Saints, Sinners and Codes of Silence

By now the world, or that small part of the world that follows American football, knows that the New Orleans Saints have been, for the past three years, taking part in some decidedly un-Saintly behavior.  No, this isn’t going to be a post about football per se but it is inspired by the events surrounding what is now known as “bounty-gate.” 

Football, a sport that thrives on violence, has been forced in the last few years to walk a shaky balance beam; one between the magnitude and types of collisions and hits that it can allow and the recent focus on the effects, both immediate and long term of those hits.  That focus has come from former players with debilitating injuries, from the medical community and also, as if they don’t have other things to worry about, from Congress; yeah that Congress the legendary house of grand-standers, losers, knaves and busybodies.  And so with all of this going on, members of the Saints’ coaching staff and defensive team decided it would be a fine time to offer bounties to players who could knock an opposing player out of a game.  It was a practice that violated an assortment of rules both written and moral and when Commissioner Roger Goodell got wind of it the Saints were told to knock it off; an edict which the team of course ignored.  The league office found out that the Saints from players on up must have thought that the commish was just kidding and continued with the bounties.  Well the Saints just found out that you do not fuck with Roger Goodell and you certainly don’t lie to him and make him and his most prized possession, the NFL, look like hypocritical chumps.  As a result, head coach Sean Payton was suspended for the year, former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams may have coached his last NFL game and various players are probably scanning the help wanted ads as they wait to see what happens when Goodell cracks the league whip on them. 

Well, someone must have told the league office of the goings on in Saintdom and here is where a moron named Warren Sapp comes in.  Warren Sapp is a former player and current idiot who now does football commentary on TV.  When Goodell fired off his lightning bolts Sapp tweeted that former Saint, Jeremy Shockey was the “snitch” in the vein that anyone who would reveal the bounty system could only be a sleazy, slimy, backstabbing dirt bag.  Here’s what you need to know about Warren Sapp; he’s a bug-eyed goon and longtime sufferer of diarrhea of the mouth with a Twitter name of QBKILLA.   In a similar tone, Mike Golic, one of ESPN’s Mike and Mike referred to the player’s traditional “code of silence” which apparently protects everything from players’ sexual escapades right up through bounties.

Codes of silence aren’t unique to football locker rooms.  They exist on the streets, in offices, in industry and in government.  A disgusting code of silence even existed in the Roman Catholic Church when priests who got their sick jollies out of telling their altar boys to bend over were shuttled from diocese to diocese and shielded by the hierarchy in order to protect the reputation of the church.  That worked out well for the church didn’t it?   Reporting illegal, immoral or otherwise harmful behavior to law enforcement, higher ups or, even worse, the media is frowned upon and can result in anything from being ostracized to be being demoted, to being harassed, to being fired, to ending up in a ditch sleeping the long sleep.  This is where a particularly repugnant T-Shirt comes in.  It bears the logo “Snitches End Up With Stitches.”

I used to work with a young man who would occasionally wear the Snitches in Stiches T-shirt and I found it offensive at the time (and still do). When Mike Golic discussed the “code of silence” he did so in reverential tones as if protecting questionable behavior is the moral thing to do.  Really?  Why is that?  Why is it honorable to keep silent about acts that are harmful or immoral or both?  Oh I know the answers.  You’ve got to have your friend’s back or you can’t do something to harm the brand of the organization.  Even if it means selling your own soul.   

I doubt that someone with Sapp’s malfunctioning moral compass would ever stop to think that whoever did blow the whistle on the Saints might have saved some player from having a knee blown out or worse.  To me it’s a pretty fair trade off if a rogue coach is forced to sit out a season to save a player from a potentially career ending injury.  Does a friend who commits crimes really deserve to be protected?  If that friend is robbing or injuring or even killing shouldn’t you first be turning that person in and then questioning your criteria for choosing friends? 

This, code of silence, “I’ve got your back,” mentality is entrenched in our society.  If you turn someone in you, YOU, Y-O-U are the bad person for “singing like a bird,” “ratting someone out,” or “dropping a dime.”  You are, in the language of my generation, a “stool pigeon” or a “rat fink.”  In an online dictionary I found a definition of rat as; “A despicable person, especially one who betrays or informs upon associates.”  Well what does that make the perpetrator?  What does it make the victim?  I know the answer to that question.  In the language of the day; “sucks for you.”  Even if you’re now broke, injured or dead. 

