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Rants November 27, 2011

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1. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, says that one morning on television they showed a 102 year old man who had walked 220 miles over the past year. What they don’t tell you on TV is that for 110 of those miles he was accompanied by his granddaughter who was helping him find his way back from the bathroom.

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2. Here’s some gossip about me you might not have heard. While reading myself to sleep in bed one night, I suddenly said, “I can’t read.” The page turned to fuzz. I got out of bed and looked at my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, who was also sitting up in bed reading. I couldn’t see her face. I rushed out to the kitchen and gobbled two baby aspirin, and called 911. Although the flashing blur that had moved off to the side of my vision was gone by this time, and I although I was completely recovered before the ambulance was half way to town, I spent the next two days in the hospital being poked and prodded and examined. Two years ago my doctor at Togus told me to eat an aspirin every day but I didn’t do it. But now you can believe that every day for the rest of my life I will eat an aspirin. Within a day dozens of well-wishers contacted me saying that they hope I felt better. Remember that when you suddenly can’t read, there is no pain or discomfort associated with it. You don’t feel bad so you can’t feel better when it goes away. Two more observations for you here. One day my father looked up from a letter and said, “I can’t read.” Because he flub dubbed around, shaved, took a shower and did who knows what else before he permitted anyone to drag him off to the hospital, he was dead within 10 days. And you should remember that I quickly gobbled two aspirin --- and also listen closely to this from Terry who says, “Quick thinking with the aspirin, my mom insisted on a cigarette before we could shove her into a car.” As you well know, I am telling you this as a public service. Don’t wait a second. Pig them aspirin and call 911. This was a very valuable experience for me: I learned how to spell aspirin.

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3. When I had a mini-stroke, radio-friend Dave wrote to say that he had a similar stroke caused by the stress of a divorce and the inevitable ensuing financial disaster. It reminded me that the day I had my mini-stroke I had plugged my solar hot water heater into the radiant heat in my cellar floor for the first time that afternoon. Heating my cellar floor with the sun’s rays was very exciting, but the really exciting part was that in the process I turned a valve and the handle broke off in my hand. I have never had a valve lever break off in my hand and because I had to drain the system and pry the plastic pipe apart, my wife says that --- even through the floor she could tell from my language that I was more than a bit excited. It takes something like an insurmountable project to get me excited, but because I now know what can happen to people who get excited, from that day forward I excluded excitement from my life. You might remember these lines from Rip Van Winkle. “Where’s your mother?” “Oh, she too had died but a short time since; she broke a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New-England peddler.”

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4. And there came a year when we were in Maine instead of working in Florida at the beginning of winter. I was pleasantly surprised to see on one late November day, that even at 8 A. M. with outside temperatures in the low 30s, the solar hot water heaters were already cranking up the temperature to respectable money saving levels in our domestic hot water tank. And with the solar panels hooked to the pipes in the new cellar floor, it should be warm in the cellar all winter. Even in cold weather the solar electric panels generate enough electricity to run the computer and most anything except the oven. Because my wife said she wanted to stretch her legs, she crawled upstairs instead of using her stair chair and returned with a handful of white sox. I looked up from stirring my rolled oats and said, “I see you also brought me some hankies.” When she looked at me with surprise, I said, “Any man who is secure with his own masculinity is not afraid of the term. Hankies, hankies, hankies.

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5. Professor Curt Stager is a climatologist who wrote a book called Deep Future. Curt Stager probably knows as much as it is possible to know about what we’ve had for climate on this planet for the past few billion years. Based on what has already happened and is happening today, his book, Deep Future, is the scientific story of what will probably happen with the world’s climate over the next 100,000 or so years. If I were to introduce him to an audience, I’d say something like this: If you’ve read Professor Curt Stager’s Deep Future you might have noticed that it is much like Boswell’s Johnson, in that you can turn to any page and encounter pure, unadulterated wisdom that is not only clearly presented but is fun to read. Anyone who has read Deep Future knows that writing the book was a snap. All Professor Stager had to do travel the globe, contact dozens of his scientist friends in as many countries, collect from them and then synthesize their latest data with his own observations on what has been happening on this planet for the past 5 or so billion years, and then write it down. But people with political agendas and religious agendas, --- and economic agendas in particular, are cut from different cloth than your cold blooded scientist who simply reports facts, and there’s the rub. When you write a book that suggests that we should change the way we treat our planet --- a book that could cost a few rich and important people a lot of money --- you will find more than a few folks who are not going to like it. You may agree with me that 7 billion of us have arrived at a crossroads in human history and that there will come a day when your children’s children will realize that Professor Stager’s Deep Future is not on a par with The Voyage of The Beagle or Mendell’s work in genetics, but above them. I firmly believe that there will come a day when mankind will wring its hands and cry out, “Why didn’t they listen to Curt Stager?” I am going to sit down so that you may do so now.

