street of my old home town that’s what you would see parked at the curb. Volvo Volvo BMW BMW Volvo.



The men of my age wore Lacoste Alligator shirts and the women had disco hair. They went to bars at night met up and followed each other’s Beemers and Volvos off up onto the ridges for pre-aids sexual adventure. I’m not bitter.



For a while, after the 2002 rotted out, 325s were parked in the town spaces. Then there was a brief minivan epoch.



I am not going to fill this space with a complete vehicular timeline except to fast forward to today where the entire town (and most of the rest of my fellow countrymen) drive SUVs.



It’s stunning, shocking and embarrassing. Huge gas guzzling behemoths where the humbler, smaller cars of my youth once parked. They block the view and the rays of the sun.



No one rives a car older than 10 years anymore. Except me I think.




Anyway, I was tooling down the road in my 1987 Volvo Station wagon when an odd vehicle pulled onto the highway in front of me. It was tiny, dwarfed by the Suburbans, Land Rovers and Expeditions that sped by in both directions. As I crept up behing the tiny car, which was holding it own in the velocity sweepstakes, I suddenly realized it was a BMW 2002. Wow! It survived the rust plague! Some guy had fixed it up nice. So I took a picture and here it is. By the way, I plan on buying a Ford Flex as soon as I can.

Negativity

Pop a cork and light up a Churchill! We’ve been on Rusty Hinge Road for 10 years! In the early months of our residency, as the sawdust levels began to subside and the patina of the previous tenants faded away, I began to collect ephemera related to my new home town. Just post cards at first. In those early days, when EBAY was just a little more than an idea, I could win auctions without much competition: two dollars here, five dollars there, before long I had quite a collection. Then it was on to pottery and books, anything even vaguely related to my zip code was fair game. I would seek it out, bid on it, and for a while, there was a fairly steady stream of envelopes, padded bags and boxes arriving at my door.

Once I figured out how to do it, I set up my EBAY account to run automatic searches specific to my desires. Borselino hats is one of my favorites, as are Volvo parts and antique banjos. The one I get every day centers on items related to my home town.


Not too long ago, I received an EBAY notification offering old photographic negatives that were alleged to have been snapped by a renowned local WPA muralist. It promised images of street scenes (I like those), old cars (sign me up) and people (I’m into people).



I won the lot for $3.95 plus postage and a week later I was running 4X5 negatives through my scanner. As anticipated, my computer screen delivered photos of old houses and cars and old-fashioned people in a 1930s back yards, sipping lemonade and pretty much doing what we modern folks do on a summer’s day (without the technological gizmos).




One of the things I began to do with my postcard collection was to get in the Toyota and drive to the various locations pictured in my 80-year-old images, with the idea of replicating the exact image as it looks today. I had some success with this, but it often required some research, since occasionally streets are renamed and in some cases entire neighborhoods have been paved over in favor of a commercial enterprise. My newly acquired negatives sparked a renewal of this interest, especially since I had the name of the photographer and some possible landmarks I could use to identify the scenes I now had on my hard drive.

I googled the artist with limited success, save for a whole lot of images of his fine murals which are still on display in many local government buildings. My next step was to go to the local library to search the town directories.

After finding a “Jim Rockford” parking spot in front of the library, I walked in the door and practically knocked over Gilbert, the unofficial town historian. I had spent many hours in various places listening to Gilbert rattle off his boundless knowledge of local lore and on this particular day, I merely mentioned the name of the muralist I was researching and Gilbert was rattling off reams of valuable information that was priceless for my research. He gave me so much data that I decided not to pursue the reference desk for the old directories and set out to photograph modern digital versions of the vintage images that I now owned.



In what I thought was a delightfully karmic twist, the address Gilbert sent me to happened to be right around the corner from my property at Rusty Hinge Road. The house was one with which I was quite familiar. Gilbert’s description of how the artist’s family used the property all made sense, but I instinctively felt that it was not the one depicted in my photos.




I won another EBAY auction of negatives of identical description and while I was waiting for them to arrive, I returned to the library to do more research on the photographer. I found three different addresses from three different decades. My subject had moved several times. From the driver’s seat of the Toyota, I took three new photos, I also discovered that, unfortunately, one of the locations was now a more modern strip mall.