There is another term for “snitch” that shows up when it concerns reporting industrial or governmental shenanigans.  It’s called whistle blowing.  During my lifetime there have been a number of whistleblowers whose actions have exposed corruption, waste and illegal activities going on in places that we thought we could trust.

                In 1970, New York Police officer Frank Serpico exposed corruption within the department.  And you thought it was just a movie.

                In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers telling the American people that most of the justification for the Vietnam War was a charade; instead of seeking peace the U.S. Government was actually broadening the war and while we were supposedly promoting democracy in Vietnam we were taking part in corruption and the rigging of elections.

                Lois Jenson exposed rampant harassment of female workers in Minnesota’s Eveleth Mines leading to a class action lawsuit that forced the mining company to establish a sexual harassment policy.  It was the first ever sexual harassment lawsuit and it served notice to the business community that harassment is a real issue that is not to be taken lightly.

                And of course who could forget “Deep Throat”, the informant who fed reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein information that eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, a sitting president who thought he was immune to the laws of the people he had been elected to serve.  At this time it’s appropriate to credit Nixon whose merry band of burglars got caught trying to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at a business complex in Washington D.C. called Watergate.  Watergate went on to become the general term to describe the chain of tawdry events leading to Nixon’s resignation.  Since then any scandal worth its salt is described with –gate tagged on to it; hence “bounty-gate.”

The people that I just described should all fall into the category of “rat fink, snitch;” shouldn’t they?  They ratted out their colleagues.  And when they and others like them did that they caused the improvement of society and in doing so they oftentimes were the victims of unrelenting retaliation.  Karen Silkwood, for instance, was in the process of exposing safety violations at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fuels production plant in Oklahoma when she died suddenly in a mysterious fatal one car crash. 

So lets put all of this in a nutshell. If you report an associate for purposely committing an immoral act that injures someone else, you are an asshole; even if the person who you are protecting is the original asshole. If on the other hand the selfsame associate becomes a victim of the immoral actions of another asshole who isn't an associate and you happened to see who the perpetrator was and turn him in then you are something altogether different.  You are now a champion of justice, a hero. Taking the twisting of morality further, consider that the moral bedrock of a code of silence is the protection of an immoral act. I have a new word for that; hypocrisy-gate.  

Gym Dandy

I just recently joined my sixth, or so, gym.  No, not concurrently; I’m all for fitness but there are limits.  My first gym was Gold’s.  Joined it in the early 80s.  As I’ve gone from gym to gym I’ve noticed that they’ve both changed and remained the same. For one the name has changed.  What used to be a gym is now a fitness center.  I guess the name gym conjures up visions of  boxers and weightlifters in a Spartan testosterone filled room, smelling of sweat and punctuated with the sounds of grunts and clanking weights; intimidating.  They’re now called fitness centers; much more egalitarian.  Gyms, pardon me, fitness centers have modernized, offer more amenities and options and cater to a wider demographic, but one aspect of the gymnasium or fitness center that has never changed is that it is a great place to observe human behavior, sometimes in its most ill-mannered or make you shake your head in disbelief, bizarre forms.

Gyms have always had their own set of theoretical protocols usually associated with taking care of the equipment and also with being courteous to your fellow members.  The real protocol however is to often ignore the theoretical protocols and destroy equipment and disgust your fellows.

Let’s take sweat.  When I joined Gold’s, sweat seemed to be a good thing.  It showed that you are actually exerting yourself.  There was one small form of etiquette that sweat required and that was to put a towel down on that bench you were laying on.  Over the years the level of toxicity in sweat has apparently been on the rise.  That’s because when I joined 24 Hour Fitness in nearby Richmond some years later members were admonished to use a towel to thoroughly wipe down the equipment.  Later I joined Hercules Fitness in the town in which I live and it has dispensers posted around the gym with sanitized wipes to wipe off the equipment.  Most recently I joined my current gym and it has various stations with spray bottles of disinfectant and towels.  I never knew that someone else’s sweat could be so horribly offensive.  Not that I want to bathe in it (well maybe Diane Lane’s but we’ll save that for another post) but c’mon; really?  Sanitizer?  I’ve seen folks, who apparently distrusting the honor of their fellow members, take the sanitizer and wipe down nearly every square inch of a piece of equipment before using it.  Do they ever sit at a park bench that over the years has been shat on by a legion of squirrels and pigeons?  Do they ever hold hands with someone or as my Uncle Al used to call it, swap spit?

