Jokers Need Not Apply

When the supplemental checks ceased some 18 months after most places were shuttered for the plague, I realized I had to get back to work to make ends meet.

Wouldn’t take much, as I’m already on Social Security, but I’m one of those who, let’s just say, joined the workforce late. As I tell my friends, I had my retirement in my twenties, so now I must work till I drop.

Fair enough. Problem was that the cinema I’d been with since 1998 changed hands during the shutdown. When it finally reopened with so many restrictions on attendance, I couldn’t imagine how the new owners could possibly afford an employee. So I never asked.

I had also been driving a delivery van for a chocolate and fudge company that hadn’t called. Since I had already asked for a reduced schedule before the shutdown, they may have figured that I had finessed a painless, de facto, “never-can-say-goodbye” retirement.

Was it just lucky coincidence that my third gig at a Renaissance festival began on the very day that the COVID payments ended? That’s just eight weekends, but it covered me for three months. I bought time.

And I finessed it. With my year-round employment seemingly off the table, I recalled a previous life–1986 to 2002 to be specific–when jobs began just after Labor Day, broke for the holidays, began again after New Year’s, and ended with sessions called “summer” even though they were over by the Fourth. If you’re good at riddles, you recognize the life of a teacher. In my case, the adjunct circuit for college writing instructors.

This allowed me to make myself known to the heads of English departments at the ten or so remaining campuses within a forty-mile radius where I did not burn bridges 20 years ago. By applying after Labor Day, I was able to delay any commitment until after New Year’s while letting them know I’d be ready on a moment’s notice.

Bizarre as it seems, that’s how a lot of that scheduling was done back in my day. According to the five dept. heads I heard from, that’s how it’s still done. They even gave me specific dates in January 2022 to get back in touch.

I never did. Two weeks after the start of the renfaire, the Screening Room brought me back for a night a week. Since they, a married couple, can double-team on busy weekends, and since all theaters require technical preparations and book work on Thursdays and Fridays, we settled on Wednesdays. With that, I’d need just one class each semester, the Tuesday-Thursday format always preferred by adjuncts, a far cry from the four, two each at two schools covering five days and who knows how many miles, that most adjuncts juggle.

That need disappeared two weeks after the faire ended. With the holiday season about to start, I recalled the various friends and relatives of the chocolate company’s owners showing up to make various special deliveries, mostly large orders for businesses to give their employees. A few of those would get me to January, so I dropped in.

“How would you like a regular Thursday route?”

“You mean year round?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Yes!”

My enthusiasm amused him, but he had no way of knowing what was behind it. He thought he was offering me a part-time job, but what he really gave me was a ticket to avoid a return to the classroom.

At dinner on that Thursday in late November, 2021, I was most thankful for that.

Thankful for my own sake, rueful for what it says about all else.

When I began teaching on the adjunct circuit, and before that in the early Eighties when I taught as a graduate assistant in South Dakota, classrooms hummed with curiosity and expectation, engaging and vibrant. Maybe it was just me and my own bring-back-the-Sixties wildness, and I was too naive to notice anything else. Maybe it was having students brand new to college taking their first classes outside of their hometowns and tight-knit high schools.

In South Dakota it all began when students smiled and smirked and laughed openly at my Boston accent. When they heard me laugh back, it was all I needed: “What’ll your parents say when you tell them you have an English teacher who can’t pronounce the letter R?”

In one class, some wag shot back: “They’ll say you should be disqualified from correcting our spelling!”

I knew he would do well. I also realized that, with or without a regional accent, if I could make a class laugh, the subject would teach itself.

And that’s how it went through the Eighties and into the Nineties when college and universities for some bureaucratic reasons started making everything standard and formal. I call it “The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.” There was no room for improvisation and even less tolerance for any challenges that might be out of any student’s “comfort zone.” Education at its best was out of bounds.

Laughter? Better be in bounds, and those bounds are small. You could make all but one laugh, but if that one took it literally, took offense, you were toast.

I was toast, and when I asked at a faculty meeting, “Is this a college or a nursing home?” I was burned toast. It was a slow process, and I saw the effect in the classrooms where students had slowed down, perhaps because they knew that they were the ones being processed.

Since then, reports from friends in academe have not been encouraging. Without realizing it at the time, I did leave just in time to avoid the advent of cellphones and ringtones sounding in classrooms. Never mind hurting a student’s feelings, I’d be hurting their noses and knocking out teeth if I or another student were interrupted by one of those–or I’d make a wisecrack about it and hurt cellphoner’s feelings.

In academe as I left it and as I hear it described today, spontaneity means suicide, and there’s no room for serendipity on the syllabus.

Argue that if you will, academe has become no country for this old man. Despite that, when it came time to find work a few years ago, I figured I’d silence that sound when I heard it.

And so the emails went out and a few were answered. What happened next was blogged in real time under headlines “Call Me Rip” and “I Are Not Stupid.” The first was my reaction to technological requirements that did not exist 20 years ago–the same amount of time that Rip Van Winkle took his snooze before awakening to a new world. The second my response to what are called “preferred pronouns,” in which I propose e (e, es) as a non-binary option to avoid the awkward confusion of a plural used for a singular for an otherwise identifiable individual.

Had I gone though with it and made those phone calls in January 2022, I’d have been tempted to change any requirement that I state “preferred pronouns” to “preferred adjectives.” Why not? If people can possess pronouns–as in my pronouns–why not other parts of speech?

