Month: May 2018

The Vision Thing

I am not religious and am not susceptible to vision problems, but lately I have had a recurrent nightmare, which I hope to be able to exorcize by telling about it here. In my dream my office is wall-papered with neatly aligned sheets of blank white White-House stationery, its tasteful and modest sized golden presidential shields at the top arranged in rows, their regularity and predictability dignified and reassuring. But crawling up from the baseboards are invading armies of obscene tarantula-like Donald Trump signatures, looking like animated LA seismograms made by the stump of a worn-down Sharpie. This vision of invasion reduces me to fear and terror. I try to take shelter under my desk, but there is no room — other people have already crouched there. It’s full and I am left out in the cold. That’s when I wake up, of course.

OK, it doesn’t take Father Sigmund to figure this out. I am neither a psychiatrist nor a graphologist, but how much of a specialist do you have to be to recognize that those tarantula signatures are evidence of a very sick human being? Of all the signatures on the three main documents of our national heritage — the Articles of the Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution — there is not one that even remotely approaches the brutality, the egotism, and the deep sense of personal insecurity displayed by those of The Donald on his tiniest regulatory memos. Those men relied on their ideas and the integrity of their personal lives to attest to their sincerity, not splashes of ink (even if some of them couldn’t resist a modest flourish before the quill pen ran dry — see John Hancock and Lewis Morris). None attempted to overwhelm the message of the documents they were signing with the imposition of their own personal grandeur. We have arrived at a new definition of the role of President. How long can we expect that little gold shield to survive? It is a reminder that it is the office commands respect, not the occupant. This must rankle Mr. Trump every time he is forced to use it to ensure the authenticity of his memos.

Is there anything constructive we can do about this ? Possibly not. The creator of these obscene scribbles seems to think they are testimonials to his power and his genius, which he buttresses further with his own version of reality by raving and ranting on his Twitter account in the early morning hours of each new day of prevarication and deception. Maybe our best bet would be to actually encourage his psychotic behavior in the hope that it might eventually burst the boundaries of believability, even among those counting on him to line their personal pockets at taxpayer expense and human suffering.

I envision a giant Pants-on-Fire clock overlooking Times Square in New York, like the world population clock on Sixth Avenue that clicks so fast that it seems to be just continually streaming. Every time Trump tells a public lie, the numbers would increment. One dial for today only, and another for the cumulative total since January 20, 2017. (There has to be an agreed-on starting point, even if it gives him a break.) This could be accompanied by a brief blast from an air-raid warning siren. Just a single burst, to call the attention of everyone to the gradual attrition to our common belief in the value of facts over fiction.

Perhaps his reaction to this would be so over-the-top as to convince even the most obtuse of his supporters that there is something basically wrong with the man.

He is sick.

Or am I?

 

Confession of a Rapist

Yes, you read that right. I am a rapist. The girl was only nine years old, which made it a clear-cut case of statutory rape in the State of North Carolina. Of course, I was only nine years old myself, which may or may not be considered an exculpatory factor, since all this took place in North Carolina, a state where the only generally recognized exculpatory factor is a white skin. But I am not a lawyer and that’s a different subject. I will just tell you what happened and you be the judge. On my ninth birthday my mother presented me with a book called “Where We Come From.” Whether she did this out of a desire as a dutiful parent to equip me with reliable information, or from a wish to avoid an embarrassing face-to-face conversation, I don’t know. I do not remember any family discussion of sex in any context at all before that time, or at any other time, for that matter. My parents, aside from being mostly worn out from the effort to recoup financially after having been floored by the Great Depression, never displayed much physical affection around the house. I do remember one occasion when they indulged in a few dance steps in each other’s arms in the living room before going out to a neighbor’s party. When father bent my mother backwards in her little flapper dress in a graceful tango move I was greatly embarrassed.