I can’t imagine that these sanitized individuals ever go in the locker rooms because I’ve seen some behavior there that’s made me want to crawl into a hazmat suit.

One of the more memorable was at 24 Hour Fitness where some fellow was at the sink shaving his head.  No not a little touch up with a blade but actual locks of hair falling in clumps on the floor around him.  To this day I wonder if he at least had the decency to take a towel and mop up that mess.  I tend to doubt it.

There’s a lot of nudity in the locker room.  A female Facebook friend commented about how disgusting it is to see all of those women walking around naked.  Really?  I don’t know what to say about that.  Maybe I can see her point though.  This happens in the men’s locker room as well.  And it’s not just walking from locker to shower and back to locker.  It’s more like strutting around, brushing teeth, strolling to the bathroom stall, brushing teeth or standing in front of the TV to watch an inning of baseball.  And it’s so often the 300 pound guy with boobs an enormous gut, and a back with so much hair it would make a grizzly bear envious.

Hey buddy can you wrap up in a towel or put on a pair of drawers before shaving in front of the mirror?  Did you know your winky is dangling in that sink that your fellow members might want to use?

And just when I thought that the new gym, uh, fitness cent...screw it you know what I mean, that I just joined has a more mature and well-mannered crowd along came the guy shaving his nether regions in the shower.  But that wasn’t the extent of it because you know how those little hairs can cling so stubbornly to the blade?  He found it necessary to give the razor an occasional vigorous shake to dislodge the little buggers.  Oh look, it’s raining pubes in here.

  

And then a day later; Say sport, is it really necessary to dry your bean with the community dryer?  Really?   I know the device is called a BLOW dryer but I don’t think that’s the job the inventor had in mind. 

When you go to a gym you often see and sometimes get to know a core group of regulars.  That’s except for that one particular time of the year.  For anyone who regularly visits the gym the worst time of the year is that two month period from January through February.  This is time of the resolutionaries; those folks who think that they added a few extra pounds over the holidays but actually have been sedentary, gluttonous sloths for years.  And so as they’re packing in that fifth plate of food at the New Year’s Day all you can eat buffet they announce to the fam that they’ve resolved to join a gym and get back that lithe body that they had 15 or 20 or 40 years ago.  They crowd into the gym, take up equipment time, walk around in a daze, join a class, hire a trainer and wheeze through a month or so of halfhearted workouts until they realize that getting in shape requires work, sweat, some discomfort and yes, real honest to goodness resolve (that’s where the word resolution comes from).  By President's Day they've become discouraged the crowds have thinned and the only folks you see are the regulars you’ve seen every day for months.  

Every gym that I’ve ever belonged to has offered some sort of nutritional option.  When I belonged to a racquetball club back when I was in my early twenties we would sit in the spa and sip beers that the club sold.  Gold’s offered a number of powdered supplements, proteins and carbohydrates and mega-doses of vitamins that, as my dad used to say, you might as well just toss straight into the toilet and cut out the middleman.  Given the times and the number of beefy bodies at Gold’s I would imagine that some independent entrepreneurs offered some injectable options that years later would help to fuck up the baseball record books. 24 Hour offered some energy bars and operated a juice bar.  But it's Hercules Fitness that has taken nutritional options to a whole new level.

