Lyrical Love

 In this spot I have cast mild aspersions in the direction of John Lennon and Paul McCartney for crafting the song "I Saw Her Standing There." Living as we are in the age of woke, and surrounded by reminders of men's fiendishness on a regular basis, I am struck once again by the opening line: "She was just seventeen, and you know what I mean..."

Well, I guess if I were sixteen or eighteen even, maybe I would have an inkling. It should be noted here that in 1963 when the song was released, Paul McCartney was twenty-one years old. A relationship with a seventeen year old girl would have caused some kind of stir perhaps even back then. I'm looking at you, Jerry Lee Lewis. I am also willing to concede that the narrator who just happened to see her standing there could be anyone. The first person does make it easy to assume that John and Paul were discussing their own experiences. But it could be just a fiction, and a handy rhyme.

A few years later, on the album generally considered their masterpiece, Paul and his buddy John crafted a ditty called "Getting Better." A couple of verses in, the boys confess, "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved." Well, that doesn't seem very nice, does it? It's a pretty big reach from the days when they just wanted to hold your hand. 

I mention this because a friend of mine and I were once entranced with the idea that all Beatles songs were love songs. This notion was easy enough to maintain while skimming across the surface of their oeuvre, but a mild dip into a song like "Norwegian Wood" finds the singer going home with a girl, who refuses to take him to bed, and in the end he burns down her house. I suppose it's easy enough to miss this point since this song did introduce the sitar to pop music. 

But really. 

It's just a few cuts later that we find the Rubber Soul's closer, "Run For Your Life." It opens with the lines, "Well, I'd rather see you dead, little girl/Than to be with another man." Which makes me wonder if once one of these Liverpool lads ever did get ahold of your hand if they would ever give it back. The whole song is an open threat to this "little girl": "You better run for your life if you can, little girl/Hide your head in the sand, little girl/Catch you with another man/That's the end, little girl." 

Kind of makes you want to reevaluate any fantasies you might be harboring about the free love of the 1960's. Sure they're love songs. From a very different point of view. 

Brrrr. 

Cute

 Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a rustling in the leaves. It gave me pause. What could it be? Now my whole attention was drawn to this big reveal, and to my great relief, it was just a squirrel. A wild animal, to be certain, but not a rat. A rat would have elicited a much different reaction. Something from the "ewww" category, I would expect. Both are rodents. Both of them are prone to scurrying. Both of them are, research tells me, rarely infected with rabies. And yet, there I was, making an intra-species judgement based almost entirely on widely held public conceptions. 

I brought this up to my wife, and it didn't take us long to decide that the chief difference was the tail. That bushy back end found on a squirrel was head and shoulders above the hairless pink appendage on a rat's posterior. I went on to suggest that a squirrel sitting on his or her haunches was most likely scanning the area for nuts, while a rat in a similar pose was obviously sending out a signal to his rat minions to attack. I was assigning motives to lower life forms, which I figured might be a sign of thinking way inside the box. 

We humans tend to revel and respect cute, while those that toil away in the shade of revulsion never receive the benefit of the doubt. As proof of concept, my wife mentioned the challenge facing a Corgi getting from place to place on those stubby little legs. It was her suggestion that the addition of ninety-six more legs would be quite a boon, causing me to question whether a centipede Corgi would still fall into the cute category. She held fast. It was her assertion that it might be even cuter, to which I had to agree, unless the stitches were visible. 

You've got a foot in the door if you're cute. Kittens, puppies, and all manner of baby animals get a pass because of their relative fluffiness and lack of perceived threat. This can change as age peels away that air of helplessness, and the true nature of the beast can be fully displayed. Pity the individual who has little else but cute to offer over the course of a lifetime. Squirrels have that going on, however, and they tend to own it. That is precisely what gets otherwise intelligent adults to stoop down and offer corn chips to an animal that is most likely carrying just as much disease as his little ratty cousin. We just feel a whole lot better about giving them food because "at least they're not rats." What is the nastiest thing we can say about pigeons? We call them "rats with wings." I've never heard anyone call a rat a "flightless pigeon." 

So what can we do? I am not sure I can promise not to flinch whenever I see a rat, but I can make an effort to make a similar scene when confronted by a squirrel. My wife and I are also looking into breeding a bushy-tailed rat. 

Wouldn't that be cute? 

Wiring

 My college roommates had a nickname for me: The Thing That Would Not Heave. I was awarded this epithet for my capacity for drinking alcohol and remaining upright. Which on the one hand was a measure of respect, but it was also a reminder from those who had the occasion to live with me that I was not easily wrestled from the center of attention when I began getting belligerent. Which was all too often for the tastes of those with whom I shared quarters. Bottom line: there was a lot of stumbling and mumbling, but not very much passing out. That would have been a relief for most of those who encountered the Thing That Would Not Heave. One testimonial from that time went like this, "If he'd just throw up, maybe he would fall asleep." 

Nope. Didn't happen. Well, there was that one time that I seem to have lost consciousness somewhere between my parents' kitchen and the two stairs leading out to their garage. I woke up with my head neatly wedged beneath my mother's Chrysler New Yorker, and a spray of Cheetos and beer that I had evacuated, I assume, on impact. Those around me at the time, not my parents because the drunken brawl we were having at their house was testament to their being out of town, took this opportunity to drag my somewhat lifeless corpse to the foldout bed down the hall. Where I rested only briefly before awakening just in time to slur my way through a confrontation with my older brother who had arrived to find out just how awful a job I was doing with my friends taking care of our childhood home. That did not end well. 

I mention this because it was one of the very few times that I can not recall a gap of time. Events between point A and point B were neatly erased from my hard drive and I only have others' accounts to fill in that blank. Like the hours I missed while under general anesthesia for knee surgery. The knee surgery that was a direct result of not simply passing out but instead going to a nearby park and jumping out of a swing when I would have been much better off throwing up and passing out. So trained physicians dosed me up and I went away for the time it took to reconstruct the ligaments I had destroyed, waking up just in time for the tube that had been helping me breathe was being snaked out of my throat. 

I had that kind of rude awakening last week when I went back online after my colonoscopy. I remember the nice nurse saying something about "IV push," then I remember being handed the bag with my clothes in it, and being told they were calling my wife to come and pick me up. My nearest reckoning has that missing chunk of time at a little under an hour. It could have been six hours. Or two days. I only have those who witnessed the experience to tell me who I behaved. 

I have never been a sound sleeper. I wake up for car horns or earthquakes. My wife and son are not equipped with this talent. Or burdened by it. I go to sleep, but I am never far away. I don't want to wake up in a swing, or drunkenly poking my older brother in the chest. That doesn't end well. But I suppose in this case it's just as well that I was elsewhere. It's just not something for which I am wired. 

Hungry Heart

 A very long time ago, when I was a small boy, I was sent to bed without supper. Well, that makes a better story than I was sent to bed without much supper because I was being a recalcitrant child who insisted that he have a hamburger for dinner and nothing else would do. Much later that night, I woke up in tears, and when my parents rushed in to see what the fuss was about, I told them that I had dreamed that my pillow was a hamburger. The punchline here would be that the pillow was missing, but it wasn't. It was just a pillow and not a giant hamburger which doubled down on my disappointment. 

This moment was reinforced by another memory of being a very young lad in Disneyland who fell asleep on his enormous hamburger after a day of the happiest place on earth. That warm bun so soft and inviting. I have heard that there are pictures of this event, but so far none of my searches through my family's photo albums have been able to uncover it. Which is fine for me, since I can close my eyes today and see it. 

All of which is to say: I have not missed that many meals in my life. Until recently. This fad of intermittent fasting has latched on to me as a way to help control my middle age spread. Making a conscious decision to go without something is a trick that I have learned to reproduce over and over again. The most recent one was swearing off Peanut M&Ms. And most breakfasts. I have become a healthier human as a result, but the challenge I still face is the moments leading up to my eventual meal. The anticipation of those has become a much larger event in my life. I catch myself some mornings playing over the night's dinner plan in absurd detail. A bit of a preoccupation, but an amusing way to wile away the hours until the next feeding.

This past week I had to fast before my procedure. This meant that I wasn't having any solid food for nearly forty-eight hours. This was a different game. My rhythms were impacted greatly, and since I was at home on vacation, I was intensely aware of the moments that I was not getting up from my computer to grab some peanuts. I watched intently as my wife ate an apple in front of me. I became acutely aware of the food I was not eating. Just a few feet away was the kitchen, where all those tasty bits sat waiting for me to come to my senses and give in.

There was even some hamburger and buns. 

Somewhere in there I had a Grich-type revelation. Here I was, pining for meals that I might be missing when there were thousands of people right here in my own city who were going without. They weren't testing themselves or prepping for a medical procedure. They are going hungry. They were falling asleep on the sidewalk, not on their toasted bun. I wanted to go back in time and teach my little self a lesson in privilege. It took me a good long while, but I learned it. 

I'm still hungry. Just a lot more realistic about it. 

Sing Along With Mitch

 I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that "we need to get the money out of politics." 

Go ahead and laugh now, because it's not going to get a lot funnier than that. Last week, Mitch McConnel who is still very much in politics, grumbled about how Atlanta-based companies were "dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government." This was in response to the new Georgia law that, among other things, makes it illegal to bring food or water to those waiting in line to vote. That new legislation is part of a wave of new suggestions from the right wing of life that is looking for ways to keep people of color from voting. I imagine the meeting in Georgia Governor's office, where someone came up with the brilliant suggestion: "Hey, I know. Them people all drink water, don't they? If they can't get water they won't vote, I'll bet!" Airtight logic like that could only be found in the office of Georgia's Governor. And as ridiculous as that sounds, when you start adding all manner of other restrictions from closing polls earlier, limiting the number of drop off ballot boxes and reducing the amount of time for absentee voting, it seems like this new law is there to do just what everyone says it will do: limit access to voting for just about everyone. 

Which is why Major League Baseball chose to move their All-Star Game out of Atlanta, and companies such as Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola have made their displeasure with the new law known. Senator Mitch insisted that such action by businesses will "invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order." As a point of clarification, when the Constitution was being written, there were no airlines or soft drink companies around to meddle inside or outside the order they were establishing. The folks at Coca-Cola have this thing they call The Coca-Cola Foundation, and they put their money into things like empowering women, protecting the environment, and enhancing communities. They also give some of those soda pop dollars to a Political Action Committee called Center Forward. And we all know that the Center isn't where we make friends, right? Left? Middle? It's all so confusing. Then there's No Labels, a PAC co-chaired by that famous middle man Joe Lieberman. And somewhere in this mix of middle is The Ripon Society, which promotes many of the old-school Republican ideals of low taxes and smaller government. Nothing in there about restricting access to voting. Which is probably why Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said,  "Our focus is now on supporting federal legislation that protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country. We all have a duty to protect everyone's right to vote, and we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the U.S." 

And maybe why, just a few days after Senator Mitch got off his soapbox about corporations hijacking our country, he popped back up to let everyone know that he didn't mean that corporations should stop contributing to political campaigns. In an incredible show of his ability to speak from both sides of his mouth simultaneously, he issued forth with this whopper: “My warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics. I’m not talking about political contributions.” Like the ones he received from UPS, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, and AT&T to name just a few. Some of the biggest contributors in the Senate run-off election in Georgia this past January were run by former McConnell aides. Give us your money. We'll figure out what to do with it. 

And for heaven's sake, don't bring them any water. 

Telephone Line

 Do you remember waiting in line to use the phone?

I do. 

Not that this makes me "so old" or anything, but the thing that leaps to mind for me is that using a telephone is not the privilege it used to be. My high school girlfriend had a phone in her room and I can remember what an extraordinary sense of power that radiated. I should point out at this point that it was an extension of the main line and not a private line, which meant that anyone who had a notion and was sneaky enough to listen in from upstairs would get an earful of all the essentially meaningless banter that took place between her and me. This could be accomplished much more easily if the handset was old school and not a trimline, as hers was. On the old school handsets, one could unscrew the cover over the transmitter and pop out the microphone, then lift the receiver carefully off the hook and listen away. Unless the folks on the original call were aware of that faint click that announced someone else coming along for the ride. The same experience could be gained by cupping your hand over the lower end of the handset, ensuring that any stifled giggles would most likely be heard in spite of all attempts made to be sneaky.

Or, it could be that a parent would simply pick up the phone upstairs and announce that it was time to terminate the call because, "I need to use the phone." That need has diminished as the proliferation of personal communication devices has expanded to absurd proportions. You know the drill: Family of four sitting at the table, peering not at one another but at the slate in their hand that carries all the wisdom of the universe, as well as the capacity to communicate to virtually anyone else on the globe, but is transmitting cat videos instead. You are also familiar with the people for whom privacy is not a concern. The reason why phone booths disappeared. The ones who carry on their personal business at maximum volume as they walk down the street. Or the corollary in which those same individuals, imagining they are being more discrete, sit in their cars with their hands-free bluetooth connections blast their private conversations through the speakers of their deluxe car stereos. 

I remember the interim. That period of time during which people like Gordon Gekko carried a brick with an antennae so he could, as my father eventually did, carry on conversations that inevitably began with the phrase, "You'll never guess where I'm calling you from." Couple this with the tendency we have grown to carry on with those on the electronic line while ignoring those standing directly in front of us. 

Yes. I'm old. Turn off your phone at the table or I'll take it away and you'll have to use your personal computer to watch cat videos. 

Will You Take This Call?

 I was on mile six of a run that felt like it might go on for a few more. I had crossed over from one side of my neighborhood route to the other. Red Barchetta war roaring through my headphones and was abruptly interrupted by the ringing of my phone. I pushed the button that allowed me to take the call. "Hello?"

I was on Spring Break. I was out for a run on a Monday morning, with cares and responsibilities set to the side for the moment. I could not imagine who would be calling me when I was at peace with the world and looking forward to a week of uncomplicated life. "Is this David Caven?"

I took a breath, that might have been connected to a sigh, "This is David Caven." And the call was dropped. At this moment, I kept running. If they really wanted to talk to me, whoever it was would call me back. Still, I couldn't keep myself from pulling the phone from my pocket, even as I kept chugging along, and checked the number. The phone rang again.

"Is this David Caven?"

I knew the answer to that one, so I answered quickly to keep the conversation lively. 

"This is Kaiser Permanente," and then I knew what I was going to be doing for my Spring Break. The results of a recent test suggested that I should get a colonoscopy. Was there a day or time that would work best for me?

I don't know how much you know about colonoscopies. Most of what I know is from the experiences of others. Most recently a friend from high school, and before that my wife. And men of my certain age are regularly corralled into this particular procedure. And I knew that there was never going to be a time that would be "best" for a colonoscopy aside from "never." 

But there I was, on the Monday morning of my week off, and I went ahead and took the plunge. While I was running what would eventually be eleven miles, I selected the earliest possible appointment so that I could get. In hindsight I suspect that had they offered me a spot any earlier, I would have just changed direction one more time and run right across town to get the sedation and getting the probe. Get it over with, please. 

Because at that moment I was feeling indestructible. I was fifty-eight years old, and I was still running. Not just across the street to avoid oncoming traffic. I was exercising, sweating, moving. You want to test me? Check out what's under my metaphorical hood? Bring it on. I made my appointment. I got it confirmed. I hung up. 

I kept running.