To this day, I wish I had, as I imagine expressions on the faces of Ph Ds named Diane and Michael who felt the need (or obeyed a requirement) to add, respectively, “she, her, hers” and “he, him, his” to their names upon receiving my application with preferred adjectives: witty, erudite, articulate, charming, handsome.

Would they at least laugh before throwing it in the trash? Or is laughter “inappropriate”?

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https://pixels.com/featured/a-village-school-william-iii-bromley.html

Upriver from Laredo

Perhaps a sequel to “Robbing Heaven” should be called “Paying Hell,” but I avoid sequels, part twos, and anything that depends on what I’ve already inflicted on the world.

Any exception must also be stand-alone, and a question arrived yesterday that meets that condition, asking if the book I reviewed, Hell to Pay, has any…

… comment on immigration policies (which are in constant conflict between the “benefits” of having more eager tax-paying labor to suppress wages and the “costs” of them becoming union members and even voting citizens)?

Yes, author Michael Lind includes two chapters titled “Global Labor Arbitrage,” one on outsourcing, the other subtitled, “How Employers Exploit Immigrants to Weaken Worker Power.” A complicated case treated with clarity. Emphasis is on the “wary eye” unions have historically cast toward immigrants.

He recalls that Cesar Chavez, leader of America’s first farmworkers strike in the Sixties, “denounced illegal immigration and reported unauthorized migrants to the Border Patrol.” Reason: they reduced wages for legal immigrants already picking grapes in California.

We may not like where some of his lines are drawn, but Lind proposes that it would be better for all involved if we started with unions, higher wages, benefits, and then admitted migrants according to prospects under those conditions.

My correspondent adds that an acquaintance was sent on a work-assignment for…

… a few weeks working in Laredo, where the Rio Grande is about 25-feet wide and wadeable at this time. He says there’s no one assembled on the other side. The locals he has asked… “where are all the migrants people keep talking about?” just shrug. They don’t know.

Meanwhile, many of us do know that the footage run by Fox–and other media outlets that sell anger and rage by catering to fear and suspicion–is often played on a loop, a few scenes made to seem like many, a few places made to seem like all. At times they have used clips of scenes years old, taken in other countries, and of crowds other than immigrants. Nor is it any coincidence that their close-ups are of the darkest-skinned and angriest individuals they can find.

None of this is news. Nor will those outlets report what is news, such as the recent easement of tensions on the border. Says my correspondent:

I suspect the falling numbers of migrants (both legal and illegal) have a significant role in inflation. Not as significant as the pandemic, the war, supply chains, and fossil fuels, but still important. Maybe as significant as rare resources like lithium and computer chips. Large sectors of ag (both big and small) rely on cheap migrant labor, especially meat, fruit, veggies, and wine.

It amazes me that the political benefits apparently outweigh the economic benefits, and therefore prevent the right from proposing or supporting any policy reforms re: economic migrants.

Lind, who suggests that we treat immigration first and foremost “as a matter of labor economics,” addresses that amazement:

To argue against low-wage immigration is not to argue against immigration as such… for several generations U.S. immigration policy has been weaponized by American employers, as one of a number of instruments, along with union busting, outsourcing, anti-worker labor laws, and the offshoring of production, that are used to undermine the bargaining power of American workers…

His answer to that is a living wage for all, which would turn recipients of tax-funded services into taxpayers themselves. First step toward that would be an increase in the current minimum wage of $7.25. Today, progressives push with no success for a national minimum wage of $15/hour while regressives suggest elimination of any minimum wage at all.

Meanwhile, if adjusted for the cost of living since 1967, it would be $22/hour.

Reminds me of the name of a town about 600 miles upriver from Laredo: There’s the Truth. If you care to know the Consequences, there’s Hell to Pay.

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Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, co-founders of La Raza, the first farmworkers union in the US. Bob Fitch photography archive, © Stanford University Libraries

From Life at the Intersection, an activist blog by Terri Lyon, author of Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism and What’s on Your Sign? How to focus your passion and change the world. This photo is featured with a superb, eye-opening sketch of Dolores Huerta, who coined the phrase in “Sí Se Puede” long before Barack Obama adopted it for his 2008 campaign. In 2011, he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom:

https://lifeattheintersection.com/2019/03/25/who-was-cesar-chavezs-surprisingly-badass-partner/

Robbing Heaven

So new that it went to press just before passage of a bill to allow child labor in Arkansas, Hell to Pay is eye-opening, assumption-busting, both-ways cutting, and very uncomfortable.

By “both-ways cutting” I don’t mean that Michael Lind, author of several books with titles such as The New Class War and The Next American Nation, veers both left and right, but that he attacks assumptions of Democrats as much as those of Republicans.

We might object–as I did while reading–that at least Democrats are on the ethical and necessary side of voting rights, reproductive rights, environmental disputes, but Lind rivets Hell to Pay‘s focus on the single wrong at the root of all that ails us. Not one to waste time getting to his point, Lind makes it the book’s subtitle:

How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.

Discomfort is for those on the left who comfortably emphasize what are called “culture war” issues, stuck in what Lind calls “the identity credentials arms race.” Since most all of this talk airs only in the worlds of academe and journalism, it is foreign to a working class more attentive to wages, taxes, prices, interest rates, mortgages, rents.

Lind may not be addressing Democrats directly, but who else would heed his repeated call to restore the presence and influence of unions to what they were in the 1950s and ’60s? He acknowledges that African-Americans were largely excluded from the benefits of those thriving years, but points out that there’s no reason why they or anyone else should be excluded from a renewal of the American vision laid out by Democrat FDR and protectively sustained by Republican Eisenhower.