The club partners with a young lady who teaches classes in something called cleanse and detox (No, not that kind of detox) that is supposed to remove toxins, parasites and colon build up from your body; sort of an intestinal Drano I guess.  A major component of this program is something called PaleoGreens, a powdered drink mix that is supposed to clean out your guts and cure what ails you.  The website claims that, among other things, it will give you a strong liver, heal the intestines, keep you regular, take care of skin problems, give you stronger hair and nails and accelerate wound healing.  I’ve heard people in the gym talk about PaleoGreens and from what I could gather it tastes like pure shit.  But don’t take my word for it.  I checked a five star review on the website that proclaims, in a classic case of damning with faint praise, “the taste is acceptable.”  Another five star review offers, “If you don't mind the dark green taste, it will be great.”  I’m not sure what exactly a “dark green taste” is but I feel safe in saying that it isn’t something that Bobby Flay is aiming for when he dons an apron.  Maybe part of the problem is that the name PaleoGreens doesn’t exactly stimulate the appetite.  When I hear PaleoGreens the first thing that comes to mind is that picture you see in kid’s dinosaur books of a Brontosaurus with green slime hanging from its mouth.  It amazes me that highly paid, supposedly smart people can get together in a conference room and decide that PaleoGreens would be a great name for a product that they want people to spend their hard earned rubles on and then actually ingest.  I think they should come up with a more appetizing name for the product.  I suggest calling it “bacon.” In fact I would go so far as to suggest tossing the greens and just eating bacon but I don’t suppose that would fly because my toxic, un-cleansed and parasitic gut tells me bacon is a paleo no-no.  I’ll wager that burgers, baloney, bread, booze, steak, chicken, churros, cheese, chocolate, coffee, candy, meat, potatoes, pastries, pasta, pizza, sausage, hot dogs, cookies, cakes, ice cream, an apple, a pear, a plum, a cherry and any good thing to make us all merry and anything else that might be enjoyable to eat are all paleo no-nos’s.  My guess is that the regimen calls for PaleoGreens a couple times a day and a bland tofu, grains and egg white concoction for your “regular” meal.  Call me a know nothing cynical bastard but when I hear PaleoGreens two words come quickly to mind; snake oil.  The website says that PaleoGreens contains grass juices, algae, enzymes, fruits, vegetables and berries.  I’ve an alternate idea; eat your vegetables.  I don’t know what to tell you about grass juices.  I suppose you could just go out to a field and graze.  It isn't really a testimonial but my dog does that now and again and then she vomits; is that the cleanse part?  As for the algae I just happen to have some in my pool at the moment; feel free, I need to get rid of that shit before summer rolls around.  Have you noticed that I’m poking fun at this?  Hey, maybe the stuff works.  You have your daily paleo and a couple of meals that taste like nothing at best and the newspaper at worst and then what? Do men and women grow inches in those places where it’s supposed to count?  Do you leap out of bed every morning ready to take on the world? Can you run faster than a speeding bullet?  Do you notice that your liver is stronger?  I always thought it was a strong son of a bitch to begin with.  Does it add a year or two to your life?  I picture the two octogenarians at the senior center.  One says to the other, “I got to be this old by eating PaleoGreens, grilled chicken, egg whites, chickpea paste and tofu all without seasoning.”  The second one says, “Really?  I ‘ve been eating sausage and biscuits and gravy every morning and having two martinis every afternoon at five.”  And then the first guy says, “Balls.”  The gym, I’m sorry, fitness center that I just joined has energy bars, energy drinks and vitamins.  It also has microwave popcorn and snacks.  If you’re old enough to pay ninety five bucks a month you’re old enough to name your own poison. I think I digressed a bit.  Sorry about that.

You’re probably reading this (well maybe you probably aren’t) and thinking, why does he go to these horrible places called gyms, er, fitness centers?  Well let’s face it, we aren’t amused by good behavior so that’s why I’m writing about the, uh, different behavior.  But in all seriousness gyms are great places.  If you put it to good use with a real sense of resolve a gym can do wonders for you.  I’ve been inspired by folks I’ve met and seen at the gym.  There is my all-time favorite spin instructor who was at one time very overweight.  She basically lost a person and is now a personal trainer.  There is the fellow who I regularly saw at Hercules Fitness.  He was grossly overweight and would struggle through a cardio and weight workout, stopping often to catch his breath but seemed to be making progress when I let my membership expire.  There are the very fit who do some incredibly tough workouts and show some amazing determination.  I highly recommend gyms for everyone at every level.  And not just during January but all year long.  Just do me a big favor.  When you’re shaving?  Put on your drawers and keep your lizard out of the sink. 

Life's Awful Curve

My last post, Dad;Reconnecting inspired some responses that merit not just a reply but an entire post.

In my original, I touched on my dad’s final years and his – our, mine and my wife and childrens’ – battle with dementia and my regrets over how badly I handled it.  In conversation with a couple of acquaintances I found that they also felt regrets over the way in which they dealt with parents suffering dementia.  A high school friend of mine, Susan, left a touching, heartfelt comment and our mutual high school friend, Craig left a kind and comforting response of his own. 

