Visions and Revisions at 81

            I miss toiling away contentedly at my quiet, and lonely writing desk pursuing topics in American literature.  I would be hard at work at the old stand even now at age 80 had I not been thwarted by cataract surgery in 2018 that went terribly wrong.  Yes, I know that sounds preposterous—isn’t cataract surgery a slam dunk?  Isn’t it the most sure-fire, least-likely-to-go-wrong elective surgery there is?  Yes, of course that is indisputably true,  but a couple of months after the surgery, my ophthalmologist-surgeon finally got around to telling me the obviously bad news in suitably somber and apologetic tones: “The surgery,” he said, “was a failure.”  

Of course I knew that already.  It was very clear (ironically) because my vision was worse than it was before the surgery—and there was no fixing the problem.  That’s the killer.  It seems, he explained, that he hadn’t noticed a wrinkle on the retina behind the cataract—no explanation, no excuses.  He just missed it.  But now that he could see the wrinkle on my right retina, he thought he’d take a look at the left side and sure enough, there was another wrinkle there too.  And both were too small for a surgical repair, that according to the retina specialist I consulted, who explained that the wrinkles were too big to allow for normal sight but too small for corrective surgery.  I was left with blurry vision I never had before the operation and two eyes that would never again work in synch.  So yes, I saw worse after the cataract surgery than I did before.  My cataract surgery had failed.

But just to be sure and to leave no stone unturned, I got a second opinion from Dr. Pit Gills of St. Luke’s Cataract Surgery Center in Tarpon Springs, recommended by my retina specialist.  Pit, and that is not a misprint, is a local TV celebrity-doctor appearing these days and nights on television ads.  And he was suitably impressive, putting me through five hours of testing before giving me five minutes of recommendations:  I should have the other cataract removed, he said.  He wouldn’t guarantee that I would see any better, but it made sense to him to proceed anyway.  It made less sense to me.  The wrinkles would both be there and surgery was still not an option to remove them.  Things had gone badly in 2018 and I was afraid they would go badly again.  I’m just not in the mood to risk another bad outcome.  Gun shy, that’s what I am. 

Immediately after the original surgery in 2018 I was furious and frustrated beyond words.  It was unthinkable that my eyes were actually worse after the surgery. I wanted something horrible to happen to the idiot doctor; I had visions of pure vengeance to punish him for what he’d done to me.  But violence is contrary to my nature, and I eventually soldiered on.  I mean, it wasn’t all that horrible—I was able to do almost everything almost normally, except for scholarly writing—which had been my life for half a century. 

Scholarly writing, I should explain, demands that I consult notes and books next to a computer, then return to the text onscreen to continue the writing.  The botched cataract surgery meant that as a writer I could not see the monitor and the papers I was working with next to the computer with the same pair of glasses.  Which made writing pretty damn near impossible. 

I was angry, but to be fair to the idiot doctor, I was also getting too old to start any new, multi-year scholarly project anyway—so maybe I should be happy it wasn’t any worse.  Right?  That was the right attitude, the most charitable one.

            And eventually I adjusted and adopted the new attitude.  I had published a lot of newspaper work and blog entries over the years, so maybe that was my future.  I didn’t need two pairs of glasses for that.  But then my future became even more seriously clouded by further health problems that began unfolding in March 2020 when a bladder issue put me in the hospital for four days—and then after a relapse for four more days in April.  Just as the urologist and I were doing an ancient celebration dance to thank the gods for my recovery (an hour before my scheduled discharge), my standard-issue heart monitor that all patients wear routinely while they are in the hospital, began sending out distress signals that caused panic at the nurse’s station.   My heart was showing signs of sudden and serious damage. 

An on-call cardiologist was called in at once, but after examining me and the data, he decided there was little chance of a problem.  I should go home and in a couple of weeks make an appointment for something called an echocardiogram, which gives a complete ultrasound picture of the heart and its performance level.  And it turned out there was indeed a problem, two of them in fact.  One was electrical that was fixable with a pacemaker.  The other was a “severely stenotic aortic heart valve,” clearly the more serious of the two problems and frightening to even say.  It would require the installation of an artificial aortic heart valve, either through open-heart surgery or by running the valve up through an artery in my groin.  Both procedures were tricky, but the catheter procedure did not demand a thoracic surgeon and a team of life and death assistants who thrilled at the chance to cut open my chest cavity and put me on life support for six hours.  Nor did it require six months of painful recovery.  Luckily, after two or three dozen hospital tests, they decided I qualified for the artery procedure, and so in July I got my pacemaker and in September I got my heart valve. By the end of the year, even though I had been out of commission for half of 2020, I felt I was “getting better.”  The cataract surgery hardly seemed important anymore.

            But here I am, four years after my last book was released in the summer of 2018, finally starting something new—but without the least bit of confidence.  That last book, a study of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s love life,  and which I called Longfellow in Love, of course, took about fifteen years to find its way into print—with time off for me to write one other longish book, a 500-page memoir, plus a lot of short pieces.  It’s a good book and I’m proud of it, but for a string of good reasons, ones that make one kind of miserable sense that left me bloodied and cursing God for my bad luck, the book fell into The Abyss of Neglect.  (I’m pretty sure that’s one of Dante’s circles of Hell. . . .)  Because of that disappointment plus the string of health problems that have been hounding me for the last three years, I haven’t done much new work in a long time.  I had for many years planned to continue with the Longfellow story, which my first book stopped in 1861, but my long disappointment with the book’s 2018 reception and my wearing ill-health that robbed me of energy combined to make me give up the Longfellow story—and nothing has taken its place.  At least not yet.

            But in the meantime, however, on April 28, 2022, I turned 80.  And that seems to have changed the rules governing reasonable expectations for productive work and the expectation of completing it—not just for the short- and long-term future, but for the present as well.

            Here’s what happened.

            First of all, going back, turning 79 was traumatic.  It was such an advanced age for men in my family—my father, and his father, for example, had both died of colon cancer at age 55—that being 79 suddenly felt wrong to me, something like survivor guilt.  I couldn’t shake it, couldn’t get past it.  I was 79.