The book was slim. The text was dry and contained terms I had no familiarity with, like “gestation” and “fertilization.” Of course I knew about fertilizer, living on a farm, but I had a hard time connecting that with the diagrams in the book, which were hard to understand. The “female reproductive tract”, for example, was depicted as a Y-shaped arrangement that looked mostly like the willow branch old Mr. Simmons our local dowser had used when he was figuring where we should dig our well. Eggs, I was familiar with, since my first assigned chore every morning was to visit the henhouse and collect the night’s production, and I knew that if you left them under the hen instead of collecting them, they would eventually hatch chicks, but I had never associated this with the idea of a woman producing a baby. Sperm, shown as little teardrop-shapes with long tails and black dots that might have been eyes, were totally mysterious.

I puzzled over the book, and finally decided to seek help from my best friend, Barbara, who lived at the dairy farm up the road. She often helped me with my homework, although I would never have admitted this to any of my overalled barefoot buddies . For Barbara and me this was just another puzzle to be deciphered. We pored over it together, and finally figured out that something had to be transferred from my wee-wee to her wee-wee for her to start making a baby. Beyond that the process remained a mystery. But the start looked to be simple enough, and we decided to give it a try.

We swam together in the pond naked all summer, so our differing physical configurations were not news to either of us. How this transfer might be accomplished though was not obvious. But the idea of a baby that we would be able to play with — to dress and undress and tickle and try to persuade to laugh — was an irresistible attraction. Practical details, like what would we do with the baby when we got tired of playing with it, or how we would feed it, or where we could keep it so our parents wouldn’t find it, didn’t concern us. Sufficient unto the day… Nine-year-olds are not any bigger on foresight than tangerine-haired real estate barons. But that’s another subject and we need to stick to the story.

So we went up into the hayloft, took off our clothes, and tried out the transferring part. After a few attempts, the prospect of success became clearer, but while the game was enjoyable enough, even a repetition over several days running produced no sign of the baby, which was supposed to give notice of its pending arrival with a swelling of Barbara’s stomach and a kick or two. We went back to the book, and decided that our problem was that nothing had passed from me into her during our gymnastics. The only logical candidate was pee, so we tried that. In fact, we tried both peeing at the same time, just in case, which was messy but the hay would dry out long before the cows got it in the winter and we used to salt it anyway, so no harm done. We washed ourselves afterwards at the pump in the yard, which occasioned no comment since my mother always encouraged us to clean ourselves up after being outside to avoid tracking Carolina’s red clay onto her kitchen floor.

But still no baby, even after an interminable wait (a week?), so we gave up the attempt at parenthood in favor of trying to excavate a rabbit hole all the way down to where the rabbit must be. There were no consequences to the rabbit but there were unfortunate consequences to my mother’s kitchen floor, and we heard about them. The book got shuffled under my bed with the previous year’s dog-eared schoolbooks, and it was several more years before the memory turned up again on my calendar, this time not because of Barbara.

I trust that by now the statute of limitations in North Carolina has run out. I ran into Barbara years later, at the front door of her house in town where I had tracked her down and rang the bell. She remembered me, and she wasn’t embarrassed; just tired. There were three kids clinging to her knees, and a fourth perched on her hip. Her hair was in mostly a bun, with some loose strands. From the bulging belly under her bathrobe she had obviously figured out the proper procedure.

There is no moral to this story.

Go back

Your message has been sent

 

Graduation Speech

I have sat through enough of these in my day to consider myself qualified to tackle the subject. Graduating from grammar school was not considered a big deal when I did it. There was no ceremony, just a handing out of final report cards and perhaps a pat on the back from a favorite teacher. All just part of the drill. But when it came time for my grandson to graduate from high school, fifty years later, things had changed. There were all the suburban child-centered cultural tokens — robes and parties and special dresses and mortarboards with tassels and lists of medals and cups and prizes to be awarded (The Federstein Left-Handed Penmanship Prize, the prize for the Most Progress in Table Manners as a Senior, the DJ Twister Prize for Break Dancing — everybody got a prize for something — it’s a sin to overlook an opportunity to beef up your child’s self esteem). There were live performances by those members of the class whose career ambitions involved the entertainment world, which after an hour seemed to include just about everybody. (Talent was not that much in evidence. Ambition sufficed. My grandson whacked away at his drum set, and he proved to be an exception. He definitely had the beat. As he got warmed up there were shouts of “Go, Will, Go!” from his temporarily awakened classmates.)