Maybe one of these properties could have been the location of the back yard in my photos. I continued to poke around and email Gilbert while I watched the mail for the new (old) negatives.
In a week, I was scanning the new material. There were a series of interior shots, taken around a Christmas dinner table, and a few others of folks sitting on a back porch and then, hallelujah, one of the properties I had photographed came up, exactly as my modern photograph had captured it.

I get an immense sense of satisfaction I get when I am able to bring the past to the present. When I am able to replicate a shot that had been taken before my father was born and study the two images side by side, every little detail and grain silently tells the story of the passing decades. I posted these images to the internet in a photosharing site where I have found neighbors with similar interests. I explained what I was doing and revealed my sources. There was some response and I was given some useful suggestions.

More negatives came up on EBAY the next day, and some of the images look like they might contain a few shots of the house around the corner.

I put in my bid and rubbed my hands together in anticipation. Lo and behold, at the last minute, I was outbid! Drat! Now someone out there has “my” negatives!

I know where you live!

Halloweener

I'll do anything to avoid doing what I have to do.

I bought 26 dollars worth of candy and parked in the living room and waited for the parade of ingrates to come to my door for handouts.

I thought I was going to have to eat all the candy myself, but eventually, some kids came through the rain, most of them in actual costumes (for once) and some of them actually enthusastic.

Well sir, they got about half of the bowlful. Normally, I have to keep a ruler handy to whack the little buggers' hands when they over-grab. These trick or treaters where very polite, if surly.

"How many shall I take?" I was asked.

"Take a bunch." I said. And because I am a health care ptofessional I said, "brush your teeth!"

Chilling Out

The house on Rusty Hinge Road came with a fairly new gas furnace. It is connected directly to a municipal gas line that lies beneath the pavement on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Last March, Melissa told me that the heater was on the fritz. This was a new experience. With my old oil furnace, I could go down into the cellar and press the button on the red box. If the Gods are in alignment, the problem was fixed.

This gas unit has no such button and unlike the oil variety of yesteryear, there is no international safety orange sticker on the side of the machine displaying the contact telephone number for service.

I called the gas company and after going through a couple menus, got a human on the line who told me that the gas company doesn’t “do that sort of thing” and I should find myself a reliable plumber who specializes in heater repairs.

So I contacted a contractor friend who recommended a plumber buddy, who I called, and that afternoon his truck was at the curb, and he had his nose inside the fallow furnace.

“You burned out the motor,” he told me in very sketchy English. “I will go to my supply house on Monday and get you a price.”

It should come as no surprise that the heater finked out during an early March cold snap and on a Saturday morning so we could plan on pretty much freezing various nether parts off until midweek.

Melissa, the saver, the collector of things, went to the basement and retrieved a couple of electric oil-filled radiators she had bought when she lived out in far more temperate Oakland, California. These portable units served her well in the short, mild winters of the bay area.

“Don’t be silly,” I chided her, “How will these things help us?” This is a big old house and those tiny things are like pebbles in the ocean.”

Unphased by my chiding, Melissa pluged them in and in a couple of hours, with the aid of some baffling laws of physics, the oil-filled electric radiators had transformed a sizable portion of the chill in the house to a comfortable level.

“I think it’s actually warmer than our furnace,” I remember thinking as my fingers thawed and I was able to type again.

On Monday, I called the plumber. He let me know that his supplier not only did not have the motor BUT they could not get one.

“It’s discontinued.” Discontinued?

He suggested I go online.

I did and after poking around for part numbers, model numbers and serial numbers, I located a brand new, non-returnable part at a warehouse somewhere in Illinois. I had it Fedex-ed out to me at breathtaking expense, and it arrived on my frozen porch by the end of the week.

Deciding that he was kind of flaky, I fired the plumber. Ultimately, I ended up calling the number on the side of a truck, “Demitri Plumbing and (more importantly) Heating.” They were able to fit me into their schedule that day.

A pleasant gentleman with a baseball cap and his name (not Demitri) embroidered on his pocket brought his tools in from the cold and in 10 minutes our house was vibrating and getting warmer.

“I guess I didn’t need that non-returnable motor after all.” I said.

“It was simply a dingus schnobber,” the technician explained, adding numbers up on an invoice. Of course it wasn’t really a “dingus schnobber” that needed tweaking -- it was something equally as unfamiliar to my vocabulary.