            What’s more, I’d been sick for most of my 78^th year, first with my bleeding bladder, then with my heart problems, and later with some reduced kidney function that changed most of my heart meds that caused my blood pressure to spike so high (210/110) in early May 2022 that I was hospitalized for the better part of a week after my 80^th birthday.  That combo of meds, symptoms, and high anxiety seemed like enough for anyone to work his way through, but I added Irritable Bowel Syndrome to my list of troubles. 

Add in the urgent all-day peeing caused by my Lasix; the shortness of breath that had something to do with my heart meds; the light-headedness that seemed now and then like a full-bore vertigo attack; and my all-around lethargy, shake it all together, and you have more symptoms than I could manage.  Little wonder I couldn’t face my writing desk during my 78^th and 79^th years.  But here I am in June of my 80^th year, struggling with all the symptoms, and making headway on every front:  I’ve lost 20 pounds  over the first six months of 2022, my meds have been readjusted, and I’m even getting a tiny bit of exercise—chair yoga, walking in the pool, and lapping my way around Publix with the help of a carriage.  It isn’t easy, and my back hurts too much to do much walking, but I am making progress.  And wonder of wonders, the itch to write has even returned.  And it seems right to spend at least a little time writing about the faltering health that I may yet steer my way clear of.  That’s the hope.  I may yet be able to resume something like my pre-78 health and productivity.

It’s weird but working on a long-term return to health is actually a certain kind of fun—or if not exactly that, at least a pleasant self-satisfaction.  Getting back to health and productivity, giving up on my desperate death watch of the last couple of years, has given me a new lease on life.I suppose.  I’ve always liked long-term projects—and this one has a sweet life or death edge to it.  Nice.  I mean, nothing much has gotten my full-time attention over the last couple of years, so right about now my “let’s live a little bit longer” goal is sharply defined, and while life and death hasn’t interested me much for a long time now, all of a sudden I’m sort of interested in seeing if I can reverse the body damage and carry on a bit longer.  It’s a good goal.  My fortune cookie tonight reads, “A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness.”  That sounds like Chinese wisdom that must be relevant somehow, even though I’m not sure what in hell it means.

Just getting to 80 was a huge kick.  I never expected to reach such a longevity milestone, but when I turned 79, just beginning my 80^th year, I found myself wanting more than anything to finish the year out so I could officially be 80 years old.  But that made the year between April 28, 2021 and April 28, 2022 go by with excruciating slowness.  I had a notion that I was getting better.  That’s true enough and I do feel that way every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but the rest of the week I have various symptoms that leave me with long-term discouragement. 

On a good day these days, I can enjoy the business of everyday living—getting up, checking on my vitals (for the last three weeks very normal), and then mostly a half-hour nap, followed by various play-time activities, like the swimming pool or maybe some chair yoga.  Nothing strenuous.  I got a haircut today.  A trip to the supermarket is a big outing—and it’s usually a failure because as soon as I start walking, with or without a carriage, my back begins to ache.  The only thing that relieves the pain is rest, preferably on my glider/armchair in the living room.  I  see and feel improvement almost every day—but every day something drags me down too.  It’s draining. And confusing.  I think maybe I have what journalists and scientists have settled on as the “right” term:  long Covid.  Symptoms include loss of smell and taste, heart damage, kidney damage, diabetes, chronic nerve pain, difficulty breathing, and overwhelming fatigue.  Throw in irritable bowel syndrome and you’ve got me to a tee. 

Me having it is the weird part because I’ve never tested positive for Covid-19, and I must have had twenty tests over two years.  There’s no record of my ever having it, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had it.  I’m actually sure I have.  I’ve got every symptom!

I  can’t tell at this point where this saga will end, but at 81, I know I don’t have much time left—not too many people survive their 80s, after all, the Death Decade as I’ve come to think about it.  At Christmas last year I ate a catered dinner and thought I got food poisoning, but it turned out to be a bowel obstruction and I was rushed into surgery that same night.  Over the next six months a bladder problem that presented itself on the April 2020 catscan of my abdomen got worse:  the bladder had migrated from its proper position into my scrotum and had wrapped itself around my left testicle.  A five-hour surgery on August 31, 2023  repaired it, and four months later I am back on my feet and nearly pain free.  The testicle is still a tad tender when I sit down or stand up, but the swelling is down, which is clear improvement.  And the pain from the surgery is nearly all gone.  I think I may even try some golf in the new year.  

But I’ve learned not to look too far into the future.  Slow things down and take each day as it comes—one day at a time.

 

 

My Friend Franny Hansen,

1919-2004

            Fran Hansen constructed high-level crossword puzzles, mostly for the New York Times, where she published 83 puzzles, including every Christmas puzzle from 1995 until her death in 2004 at age 85. 

But she also constructed puzzles for the Washington Post, the LA Times, several other news and magazine outlets, and such book publishers as Dell, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.  For decades she was widely praised as a master of the craft.

According to Will Shortz, who took over the Times puzzle editorship in 1993, Hansen caused a sensation with her first puzzle in 1964, submitted to the then editor Margaret Farrar.  The puzzle was based on Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and forced solvers into reading and writing backwards to finish the 21 x 21 Sunday grid—a true tour de force.

Her signature puzzles were based on her own five-line limericks.  Shortz said of them that they had “perfect rhyme, and perfect meter” plus a perfect letter and syllable  count—and that they were “funny besides.”

I met Franny in 1992 at a wedding in Metuchen, NJ, where she lived most of her life.  My wife and I were seated at the “old people’s” table where Fran, a widow since 1983. also got dumped.  The groom was Benn Ciardi, the son of deceased celebrity poet John Ciardi, whose biography I was then writing.  Fran was a good friend of Benn’s mother Judith, the core members of a local women’s club they called The Quiet Hour that met once a month. 

Frannie and I became friends at once because we shared an interest in the Ciardi family, the standard repertory of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, crossword puzzles, and funny limericks.  Hers were much better mine, and she proved it by going right into what she called her favorite: 

            A defiant old maid, pray forgive her,

            Remarked with a bit of a quiver:

                        Tonight I shall smoke

                        And drink till I croak—

            And nuts to my lungs and my liver!