Basically, Lind calls that bipartisan vision a “living wage/social-insurance economy” that was replaced by a “low wage/high-welfare system” installed by Ronald Reagan and sheepishly sustained by Bill Clinton. Yes, Reagan trashed welfare, but his deregulation sent American manufacturing overseas, lowered wages here, and created the need for far more public assistance.

No coincidence, then, that Reagan’s war on unions, starting with the air-traffic controllers as soon as he took office, not only precipitated America’s decline, but insured it by pitting the working class against itself. While no one begrudged the Social Security or Medicare checks for which we ourselves paid into (“social-insurance”), those barely getting by seethed at those left in need of public assistance (“high-welfare”).

Though unstated, “divide and conquer” underpinned Reaganism just as much as it blatantly announces Trumpism. When Bill Clinton famously announced “the end of welfare as we know it,” he wasn’t making any reform. He was waving a white flag.

We saw Democrats wave another white flag last week when they agreed to the work-requirements for those on welfare. As dissenters such as Elizabeth Warren objected, it forces people to accept jobs that pay poverty wages–which in turn subsidizes the largest corporations, and which illustrates a foremost point of Hell to Pay.

Some of author Michael Lind’s points are overstated–I’ve never heard feminists call for “defamilization,” although I must agree that “birthing people” for “mothers” is “curiously stilted, liturgical language.” In fact, I’d go a bit further, and I hasten to add that Lind’s overall logic regarding America’s declining birth rates is too solid to dismiss.

With a fair corporate tax rate and living wages secured by unions, both of which allowed America to thrive in the ’50s, couples would be having children earlier and communities would become tighter knit as people had more time for each other. Healthier villages could raise more children.

To explain our descent from that to stressful gun-and-drug plagued nation we have become, Hell to Pay fills in the details of how Bernie Sanders’ (and Ralph Nader’s) frequent charge that corporate America “privatizes the benefits of cheap labor and socializes the costs.” In a chapter titled “Scrooge Revisited,” Lind nails it with numbers that make the nail very, very long:

60 percent of the $7 billion in annual welfare benefits that went to low-wage workers went to the employees of only ten corporations, with McDonald’s alone responsible for $1.2 billion.

Add supplemental programs for health care, housing, and food, and The Labor Center at UC Berkeley calculates “that welfare for low-wage Americans costs taxpayers $150 billion each year.” Lind continues:

The fact that a quarter of the entire American workforce in the twenty-first century (is) so poorly paid that it need(s) to rely on one or another means-tested welfare program would have shocked mid-twentieth century Roosevelt Democrats and Eisenhower Republicans.

As Lind makes clear, the genius of corporate America has been to convince most of the American public that its own scam is a philanthropic effort by the government turned parasitic–and that the poor rather than the corporations are the parasites.

But he stops short of saying how much of the convincing has been done by corporate owned and controlled Republicans in Congress and, as is now painfully obvious, on the Supreme Court–all of them amplified on the Republican Party’s Mouthpiece, Fox News.

He rightfully reminds us that many Democrats are also in thrall to corporate sponsors. Hillary Clinton’s still-hidden speeches, after all, were not to the ACLU and the Sierra Club, but to Goldman Sachs and Monsanto, .

Few present-day politicians are named. Only Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California gain favorable, if brief, mention for their pursuit of the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act” (or “BEZOS,” a play on the name of Amazon’s owner), a tax on corporations in the amount of the means-tested public assistance that all their employees received.

And on Hell to Pay‘s final page, an unavoidable reference looking to the 2024 election and the possibilty…

… that populist demogogues, some of them more effective and focused than Donald Trump, will lead ephemeral and disruptive rebellions by the marginalized and dispossessed.

Too bad Lind didn’t have the chance to see what one of those demogogues would do just two months before his book arrived in bookstores and libraries. To counter the corporate premise that “lowering the prices of goods and services by lowering the wages of workers who provide them,” Lind asks rhetorically: “Why not legalize child labor?”

Before anyone could read the question, newly-elected Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders would sign a bill to do exactly that in Arkansas. Not only that, but reports from dozens of sources tell us that similar bills are now pending in several more Republican-controlled states.

In 2024, America will either heed Hell to Pay, or it will be Hell and we will pay.

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690656/hell-to-pay-by-michael-lind/

Fear & Loathing in Boston

If I had to describe what it is to be a Boston sports fan in 2023 with honesty as brutal as Hunter Thompson’s reports from the campaign trail or with insight as searing as Dante’s burning Hell, I could simply tell you what has happened.

For starters–pun but partial–the Red Sox are a Jekyll & Hyde operation that either manages to give up a few more runs when they score many, or score nothing when they hold the other team to very little. If their lineup is balanced, it’s because they have guys who can hit but can’t field, and others who can field but can’t hit, including a first-baseman who seems to think a bat is something to hold on his shoulder, like a prop for photo ops, while awaiting ball four.

Starters? That’s the baseball term for the rotation of pitchers, usually five, on a team who begin games and pitch five or more innings unless they are knocked out sooner. Among the Red Sox’ many problems is that their starters too often think the first two innings are for the other team’s batting practice.

For too many Fenway fans, it hardly matters who the other team is, or even how far the Sox might be behind. In the late innings they will start their knuckle-dragging, gutter-sniping, brain-damaged “Yankees suck!” chant. So embarrassing to have anything in common with them, but you could laugh all night imagining how fans of the opposing teams back home hearing it on TV must be laughing at us.