And of course the bestowal of college degrees is the really big deal — with a “name” speaker to inspire the newly fledged masters of the universe. The properly prominent and robed speakers, slashes of school colors peeking out from the folds concealing their McDonalds addictions, having themselves just received their honorary degrees, dispensed advice in pontifical cadences, usually presenting themselves as examples of hard-won success gained by their own extraordinary diligence.

During these oratorical orgies I amuse myself by pretending that I have been the chosen Commencement Day Speaker, instead of the eminent gentleman (It was always a gentleman.) at the podium. At the bestowal of my own modest BA, I didn’t actually listen at all; the PA system proving inadequate in the brisk breeze at the outdoor conclave. I just watched the traditional passing of the rolled-up diploma-batons and watched for where the extra loud applause was coming from so I could spot the proud parents and friends.

But recently, at my grandson’s college graduation, I let my mind wander. Could I do better? What if I were really asked to give the big speech? No danger, of course. I have done nothing to warrant being selected for the role — I stopped giving money to my alumni fund when I discovered that the president of my college had a bigger salary than the president of my country (Eight times as much, would you believe, plus a mansion, for a cushy job heading up an Ivy League University?), and I have done nothing in my professional life to give me either audience-drawing or donor-drawing power. What would I find to say?

*

“Hello, graduates. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, ‘This old fart is like all the other old farts at campuses around the country who revel in their moment in the spotlight, and he will say what they all will say. I will just sneak this earbud in and find something in my playlist that will drown him out.’

“Well, perhaps this is one old fart who will surprise you. At least I will try.

“I am now in my tenth decade. At twenty there is no way you can imagine what that feels like. I have already lived longer than any of my forebears. I didn’t expect this. It was not part of my life plan.

“I am financially independent. I mention that first because it came as such a surprise to me. After starting with a T-shirt and an army discharge certificate and neither job nor bank account I have ended up comfortably retired. I didn’t expect that. No one in my family had ever before been even comfortably well off. They all worked till they dropped, worried about whether to pay the doctor bill or the rent.

“I am in reasonably good health. I walk without a cane, I can still (with the help of glasses) read the six-point type of the obituaries in the Times, I can hold my own in one-on-one conversations provided I can see your face well enough to read your lips, and I can still think straight (at least I think I can think straight). I didn’t expect that either at 95.

“The main message here is that things don’t turn out the way you expected. So most of the time you have spent planning on what you will do in the future — near or distant — is wasted.

“Lady Luck will be a huge factor in your life whether you like it or not. Cases in point:

  • My grandson who spent endless hours on the Schuykill River to qualify for a spot on the Olympic Rowing Team, was knocked off his bicycle by a careless motorist one afternoon on his way to practice, and had to abandon his ambition and find another one — all in the space of a few minutes.

  • My brother-in-law who retired and sold his house in New Jersey and moved with his wife to Florida where they planned a calm retirement, had their plan derailed when his wife developed dementia and he developed glaucoma and they would up in a hospice and an assisted care facility respectively.

  • My temporary gig as manuscript typist turned into regular employment as a typesetter which turned into the proprietorship of a keyboarding service which turned into a book composition house which turned into a scientific journal production company, none of which had any relation to any subject I studied in four years of college or three in the army, and for which I had no formal training whatsoever.

  • My best friend at college spent hours and hours practicing at the music room piano (while I listened and did my homework and grew to appreciate both Beethoven and Rachmaninoff). He did it to please his mother, who envisioned a shining Carnegie Hall career for him. Meanwhile his pocket-money job as a stringer for newspapers covering local sports developed into a byline and eventually into full-time employment, several sports books and induction into the Basketball Writers Hall of Fame.