Will Shortz liked this one best:    

                        Said W, Somerset Maugham

                        I shall visit the island of Guam.

                                    If I find it is hot,

                                    I shall leave on the spot.

                        I detest feeling overly waugham.

Franny and I had breezy conversations all afternoon about about Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini, about what a good crossword solver John Ciardi (who had died in 1986) had been, but I wanted to hear more and more about how she constructed the puzzles. Actually knowing a real-life constructor of Times puzzles, was an enormous kick for me and I wanted to hear all her stories.  But there wasn’t enough time.  Not nearly.

            When I got home I looked for her puzzles in the many collections on my bookshelf.  I had solved them all once upon a time, but now I wanted to study them to see what Miss Franny Hanson had been up to—and I was charmed and fascinated by her skill. 

I was also on the lookout for new ones by her—or at least new to me.  And when I found one, I’d solve it and often I’d send it to her with a note about how hard certain clues were.  She’d sign it and send it back with a word or two about the puzzle.  I think for both of us this little routine became great fun.

In late December 1998 I solved Franny’s Christmas puzzle for the Times, Yule Get Over It, and sent her a letter bragging a little and telling her how much fun it had been.  I also told her that my life of Ciardi, which she had a copy of and praised lavishly, had won an award from Choice magazine, a gold sticker for being Academic Book of the Year.  She was extravagantly happy to hear the good news and wrote in early May 1999 that “if they didn’t give you the Pulitzer, somebody goofed, that’s all.”  We had a mutual admiration society going.  “It’s a wonderful book and although it took years of your life, you have something to be proud of for the rest of your life.”

In July 2000 she was delighted to hear the paperback edition of my Ciardi book was about to be released.  I sent her a copy of the advertising bookmark that had been printed, for which she thanked me and called me a peach.  In September I ran across a book with another of her puzzles.  “My goodness, I had completely forgotten that old Flag Day puzzle!  Bless you for sending it along and I see you are a solving pro—good for you!”  She said she was writing more daily puzzles than in years past because she was “getting lazy in my dotage,” and because “they go much faster than the big ones!”

Two days later she got another note and finished puzzle from me and wrote back, “You are really on a puzzle bender!  Sounds to me like you are an A-one puzzler—keep it up!”  She signed off, Cheers, Franny.

When she died on July 9, 2004, I felt like I had lost a friend I’d met only once in my life, and with whom I had exchanged maybe ten letters in all, but her words remain with me twenty years later.

 

 

Visions and Revisions at 80: April 29, 2022

         I miss toiling away contentedly at my quiet, and lonely writing desk pursuing topics in American literature.  I would be hard at work at the old stand even now at age 80 had I not been thwarted by cataract surgery in 2018 that went terribly wrong.  Yes, I know that sounds preposterous—isn’t cataract surgery a slam dunk?  Isn’t it the most sure-fire, least-likely-to-go-wrong elective surgery there is?  Yes, of course that is indisputably true,  but a couple of months after the surgery, my ophthalmologist-surgeon finally got around to telling me the obviously bad news in suitably somber and apologetic tones: “The surgery,” he said,“was a failure.” 

Of course I knew that already.  It was very clear (ironically) because my vision was worse than it was before the surgery—and there was no fixing the problem.  That’s the killer.  It seems, he explained, that he hadn’t noticed a wrinkle on the retina behind the cataract—no explanation, no excuses.  He just missed it.  But now that he could see the wrinkle on my right retina, he thought he’d take a look at the left side and sure enough, there was another wrinkle there too.  And both were too small for a surgical repair, that according to the retina specialist I consulted, who explained that the wrinkles were too big to allow for normal sight but too small for corrective surgery.  I was left with blurry vision I never had before the operation and two eyes that would never again work in synch.  So yes, I saw worse after the cataract surgery than I did before.  My cataract surgery had failed.

But just to be sure and to leave no stone unturned, I got a second opinion from Dr. Pit Gills of St. Luke’s Cataract Surgery Center in Tarpon Springs, recommended by my retina specialist.  Pit, and that is not a misprint, is a local TV celebrity-doctor appearing these days and nights on television ads.  And he was suitably impressive, putting me through five hours of testing before giving me five minutes of recommendations:  I should have the other cataract removed, he said.  He wouldn’t guarantee that I would see any better, but it made sense to him to proceed anyway.  It made less sense to me.  The wrinkles would both be there and surgery was still not an option to remove them.  Things had gone badly in 2018 and I was afraid they would go badly again.  I’m just not in the mood to risk another bad outcome.  Gun shy, that’s what I am. 

Immediately after the original surgery in 2018 I was furious and frustrated beyond words.  It was unthinkable that my eyes were actually worse after the surgery. I wanted something horrible to happen to the idiot doctor; I had visions of pure vengeance to punish him for what he’d done to me.  But violence is contrary to my nature, and I eventually soldiered on.  I mean, it wasn’t all that horrible—I was able to do almost everything almost normally, except for scholarly writing—which had been my life for half a century. 

Scholarly writing, I should explain, demands that I consult notes and books next to a computer, then return to the text onscreen to continue the writing.  The botched cataract surgery meant that as a writer I could not see the monitor and the papers I was working with next to the computer with the same pair of glasses.  Which made writing pretty damn near impossible. 

I was angry, but to be fair to the idiot doctor, I was also getting too old to start any new, multi-year scholarly project anyway—so maybe I should be happy it wasn’t any worse.  Right?  That was the right attitude, the most charitable one.

            And eventually I adjusted and adopted the new attitude.  I had published a lot of newspaper work and blog entries over the years, so maybe that was my future.  I didn’t need two pairs of glasses for that.  But then my future became even more seriously clouded by further health problems that began unfolding in March 2020 when a bladder issue put me in the hospital for four days—and then after a relapse for four more days in April.  Just as the urologist and I were doing an ancient celebration dance to thank the gods for my recovery (an hour before my scheduled discharge), my standard-issue heart monitor that all patients wear routinely while they are in the hospital, began sending out distress signals that caused panic at the nurse’s station.   My heart was showing signs of sudden and serious damage. 