Red Sox TV broadcasters can be equally maddening. After bemoaning the passing of the witty Jerry Remy last year, we do it again over the retirement of the hilarious Dennis Eckersley this year. In their color commentary place we have Kevin Youkilis who seems to think he gets paid according to how often he inserts “right there!”–sometimes “right here!”– into everything he says, always with exclamation. For play-by-play, we have Dave O’Brien who never fails to add “in a row” after telling us that a player has a hitting streak of so many games.

Those foibles are no doubt amplified by the abrupt disappearance of the wildly entertaining Jack Edwards, play-by-play commentator for our hockey Bruins. They and our basketball Celtics rode high all season only to fall flat in the post season. After setting a new high for the best regular season won-lost record in NHL history, the Bs were no more coherent in the first playoff round than first-graders playing pin the tail on the donkey.

Not to be underdone, the Cs apparently thought that actual basketball was played only during the regular season, and that the post-season was a contest of long-distance shots. They got away with it through two nail-biting rounds, but in round three they could have changed their name to The Clang Gang.

While we Boston fans let ourselves believe that the Bruins would breeze through the East on their way to the Stanley Cup finals, we also thought the Celtics could be beaten only by the Milwaukee Bucks. When the Bucks fell in the first round, we figured one trophy was already ours, and the second within reach.

A city with two championships in one year! Rarely happens, but Boston had it in ’04 and ’18 with the Red Sox and Patriots.

What makes the dual losses doubly worse is that both were to Miami teams. And both have made it to the finals with a chance to win it all. Most of us would likely say that dual champions in Los Angeles or Philadelphia would be worse, and in New York would be worst of all.

However, considering what the two cities symbolize–Boston with its renowned universities and medical centers; Miami where books and courses of study are banned from schools, where medical care is legislated–the possibility of the Panthers and Heat as dual champions is beyond depressing.

Could call it unpatriotic.

Speaking of which, what does it tell us when the young guy showing off the razors in the TV ads for Gillette, the company that owns the New England Patriots, is the quarterback for the rival Buffalo Bills?

Hunter Thompson would have a field day with a detail like that. Dante would offer it on one of the levels in his streak of nine levels in a row right there!

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Apparently, he doesn’t use it that often.

Buying into Blindness

When someone in town asks if I “still write” for the local newspaper, I take one of those deep breaths of exasperation before saying “Yes.”

Like many folks, I am still running into acquaintances I last saw before March, 2020, when the restrictions were put in place. And so the question is fairly frequent. If people asked if I still live on Plum Island, show films at the Screening Room, perform at King Richard’s Faire, or refuse to get a cellphone, I’d answer with a smile, possibly a joke if one came to mind.

But I no longer hear this as a question. Rather, I hear them telling me that they don’t read the local paper. Tempting to ask why they then care if I still write, but it goes with the territory that, read or not, I’m still fair game for anyone who wants to say what they think.

Or am I? Raising that question is an encounter in the supermarket this week when a woman responded to my exasperated “yes” by telling me that she “stopped following the news.”

As I drew another breath of exasperation, she continued with complaints about inflation and who knows what after I tuned her out. When she seemed to pause, I started to say, “Well, good to see you again,” but then came a line that lit my fuse:

I never bought into that COVID stuff.

Most people would describe what happened next by saying that I “snapped.” I don’t deny it, but to be more precise, I took the line to mean that she thought the virus a hoax. For that, my fuse is short:

Are you saying you don’t believe it happened???!!!

No, no, no! I believe it!

Okay, then I don’t know what you mean by “buy into” it.

I don’t believe we should have shut down everything and not let anyone go anywhere.

Were you aware of the nightly death tolls? Did you see the footage of overcrowded hospitals? The 18-wheelers outside hospitals being used as refrigerated morgues?

Yes, but look what it did to the economy!

Luckily, we were in a corner of the store where no one else happened to be at that moment. This next quote omits at least two expletives:

Who do you think you are??? Did you hear the interviews with nurses coming to pieces describing what it was like to hold the hands of people–young, middle-age, elderly, terrified–as they die with no relative or friend with them? And then having to walk down a corridor and into another room to tell the family? Who are you? What are you?

In her attempt to stop me, I heard the word “inflation.” I glanced into her basket:

What??? The price of your cottage cheese is worth more than four-thousand dead in O-hi-o? Maybe you can lower the price of your fettuccini by putting the keep-it-running-no-matter-the-cost crowd back in the White House.

Her silence allowed me to catch myself, and I paused for another deep breath. I lowered my voice, and I’m sure my blood pressure:

Oh, by the way, are you aware that we right now have the lowest unemployment rate that we seen since the 1960s? Record setting job growth? Record business investments across the country? Oh, wait, you don’t “follow” the news, so how could you know any of that? How could you know anything?

Abruptly, I walked away, pushing my cart. Amazingly, she called out a friendly sounding, “We’ll see ya!” Taking another breath of exasperation, I thought, “I hope not!” Honestly, I didn’t mean to say it aloud.

Later that day, under the calming influence of a Riverwalk IPA and a Plum Island sunset, I considered what might happen should we cross paths again. Newburyport is a small town, so it seems inevitable.

I’ll be sure to offer a cheery “hello” and address her by name. If she wants to talk about places she’s been, things she’s done, films she’s seen, I’ll be glad to listen, answer questions, and trade notes.