Susan wrote:  “My mom, like your dad, began suffering from dementia a very short time after my dad died. She was such a strong person that she lived too many years with it before finally succumbing. I, too, am filled with regret for the way I handled her illness. I, too, am not proud of the way I handled her situation. I don't have a lot of regrets in my life, but I wish I could have a do-over on that one.”

Craig’s response: “Never regret how you dealt with a parent's dementia. I deal with dementia on a daily basis. Some days I will see each stage of dementia - early silly confusion, one's undeniable fear and trepidation as they realize the harpoon is set, the early failings, the argumentative phase, the wandering phase, the incontinence phase, the placement phase. I no longer see the zombie/coma phase, as I do not do nursing homes any longer. There is no instruction booklet for the process. I see families struggling to 'do the right thing' neither knowing what that is or how to do it. That's because there are no rights and wrongs, strong players and inadequate players - we are all just regular folk shlepping though life who get thrown an awful curve-ball. You take your best swing! That's it. Neither of you did a bad job - there is no such thing. Remember too, that as you felt your inadequacies mount, as the disease progressed, the shell that personified your loved-one lack the insight and memory to either know or recall that they were treated badly. In fact they were not. When your fathers hug you at The Pearly Gates, neither will even mention it. If you apologize, "Poppa I'm sorry I let you down there at the end", your going to make him frown and then smile and wink at you and confess, "You did a great job - a hell-of-a-lot better than I did with my old man. So give us another hug." I will brook no more regret over this ugly, diabolical illness which is impossible to 'handle' well. 'Nuf said!”

In her response to Craig, Susan summed up my feelings, again better than I could express:  “Craig, you brought a tear to my eye with your kind comments! When we're young and in a different place in our lives, we make choices we wouldn't necessarily make later on. (I had a similar conversation with my daughter just a few weeks ago on choices made and possible regrets later.) I don't know how much I would have done differently if my parent was facing dementia today. I know there would be some things done differently, but you're right. We do the best we can at the time, with the knowledge and abilities we have at that time. I can't say I won't continue to have some regrets, but it helps to know I'm not alone when it comes to simply being human and making good decisions and not-so-good ones. Thanks Craig, and Paul, for helping me better understand that I'm not alone.”

As I read their comments again in writing this post the emotions welled up again.  I don’t always respond to comments, though I should, but theirs particularly warrant a response and this post is in part my response.  I’d already planned on writing a post on this topic and I even had some version of, “there’s no instruction book that covers this,” all ready to go but Craig beat me to it and said it all so much better than I could.  While he didn’t say as much, I’m certain that Craig’s daily encounters with dementia come through his work as a physician. 

I’m 58, about the age my dad was when he was starting to forget things and become flustered.  I’ve reached that point at which I ask myself, how will I age?  It’s a question that we baby boomers have to face.  And that question comes with its own myriad subset of questions.  Will we be self-sufficient?  Will we be physically able to take care of ourselves?  What will become of our mental faculties?  Will we be financially able?  One of the acquaintances that I spoke with told me that her husband has a real and tangible fear of the same dementia that plagued the aunt he had to care for.  In a comment to my post, Scott wrote; “I find myself getting a little lump in the throat whenever I do something that is a mental slip, thinking about how it must have been for him and wondering if it is something I'll be dealing with in the not so distant future.” 

And then there is the question that haunts those of us with children, making their way with families of their own; will we be a burden on our children?  After having difficulties with my maternal grandmother, my parents suggested to me that they would never be a burden.  Which of course begs its own question; how can you make that suggestion?  There’s the strong potential that the option will not be one that we can control; which is just the reason that I’ve not made that suggestion to my own children.  I do what I can to avoid that circumstance by keeping both physically and mentally active.  And while my future independence isn’t the motivation it is a hopeful byproduct that I keep in the back of my still able mind.

I have two wonderful children who’ve expressed that they would of course take care of my wife and me when we’re doddering.  They make that statement with the same certainty that they would have in saying the sun will rise in the morning and while I don’t doubt their sincerity and have every faith in their love for us I have to wonder if they realize the full import of the baggage that comes with a dependent parent.  Every generation, every young family potentially has to face the quandaries.  Dealing with everything from deciding whether or not to take the old boy out to dinner with the family, to is he going to be okay at home, to is he going to wander out of the house, to how in the hell do we take our family vacation which all boil down to the question of “how do we just have a normal family life?”   