An on-call cardiologist was called in at once, but after examining me and the data, he decided there was little chance of a problem.  I should go home and in a couple of weeks make an appointment for something called an echocardiogram, which gives a complete ultrasound picture of the heart and its performance level.  And it turned out there was indeed a problem, two of them in fact.  One was electrical that was fixable with a pacemaker.  The other was a “severely stenotic aortic heart valve,” clearly the more serious of the two problems and frightening to even say.  It would require the installation of an artificial aortic heart valve, either through open-heart surgery or by running the valve up through an artery in my groin.  Both procedures were tricky, but the catheter procedure did not demand a thoracic surgeon and a team of life and death assistants who thrilled at the chance to cut open my chest cavity and put me on life support for six hours.  Nor did it require six months of painful recovery.  Luckily, after two or three dozen hospital tests, they decided I qualified for the artery procedure, and so in July I got my pacemaker and in September I got my heart valve. By the end of the year, even though I had been out of commission for half of 2020, I felt I was “getting better.”  The cataract surgery hardly seemed important anymore.

            But here I am, four years after my last book was released in the summer of 2018, finally starting something new—but without the least bit of confidence.  That last book, a study of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s love life,  and which I called Longfellow in Love, of course, took about fifteen years to find its way into print—with time off for me to write one other longish book, a 500-page memoir, plus a lot of short pieces.  It’s a good book and I’m proud of it, but for a string of good reasons, ones that make one kind of miserable sense that left me bloodied and cursing God for my bad luck, the book fell into The Abyss of Neglect.  (I’m pretty sure that’s one of Dante’s circles of Hell. . . .)  Because of that disappointment plus the string of health problems that have been hounding me for the last three years, I haven’t done much new work in a long time.  I had for many years planned to continue with the Longfellow story, which my first book stopped in 1861, but my long disappointment with the book’s 2018 reception and my wearing ill-health that robbed me of energy combined to make me give up the Longfellow story—and nothing has taken its place.  At least not yet.

            But in the meantime, however, on April 28, 2022, I turned 80.  And that seems to have changed the rules governing reasonable expectations for productive work and the expectation of completing it—not just for the short- and long-term future, but for the present as well.

            Here’s what happened.

            First of all, going back, turning 79 was traumatic.  It was such an advanced age for men in my family—my father, and his father, for example, had both died of colon cancer at age 55—that being 79 suddenly felt wrong to me, something like survivor guilt.  I couldn’t shake it, couldn’t get past it.  I was 79.

            What’s more, I’d been sick for most of my 78^th year, first with my bleeding bladder, then with my heart problems, and later with some reduced kidney function that changed most of my heart meds that caused my blood pressure to spike so high (210/110) in early May 2022 that I was hospitalized for the better part of a week after my 80^th birthday.  That combo of meds, symptoms, and high anxiety seemed like enough for anyone to work his way through, but I added Irritable Bowel Syndrome to my list of troubles. 

Add in the urgent all-day peeing caused by my Lasix; the shortness of breath that had something to do with my heart meds; the light-headedness that seemed now and then like a full-bore vertigo attack; and my all-around lethargy, shake it all together, and you have more symptoms than I could manage.  Little wonder I couldn’t face my writing desk during my 78^th and 79^th years.  But here I am in June of my 80^th year, struggling with all the symptoms, and making headway on every front:  I’ve lost 20 pounds  over the first six months of 2022, my meds have been readjusted, and I’m even getting a tiny bit of exercise—chair yoga, walking in the pool, and lapping my way around Publix with the help of a carriage.  It isn’t easy, and my back hurts too much to do much walking, but I am making progress.  And wonder of wonders, the itch to write has even returned.  And it seems right to spend at least a little time writing about the faltering health that I may yet steer my way clear of.  That’s the hope.  I may yet be able to resume something like my pre-78 health and productivity.

v  

It’s weird but working on a long-term return to health is actually a certain kind of fun—or if not exactly that, at least a pleasant self-satisfaction.  Getting back to health and productivity, giving up on my desperate death watch of the last couple of years, has given me a new lease on life.I suppose.  I’ve always liked long-term projects—and this one has a sweet life or death edge to it.  Nice.  I mean, nothing much has gotten my full-time attention over the last couple of years, so right about now my “let’s live a little bit longer” goal is sharply defined, and while life and death hasn’t interested me much for a long time now, all of a sudden I’m sort of interested in seeing if I can reverse the body damage and carry on a bit longer.  It’s a good goal.  My fortune cookie tonight reads, “A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness.”  That sounds like Chinese wisdom that must be relevant somehow, even though I’m not sure what in hell it means.

Just getting to 80 was a huge kick.  I never expected to reach such a longevity milestone, but when I turned 79, just beginning my 80^th year, I found myself wanting more than anything to finish the year out so I could officially be 80 years old.  But that made the year between April 28, 2021 and April 28, 2022 go by with excruciating slowness.  I had a notion that I was getting better.  That’s true enough and I do feel that way every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but the rest of the week I have various symptoms that leave me with long-term discouragement. 

On a good day these days, I can enjoy the business of everyday living—getting up, checking on my vitals (for the last three weeks very normal), and then mostly a half-hour nap, followed by various play-time activities, like the swimming pool or maybe some chair yoga.  Nothing strenuous.  I got a haircut today.  A trip to the supermarket is a big outing—and it’s usually a failure because as soon as I start walking, with or without a carriage, my back begins to ache.  The only thing that relieves the pain is rest, preferably on my glider/armchair in the living room.  I  see and feel improvement almost every day—but every day something drags me down too.  It’s draining. And confusing.  I think maybe I have what journalists and scientists have settled on as the “right” term:  long Covid.  Symptoms include loss of smell and taste, heart damage, kidney damage, diabetes, chronic nerve pain, difficulty breathing, and overwhelming fatigue.  Throw in irritable bowel syndrome and you’ve got me to a tee. 