“These are random samples from my own experience. There exists a journal called The Journal of Unintended Consequences, an issue of which should appear on every library shelf that holds Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. His book assumed that what you had to do was work out a plan, follow his recipes for good behavior, and reap the rewards. (It worked beautifully for him, of course — eleven titles, all on the same subject, fifteen million copies.) But he was the exception; not the rule.

“So as you new graduates go forth from this place, with your ambitions and your strategies, remember that as Bobby Burns told us ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft a-gley.’ Allow for surprises. Life, like history, is just one damn thing after another.

*

“Hey! Wake up! Take those wires out of your ears! This old fart is giving you valuable advice. What do you think this is — a joke?”

Go back

Your message has been sent

 

Hard Choices

Chief Executive Officer: Come on in, buddy. My office door is always open. Have a sit.

Chief Financial Officer: Thanks.

CEO: What’s new?

CFO: Well, it ain’t exactly new. We’re due to report to shareholders on the fiscal year this month. Happens every year. But this year I see a problem.

CEO: You’ve handled them before. You can handle this one. I’m going to be in Bermuda. Family and I leave Monday. We chartered a jet.

CFO: I don’t think it’s going to be that easy this time. It’s been a lousy year. I might even say superlousy.

CEO: Tell me about it.

CFO: Revenue down 25 percent. Same store sales down 35.

CEO: How come?

CFO: Who knows? The gadget market is always risky. People want the latest one; not necessarily the best one. Combination lipsticks and Mace sprays are just not big this year. Plus we got some new competition.

CEO: So we come up with the next big thing. Don’t have to tell ‘em what it is; just tell the analysts it’s coming. They’ll have their tongues hanging out in anticipation. Everyone wants in on the next Xerox. Stock price will go over the moon.

CFO: We did that last year, but the designers never came up with anything the salesmen felt they could sell.

CEO: So we hire new designers.

CFO: Haven’t got enough money to offer them good salaries.

CEO: Not enough money?

CFO: Cash flow negative, we’ve already put our suppliers on notice — payables on 90-day basis now, 120 days starting next week, but we’re already 120 days behind with most of them. We’re paying C.O.D. on two of our biggest accounts already.

CEO: So call the bank. They have to be on our side if they expect to ever get their loans back.

CFO: I think they’ve already written us off. They don’t answer my phone calls. I have to hike down to the branch office and sign the visitor sheet.

CEO: So tell the shareholders we need another round of start-up financing — to expand our share of the market.

CFO: Tried that at the last board meeting. It won’t fly. Our own directors are selling on the sly. Scared.

CEO: So we move production overseas. India. Fifty cents and hour, same quality, same schedules. And everybody speaks English, not Cantonese.

CFO: We’re already there. And they’re wising up. Seventy cents in the last contract.

CEO: How about layoffs? Bring the payroll down. Employees don’t want to risk losing their jobs if the company goes bust. They’re more willing to bet on their chances of personally escaping the ax. Besides, the union needs us bad. Did I mention that Charlie and his girlfriend are meeting us in Bermuda? He’s the celebrating his election as the new union president. How many would we have to lay off?

CFO: Thousands. And don’t forget that in the end they’re our customers. If we lose any more customers we’re going to die of loneliness. And we’d be losing even more revenue.

CEO: So what do you figure on doing?

CFO: So I checked out Chapter Eleven. Lawyers say we’re not good candidates. No believable plan. Judge would probably order liquidation.

CEO: What’s left then?

CFO: You and I resign. Let the Board take the heat. How is your retirement fund doing? Is your golden parachute in good repair? How’s the weather in Bermuda this time of year?

CEO: Time for lunch. We’re booked at noon. We need to draft an announcement.

CFO: I’ll get my tie.

Go back

Your message has been sent