With the large boomer generation transitioning into late middle and old age this shouldn’t be just a question within the domestic circle.  A big segment of this nation is going to be losing its collective marbles and we, those of us that are aging and our families, should be wondering how this nation is going to deal with it.  From the Alzheimer’s Association website are just a few of the many sobering facts:

·         5.4 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease.

·         One in eight older Americans has Alzheimer's disease.

·         Alzheimer's disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States and the only cause of death among the top 10 in the United States that cannot be prevented, cured or even slowed.

·         More than 15 million Americans provide unpaid care valued at $210 billion for persons with Alzheimer's and other dementias. 

·         Payments for care are estimated to be $200 billion in the United States in 2012.

•        Today, 5.4 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease – 5.2 million aged 65 and over, and 200,000 under the age of 65. By 2050, up to 16 million will have the disease.

•     Of Americans aged 65 and over, 1 in 8 has Alzheimer’s, and nearly half of people aged 85 and             

       older have the disease.

•     Another American develops Alzheimer’s disease every 68 seconds. In 2050, an American will develop the disease every 33 seconds.

This country has faced up to major crises in the past with large measures of success and some of these have included finding many cures.  On the other hand, as I’m reminded every time I fill up the tank, we’ve had a history of kicking the can down the road.  I suppose that I could transition this into a commentary about the debate over nationalized health care and the rising costs of health care.  I’ll leave that for another time and just keep hoping that one of the cans that we kick down the national road won’t be full of those lost marbles. 

Just this past week a co-worker’s mother had a heart attack that put her in hospice care.  The mother has been suffering from dementia for ten years now.  In conversation another co-worker commented that he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a loved one “not know who I am.”  I told him that I went through that for nearly 10 years myself and he sadly shook his head and allowed that he was sorry.  The woman whose mother is now in hospice said to me that there will be no heroic efforts from here on out; “It’s been 10 years now; its time.”  Of course I felt the same way when my father passed; hell it was past time.  And he would have agreed.  Had he been able to have a half day of lucidity and figured out a way to end it himself he would have.  I know I would; sit in front of the TV, watch the Three Stooges with a nice sedative or ten and a bottle of Maker’s Mark.  Yeah I know it would horrify some of the family and friends and the local Catholic prelate; “my son how can you disrespect God’s gift?”  Look I got an electric pizza cooker as a wedding gift but at a certain point it gave up the ghost and the pizzas came out half-baked and it was about time to toss it.  When my thought processes start coming out half-baked it’s time to realize that the gift is about wore out.  I don’t want to deal with 5 years of putting the can of shaving cream in the oven and a quart of milk in the toolbox; or worse.  

And so thank you to Susan and to Scott and those who I spoke with over the last week or so.  It was somewhat reassuring to know that there are others who went through the same experience of trying to do right and in the end feeling like the job got badly botched at times.  And thank you to Craig who reminded us with some of the most eloquent words that I’ve ever read that “…we are all just regular folk shlepping though life who get thrown an awful curve-ball. You take your best swing! That's it.”

And a final note:  Susan, Scott and Craig are three of my oldest friends.  I went to high school and junior college with Susan and Craig and we were best of friends who went our separate ways.  We reconnected through Facebook but have not yet reunited.  I’d say it’s time.  I met Scott after graduating college.  We spent some years sharing living quarters and some great memories, many that are lost in a fog of varied substances.  He was the best man at my wedding and we still get together at times, although not often enough.  They are three of the finest people that I’m proud to know. 

Comments are greatly appreciated and encouraged and may be left in the comments section below.  While I don’t always respond to them (and I admit to it being bad manners) I do read them.  Unrepentant spam will be deleted and sent to spam hell. 

Dad; Reconnecting

 "For many years fathers who have said or done things that may not always have made sense to their children have found themselves saying or thinking just as their fathers had, "Someday you'll thank me."  From Wisdom of our Fathers by Tim Russert.

I spent last evening reading some blogs from 1949.  That’s ridiculous, you say, there were no blogs in 1949.  Of course there were; they just weren’t called blogs.  They were called opinion pieces and they were columns in print; newspapers and magazines.  Not everyone could do that sort of thing in those days.  You actually had to be employed by the journal that your work appeared in or be invited as a guest columnist.  Today through blogs and various social media on the internet anyone can be a writer or even pose as one; I’m living proof.  But I’ve digressed. 