“It happens all the time,” the kindly technician explained, “It’s the first thing I always check.” I wrote out a big check and handed it to my new friend.

“Your plumber should have known that much.”

“You know anybody that needs a motor?” I asked, seeing a fairly hefty portion of a weeks pay in an unopened box on the cellar floor.

“I could take it off your hands but it is of no value to us,” he said.

“Skip it,” I told him, graciously leading him out the door.

March became April and we opened the windows and turned off the furnace. The warm blur of summer went by. We tried to put it off as long as we could but a couple days ago, we turned on the heat.

Again the comfortable hum of the motor could be felt throughout the ancient beams and boards. The dust bunnies and cat hair that had collected over the summer was rudely awakened from hibernation and made airborne as the warm air came blasting out of the registers. And then, alas, no heat.

When I returned from work one morning, the oil-filled radiators were back on the job. Before I went to bed, I had an appointment set up with Demitri.

The next afternoon, the house was humming and I was writing a check to Demitri, who assured me that my furnace would be giving me many more years of happy service.

I need a new roof and the paint is peeling and I would really love to put in a new garage. In spite of Demitri’s attempts at calming my qualms, am I going to need a new furnace? Good thing Melissa saved these oil-filled radiators.

Maybe I just need a new house.

Meanwhile I’ll go online and look for a replacement dingus schnobber.

Flour Power

I am on a diet again. I am really good when I set my mind to it. Problem is that the minute I even start to fit into that pair of pants I have stowed somewhere back in the closet, I celebrate with a never ending conga line of delicious food that I had so diligently resisted for months and months.

So, in truth, I am pretty good at starting a diet, but I stink at staying on a diet. And take a note, kiddies, it gets harder as you get older.

So with my increasing girth, the achy joints, sagging jowls, elevating blood sugar and the specter of mortality staring me in the face, I have dusted off the old diet book that was recommended to me many years ago by my dour doctor and joined the losing team.

The diet book on my shelf is basically a Frenchman’s version of the Atkin’s plan: nix the carbs and loose the pounds. One slight deviation from the late, great Doctor Atkins prescription is whole wheat bread, a carbohydrate, is allowed for breakfast. Not your basic grocery store whole wheat, mind you, my book insists on purely whole wheat flour, with out a speck of enriched white flour. After scouring the ingredient labels in every grocery store in the county, I decided I was going to have to dust off my old bread pans and bake my own.

When I was a kid, I got into making bread. I think that probably one of the neighborhood hippy chicks had made a fresh loaf and I was attracted to the enticing allure of both. My sense memory alarm clangs loudly with the taste of that first oven fresh chunk, slathered with butter in a once familiar, fragrant kitchen. After that first taste, I was hooked. With my soon-to-be lifelong instant-gratification issues blaring loudly, it was just a matter of minutes before the family kitchen was a flurry of flying flour.

My mother, a talented cook, was not especially keen on the wife/mother expectations thrust upon her by the “Mad Men” mores of the time. She gladly relinquished her kitchen to me; in fact she’d have resented the concept of the kitchen being designated as “hers.”

So she was delighted to underwrite my bread-baking phase, and happy to lend her expertise. As much as I loved the idea of making fresh bread, I was completely unaware of the choreography involved in the process. There’s a thing about yeast and its properties and its sensitivities to temperature and ingredients. There are huge periods of waiting for stages of rising and something called “proofing” not to mention the fact that once all of the front end stages are completed, there’s a matter of waiting for the baking piece and once it’s out of the oven, you have to wait a few minutes for the bread to cool down before it can be safely eaten without serious injury. So much for instant gratification.

While my memory seems to look back at what seemed like months of bread-baking experimentation, I suspect it was no longer than a week or two, but I am also sure it was something with which I was obsessed. During the bread making epoch, I made white bread, French bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, raisin bread, pumpernickel, rolls and virtually every recipe the Joy of Cooking offered.

I always came back to plain old white bread because it was the most reactive to the yeast, wherein it dependably rose with gusto, while some of the others seemed to rise with indifference or worse, not at all, leaving me with fragrant inedible bricks. The white bread, God Bless America, was the most popular among my family of tasters.

Somewhere, possibly in a landfill in New Hampshire, there may be remnants of the old family kitchen. Archeologists, many centuries from now, painstaking sifting through that landfill, will scratch their heads, write papers and give lectures about the layers of sturdy wheat-based cement and linoleum circa 1955 uncovered there.