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6. When I look out the window and up the road, all I see are The Ojala house and Frank Kerswell's house and trees. If I'd sat by this same window and looked in the same direction 70 years ago I'd be able to see the house in which I was born. My brother, who is only 71, says he remembers standing on our front lawn 65 years ago and seeing the rays of the setting sun reflecting off the windows of the Ojala house. Now there are huge trees in the way. In the early 40s some people were still using horses here and many people had cows. People burned wood. So there weren't all that many trees and you could see houses half a mile away. A fact of life in Maine is that trees grow and if you don't mow your field or have animals grazing on it, the next time you look out the window you see trees 50 feet tall. Forty years ago when I moved into this house I could look out my bedroom window and see houses and the church on the other side of the river, but that view has also been eclipsed by trees. Seems as I remember being off Tenants Harbor on the Cutter Laurel in 1955 and being able to see houses up this way. I was in the bridge gang and we were on top of things and had binoculars. When the oil runs out we'll either have solar powered cars or go back to back to the horse and buggy. Horses are hard on some small trees. And because everyone will be burning wood there's a good chance that in 100 years anyone sitting here in this chair and looking out the window will be able to see the house in which Robert Skoglund was born. --- On warm days when there is no wood smoke.

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7. Dave Rowe sent me a letter that says, “Building anything is a learning experience. Once it's finished there will be a list of things you wish you'd done differently, and a longer list of things you will do differently on another similar project down the road.... Plans are only as extensively thought out as the experience of the planner allows. It will work when you're finished, and it will be a complete success, regardless of what you may have done better. At that point you'll look at some other project you want to do, you'll put pen to paper, and you'll do it better than the last one.” Dave might agree with me that the same applies to concerts or shows. I brought a young friend with me to help me emcee the last Denny Breau concert in Lewiston. She is very bright and I thought that with a bit of practice she'd do well on stage. If she enjoyed it, she might want to do more. I told her not to worry about doing something wrong. No matter what you do on stage, there it is. A concert is what it is. Every concert will be different no matter how much you plan and prepare. ..... As Dave so astutely said, "It will work when you're finished, and it will be a complete success, regardless of what you may have done better."

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8. A new ad for a flight simulator just turned up on my Facebook page. I was more than a little disturbed when I noticed that they don’t tell you how to land the plane.

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9. And here from the catalogue of What they don't tell you. The note on the bottom of the email said, “53 Year Old Mom Looks 33 The Stunning Results of Her Wrinkle Trick Has Botox Doctors Worried” Perhaps doctors are worried because they know the secret pills she is eating will kill her within a year.

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10. Are you clever enough to start to build something and know what it is going to look like when you have finished? I can’t do it. When I decided to put little plastic pipes in my cellar floor and heat my cellar floor with the solar hot water heaters on the side of my house, I spent a couple of weeks drawing dozens of diagrams of how to hook it up. I took a yellow magic marker and traced out the direction the liquid would go if I shut one valve and opened another. But not until I got some pipes up on the wall did I realize that I didn't need to drop two pipes down from the copper pipe at the top to hook into the system. I only needed to cut into a copper pipe at the top and put a plastic pipe in, giving it a straight run when the boiler isn't heating the cellar floor. You should know that by turning a couple of valves I can also heat the floor with backup oil heat on cloudy days. Can you see these things ahead of time? Can you draw plans and then have it come out the way you designed it? I have to build it as I go and only when I'm done can I see how it should be done so I take it apart and build it over again, hopefully the right way the second or third time. You have no idea of how long it took me to learn that I had to use glass for the backs of my solar hot water heaters. For two days I put off connecting the pipes in the floor to the hot water heating panels outside. I'd never done it before so I was scared to start.

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11. Since my wife’s application to be a student monitor in a private school was rejected, I’ve taken to calling her the Almost Prefect Woman.

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12. Is your husband or wife a flirt? They don't worry about people who flirt in Sweden. There's an old Swedish saying that, roughly translated, says, "Whet your appetite away, but come home to eat."

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