Me having it is the weird part because I’ve never tested positive for Covid-19, and I must have had twenty tests over two years.  There’s no record of my ever having it, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had it.  I’m actually sure I have.  I’ve got every symptom!

I  can’t tell at this point where this saga will end, but at 81, I know I don’t have much time left—not too many people survive their 80s, after all, the Death Decade as I’ve come to think about it.  At Christmas last year I ate a catered dinner and thought I got food poisoning, but it turned out to be a bowel obstruction and I was rushed into surgery that same night.  Over the next six months a bladder problem that presented itself on the April 2020 catscan of my abdomen got worse:  the bladder had migrated from its proper position into my scrotum and had wrapped itself around my left testicle.  A five-hour surgery on August 31, 2023  repaired it, and two months later I am back on my feet and nearly pain free.  The testicle is still tender when I sit down or stand up from a chair.  But there is improvement.  I may even be able to play golf come Thanksgiving.

But that’s a little rosier than I feel right now.  My body is aging rapidly and breaking down one organ at a time.  I can’t imaging surviving much longer, but the doctors have been putting me back together for going on four years now, so who knows?  I’ll hang in as long as I can.

 

2000

 

Saturday, January 1, 2000.  01.01.00  

          It is just another date, but it seems magical anyway.  We are lucky (in one odd way of thinking) to be alive during this arbitrary calendar transition that marks the first day of a thousand year period when people will keep track of the date with a four-digit number with a two at the start.  And yesterday was the last day of a thousand year period when people kept track of the date with a four-digit number beginning with a one.  A thousand years.  A millennium.  And it starts now.

            Because I was born in 1942, I am 58 years old as we begin the new age, which means that regardless of how many years I live into the new millennium, I truly belong to the earlier one, which is fine.  I do like thinking I may see some part of the 2000s—that should be fun, but I’ll always be the old guy, the dinosaur who was born in the middle of the twentieth century.  Again, I’m good with that.  That was my era.  I’m glad I was a part of it.

            My father, who was born in 1914, died in the eleventh month of his 55^th year in 1970.  He had hoped to be alive in the year 2000.  We talked about it once.  He calculated that he would have to be 86 at the millennium, which he didn’t think was likely given the short life of his own father.  But he took a delight in the thought that I would probably make it.  So to repeat:  I feel fortunate, privileged really, to have lived long enough to see this magical date.

            But the day itself was dull.  My wife the RN had to put in a shift at the hospital, and I didn't do much at all.  I took care of a few routine household chores, read a few chapters in Pride and Prejudice, took three (!) short naps, and cooked supper.  My wife went to bed early—she works again tomorrow—and I was in bed before 11:00.  But here’s where the day got special:  I slept without interruption till 8:30:  9 ½ hours!  That's damn near a record for me.  

             I’d say that’s a good way to start any millennium.

Bewildered Bill's Ironic Presidency

 Originally published in the New Jersey Herald, January 24, 1999.

            Irony is a cheap commodity, but it does add color and texture to our current political tempest.  For example, Bill Clinton has admitted to sexual misconduct in office, and at the same time he has fought for the right of women to be protected from bosses who use their authority for sexual favors.

            And it doesn’t seem to matter if Monica Lewinsky pursued him or he pursued her because in today’s world, ironically shaped largely by Bill Clinton, men guilty of such irresponsible sexual behavior in the workplace are fired.  And it hasn’t passed anyone’s notice that our baby boomer peace president has launched more than one timely military action.  More irony. 

            It is not ironic, however, that the country seems to be standing behind its beleaguered president.  The nation’s largest population group is Clinton’s own boomer generation, and they stand steadfastly behind one of their own.  They recall the counter-culture movement of the ‘60s and the sexual freedoms they fought to establish against a Silent Majority of Puritan moralizers.  It was their work that challenged sodomy laws and evicted the government from the bedrooms of consenting adults.  It was the boomers who faced down Richard Nixon.  No, it makes perfect sense that the boomer generation should stand behind Bill Clinton.

            The self-indulgent motto of the boomers in the old days, of course, was “if it feels good, do it.”  And the central tenet of their creed was “don’t trust anyone over 30,” no doubt because their elders (the hated GI generation) were getting in the way of their pleasures:  sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

            But there were other, better, reasons for the generational conflict.  GI elders were also mismanaging the Vietnam war and standing in the way of civil rights.  The boomers resisted their “mean-spirited” GI fathers at every turn, and the result was the most pronounced, rancorous, and painful Generation Gap in American history.

            Thinking they had won the political war of the century, the boomers were galled at the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the 12 years of Republican rule that followed, although huge numbers of them traded in their tie-dye outfits for three-piece suits to capitalize on the economic boom that was dawning. 

            But to put up with the dismantlement of government programs for the poor and the reestablishment of the primacy of the defense budget was more than they could tolerate.  They fumed until they saw a beatable George Bush in 1992 and elected one of their own, a charming Democrat from Arkansas.  And he espoused all the Democratic liberal policies they had been longing for since Richard Nixon’s resignation.  Bill Clinton was the triumph of an entire generation.

            Today, six years into his presidency, he is aided in his impeachment crisis by the very fact of his incumbency, plus the nearly undisputed right of people to conduct their sexual lives as they wish.  Further bolstered by a huge 60 percent approval ratings from the people who elected him, Bill Clinton seems virtually invincible.

            His opponents, like Bob Dole in the last election, are depicted by the boomer Left as doddering old men from an era that was disgraced and beaten in the ‘60s and are now being resurrected for one last-ditch fight between the generations.  Impeachment 1999 has the eerie feel of history repeating itself.

            Of course it oversimplifies to see all Republicans as a new manifestation of the GI generation and all Democrats as the embodiment of the boomer generation, but there are enough of the old stereotypes left for the comparison to have some usefulness.

            The “older generation,” still sick at heart over the way the country has drifted morally ever since the ’60s, looks for redemption.  The “younger generation” with newly rediscovered moral righteousness, is digging its heels in for a new fight, the glory days come again.