If she ignores me, that’s as much her right as it is to ignore news–and as it is my right not to listen to those who ignore news express opinions about what is in the news. No more fair game for foul calls.

And no more breaths of exasperation. If you wear blinders, I’ve no time for what you think you see.

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https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-blind-leading-the-blind-pieter-brueghel-the-younger.html

Reform on a Dime

Today was my first delivery in at least a year to a place on which I dropped a dime following my last visit.

Since the plague put me in semi-retirement, another driver usually covers this route, but I have noticed that this customer has been steady, telling me that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as promised, kept me and my employer anonymous, just as I am keeping the offending company anonymous.

Whether or not the supervisor who heard me vent a year ago made any connection between me and OSHA’s visit soon after is now a moot point.

As it was, large trucks were able to back into a platform about five feet high, but those of us driving cargo vans and the smaller Ford Transits such as I drive had a walkway barely four-feet wide and about five off the ground.

What made this dangerous was the lack of a railing.

Compounding that danger was a door that opened toward rather than away from us, forcing a contorted maneuver of up to 140 lbs. on a two-wheeler maybe two-and-a-half feet wide past a wide, heavy door we had to simultaneously hold open.

You might say that the lack of a railing was a hazard while the wrong-way door was merely inconvenience. But when the walkway is just four-feet wide, the door lights up that hazard like a bumper on a pinball machine.

Such was the case I made a year ago to the Boston office of the federal agency. OSHA’s agent told me they would pay a visit, and did I want to be informed of their finding? Yes, I said.

Barely three weeks passed before he called back. Yes, they were ordered to install a railing. I thanked him, and then he thanked me for calling in. He said nothing about the door, and I didn’t want to press the matter. With a railing, I figured, the wrong-way door would remain an annoyance, but no longer a hazard.

Today I took satisfaction in seeing that railing for the first time, still looking brand new. I put the two-wheeler on the platform and stacked it before climbing a few steps to roll it down the now non-threatening walkway. I stopped a distance from the door, allowing for its width, and made my way around the stack to reach for the bell.

Catching my eye were door hinges that appeared brand new. More than that, they were on the side of the door away from me. Then I noticed the door handle, also new on a door which, new or not, was now right-way.

Though seemingly simple and isolated, restricted to a small and hardly noticed segment of the American population, this is a story I expect to be telling in the weeks and months to come. Anyone who tells me that businesses should run free of regulation, or that government agencies never accomplish anything that does us any good will hear it.

In person if possible, but if necessary, I’m willing to drop more dimes.

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https://www.kha.com/fall-protection-the-most-violated-osha-standard/

A Not-To-Do List

Tempting to claim that the past four weeks since my last post were an extended, restful vacation, and that would not be entirely untrue.

Nice weather has had me sitting outdoors overlooking the Plum Island Sound and laughing at the mainland when I wasn’t looking down into Herman Melville’s Mardi, by far his longest novel, an apparent attempt to channel Defoe, Dante, Swift, and Shakespeare all at once.

In the evenings I was usually captivated by the Jekyll & Hyde routine of both the Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics, and there were a couple of weekend day trips. Also, I have had two columns in the local paper this month, though both were adaptations of previous blogs. Newburyport readers rather liked my former pot-head take on keeping pot shops away from downtown, and they are still nervously laughing at yesterday’s account of cracking jokes while a dermatologist cut a cyst from my throat.

A third sent in today was originally a detailed letter to Newburyport’s mayor about “weeding” at the public library which has made literature such as Mardi hard to find. It was prompted by the surprise resignation of the young head librarian just a year after her appointment. His reply, in its entirety: “Thanks for the email. I look forward to working through the Head Librarian search process.” Seeing no mention of the problem, I realized that I must make it public. So I haven’t been entirely unproductive or merely derivative, much less divorced from civic life.

All of which hardly explains a month-long lull, which brings me to the second minor surgery, this one on my back and infected, unlike the harmless cyst removed as a precaution and played for laughs in the operating room. Seriously, the good doctor asked me to stop, but I just couldn’t shut up. The blog is headlined “A Fan of Anesthesia,” but the better title might be “Doctor Resisted Suicide.”

Maybe it was an all-knowing God or maybe it was Karma or maybe it was just desserts, whatever those are, that I should be stricken with a second medical problem so soon–not so perilously placed, but far more annoying and with a week’s worth of antibiotics that I blame for my lethargy.

Then again, those pills may be the reason that I didn’t seem to be reading Mardi so much as hallucinating it. Might help you to know that the title is not the French word for Tuesday, but the Polynesian word for World. No marijuana or even Narragansett Lager required:

Robinson Crusoe is set on an island. So am I.

Shakespeare’s Tempest casts spells at the mainland. So do I.

Gulliver’s Travels describes weird people. Ever been to Plum Island?

Dante’s Inferno burns as Hell. Yes, I was still watching nightly news.

For all I know, whatever it was that a bug, most likely a tic, shot into my back was what made me think I was Prospero depending on Friday to keep the Yahoos away while my mind raced in circles. Call me Ishmael. Before I could get to the operating table, I kept hot towels on it, and when it seemed ready, I reached it with two fingers.

If you really want a description of what happened next, you’ll have to send a private message. Next day, the doctor said my shoulder appeared clean, but he took swabs for tests that all proved negative. I’m now healing without need of any bandage.

Expressing the most concern was my hiking friend up in Maine who wondered if a tic got me on our last stroll in the Wells Estuary. Seems doubtful that it would take me ten days to feel it, but she was insistent that I start taking precautions. I thanked her for the repellants she soon sent and will put them to use when hiking in woods and weeds and wetlands.