Fast forward three decades, Melissa and I are making whole-wheat bread in the test kitchens of Rusty Hinge Road. I have hit upon a fool proof, all-wheat, batter-style bread found in Fannie Farmer. It works well, smells terrific and tastes pretty good. With the internet at our fingertips and about four feet of cook books on the pantry shelf, there is no visible end to the recipes available for the type of bread required by the French diet book my dour doc gave me. A wheat berry, rye and whole wheat recipe from last week is quite edible but a bit too dense. It toasts well, and it fills the house with an intoxicating aroma that cannot be described accurately except to say it smells like home. Particularly with a hefty dollop of fat-free ricotta cheese and a splash of that Korean hot sauce with the rooster on the bottle.

The diet seems to be working. The most used notch on my belt no longer requires a struggle to reach. I am starving most of the day, but using the Frenchman’s diet, I can choose from a variety of specific snacks to fend off the cravings.

And every morning, I look forward a slice or two of delicious homemade bread for breakfast.
Now, where are those pants?

Funky Dunkin!

This is a variation on a previous post.

One of the things they stressed in nursing school was the importance of good hygiene in the prevention of the spread of germs. Our instructors, after lining us up behind sinks, would watch us soap our fingers and wash them in very specific and clinically effective ways.

If we took short cuts or failed to meticulously scrub each finger to their liking, we’d be sent to the back of the line to do it over or worse: drummed out of the corps.

It’s no secret that nursing instructors are a harsh lot, but their strict standards were not formulated for the purpose of stripping us of our last shreds of dignity, rather the point they were making, and reinforcing and pounding into our otherwise empty heads was: germs are everywhere, often on our filthy hands and ready to spread if we were not hyper-vigilant.

Now that I work nights, I have gotten into the habit of stopping at “Crusty Crullers,” an ubiquitous pastry/coffee chain, for a mammoth coffee on my way into the office. Working while the rest of the world sleeps requires copious amounts of self-discipline and buckets of caffeinated beverages. In spite of the fact that I have discovered that sleep deprivation soundly trumps caffeine, the habit is entrenched. I like coffee: it is warm and soothing (unless it is iced coffee and then it is cool and soothing) and I like the size of the containers available at Crusty Crullers, even if the coffee itself is kind of lousy.

The pink and orange logo is familiar, and the staff seems to spend a whole lot of time training the new people to polish the fixtures and mop the floor. Obviously, there is a corporate policy regarding cleanliness that is strictly enforced, depending on the franchise. At 6:15 p.m., which is my regular arrival time, the employees are invariably hard at work, tending to the overall clutter-free ambience that is typical of Crusty Crullers: cleaning, sweeping and polishing.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit, I’ll have a donut now and then., Prior to recent heavy marketing campaigns pushing their coffee, Crusty Crullers got its start as a purveyor of donuts. In my youth, each branch of this concern had a bakery in the back, rolling out dough and dropping it into roiling vats of hot fat. Nowadays centralized kitchens, serviced by delivery trucks keep the racks donuts, bagels muffins and cookies full.

Anatomy buffs know that the skin is the largest organ in the body. It is a remarkable organ at that, among other things, keeps our insides on the insides. Our skin also serves as a shield, the first line of defense against malevolent microbes that are as ubiquitous as the ubiquitous pastry/coffee chain that has been mentioned repeatedly in this article.
To that end and armed with that knowledge, you see a lot more safety precautions in your day-to-day life. From the dental hygienist to the auto mechanic everyone is wearing gloves. And at Crusty Crullers there are systems in place to ensure that the pleasant baseball-capped food handlers are following what can only be company policy when it comes to food/hand contact and precautionary hygiene.

Like so many other places I go to get food that will kill me in other ways, the person behind the counter has the good habit of donning a fresh pair of disposable gloves prior to preparing whatever cheese laden porcine taste orgy I order. Before touching my filthy money, the gloves are removed, the cash register is operated and fresh gloves are put on prior to serving the next customer in line.

When a donut is ordered at Crusty Crullers, the employee grabs a clean paper bag and pops it open with a flick of the wrist. Then to ensure a barrier between their hands and the pastry (even though they are mandated by signs in two languages to wash their hands after using the facilities), a hermetically folded waxed paper square is employed to pick up the requested pastry / donut which is then deftly dropped in the bag.