            Played out some 40 years after its first curtain, the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton is actually the final act in a historical drama filled with pious protestations and political bloodshed.  Heart-pounding generational conflict, a hallmark of the tense 1960s, has once again taken center stage.  But it’s ironic that the millennium, thick with portent and doom should be ending on such slender stuff as Monicagate.

Reviewing an Obituary

           I'm 80 now, and just like all the other 80-year-olds, I read more obituaries than I used to.  The old joke is that I read the daily obits just to see if my name appears.  I remember too that an editor I once worked for when I was writing movie reviews for a newspaper in New Jersey told me that everyone makes the paper twice in his life, when he is born and when he dies.  

           And so I recently read the obituary on rock 'n' roll's Jerry Lee Lewis, who died on October 29.  His fame came from the outrageous music he exploded back in the late 1950s, when I was a teenager and enthralled with the new rock music that came blasting out of my AM car radio--whenever my dad would let me have the family car for a few hours.

          In 1957 Lewis released two songs that instantly crept into my teenage psyche, "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On."  And now, after a lifetime of scandalous music and a more scandalous personal life, the Killer, as he liked to call himself, has died at 87.  

          It's been years since I thought at all about the Killer, my own growth in music having long ago morphed from Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard to the killer B's:  Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.  But that transition was very slow, and even today I occasionally long for the Doo Wop sounds of my younger years.  Adolescence pulls us back now and then no matter what age we reach.

          The obit I read on Lewis was written by Hillel Italie for the Associated Press.  I didn't think anyone could capture Lewis in 750 words, but I was wrong, stunningly wrong, because Italie wrote what may be the most perfect obituary ever written.  Okay, that's probably overstated, but you get the idea:  this is an essay students should read to learn how to write.  It's a brilliant piece.

          The Killer's music, Italie wrote, was not the "tender" ballads cherished by old folks.  No, no, "Lewis was all about lust and gratification with his leering tenor and demanding asides, violent tempos and brash glissandi, cocky sneer and crazy blond hair.  He was a one-man stampede."  What a great capture, a "one-man stampede."  Brilliant.

          But then came the personal scandal that dragged him down and out of the public favor:  while touring in England in 1958, he  married his 13-year-old cousin.  Bad enough, but he was at the time already married.  They remained together until the early 1970s before they divorced.  All told, the Killer was married seven times, and as Italie reports, "he was rarely far from trouble or death."

          Though he left a lean collection of memorable songs, " Italie concluded," they were enough to ensure his place as a rock 'n' roll architect."  Again, "architect" is the perfect word, another brilliant capture.

          Thanks to You Tube I was able to fish out some early Killer classics.  There's even a concert sequence from the movie made of his life, Great Balls of Fire! with Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder.  Sweet stuff to read and re-experience--all brought back to me by Hillel Italie, a friend I've never met.

Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire! (1957)

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On (Steve Allen Show - 1957)

Baseball and Racism: An Excerpt from Chapter Two of "Random Miracles: A Memoir"

     My father and I also watched baseball on our new 1949 RCA console television with the ten-inch screen.  My boyhood passion and obsession was with the mighty New York Yankees just as they were beginning their dynasty of five straight World Series crowns from 1949 to 1953.  In 1949 my dad and I went to see our first game together at Yankee Stadium; right fielder Hank Bauer and first baseman Joe Collins hit home runs in a losing cause.

    My Yankees, however, didn't lose too often, and as each season wore on between 1949 and 1955 or so, I would follow every game, every statistic, every box score.  I learned basic arithmetic just to be able to calculate batting averages and winning percentages.  The Yankees battled the Boston Red Sox, the Detroit Tigers, and the Cleveland Indians from 1949 to 1953, muscling their way to championships each year.  I was devastated by the 1954 season when we went 103-51, a gaudy .669 winning percentage, and lost to the Cleveland Indians who compiled a ridiculous record of 111-43, an unheard of .751.  Losing like that just wasn't fair; I was racked with misery. 

    I had a lot of favorite Yankees during the dynasty years, like Mickey Mantle and a little-known third baseman Andy Carey, a lifetime .237 hitter in ten Big League seasons (.302 in 1954), who played in four World Series, winning two, in 1956 and 1958.  When the ball went around the horn, he always tossed it underhand back to the pitcher, and he had enough power to put the ball over the left center field fence at Yankee Stadium, a prodigious wallop.  

    I loved watching Andy Carey, but I felt more "connected" to Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Yogi Berra, although I can't imagine I understood what my dad was talking about when he explained the Italian part to me.  I had to be taught what it meant that "they were just like us."  And to tell the truth, it didn't at first resonate with me as it seemed to do with some others of my friends and neighbors in the Italian section of town we lived in.  The truth was I loved all the Yankees--but eventually I did come around to thinking it was terrific that those three future Hall of Famers happened to be Italian. Just like me.

    Our biggest rival back then was the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom we beat in the World Series of 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953, but gallingly lost to in 1955.  The Dodgers had Jackie Robinson during all those years, the man who broke the color barrier in Major League baseball in 1947 (when he was Rookie of the Year), and later they had Roy Campanella, and a few other "colored" players who had come up from the Negro Leagues.  I remember wrestling with Campanella's Italian name and wondering what that was all about.  We weren't proud of him, or for that matter of Italian Carl Furillo either, the Dodger right fielder with a rifle for an arm--but that was because they were not Yankees, and that may all the difference.  At least to me.

    Being a Yankee trumped being Italian, so certainly it was more important than color.  The Yankees, as a matter of fact, didn't have any black players--and were widely criticized for it (unjustly I thought back then)--until Elston Howard joined the team in 1955.  I remember deducing, from 1949 to 1955, when I was ages seven to thirteen, that having an all-white team, like my Yankees, was a better thing than having a team of blacks and whites, like the hated Dodgers.  My lily-white Yankees had to be right and the integrated Dodgers had to be wrong, which led to the conclusion that Major League baseball should be the domain of white people only.  I wasn't a racist seven-year old, I was a seven-year old Yankee fan.

