Mesa Vista

I checked, just to make sure. The name of the place is Mesa Vista, and back when I was taking piano lessons, it's where we used to give our recitals. In those days, we would refer to it as "an old folks' home." Now we would describe it as "an assisted care facility." And even now they tout "Entertainment by talented musicians and singers" as part of their Life Enrichment Activities. In the early seventies, I didn't feel much like a life enrichment activity. I felt like I was being sent away to the gulag.
All of Mary Kay Hefley's students lined up just outside the sun room, in the hallway next to the elevator. More than once it occurred to me that it would be easy enough to just walk over, push the button and head on down to the ground floor, walking out into the night. Just leave my music on the chair, and keep on walking. If the residents of Mesa Vista, those who were well enough to make it into the sun room after the sun had gone down missed out on the life enrichment that I brought them, so be it. I was uncomfortable. I was nervous. And my life was definitely not being enriched.
At this point in my life, I understood that making these yearly visits to the nursing home was the right thing to do, but I was also extremely aware of how uptight doing the right thing was making me. My younger brother and I never actually spoke about this, but we had a shrug here and an eye roll there that bonded us through the seemingly endless evening of entertainment. Neither of us fled. We sat and waited our turn and tried not to think too much about what was going on down the hall. That long, dark hallway filled with curious sounds and smells.
It was always a bit of a relief to be introduced and walk out to the piano, past the fireplace on the left and the sea of expectant faces on the right. As I sat down on the bench, I placed my music on the stand, then turned to face my audience. I gave the rushed, perfunctory introduction to the piece I was performing, and turned back to face the music. Those few minutes stretched out like hours, but when I finally hit the DC al Fine, I knew that I could make it. Sometimes, while my brother or I was playing, one of the ladies or gentlemen would decide they had heard enough and begin to scoot out of the room in their wheelchair or walker. On other occasions, one of those residents might take it on themselves to sing along, whether they knew the tune or not. It was, as show biz folks might say, a tough crowd.
And then it was time to go home. We were free to go for another year. The old folks stayed. That never occurred to me back then. It was their home.

Exact Change

At midnight on March 27, an era ended. The last toll was taken on the Golden Gate Bridge. That doesn't mean that toll won't be paid, it just won't be taken. By humans. It would be fun to tell you that a group of trained elephants have been put in the place of those humans who have been taking and receiving correct and not-so-correct change for the past seventy-five years. The booths would not accommodate pachyderms, so this solution was thinking far too out of the box. Instead, the toll will now be electronically deleted from your bank account by an electrical pulse. It's hardly noticeable, and after the first dozen or so attempts, it will only give off the slightest twinge. In the nerves of the Bridge District employees who were displaced.
They were all offered new jobs, and some of them were taken. Driving buses and other tasks that have yet to be usurped by artificial intelligence. Some of them didn't. They walked away with a bitter taste in their mouths, not interested in the sixteen million dollars of expected savings, or the streamlining of traffic patterns that will no longer have to stop for this simple human interaction. They feel the same way McDonald's employees felt when they were all replaced by cyborgs in the early twenty-first century.
By way of confession, I will say that my family had switched to the electronic method for paying tolls some years back. It's faster. It's cheaper. And once you're used to that twenty to thirty volt surge that pours through your car as the "lasers" track your motor vehicle to its ultimate destination, it's hardly noticeable.
Except you have this crazy urge to visit your local McDonald's. Or maybe that's the metal plate the Bridge District insisted that I needed to have inserted in my skull.

Some Kind Of Help Is What Helping's All About

Brian Watson of Microsoft called me the other day. To be more precise, one of Mister Watson's underlings called me. This associate wanted to let me know that Microsoft had been receiving "certain error messages" and they were concerned about "possible security issues" with my PC running Windows operating system. Initially, I felt grateful that I happened to be home to take this call, since most weekdays I would have been at school, in a room full of PCs running Windows operating system. As the computer teacher at an urban elementary school, I have more than just a passing familiarity with error messages and security issues working with Microsoft products. It occurred to me to ask what these folks might have to offer for my budget-strapped lab in the way of technical support, but I wasn't getting a word in edgewise.
This might also be the time to relate that the other issue I had besides the very assertive and persistent nature of the "help" I was getting from this "Microsoft" employee was the rather thick Indian accent through which I was having to decipher all of this very important technical "help." I wanted to know how this very concerned individual had discovered that I was having difficulty with my computer. I wondered if he could tell me what IP address was sending the error messages. He gave me a series of numbers that loosely fit the IP format, but were not the ones associated with my machine. Could it be that he had made a mistake?
"Do you want to talk to my direct supervisor?" asked my increasingly impatient expert.
"Sure," I said. "I'll hold."
I needn't have worried, since the supervisor seemed to be standing very close to his drone. There was no hold music, no silence, just a rustle of the phone being passed and the chatter in the background.
"Who am I speaking to?"
"This is Ben Watson."
Now we were getting somewhere. "Ben, what precisely did you want to achieve by calling me and getting me to turn on my computer?"
In a similarly thick Indian accent, Ben Watson proceeded to give me the same line about errors and security, and then implored me to go to the keyboard, "Press the control key. You know where the control key is?"
"Yes, I do, but I'm not going to push it, Ben. And just out of curiosity, where are you calling from?"
"Ah - Washington - and now if you would please start by pressing the control key..."
"Ben, I'm not going to press any key until you tell me what it is that you expect to achieve by having me do all of this."
"Now you are just messing with me," grimaced Ben. Only he didn't use the word "messing."
"That didn't sound very professional Ben, I think you owe me an apology."
But Ben didn't hear me. He had hung up in frustration. He wasn't going to help me solve my security and error issues today. He wasn't going to get me to buy a useless virus protection system or enable him and his associates to gain remote access to my computer to have their way with, then cast it aside. I'm not sure that Ben was actually a Microsoft employee. It was nice of him to try, at least.

Holes In The Holy

It's about this time every year that my wife and I begin our theological discussions about the very neat way that the powers that be (Romans) massaged the old lunar calendar into their new one, finding ways to paste over some of their less-than-holy days with bits and pieces of the sacred moments from a time before theirs. Twelve months, and almost every one of them ended with some sort of saint or holiness wedged in here or there, but Springtime is especially holidasical.
Good Friday. Passover. Palm Sunday. Easter. We are currently knee-deep in the hoopla. What we find confounding, however, is the certainty with which the makers of this calendar have attached an exact date for Jesus' birth, just after the winter solstice, but they couldn't be bothered to be as specific with the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior. It tends to slosh around late March and early April, much in the same way that the celebration of Moses and his followers being freed from their bondage by the Egyptians. It was my wife that first clued me into the idea that Jesus and his disciples were probably having a Seder just before the Romans came and picked him up for vagrancy and being the Son of God.
Conspiracy? We've come to expect that kind of those nutty Romans. If it all starts to seem a little like a Monty Python skit, you're not alone. Add to all this coincidence the way the calendar conveniently places that rebirth thing right on top of all the pagan rites of Spring, and you've got a great big Easter Basket full of confusion. Sometimes it's hard not to think of Jesus and Moses as contemporaries, like Superman and Batman starring in their own comic book worlds, but with the occasional crossover tie-in issues. They would definitely be in the DC universe. That might explain the whole Amazonian thing with Wonder Woman, but that would bring the Greeks into it. The Greeks do have one heck of an Easter celebration themselves, even if theirs is harder to find than the Romans. I guess we blame Jimmy Stewart for the six-foot tall bunny. He was Scotch-Irish.
Confused yet? We are.

A Marathon Of Excuses

The marathon bypassed our house again this year. Than meant that the street didn't get as much public works attention in the days before the race. It also meant that, in order to take in the sweaty spectacle, my wife and I had to trot on over a couple of blocks. I use the term "trot" to describe the somewhat delicate way in which the three of us, dog included, made our way over to the course. We stood on a corner for a few minutes, watching the runners chug their way past the halfway point of their journey across town and back again.
We became somewhat self-conscious, standing there. We decided to move along down the sidewalk, in solidarity with these athletes, the ones who had popped out of bed hours before to be on the starting line before my wife and I had opened our eyes fully. Our little group made it a few blocks before turning back toward our home. My wife was enthused enough to want to carry her portable speakers up to that corner and provide the sweaty mass some musical inspiration. I went back to our garage and pounded on the punching bag, working up the perspiration that would make me feel as though I too had been exerting myself. When I finished that, I went back outside our fence, and proceeded to take another lap around our neighborhood. This time, the faces on the stream of runners didn't look quite so fresh. This group was working a little harder at their personal best. I saw a sign go past on one of the race officials that said "3:45." Three hours and forty-five minutes. That was the expected finish time for this cluster of runners. I thought about the hour or so that I have spent on ten kilometer courses in my past and considered, not for the first time, what it would take for me to commit to running four times that long. I felt the pain in my legs and feet. I felt the weight of fifty years pressing down on me.
I turned the corner and went home for the second time, aware of the opportunity that was passing me by just a couple blocks away. Again. They'll be back again. Next year. When I'll be fifty-one. And my back will be sore. And my ankle will be aching.

We Have Ways Of Making You Tock

The grandfather clock that hangs on our living room wall had a little problem over the past couple of weeks. Somewhere around the time I raced around the house setting all our time machines ahead, with the intent of saving an hour of daylight, I managed to mess with the workings of the old Regulator. To be very specific, this wasn't a grandfather clock in the most traditional sense. This clock was the one that my father presented to my wife and I on the occasion of our wedding. It wasn't a grandfather clock then, it was only a father clock. It became a grandfather clock some years later when our son was born. Though they share a name and a certain amount of genetics, these two gentlemen never had a chance to meet. My father stopped ticking about a year before my son arrived. The pendulum swing of the timepiece he gave us became the sound of the past, a lasting connection between two generations.
That's why I had a moment after I took the clock off the wall to try my hand at making it work again. My father was a fairly handy guy, having built our cabin in the mountains and all, but no one would have mistaken him for a master craftsman. He was the type of guy who had a lot of really great plans to build things, but never got around to completing them. When he left my mother, he left her with a garage full of bits and pieces of lumber that might eventually have become a desk, and there was another set of scraps that had been set aside to become a bar for the basement. I took it as a tribute that he completed the wedding present for my wife and I and delivered it in one piece on time. It has since become something of an heirloom in our home. That's why taking the back off this contraption gave me pause. What if I did something that kept it from working forever?
And then, as most moments do, it passed. I was able to find the screw that had come loose and, with some patient assistance from my loving wife, I was able to piece it back together and get it back on the wall where it returned to its job of marking the seconds and minutes and hours of our days, the way it has for nearly twenty years. It felt good to have that heartbeat back in our lives.

Going Postal - Again

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I have been waiting for some time for the other shoe to drop, at least metaphorically speaking, when it comes to Saturday postal delivery. I was just a little embarrassed to discover that I have written three separate posts about this dire consequence of the fiscal crunch. The one that has been going on for the past four years, if you are using my opinions as a measuring tape. But guess what? We don't have to worry about not getting the ACE Hardware circular in your mailbox for a few more Saturdays because Congress passed legislation on Thursday requiring six-day delivery.
Does Congress know that the Post Office lost sixteen billion dollars last year, and cutting delivery back to five days would save two billion dollars annually? Sure they do, but you know what lively pranksters those legislators are. Their side bet on the matter is this: You won't get first class mail on Saturday. That will be the way to work around the trouble. It has been estimated that the Postal Service could run out of money as soon as October unless some sort of bailout can be arranged. They USPS loses twenty-five million dollars each day. The vast majority of these losses come from heavy mandatory payments into its future retirees' health fund. And the vast sea of Americans who now communicate electronically.
Perhaps if I changed the way I disseminate my thoughts to include a postal element. I could print out a few hundred of these little missives along with my regularly scheduled cybercast and stick them in the mail. A few hundred stamps a week might save the post office up the street from becoming another Starbuck's. All those random thoughts that become one-line e-mails? Those could be hand delivered to the lucky individual for whom it was intended instead of waiting in that cold and sterile environment of the In Box.
Or I can keep hiking out to the mailbox and waiting for the end, mercifully, to come.