As for her advice to tuck my pants into my socks, I was so mortified by the image that saying “no” just didn’t seem to be enough. I started thinking of comparisons that would answer her metaphorically, as in I would do this before I do that.

Before long, I had a list:

Eat sushi

Own a cellphone

Vote Republican

Vote for a 3rd party without Ranked Choice Voting in place

Get a tattoo

Pierce my ear

Pierce my nose

Pierce anything

Order a glass of milk in a restaurant

Buy light beer

Drink carrot juice

Put sugar in coffee

Order decaf

Order tea

Open bottles with my teeth

Watch Fox News

Watch a “reality” TV show

Watch a sitcom

Use a plural pronoun for one otherwise identifiable person

State my preferred pronouns without my preferred adjectives: witty, handsome, charming

Use the word “grab” in place of “get”

Use “these ones” in place of “these”

Use “You guys” in place of “You” (plural)

Participate in karaoke

Line dance

Attend an opera by Wagner

Watch a film heavy in special effects

Read Ayn Rand

Listen to anyone who cites Ayn Rand

Allow anyone to use the word “appropriate” without asking what it means

Listen to opinions of anyone who says “I no longer follow (or read or watch) the news.”

Travel to India

Spend a getaway weekend in Amarillo, Texas

Move to Florida

Skydive

Make any dish with tofu as an ingredient

Buy cauliflower

Respond to any suggestion that includes the word “hurry”

Wear a watch

Wear stilettos

Wear any high heels

Take up fishing

Wear lederhosen

Wear a dunce cap

On second thought, I’m not sure about the dunce cap. It’s pretty much the same thing as pants tucked into socks, except that it’s at the other end.

That applies not only to the classical, conical dunce cap, but to the modern red baseball caps–or, “feed caps” as they are known on the Great Plains–with four words lately taken to heart by the most gullible among us.

In either case, it wouldn’t matter which happened first. But in no case would I go into hiding for another four weeks to dodge the choice.

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https://www.elsa-support.co.uk/the-not-to-do-list/

Nature’s ‘Jolly Round Board’

When someone gives you a book titled Beer Hiking New England, you wonder if she’s trying to aid your effort to lose weight or sabotage it.

Then you start thumbing through 340 colorful pages of maps, photos, charts, and graphs of elevation for 50 trails in six states, combined with descriptions of 50 brew pubs within four miles of each trailhead, and you say “thank you” and start planning.

Since my friend, a member of the Appalachian Mountain Club, shares my contradictory interests in weight loss and craft ale, I went looking for entries between here and Portland where she lives, and found the Wells Estuary Reserve that separates the tourist hotspots of Ogunquit and Kennebunkport.

Looking toward the ocean. There is a barrier beach much like Plum Island on the other side of that stand of trees.
Photo: Carla Valentine

And so we met on an overcast Sunday at the Maine Diner, less than a mile from the trailhead, for coffee that would fuel us over 3.9 miles of trail, much of it on boardwalks over wetlands. Might call it the Hellcat Trail on Plum Island set in a pine forest in lieu of tall marsh grass. Instead of an observation tower, the boardwalks lead to a few decks with benches overlooking broad meadows, and placards to tell you what’s in sight. Benches are scattered along the entire trail, as are placards to identify trees and other flora and fauna, including the swamps that one calls “Nature’s Cafeteria.”

Among Nature’s Cafeteria’s treats is Skunk Cabbage. Photo: Carla Valentine

One of the loop’s tangents takes you to Wells Beach, which I’m tempted to call “Plum Island with rocks,” except that my companion reminded me that it’s probably the least rocky point on Maine’s coast. I sat corrected on one of several benches that allowed us to turn what Beer Hiking estimates as a two-hour walk into more like three.

We also paused to consider a porcupine halfway up a pine tree. We’d have missed it if not for a woman, perhaps college age, peering through field glasses. Hard to find, but she gave good directions, and after we both had a look, she declared, “Well, I can take that off my bucket list!”

I almost fainted: “Bucket? Did you just use the word bucket?”

She smiled: “Yes!”

Aghast: “That’s for old people like me, not for you!”

My companion couldn’t fathom my objection: “She got it done!”

Double-teamed, I turned in both directions: “The reference is to the expression, ‘kick the bucket,’ doing it before you die!”

They just smiled, and we continued on as the young woman remained in place, admiring the tree-climbing critter, perhaps hoping to fit every quill into her bucket, which better be very, very large considering the head start she’s taking. A few steps away, I wondered if my grandson might cross second grade off his “bucket list” in a couple of months, and I turned back to her: “Thank you!”

Her smile and wave were so warm, they may have been on my modest bucket list without my knowing it.

Our strangest encounter came at the start of the first of the five trails that form the loop–the “Muskie Trail,” named for Edmund Muskie, Maine’s US Senator (1959-1980) best remembered as Hubert Humphrey’s VP running mate in 1968 and the prime target and victim of the Nixon campaign’s dirty tricks in 1972. Before I could reminisce out loud about my exchange of correspondence with the always helpful senator during my brief stint as a reporter for the St. John Valley Times on Maine’s northern border, we were looking at a man coming toward us garbed as a jouster, repleat with helmet, armor, and a coat of arms.

My companion laughed: “Must be a friend of yours from King Richard’s!”

A time-warp into my previous life warped again into the 16th Century: “Probably.”