    I could not have known back then that my Yankees had, in fact, the dubious distinction of having fielded another of the most notorious racists in baseball history, Jake Powell, an outfielder they obtained in a 1936 trade with the Washington Senators.  He had hit .312 for the Senators in 1935, and had a combined batting average with the two teams in 1936 of .299 (7 HR, 78 RBIs).  He was an important player in the World Series that year against the New York Giants, which the Yankees won, four games to two.  Powell hit .455 in the six-game series, picking up ten hits, walking four times, hitting one homer, and knocking in five runs.  He was a good player, a valuable addition to the Yankee lineup that won four straight world championships in the late 1930s.  

    Powell, however, had some serious issues.  He'd been widely criticized in Washington, before he was traded to New York, for a play in which he collided with the great Hank Greenberg, breaking Greenberg's wrist and ending his 1936 season after only twelve games.  Many believed the ferocious hit was the result of Powell's open anti-Semitism.

    As a Yankee on July 29, 1938, Powell was interviewed on the radio before a game with the White Sox in Chicago.  When asked what he did during the off-season to keep in shape, he replied that he was a policeman in Dayton, Ohio, and that the kept in shape "by cracking niggers over the head with my nightstick."  He wasn't a policeman at all, as it turned out, and he later claimed he'd only been "joking," but the incident reveals how deep his own racism was and how widespread it had become in baseball, so widespread that such a reprehensible character as Powell could say such a shameful thing so casually on a radio broadcast.  The storm of protest that followed, however, resulted in a ten-game suspension, not much more than a slap on the wrist.

    Ironically, the Yankees had traded another racist and anti-Semite, Ben Chapman, to the Senators to get Powell in 1936.  Chapman, according to the New York Times (July 27, 2008) regularly "taunted Jewish spectators at Yankee Stadium with Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic epithets."  Later, when Chapman was manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, he became infamous, according the Times report, "for his vitriolic race-baiting of Jackie Robinson in 1947."

    The story of black first baseman Vic Power, who never got to play for the Yankees, may even be a more telling example of Yankee racism.  Power was a nineteen-year-old Minor League phenom in 1950, hitting .334 with 105 RBIs.  The Yankees bought his contract and sent him to their minor league affiliate in Syracuse where he hit .294; the following year they sent him to Kansas City where he hit .331.  In neither year did the Yankees call him up in September, when rosters were expanded to allow teams to see how their best minor leaguers could do in the Majors.  

    In 1953 Power did even better, hitting .349 with 217 hits and 93 RBIs, but still the Yankees ignored him.  The trouble with Power was that he was "flamboyant," according to baseball observers, which meant that he drove flashy Cadillacs and went out with white women--and so the Yankees traded him in December 1953 to the Philadelphia Athletics (which would move in 1954 to Kansas City and later to Oakland).  Esteemed baseball chronicler Roger Kahn quoted an unnamed "high-ranking" Yankee executive that year as saying there would never be a black man in a Yankee uniform:  "We don't want that sort of crowd.  It would offend boxholders from Westchester to sit with niggers."  And Kahn also quoted Yankee traveling secretary Billy McCorry in 1953 as saying that "no nigger will ever have a berth on any train I'm running."

    That's the team I was rooting for with all my heart and soul.

My Standards Are Slipping

 Back on March 28 of this year (2022), I was browsing through the electronic edition of the Tampa Bay Times and landed on an article by one of my favorite Times writers, Sue Carlton, writing in the Local & State section that day.  Her subject?  Pizza.

She had stumbled on a website with interesting pizza data and must have thought her readers would be as interested in them as she was.  She was right, I was.  I took away the following details:

Among America's top 15 pizza cities, Tampa is 12th, ahead of New York, which for some reason didn't even make the top 15, but well behind Detroit, which came in first.  According to the survey, Carlton reports, "Tampa boasts eight pizza joints for every 100,000 residents, who spend a higher percentage of annual income on pizza than any other city in the top 15.  An average cheese pizza here will cost you $8.73--not so thrifty as Nashville at $6.65, but not as pricey as Philly at $9.71."

And we have a lot of pizzerias to pick from in Tampa Bay, one every 1.75 miles in fact, which is "38 % better than the average city" in the study, which also concluded that Tampa Bay has "4.3 independent pizza restaurants per 100,000 residents," 7th best in the country.  I wasn't surprised at pizza's popularity, but I was stunned that Tampa Bay produced pies that anyone ate with relish.  So to speak.

When we moved to Florida from New Jersey in April 2006, we were in fact horribly disappointed by the pizza then available everywhere in our part of Tampa Bay.  It was a grotesque imitation of our once-a-week favorite meal at Newton Pizza on the Newton-Sparta Road in Sussex County, NJ.  Even in the sticks, you got a good pie in NJ.  What a comfort!  We had no idea what was waiting for us.

It was crazy, but what seemed like regular, normal, everyday Florida folks believed  Dominos and Papa Johns, Little Caesars and Marcos made perfectly fine  pies, real Italian pizza that they ordered with barbecue sauce or Hawaiian pineapple or Mexican taco "toppings," as the locals called these hybrid impostors.

There were only a handful of small, neighborhood pizza joints in our part of Tampa Bay--and they were better, more comfortable to us Italians from Northern New Jersey, home of the pizza-chomping Sopranos on HBO.  But none of the small pizzerias or the big chain delivery stores passed the Jersey Taste Test.  Not a one.

I'm tempted to conclude however that gradually, after twenty long years of bad Tampa Bay pizzas, the pies have gotten better.  I would really like to believe that, and it is possible of course that the pies really have improved, but I suspect, what mortification!, that the pies are just as bad as they ever were--and all that has changed are my formerly high standards that have gotten lower and lower.  

It's a pity, but now when we go to New Jersey and have a pizza, it's no longer the gold standard.  I actually find myself missing my Tampa counterfeits. 

Pizza just ain't what it used to be.  Sob.

Addendum:

August 10, 2022.  Tampa Bay Times:  Domino's Falls in Italy

by Giulia Morpurgo and Antonio Vanuzzo

Two writers for the Bloomberg News Service reported that Domino's Pizza has closed its 29 branches in Italy after seven years of trying to get a foothold in the Land of Pizza.  What a relief.