As a health care professional, this procedure works for me. I am sure that scientists with Petri dishes could demonstrate that either it makes no difference or it does the job. I believe the best defense against these bugs is routine exposure and the natural development of antibodies. But with a whole new generation of super scary mutations popping up hither and thither, I appreciate the gesture on the part of Crusty Crullers. Tongs are another way of handling it but who knows if the tongs have recently been through a dishwasher?

So, after going to the trouble of carefully using the wax paper to safely move my donut from the rack to the bag, please don’t throw the waxed paper square into the bag. It ruins the effect.

And it makes me sick!

Hats off to Larry

Yes, "Hats Off to Larry," was an old doo-wop hit, or maybe not such a hit or not so much doo-wop, anyway, hats off to Larry, my dear friend who died last Christmas day.

Larry was, like me, a hat fancier and he left plenty nifty toppers in his wake. His wife, Maureen, called me over to have the right of first refusal of his collection which I reluctantly picked through. I have a gigantic, if not empty, head, slightly larger than Larry's, proving nothing about intellect and head size since Larry was smart as all get out and I am at best, just kinda smart.

Today, I wore my boater to Westport to look at 99% bad art. I can't slap a hat on my over sized noggin without thinking about Larry.

I miss you old man and I'd drink to you, but alas - or maybe - thank God - neither one of us drank (anymore). So, hats off to you old friend.

Talk is cheap

Late at night, on the floor, fluorescents burning a big hole in my cornea. When I am the boss around here, which is at least once a week, I turn the lights down. I call it "disco style." It makes it hard to read the fine print in front of you sometimes, but it has a calming effect on my coworkers and my "customers," many who are denied wrist watches, so they come out in the middle of the night to check the clock on our wall.

Let's then, talk about Michael Jackson, shall we?

First of all, is it really such a big shock that he is dead? I mean, I was surprised he made it this far. If the constant chipping away at his face didn't ultimately just reduce him to a headless corpse, isn't it possible for someone to just die of weirdness?

I know if this blog had readers, some of them might decide to get all caught up in the blather and criticise me for kicking a man while he is as down as you can get, but since I still await subscribers, I feel pretty comfortable that I am not offending anyone.

I like to flip back and forth from the news all day. Between Anthony Bourdain or the bald guy that eats weird stuff or the motorcycle dullards and see what's going on on MSNBC. Usually there is some sort of political argument about Sarah Palin or Barrack Obama, and there is seldom anyone new, really: Pat Buchanan, Eugene Robinson, et al. But between the arguing, I can usually decide what the major issues of the day are, but to have everyone all lathered up about MJ - c'mon! Reagan didn't get that much coverage and he got way too much coverage!

Slobbery, teary eyed, normally sedate newsblasters acting as if Michael Jackson made the sun rise and set. Ended up there was nothing for me to watch newswise today, although the bald guy was chewing on some beaver intestines and Bordaine was drunk in some foreign country - again.

I was glad that I had DVR'ed "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" so there was something to do on a rainy day while I waited to go to work.

Lowgiene

I'll admit. I frequent Dunkin' Donuts.

When I didn't work the night shift, I was particular about my coffee. I always thought DD coffee was over-praised.

However, you can't beat the volume of a large DD coffee when you are walking into a 13 hour overnight shift.

This post is about the donuts. First of all, are they really donuts? The franchise is ubiquitous, no doubt about it. But I have had better donuts, fresh, out of the grease, second degree burn glazed donuts. But these Dunkin' Donuts are underwhelming. What's worse, they are no longer made in the back room, rather they are all made somewhere in a central bakery, no doubt in New Jersey - not that there's anything wrong with that. Problem is that they are stale about the time they show up.

Having said all that I am known to select a product called "Chocolate Stick" along with my extra large coffee. The attendant, or the worker, or whatever has been trained to handle the goods in a specific hygienic fashion. They'll take a bag in their left hand, hold it by the corner, swing their arm in a fast arc, forcing it open. With the right hand, they'll carefully pull a square of wax paper out of a box to make a barrier between the worker's hand and the product. The product is carefully maneuvered into the bag and dropped in. Boom. Assuming the product made it to the shelf without direct human contact, it can be argued that the square of wax paper had completed the transaction so that the only hand that ever touches the product, in this case the "Chocolate Stick," is the purchaser, or in this case, mine.