He told us he was lost, and asked if we had seen a battle taking place. Astonished, we said no; he said thanks and kept going, thankfully in the opposite direction.

Laudholm Farm buildings at the trailhead. Worth noting that the Swedish suffix, “holm,” means “meadow,” and “laud” means “praise,” giving us English words such as “applaud” and “lauditory.” Photo by Carla Valentine.

We two changed directions near the end of the 3.9 loop, taking our growing appetites on a shortcut back to the trailhead for a 3.6 hike (according to an app on her phone). That’s still my longest walk of the year, nearly a half mile more than I do in the gym, though having company makes it seem shorter–despite being leisurely and taking longer. A time warp or a distance warp? Flip a coin.

Figuring that we had earned it, we flipped coins for mouth-watering smash burgers at the Batson River Brewery and Distillery a few miles south on the road that connects US 1 to Wells Beach. Though I’m always on the lookout for IPAs, I couldn’t resist ordering a Barber Chair Bitter just so I could say the name aloud. It did not disappoint.

No offense to Nature’s Cafeteria, but it apparently lacks a liquor license, and so we took our thirst down the road to Batson Brewery. That must be photographer Carla V’s Barber Chair Bitter, as mine was two-thirds gone by the time the burgers arrived.

Laughing at the idea that the combination of brew pubs with nature trails most likely turns the goal of weight loss into the compromise of “breaking even,” I recalled Herman Melville’s hedonistic declaration in Mardi:

No sensible man can harbor a doubt, but that there is a great deal of satisfaction in dining. More: there is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.

And well knowing this, nature has provided this jolly round board, our globe, which in an endless sequence of courses and crops, spreads a perpetual feast.

His next line, alas, is sobering:

Though, as with most public banquets, there is no small crowding, and many go away famished from plenty.

No doubt that’s why we chose the offseason to hike Maine’s coast. While dining, we brainstormed other relatively nearby and inland entries in Carey Kish’s book: The Great Bay Estuary and the Stoneface Brewing Co. in Newington, NH? The Northwood Meadows and the Northwoods Brewing Co. in Northwood NH?

While writing this, I wonder if two more entries in Beer Hiking New England–Plum Island’s Hellcat Trail and Walden Pond–require revisits followed by fare at the Newburyport Brewing Co. and True West Brewery respectively.

Otherwise, we will be nothing until refilled.

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https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/207/guidebook-beer-breweries-trails-hiking-new-england/97-abe921c3-b41a-4140-9134-f4264748ac8a

This book continues a series that includes: Beer Hiking Pacific Northwest, Beer Hiking Colorado, and Randos Biere au Quebec, with Beer Hiking New York and Beer Hiking the Canadian Rockies soon to come. The author/editor of the New England volume, Carey Kish, is the editor of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Maine Mountain Guide.

As I mentioned to my companion over our Barber Chair Bitters, the series reminds me of both the Green Book published annually from the 1930s into the 1960s and the Guide Books published as part of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s–if only because I reviewed books about both published in recent years:

Recovering the Green Book

Forking off in All Directions

Jack the Ripper’s Riff

Working the counter at the Screening Room can be an athletic event in the last minutes before a show’s scheduled start.

Many patrons arrive just ahead of starting time, some deliberately a few minutes late to avoid the coming attractions. Thank this art cinema’s founders as well as the new owners that there are no ads for car dealerships, fast food joints, or anything else to prolong the delay, although that might take a bit of pressure off one person ripping tickets while also slinging popcorn into bags, pouring butter into it, grabbing candy out of the glass-enclosed case and soft drinks out of the fridge, all while totalling prices and making change.

If that’s not enough of a juggling act, we also have a popcorn popper decidedly designed for a left-handed concessionaire, which I am not. And so it is with a lobby full of eyes on me that I shakily raise cups of oil proportioned with kernels to the rotating cooker while my right hand hangs idly by, contemplating an anti-discrimination lawsuit.

More than once, I’ve given folks in the lobby a play-by-play as I slowly fill the cooker. They laugh, and after banging the cups downward to get every kernel into it, I can’t resist: “Few people know this, but Shakespeare titled his play Measure for Measure as a tribute to concessionaires in the lobby of the Globe Theater.” When laughter turns into oohs and aahs, I wonder if they believe it.

Time for ridiculous jokes that pass for literary history is also provided by the tedious process of credit cards. I swear, if I could go back in time and erase three people from the history of the world, someone would need to remind me of dictators and warmongers before I got my hands on the inventors of the credit card, the cell phone, and the car alarm.

Then again, I might also be re-directed by catching sight of the idiot who first declared, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” or the equally imbecilic, “The customer is always right.”

Another handicap is the reputation that I apparently have for being able to tell how old people are just by looking at them. I suppose I should be flattered and should fake having such a power by assuming that this one is a senior while that one is not. Instead, I have a vivid memory of two occasions about 20 years ago when ticket takers charged a senior rate for women who were not. Never again! I don’t care if Methuselah walks in there wearing a name tag; if he doesn’t say “senior” or something recognizably synonymous, I’m charging full price.

Many seniors wait until the transaction is made before saying it. Most all of them get a laugh out of it, as it implies they look younger. Nor is it difficult for me to hand over the two dollar difference. So far, so good. Customers are happy, laughing, and they got the discount.

On my side of the counter, it’s like being behind a driver who waits until making the turn before putting on the directional. A ticket is already ripped, but I need to replace it and/or make a notation. Simple, right? Try doing it in those last ten minutes when you have a line of customers facing you, the ones in front holding out their credit cards, someone in the middle asking when the movie gets out, another in back asking about parking on State Street, yet another off to your side asking for napkins, and one more from the back of the hall asking where the restrooms are.