"Vagina Obscura": A Review of Sorts--and a Comment of a Different Sort. . .

From the review by Emily Willingham , Ph.D., author of Phallacy:  Life Lessons from the Animal Penis:

          "The vagina is having a much-belated moment, and thanks to Rachel E. Gross, now so are the ovaries, clitoris, and uterus.  In Vagina Obscura, Gross clears away the linguistic and scientific shroud from the least investigated and most misunderstood structures in the human body and tells their story deftly and beautifully."

From a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times Book Review, April 24, 2022:

          "In the early 1970s a medical man suggested I stop using Bag Balm  on my chapped, overworked hands because it contained traces of mercury.  So did, I pointed out, my diaphragm's contraceptive gel.  "Well, of course!  You need something to kill the sperm."  Maya Salem's review of "Vagina Obscura," by Rachel Gross (April 10), makes clear that historically science was in line with Darwin's notion of a woman as an "object to be beloved and played with."  Why mess with that?

Rebecca Okrent

New York

Democracy is a Messy Business: Thoughts from the Summer 2020

 I am solidly against the Moron President whose next idea is destined to  die of loneliness.  But I'll say this as his first four years in office draw to a close:  it hasn't been boring.

It's silly, pointless, and completely unnecessary to make a list of Trump's offenses against reason, decency, the planet, even common sense, so I won't get started on that run of fun facts and figures--tempting as that is.

But here's the thing.  I'll be 80 at my next birthday and could be spending my old age during yet another piously boring Democratic presidency struggling with ways to improve human rights by fine-tuning the manifesto of Political Correctness.  Hillary Rodham Clinton would have taken us along that path.

I am of course in favor of equal rights for women, civil rights for Blacks, and a full-range of human rights for everyone else--even the obese.  But I still resist being a professional proponent of Political Correctness.

Planetary Correctness is another matter.  Even to the scientists who have been warning us about global warming for the last quarter century, Earth is apparently already beyond saving, so I can't see that it makes much difference at this point if we cool things off by a couple of degrees.  And it has always been disconcerting to discover that a look through the four-and-a-half-billion-year-history of the planet reveals regular periods of overheating and deep freezes which will continue regardless of what we do to alter the patterns.  

With a resigned and sorrowful sigh, however, I still feel duty-bound to do what I can to lower the temperature.  I think it's too late, but I'm still working the problem.  Call me a planetary Pollyanna. 

Ah, what the hell.  If the Idiot President isn't alarmed, why should I be?

We are living--if we are lucky enough to survive--at a time that historians will report and revise for generations to come.  Like the evil emperor Nero who threatened the Roman Empire, Donald Trump is the narcissistic president who is threatening the American Republic.  It's quite extraordinary to be alive during this decisive moment in history.  And to have a vote.

You'd think someone as stupid as Donald Trump would be quiet and circumspect, careful of making mistakes, fearful of being found out, but no! The Moron rushes forward, one foot on the pedal, the other in his mouth, lunging from one self-created crisis to the next defying his advisers, his cabinet, and his voters--who will turn on him in November.

But none of it is boring.  You gotta give him that.  At its best, Democracy is a messy business.  And it doesn't get any messier than it is now.

"COTTON MATHER, YOU DOG!"

 Originally published in the Tampa Free Press, September 23, 2021

    Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

from a 19th-century engraving.  Wikipedia

COTTON MATHER, You Dog!

Inoculations 300 Years Ago

    Cotton Mather, the cantankerous Boston minister who has been saddled with a big portion of the blame for the deadly Salem Witch Trials in 1692, was a hero in 1721 when he espoused inoculations to fight off the deadly smallpox epidemic that had reappeared in Boston that year.

    The anti-inoculators were so fierce and ferocious in their opposition, however, that one of them hurled a homemade bomb through Mather's bedroom window one November night.  It came with a message:  "COTTON MATHER, You Dog!  I'll inoculate you with this!"

    What exactly had Mather done to deserve such treatment?

    For starters, he was smart enough to recognize the recurring pattern of smallpox epidemics in Boston.  He had calculated that from 1630 the disease came back every twelve years.  He was expecting the next attack to begin in 1714, but it didn't come that year, which drove Mather to speculate that the 1713 measles epidemic that had claimed his wife and three of his children had somehow altered the smallpox pattern.

    Everyone in Boston, however, feared its deadly return from one year to the next that decade, and then in 1721, it hit again with a vengeance.  In all nearly 6,000 people were infected that year, about half the city, 844 of whom died, according to Kenneth Silverman's Pulitzer prize-winning biography, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1984).

    But Mather did more than simply detect a pattern.  Drawing from successful inoculation accounts published by the British Royal Society and adding word-of-mouth testimonies provided by his African servant, Onesimus, he published his theory of inoculations.  The evidence was sufficient, Mather argued, to begin a wide program of life-saving procedures--but his arguments fell largely on deaf ears.

    However, through the work of a respected Boston physician, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, an unknown number of what may be called "Mather's inoculations" were administered during the summer of 1721 throughout the city and surrounding areas.  There continued to be hot disagreement, but the general public had begun to be educated to the theory and implementation of protection through inoculation, the very same principles that would become widely accepted over the next three centuries.

    Mather's critics remained loud, violent, and persistent, however, very slow to accept the controversial theory.  And many never did.  They worried that inoculation wouldn't stop the disease but would instead worsen it.  They called Mather and the other inoculators hypocritical and authoritarian.  And they dragged out their most reliable all-purpose argument:  smallpox was a divine judgment against a sinful people.  And sinners always got what they deserved.

    History has corrected the judgment against Cotton Mather in this 1721 political-scientific-religious battle over infectious disease.  It has recognized the rightness of his crusade for inoculation against smallpox--and by extension against countless other deadly diseases from measles to polio to Covid-19.  There is no longer any scientific dispute about inoculations or immunizations, what we call vaccinations today:  they have saved millions of lives and will save millions more as people line up one by one, roll up their sleeves, and get their shots.  

    All of this due to the tireless work of an unlikely spokesman for science, the Rev. Cotton Mather, the most puritanical of all the 17th-century New England ministers.