But lately, I have noticed that the wax paper has ended up in the bag. This brings any bugs that may be lurking on the employees hands join the product in the bag.

I'm not like that, really, but - really!

Indepants

Fourth of July. Table of food. Beach full of strangers. A handful of friends and family.

Two sets of fireworks. Buckets of moosquitoes. Fabulous clouds. Summer is finally here.

Hot dog!

Dingleberry

I couldn't help it. I dropped the old LG phone (is everything made by LG?) one too many times until I had to use blue tape to hold the battery compartment on. Finally, one day when I was avoiding doing something else, I went over to the Verizon store and got myself a Blackberry.

Why should I be different?

Now that I have finally fired the new unit up, complete with teeny tiny Internet service and a couple of addictive games, I carry my desk in my pocket.

To make life even more silly, and to the embarrassment of my daughter, I bought a nerd holster to go with it so the Blackberry is attached to my ass cheek most of the time.

Every time I get an email it goes "Bing!" and if I get a "text," (doesn't anybody just call anymore?) it goes "Eh! Eh!"

It is a whole lotta fun, and late at night, when the darkness of the psych unit is dim and the techs are melting at computer screens and whoever the other nurse is naps in a corner and the patients are all asleep, I can play one of the very addictive word games I figured out how to download.

I can even look at this blog, teeny tiny and barely readable, although the computer wizards at the hospital cut off my access to this site so I can't write pithy updates from the floor for the readers who don't read this. Well me, anyway.

Diplomats

In the past year, I have been to my own graduation from nursing school, my daughter’s graduation from High School, Melissa’s graduation from Wesleyan (Master’s degree, thank you) and my son’s graduation from college.
Think of the sheep who have given their skin just for the matriculation of my family. Maybe Mary’s little lamb would be well-advised not to follow her to school so much.
Traditionally, millions of boring graduation orators have stressed the meaning of the word “commencement” at millions of graduation ceremonies, pointing out that the word does not connotate the end of something; rather it implies the beginning of something.
This is, traditionally true, of course, but nowadays, with the economy circling the drain and all, I heard more and more about how commencement really pointed the assembled mortarboards in a negative direction.
When I graduated from nursing school, hospitals, home care agencies, and any and all other manner of medical facilities, were climbing over each other to get us new nurses on their payrolls. This year, the graduating class of my alma mater is populated with frustrated job hunters. While the “nursing shortage” that is part of our culture still exists, the money shortage is currently overriding it.
Meanwhile, over at the Wesleyan podium, apologies were the word of the day. Speakers couldn’t help but bear some responsibility for the world into which their graduates were being thrust. No hyperbole would cushion the inevitable blow that would be struck upon the hung-over graduates, the soft, safe tablecloth of academia being yanked off the table in one resounding tug. The silverware of massive college loans crashing about their feet; the resounding din of reality wrapped in an awkward metaphor.
Back in the day, there was a job in Daddy’s firm awaiting, or headhunters had long since recruited you into a blue chip, Wall Street firm. Now Daddy’s firm is on bailout and the headhunters a looking for jobs for themselves.
At the Rhode Island School of Design, where my son was recently elevated to the ranks of alumni, artists prepared themselves for traditional lives in smelly garrets, painting, waiting tables and eating cold, canned spaghetti.
Advantage: artists. No longer a curse, for we no more can change our artistic destiny than we can our genetic code. Many are called but virtually none are chosen. Still, art is permanent, it cannot be killed. And the atmosphere at RISD was a deep contrast to the other graduations I had attended. A jazz band, perfectly piped into the speaker system set the tone, while conspicuous flat screen televisions, made the podium proceedings clearly visible to even the most inconvenienced parent. Sunny, jazzy, jolly; no apologies offered.
There was here, a sense of optimism. Much the same as there is inherent with all artists, since most of our future energies are directed toward a blank canvas or a lump of clay. While success is luscious, it is not as important as the drive to create. And the diploma, once a ticket to financial stability, is now a receipt for astronomical tuition bills. An artist, at least, can flip it over and use it to make a sketch.
Yes, the word “Commencement,” suggests beginning. Melissa, a working artist, got her Master’s degree creating art. Hannah, my daughter is studying art at Cooper Union. Alexander, my son, is hanging his diploma on the wall and hanging out his shingle as an artist. In an atmosphere where everything is upside-down, where Wall Street, once the central hub of enormous paydays, is now the center of insolvent sadness, and reliable juggernaut industries like American Chromium automobiles and hugely endowed banks are starving. A word traditionally reserved for artists.
Maybe it’s an finally even playing field. Maybe now artist’s can have the same opportunity as everyone else, especially since everyone else has no opportunity. And maybe we can get some of that bail-out money, allowing us to quit our menial day jobs to create the art we are destined to create. This would make jobs available to the brokers and bankers and automobile company executives who have found themselves in need of honest work.
I only regret that I didn’t stick it out myself. For I am an artist. There, I said it. And I have suppressed the drive to create, and yet, I just typed 744 words. And when I am done, I will draw a picture.
I just can’t help it.
You want fries with that?

Graduation Day

When the ivy walks are far behind
No matter where our paths may wind
We'll remember always
Graduation day
- Four Freshmen, written by unknown.

I used to say, back in the day, "If you want a year to go by quickly, wait out a pregnancy." Man, was I clever back in the day.

In a not dissimilar vein, It really seems like about 2 minutes ago that we brought two cars full of stuff to RISD and dropped off our green art student to live in a really well-situated dorm room over looking Providence. I guess I'll have to watch the "True-Hollywood Story" of his life in a couple of years, to see what REALLY happened, but in the meantime, he has survived college and now gets to survive life - and what a crappy time to be unleashed on reality.

At RISD, graduates are allowed to modify the traditional cap and gown scenario and we were not to be dissapointed. Many had gone to great lengths to decorate their garbs. Alexander, master of last-minute sublety, wore the green Snuggie I had given him for Christmas (fig one).

Super hi-tech ceremony with gigantic flat screens posted all over the inside of the huge tent. We came early and found a row of seats in front of one of the screens, enabling us to see the whole 3-hour ceremony as if we had front-row seats.

A splendid end to the fastest 4 years I had ever lived through.

Congradulations son, try to stay out of mischief

Are enn?

"It's late in the evening, people, but I ain't worried about that lonesome road because everything's cool. You understand?"
- Taj Mahal "Bacon Fat."

Lot's of work to be done on the unit now that all the work is done. don't I have to log on more often and contribute? I oughta let some people know I am out there. Or in here. Or in there.

In the interest of self-preservation I will not write about the miserable drudgery I am suffering at the hands - or more anatomically appropriate - flapping lips of a fellow worker who talks constantly, as if the thought process is connected to the larynx. I am not a mean person usually, but, land o' goshen, I had to ask my fellow worker to please stop talking so I could think.

I was trying to write a nursing note: a collection of adjectives describing the affect, mood, behavior and thought process of a particular patient. My colleague was rattling of adjectives, trying to put together a similar note. I couldn't listen and think at the same time. And due to the shrillness and pause-free tonal quality of the voice in my ear, I could not tune it out.

Mood: frustrated

Congratulations

I went to the pinning ceremony for the class of 2009 at my almamater yesterday. Here is how it went for us. Last year.

Pomp, Circumstance and Candle Wax
Eyes bloodshot, temples throbbing, we all passed the final exam. Some more than others, but the magic equation is C=RN, so 54 students, threadbare and dog-eared, gathered in a walnut bar, mid-May, to celebrate the end of nursing school.
Now that it’s over, I’m experiencing a bit of culture shock. Suddenly the alarm clock does not go off and there is nothing left to study. There is no clinical rotation for which to prepare. There is a huge void, empty of syllabi, medications to look up, and lectures to endure. Mostly though, it is the faces; the tired, familiar faces that have helped each other push that boulder up a hill for two solid years, that have retreated and vanished as if there has been a bus crash.
So, for about a week we rekindled the fires and relationships of our former lives. My kids had grown. One was off at college. Several neighbors had moved away and others had moved in. There were two years’ worth of New Yorker magazines to pretend to read, two years’ worth of dust bunnies in the corners and then there was the matter of the woman who lives in my house on Rusty Hinge road, what was her name again?
It was a scary feeling. What were we supposed to do? Well, here’s what we were supposed to do: get jobs as nurses and study for our nursing boards but first, we had to sit through one last requirement of nursing school: the pinning ceremony.
Job schmob, don’t you know there is nursing shortage? Exam Schmexam, almost everybody passes that on the first try, but the pinning ceremony, what was that exactly?
It is built on generations of Nursing tradition, probably, like everything else, devised by Florence Nightingale – the Florence Henderson of the sitcom that was the prehensile Brady Bunch of nursing practice – it was she who sort of brought my new profession, which appears to have some genesis in the world’s oldest profession, out of the dark ages and into the 19th century. Most instructors, while mentioning her with respectful solemnity, are quick to point out that not all that much has changed in Nursing practices since old Flo transformed it into a science, which it truly is. But we were talking about the pinning ceremony and here’s what it is: sometime in the darkest, most insecure, shakiest part of the last semester of Nursing school, when you are convinced you are crazy and wonder why you had ever decided to pursue such a lofty ambition, a little man showed up at class and collects checks for our “pins.” These gold (toned) circular lapel jobbies are custom-enameled with the emblem of our Alma Mater with the graduate’s initials engraved (crookedly) on the back.
Assuming one gets to the end, it is this pin with which one is pinned at the pinning ceremony. It is cheaper and far less painful than a tattoo.
Other traditions: everyone wears white, which is great if you are a bride or suffer from chronic dandruff, but these days nurses don’t wear all white most of the time, we wear scrubs that have “Hannah Montana’s” image impregnated in the polyester. So there’s the next item on the “to do” list: buy white nursing outfits. Another part of the ceremony involves a lamp and open flame, which goes back once again to Florence’s tenure (having to do with her sobriquet, “the Lady with the Lamp”). My class voted to be cheap and went with candles, rather than shell out another 12 bucks a head for official imitation Crimean war style porcelain lamps. In any event, word got around that the Fire Marshall wasn’t too pleased. Fortunately for him, we were all almost nurses, and even though we were not much use when it comes to putting out burning buildings, we were all about tending to burn victims.
So, a week after the final exam, we all arrived at the place of the pinning, scrubbed and shiny. The women had had their hair done so as to render them unrecognizable and the men looked like ice cream vendors.
But as we all came together one last time, and we were rested and the hangovers were gone we realized the good news along with the bad: the good news, it was over at last, the bad news: it was over for us.
That’s when the waterworks started. Tears of joy at first then the gulping, shattering realization that we were all going our separate ways and that even though we promised not to stray too far, we’d already begun to drift apart.
They queued us up in the back hall and checked us for alphabetization and made sure we were all properly free of crumbs and lint. We pulsed with energy as the friends and family members we had all not seen much of for 24 months, assembled in their seats with bouquets, flash cameras and possibly a thousand restless, noisy kids. We marched down the aisle to the thunder of their applause and on to the stage, filled with carefully arranged chairs under the hot lights of the stage.
More than a century of tradition poured over the audience for the next hour or so, as we waited in our whites gleaming from the glow within and the lights without and finally from the slim candles we all held aloft while we mumbled our way through the “Nursing Pledge,” and then, one by one, our instructors pinned us. A final happy finish. A coup de grace, delivered by the very folks who for the past two years had held our futures in their hands, and we marched back down and through the aisle to the rhythmic foot stomps and claps and into the night where nothing bad could possibly happen on this day that took so long to arrive.
It’s summer now, for real. Waves of heat warp the sight line over the highway and we hold fresh résumés in our carefully washed hands to find out just how desperate the need is for new nurses.
Jobs are out there, hiding in the bushes, but before we are secure in our new careers, the boards must be taken and passed. The books wait, but not for long, in the silence and the long overdue sleep at last.
This might pinch a bit.

Late night foray into the blogosphere

OK. I'll throw one of my many hats into the ring. Let's start by telling you what's what. I am going to assume if you are reading this you are somewhat acquainted with me and my machinations. I have to be careful, obviously, this is a family blog, I guess. My intention is to open up access mostly to readers of my monthly column "The Homemoaner" published by the Hersam-Acorn newspaper company.
I a writing this, very late at night at a top-secret, undisclosed location. I intend to contribute content ad lib, with no real theme. As stated in the blurb, I am a columnist, a justice of the peace, a registered nurse, oh yeah, I almost forgot, a husband, a real estate agent, a father, a son, a brother, an unapologetic liberal democrat and a knucklehead. If participation is possible - and I am not "blog savvy," participate. No one is excluded.
Love love love.