May not qualify as an athletic event, but it sure feels like one. And there is that four-step hop up into the projection booth to start the show on time while patrons are still coming through the door.

For all that, I don’t waste time complaining, and I maintain a smile, or at least a straight face. Except for the woman who, after paying admission and with the coming attractions already on, picked up a $1.25 chocolate, handed me a credit card, waited for the transaction to go through, then asked for a San Pellegrino, and handed the card back to me.

She may have detected a murderous undertone when I asked if she wanted a receipt, but she made no complaint. With few exceptions I’ve started the films on time, and I can’t recall anyone going without popcorn, though at times the butter can’t melt fast enough. Screening Room patrons have been patient when I’ve needed it, supportive overall, and on one count–and I do mean count–they give me way too much credit.

With tickets and concessions all at one counter, we add them all together. With the numbers all small–$12 or $10 for tix, $5 or less for concessions–this is little more than counting. With combinations always the same–$5 for popcorn and $2 for sodas make for a lot of $7s–it’s easy to be rapid which, in those last ten minutes, is necessary.

No matter. To hear patrons remark on my mathematical skills, you’d think I was moonlighting from a day-job as an accountant for the International Monetary Fund or as an engineer calculating interplanetary missions for NASA. Seems like nothing to me, but the truth is that I did enter Salem State as a math major 55 years ago after taking straight As in math all through elementary and high school, including algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, and an intro to calculus.

But 1968 had a way of changing people. By the start of second semester, I was an English major writing for the student paper. Strange to think that I wrote just one film review in four years for The Log. Stranger to think that it was Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

Just as well. Who needs advanced calculus to be a nimble Jack the Ripper or a quick Jack in the Booth at a theater near you?

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Taken in March, 2020, days after we were, as the sign on the door said, “shuttered for the duration of the plague.” Courtesy of the Newburyport Daily News.

Not a lot of room back there. You can see the side of the popcorn machine off to the left, and those chairs on the right have been replaced by the refrigerator. Photo from https://www.msonewsports.com/

View from the booth before the show goes on. Off to the left is one of the old 35m projectors rendered obsolete by the transition to digital in 2014. The former owner thought to display it. If you’ve ever been to Cleveland, you know that the Rock Hall’s for name is “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.” I’m lobbying the new owners to re-name the place “Screening Room and Museum.” Photo: http://cinematreasures.org/photos/329179

A Welcome Counter-Fit

Maine Diner, Wells, Maine

If you’re touring Maine’s southern coast between Portland and the New Hampshire border looking for breakfast, you can hardly go wrong. Indecisive types might even complain that there are too many excellent choices.

Before the pandemic, I was dispatched north once a week, enough to visit them all depending on my craving that morning. For eggs Benedict it was Mike’s All Day Breakfast on the road connecting US1 to Kennebunkport; for an omelet, The Egg & I on US1 between Ogunquit and Wells; for an oversized blueberry scone, Backyard in Ogunquit center; and for biscuits and gravy never easy to find on New England menus, The Maine Diner in Wells.

Also on its menu is the “El Tiante,” named for the legendary, colorful Red Sox pitcher and Hall-of-Famer, Louis Tiant, whose kaleidoscopic wind-up all little league pitchers tried to imitate much to the dismay of our coaches back in the 60s: poached eggs over corned beef hash with a small bowl of fruit in lieu of homefries. There’s another entre named for a celebrity patron, former WEEI jock Eddie Andleman, but any memory of that windbag threatens my appetite.

The restaurants I name are just the first four that come to mind, all within a four-mile radius suited to the timing of my deliveries any given Friday. Last Friday, the timing and my craving combined to steer me into Mike’s for an Irish Benny. Unfortunately, it was quite busy, with way too few staff to handle it–a common story for restaurants since the pandemic.* Since I was on the clock, I got back behind the wheel and reluctantly stopped at the Maine Diner.

Reluctant? Only because my last time there, back in December, I was horrified to learn that I barely fit at the counter when my stomach pressed against it as I squished in, ordered, and had the biscuits and gravy. To leave, I could barely turn the chair. If only in my own eyes, I was thoroughly humiliated, and once back on the road, I resolved to join a gym after a couple years of ignoring recommendations of a few friends to do just that.

But I knew the Maine Diner made very good Bennies, and it was worth the embarrassment. When I spotted the last chair empty at the end of the counter, I was grateful that my self-humilation would be slightly less.

When I took the seat, instant euphoria! Not even my sweatshirt, thick as it is, touched the counter! I fit!

So a few months in the gym have paid off, and with weather improving, most of my walking is now on the marsh side of Plum Island. When it gets hot, I’ll be barefoot on the surf at low tide.

For the sake of an occasional change of scenery, a friend in Portland and I converge for hikes in places such as Ogunquit’s Marginal Way, with the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Reserve and the Wells Estuary, both on our horizon and both within two miles of the Maine Diner.

Nice to know we have a base of operations where I can make myself comfortable.

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*Of several restaurants, pubs, cafes, coffeeshops, and diners that have folded due to an inability to find enough staff, the loss of Lindsay’s last November, a family-owned-and-operated for 74 years seafood place on what we in Massachusetts call “the upper Cape” has been most tragic. I am among many fans of its best-ever-best-anywhere crab cakes who still has hopes for its return. Notice its resemblance to the Maine Diner: