Humidity & Hot Air

I haven't written one of these things for over two months, and I've begun to worry about the reasons for that. I don't know what writer's block is, but I do know that I don't live there. To be sure, this summer has not been full of many pleasures and delights - the weather was beastly hot and humid for a few days - nothing that residents of the American South would be derailed by, but up here in what we call the "northland," we just melted into puddles of goo.

After what seemed like forever, the heat subsided, but the humidity has remained, so the towels hanging on the rail are forever damp, paper curls, the spirit weakens until one senses that

Yes, two of my rooms at home are air-conditioned (it's over a hundred years old - pretty old by our standards - and is heated by radiators, and to the best of my knowledge, it can't be cooled by radiators, so we all suffer and survive.

Islay the Scotty has had a rambunctious summer chasing squirrels, birds, and the occasional cyclist, but the head and humidity knocked her for six, too.

Come to think of it, when it turns really hot, I don't consume alcohol - no beer, none of my whisky drams, none of the dreadfully sounding popular forms of pushing alcohol down the gullets of the young.

Maybe it's that I've been paying too much attention to daily events - the cable channels must be grateful during the slow season when reporters tend to be on holiday for sundry wars, airline industry problems, and confessions from decade old murderers, each of which allows them to terrorize those of us sitting slack-mouthed in front of our television sets.

The rich are doing great, thank you very much; the poor, who will always be with us, increase. We can't figure out an equitable immigration policy or how to provide our citizens with medical insurance, what constitutes appropriate end-of-life care when all hope is gone, or how to invent a car which does not make us dependent on people, none of whom seems to like us at all. And while the globe heats up, it's our country which contributes much to the problem which actively chooses to avoid even thinking about the problem. Even public radio and television now have what they call "enhanced underwriting," or what the rest of us would call commercials

Meanwhile, our politicians diddle while the voters burn, and any list of their accomplishments during this Congress would be appallingly brief. Those in the administration play the terror card at every opportunity, vaguely aware that they are weakening the Constitution but apparently not caring.

William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" just after World War I. It was taught to me in secondary school, and I have yet to shake it out of my ears, probably because through the decades of my life it has increased in meaning. So here it is:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats, 1920


Normally, summer ends, and we start bunching our muscles because we know that darkness, snow, and ice are just ahead. This time, at least for me, I'm hoping things won't get a hell of a lot worse than they are - they're already bad, and that a few months of cold and dark might offer some kind of perverse respite, enough anyway, to help us slough off this national depressive state, so that we can look to the future with some sense of hope, however moderate.

There's Customer Service & Then There's Customer Service

As a predominantly internet business, my company rarely deals with customers in person. Occasionally, some hardy soul will find his or her way to our office/warehouse on the second floor of what used to be a movie theatre in suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota - that happens so infrequently that we are always surprised - and given the general state of things, not always delighted.

A decade ago, most of our business came in by fax, mail, or phone. When we decided to stop pulverizing trees by publishing catalogs and to head to the internet, we did so with some trepidation.

Yet in spite of all those electrons dancing from hither to yon and all over the globe, we've gotten to know some of our customers from phone conversations and the comments they write about the business in on-line evaluations or letters.

About a year ago [Ed. Note: May, 2005], on the day I was flying to Glasgow, Scotland, on holiday, I checked my email just before heading to the airport. One new order had come in, and it turned out the customers lived in Scotland and not more than twenty miles away from the bed & breakfast I had booked near Loch Lomond for the next night.

This was too good to be true, so I threw caution out of my carry-on, tore back to the office, did the paperwork and put a baton and carrying case in the space left by caution's departure, and then headed to the airport.

When I fly through the night across the Atlantic, my goal is to get in the rental car and drive no more than thirty minutes to my first night's lodging and then collapse. So after a brief nap, I rang up the customer - let's call her Ellen G - and after telling her my name, I said that I had good news and bad news about her baton order.

"The good news is that the baton has shipped. The bad news is that I'm here to deliver it in person."

Ellen tooks this news onboard very evenly. "My hustand and I are leaving in the morning for Lancashire where our daughter has a school performance. Is there any chance you could come up tonight?"

And so I got in the car, remembering to keep to the left, and headed north along the western shore of Loch Lomond in that period the Scos call the gloaming, with a crescent moon eventually lighting the night sky.

I turned away from Loch Lomond and found my way to the village of Arrochar on Loch Long, and shortly thereafter was knocking on the door of a stone cottage, and Ellen herself answered the door. No doubt she was surprised, and I was delighted. I gave her the parcel, and she invited me in for coffee.

Her husband Stuart came along, and we sat down and chatted for a few minutes. At one point she said that while I was enroute to the cottage, she and Stuart checked the picture of me on the company's web-site to make sure the guy at the door was the same person. I guess I couldn't blame them - stranger arrives after dark from the USA with something you've ordered online the day before.

As it turned out, the baton and case were to be a birthday present for Ellen's brother, and she would see him the next day. She told me that she would say to him that she had a remarkable story to tell him - but not until his birthday.

We talked about the internet, its advantages for people living in small villages, how she had come to order from us, what she and her husband did , and about the renovation of their cottage.

And then it was time for me to go. On the drive back, I thought about what a rare experienced this had been - to get an order from over four thousand miles from our office and to be able to deliver it the very next day. That has never happened before, although once or twice orders from London have arrived the day after I've flown there - I've always regretted the missed opportunity.

I don't expect this will ever happen again, and until Ellen and Stuart read this, they'll not know what a treat it was for me to be driving down from the Highlands later in the trip, and as we went past their cottage, I said to Karen, "I have a customer who lives in the stone cottage, just there. Nice people, she and her husband...she's the one who bought a baton for her brother. Hope he'll like it."

It was a great trip to Scotland, one of my favorite places ever, and after swimming in all those electrons all these years at The Nash Company, meeting one of our Scottish customers was one of the highlights of the trip. Maybe, just maybe, lightning - or pixels might strike twice and soon, because I'm heading back to Scotland shortly, and I have this funny feeling....

Shades of Gray

t a recent holiday event, one of this column's regular readers reminded me that now that the Christmas screed had gone past its sell-by date, perhaps it was time for a new one.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Screeds come to me in a variety of places - in the car, the shower, during a meal, but rarely from someone else, and at least this friend was kind enough not to include several ideas along with his remonstrative observation. Having done this sort of thing on radio for several years in the distant past, I learned quickly that any idea from someone else was, for some reason, not usable - perhaps because it was not my idea or didn't fit whatever sensibility I have developed over the years.

I did think about the apparent drought in the arrival of a new idea, and while listening to the radio one day, I heard that the stretch of gray days - that is, days without sun, had set some sort of record for our teentsy part of the planet, a record untouched for years, and one of those records kept by people who should have gotten around to keeping track of more important things.

Gray days got me thinking about colors. Here in Minnesota the dominant winter color is white, with occasional blots of dark mud - the thing about gray is a recent phenomenon. White or gray or both make some people blue here, even people who describe themselves as red.

Most political red and blue people, just before they start talking loudly in black and white, seem to be suffering from a case of seething purple rage.

For me, I admire those citizens and politicians who appreciate gray, which probably means they are more interested in what politicians can accomplish than the green required to put them in a corporate or issue-oriented pocket.

I haven't brought this up because when politics enters the world of the screed, I turn a pale shade of yellow and try to avoid it...and while typing this, I've tried every way I can to move in another direction.

And haven't found one.

Let's appreciate gray - the calm tonality of compromise, concession, and progress, however, haltingly it may come when the school board, city council, legislature - or even Congress, convene to struggle with issues facing most of us. Too dull for the networks, especially Fox, but suitable for us in our ordinary tax-paying, bill-paying, just trying-to-get-along and keep-our-heads-above water lives.

It's the shouting from the red and blue people who view the world in black and white which has put me into a darkling funk these last several weeks. Nobody can think in the midst of all the yelling.

If you can ignore the cacophony, try to take time to enjoy the golden light of the sun, whenever it appears; whether it shines on your face or in your soul, enjoy it in the silence of your own thinking.

Now that's a good resolution!

(I promise to do better next time.

Bah, Humbug...

Some years ago, I careened off the Christmas track so lovingly created and maintained by manufacturers, marketers, retailers, and the media. When I came to, there was a bump on my head, and I discovered that I had landed in the dark part of Holiday Forest.

Shortly thereafter Scrooge-like tendencies began to appear, thoughts of “Bah Humbug” danced in my head with no sugar plum fairies to carry them away, and the word Grinch entered the vocabulary of my self-concept.

While these symptoms have not worsened, neither have they shown any signs of diminution.

This autumn while I was flying across the Atlantic, I took some time to think about what had gone wrong. My conclusion was that I had not gone wrong at all; it was the world which became deranged.

What does Black Friday, Black Monday, getting up at 5:00 am the day after Thanksgiving, the need to find “the perfect present,” the compusion to acquire the really “hot” item have to do with Christmas.

Not much.

At the Christmas Concert I attended last weekend, the choir sang Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Mid-Winter. “ It is one of the carols performed almost every year in “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England**,

Here’s the text of this great and solemn carol:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.





Love, simply, is the message of Christmas. Nothing more, but nothing less.

The rest of it is cacophony, joyous cacophony perhaps, but in today’s zeitgeist, the noise drowns out nearly everything else.

It’s a good time to stick to the basics.

Cheers to you and yours,








**The service is broadcast live on Christmas Eve Morning at 10 am Eastern Time on hundreds of public radio stations across the United States, many of which repeat the broadcast on Christmas Day. That’s radio, not television, and it is also available on the BBC World Service.

Getting Hip The Hard Way

Having just navigated through the replacement of a hip and the first stage of recovery, I am now able to reflect on the last couple of years…the decline of function, the increase of pain, and my continuing impression of Treasure Island's Long John Silver, with his peg-legged gait, before I was wheeled into Surgery and put in the hands of a doctor whose work gives every indication of allowing me to live in a world with a much wider orbit than previously.

There is nothing on earth which can appropriately measure my gratitude for his and his colleagues’ skills in helping me get another shot at being able to walk comfortably. I even dream of a trip to Scotland and a hike around my favorite loch.

But here is what I don’t get and probably never will: Why did I get the best advice in dealing with my declining hip from a complete stranger in London, my stockbroker, and an old friend?

The people in the white coats were helpful, interested, and happy to prescribe physical therapy, the now rejected anti-inflammatories like VIOXX and Celebrex (and for a time these meds did help some), and home exercise.

Last year when the pain got to the point where I would do anything just to get through a day and a night without being driven bonkers by the pain, I felt I was hitting the wall. Then on a trip to London, my medical luck began to change. On a guided walk one Sunday morning, I was struggling to keep up with the group, when one of us came over to me and asked for my cane, and I was so surprised, I just handed it over, feeling like such a dumb cluck. The cane was adjustable, and she lengthened it some, and gave it back, saying, “Try this.” Recovering somewhat, I said something like, “Well, but..how…why.” I can be very good with words sometimes.

She responded, “Oh, well maybe it’s my thirty years as a physical therapist, maybe it’s because I got a new hip at Johns Hopkins seven months ago, or maybe I just recognized your walk.” For the rest of the morning, when the guide wasn’t talking, I was asking questions about hip replacement and getting good answers. She recommended some meditation tapes, and after I overcame my intuitive dislike of the prospect of some middle aged woman with new-agey flute music playing behind her telling me I should feel better about myself, I bought a couple and found the damn things actually helped.

Fast forward to last September and a phone conversation I was having with my broker. She asked about the hip, received a frank answer, and asked if I had ever tried water therapy. I described an attempt to do some of that in a YMCA pool, without much success.

She told me about a center with a therapy pool and recommended I get an evaluation. At that point, the pain told me I had little to lose, so off I went for my assessment, first on dry land and then in the 91 degree (F) therapy pool. The therapist said they could help me, and when I got back to the car, I did not know whether to laugh at the irony of finding this place so late in my struggle or cry.

So I signed up and began the long process of preparing for my surgery. Three to four mornings a week I was in the pool being trained by a therapist, and once my program was developed, I showed up and did it on my own. And this was the best thing I did. Period. Full stop. By the time the doors to the Operating Room swung open, I was ready, not just for the operation, but for the recovery from the surgery.

The old friend asked about my hip and recommended I see a masseuse she had discovered. I demurred, probably the usual guy thing. A few weeks later, the friend prodded, and I knew better than to resist. And so the masseuse helped get me and my hip ready to receive the titanium, polyethylene, and ceramic replacement.

I went straight home from the hospital to my home where my two sisters came over consecutive weeks and gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received – their attention, support, and love. It was the first time we’d been alone together in half a century without spouses, children, pets, and so on, and my recuperative incapacities notwithstanding, it was a wonderful time.

I’m still using the meditation recordings; I’m back in the pool being trained to help me learn a normal gait; and I’m still getting massage. I have every hope that what I have learned and implemented in my daily life will help as I travel on.

In this day and age, we all have to be active, indeed aggressive, advocates for coping with our disabilities, whatever they may be. Books, web-sites, networking, asking questions of everyone who is or has dealt with a situation like yours can be incredibly useful in improving your coping skills, providing the resources for better questions when you do deal with the medical establishment, and improving your life and perhaps delaying surgery for a bit.

Yes, I have been very lucky, stimulated by pain and assisted by friends and strangers, accompanied by perseverance, something I learned from a paraplegic scotty who owned me years ago, but that's another story for another time.

Preparing For Winter

We had a very dry summer, followed by a somewhat dry autumn; the leaves lacked their usual brilliant color, but under the circumstances, they did exactly what they were supposed to do – warn us that “it” was coming again.

“It” is the cold and the snow and all the little things which hurry along under their skirts, and these have to do mainly with warmth and safety. If you’ve lived here long enough, you don’t think that much about doing: A day arrives, there is the barely audible “click” in your brain, and everything changes.

The garage is organized so that an automobile will actually be able to fit inside it. This is made possible by moving herbicides to the warm basement of the house so that they will be “safe,” and useable again next Spring when you move them back to the garage so that you can find them again in the autumn to put back in the basement. Unless they have reached their “use by date,” in which case you throw them out recycle them appropriately.

Back in the corner of the garage, the snow tires have sat since the Spring. Now is the time to get them into the back of the car to take them to the tire place where a husky lad will put them on the car and place the “summer tires” in the back of the car. This gives you an early season opportunity to hurt your back or at least say that you hurt your back. What brings relief to your back is to find someone else to do the snow blowing or shoveling. Money is likely involved, but this is a good investment – in fact, among the best.

The same goes for removing the fallen leaves from the yard. Find somebody who will do it for you. Write the check. Complain for no more than three days about the cost, and give daily thanks for the fact that you have chosen to provide employment in our difficult economy and no longer choose to do it yourself.

I have some driveway markers, basically green poles on a spring which help keep people on the driveway. They are an attractive dark green color until you try to find the base in the grassy ground – also dark green. If you wait until the grass is no longer dark green, the ground may be too hard to dig the hole for any new markers. There will come a point when you leave the markers in the garage next to the tires and await perfect installation conditions which never seem to arrive.

The winter clothes which may have been properly stored in the basement (or may not have if summer cold weather arrived as the clothes were finding their own way down a couple of floors). If the latter situation applies, be sure to check the laundry and other nearby locations. Once the clothes are returned to their winter locations, check them for wear, newly observed design and styling flaws, and then put them in the place where they probably should be all the time anyway.

Shovels, ice chippers, bags of sand, and similar tools of the season need to be placed by the front door, and when this happens you are reminded to turn off the outside faucets. In order to do this, one frequently has to step over the winter clothes which were not put away, so one must be careful.

Winter requires an array of footwear for warmth and safety. When I was a kid, we had black galoshes with metal buckles. Ugly and cold, but at least they kept your feet dry. Nowadays you can choose between ugly insulated boots, boots with felt insulation, so big you have to walk like a giant in them, slip-on boots with hearty soles, thingies with sharp points that slip over boots for walking on ice. Beyond that, there are walking sleds (“Sparks, as they call them in Scandinavia), walking poles, cross country skiis, snow shoes.

Others who live here believe that engines are essential in the winter – snowmobiles and similar contrivances. Many of us believe that these provide too much pleasure in the winter and are creatures of the devil, environmentally wasteful, and so, in a word, purposeless. I’m sorry to report that these machines and their brethren seem to be a very popular way of dealing with early darkness and perennial cold and snow – there is almost always the so.

The furnace needs to be checked and tuned, supplies of cocoa and whisky to be aggregated (part of blizzard prevention), extra blankets put on or near the beds, the battery powered radio located in case of power failure), the safety supplies for the car (blankets, ice scrapers (several for different kinds of ice and as back-up), sleeping bag, small shovel, bag of sand, coffee can for individual relief. Inside the house those of us without a lot of hair look around the nightcap to be found, second only in importance to blankets and duvets. Hot water bottles are also a good investment. Not only are they warm, but if you are surprised by them, you can learn the difference between first and second degree burns.

Lastly, the winter vocabulary returns to active use. This is aided by a lot of preparatory discussion having to do changes in the weather – looks like snow, could be unpleasant tomorrow, have to change the oil in the car, better tell the cat, bring in the brass monkeys – all that discussion which is really the way we warn each other and assure each other that we are prepared and prepared to endure it together.

Our vocabularies change, too, so that windchill, black ice, turning into a skid, braking distance, blue wax, kitty litter (a sand substitute), and a whole host of curse words not required the rest of the year arrive as though freshly minted. Other words used during this time are Florida, Mexico, Vegas, California, the Caribbean, Hawaii, even Iowa.

But of course, we never are completely prepared for winter, not even for the gray day when the first white flakes descend from the sky, land, linger for just an instant before the last heat of the ground melts them. That experience is as old as we are, but new and simple and beautiful each autumn.

And then, alas, experience starts to accumulate and linger on our roads and sidewalks, and steps. Outwardly we continue to complain, but secretly we just look forward to crawling into our beds, snuggling under the covers with a good book, surrounded by the quiet of a winter’s night and being grateful just for being warm.

How I Found Courage

A couple of days before Thanksgiving, I sat down and wrote a screed, and I am thankful I didn’t put it up on the site. It was off the mark, a bit sour, and not what I intended. What follows comes closer to the mark.

Each year I find I am thankful for yet another “something” which has come into my life, and this year what tops the list is a place called “Courage Center.”

For the last several years my right hip has started to deteriorate, and the discomfort has moved from sporadic to continual to continuous, and the situation finally got to the point where I’m scheduled for a replacement hip early in the New Year.

I tried everything I could think of to delay the surgery – glucosamine/chondroitin, riding a bike followed by riding a semi-recumbent bike, active stretching and strengthening, physical therapy, anti-inflammatories – including the now infamous VIOXX.

On the recommendation of a physical therapist from Baltimore whom I met by chance on a walk in London (a story for another time), I bought some meditation tapes and found them far more helpful than I ever would have imagined..new age music and all.

Then one day, I was talking to my stockbroker, and she listened to the hip update and then recommended I go out to a place called Courage Center for some work in their therapy pool. I figured it beat slaughtering a chicken and slathering the warm fat on my hip, so in a “what the hell” mood which failed to disguise the true level of my desperation, I made an appointment for an evaluation.

I met one of their physical therapists in the reception area, and on the hike down to the room where she was going to assess my state of hip, I felt like carrion being watched by a hungry eagle. By the time we arrived, she had it pretty well sorted out but confirmed it with the usual pushing and pulling and aches and pains.

Then we got in the pool, and I learned about the advantages of 91 degree (Fahrenheit) water, of working out in an environment of nearly zero gravity, and discovering exercises which would help my hip and prepare me for the day when I would have a new hip which would be an improvement over what I’ve got now.

Truth to tell, I got in my car after that first session, and I didn’t know whether to laugh - almost angrily - at my not having learned about the place far earlier than I did or to cry at my never having felt so good after a workout with the hip in its sad state.

I had always thought that the Courage Center was for people with disabilities, serious physical problems; yes, and, it turned out, I was one of them. My disability was pretty modest compared to some of the people helped by the staff at Courage Center, but that didn’t matter.

So for several weeks Kathy trained me to do a water program which would help me, and then I was allowed to come work out on my own. Every morning when I get up and head for the pool, I have exactly the same set of feelings I had when I was a hockey playing kid and it was time to go to the rink – anticipation bordering on excitement, and the urge to tear out of the house and go get in the pool.

As a result of our efforts, I shall probably be better prepared to cope with the surgery and the period immediately thereafter, and I know I’ll count the days until I can get back in the pool.

In the meantime, I’m getting to know some of the others working out in the pool, to appreciate what they’ve overcome with assistance and hard work, and to ease myself into the ad hoc community which ebbs and flows in the pool each workout.

I may be a latecomer to this remarkable place, but I shall always be deeply thankful for the facilities, services, and staff of Courage Center, yet another reason why I'm glad I live in Minnesota.