Last night I looked through a scrapbook of columns written by one Richard O. Anderson, columnist and news editor for the Kaysville Weekly Reflex; and my father.  Dad had a regular column called Cabbages and Kings.  The Reflex was published on Thursdays in little Kaysville, Utah; population in 1949 less than 2,000.  I’d come across the scrapbook some years back while doing one of those house cleanings that exhumed everything from some of my college report cards to the kids grade school drawings to letters from old girlfriends, to yes, a scrapbook of dad’s newspaper columns. When I first found it I took a quick peak then relegated it to a box with some other artifacts and forgot about it until just recently.  Somewhere in that cobwebbed cave called my memory I had recalled that dad did write for a newspaper a few years before I was born.  I’d just never been interested enough to go into the details.  A few months back I once again rummaged through the box and skimmed over a column or two.  On this Friday night I pulled it out and read for hours. 

                On deciding where to go on vacation: “If you’re a married man don’t fret about this problem at all.  Let your wife do the deciding.  She will anyway.  If you don’t belong in this category it’s possible to get all the general effects of a vacation by staying right at home.”

As I read through his works I found that I was discovering a connection.  Right there before me on fragile, yellowing newsprint was my style of expression, my, yes, sarcasm and my sense of humor; and it was 63 years old.  But I also realized that I was seeing an even more far reaching connection.  It was that biting humor, the irony and sarcasm that often show up in my son and daughter especially in those verbal sparring matches of theirs; the grandson that he barely knew and the granddaughter that due to the ravages of dementia he really never knew.  I read through his columns, smiling, chuckling, and laughing out loud.  I’m writing this the next morning through a mist of tears. 

In recent years, late, much too late I’ve gained a great appreciation for my dad; more so than when I was a kid and much more so than in those last few years when he was plagued by Alzheimer’s.  I remember in the years leading up to his dementia how flustered he got when he would forget those things that he knew he should be remembering.  I didn’t have the empathy at the time to realize how frightening, how devastating it must have been for him to realize the dulling of his once sharp wit.  My mom in some prescience that she would pass before my father admonished me that I would probably be looking out for him.  When she did pass suddenly he plunged deep into dementia and the remaining years were not pretty.  They don’t inspire any pride in the way I handled the situation and in fact they revealed many personal imperfections.  Suffering from pneumonia he took his last labored breath in March of 1999 and the most sage comment of that evening came from his then 16 year old grandson; “He’s free.”

                My wife and I just watched the movie J. Edgar, which briefly touched on those popular movies in the forties and fifties that were advertised as being “from the secret files of the FBI.” From November 1949; “Are we to believe that a movie scout walked into the FBI office in Washington, announced that he would like to borrow a little secret material to make a movie and then rummaged around through the files until he found the type of material that would appeal to the moviegoer.”

Sadly the memory of his confused years had been the clearest when all this while they should have been banished to obscurity.  I know those years weren’t dad even though I never knew a lot of the details of his life.  I know he was born in Toeele, Utah and grew up in the Salt Lake City area.  He graduated high school and that’s where his formal education stopped.  He spent some time in the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) working in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and then served in the Army-Air Corps (The precursor to the Air Force) in World War Two.  He came home with an Italian war bride and they kicked around between Utah, West Virginia, and California until finally settling in San Mateo, California in 1956.  He held a variety of jobs; he repaired radios and televisions, was a writer and news editor, a radio operator at San Francisco International Airport and finally an engineering writer at GTE in San Carlos, California.  Much of what he knew for his job at GTE he taught himself.  His writing skills came from his voracious reading and appreciation of the power of the written word.  He was self-taught in geometry, trigonometry and calculus.  Beyond these linear facts there’s very little that I know about the events of his life.

I’m aware of those things that he held dear because he passed them on to me.  He fancied books and classic literature.  When I was a young boy he would read to me before turning out the lights.  Not fairy tales but classics like Treasure Island, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, War of the Worlds and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Probably the most memorable of those bedtime stories was Jack London’s, The Call of the Wild.  I was captivated by that book and I still remember its blue binding with an image of an Alaskan Husky on the front cover. That copy is long gone but I’ve reread the story a number of times.  When I was older, he would often go to the bookshelf, scan the titles, pull out a book and suggest, “This one’s pretty good.”  And so it was with Willi Heinrich’s Cross of Iron, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, a book that I would one day suggest to my own son. 

                On the impending nuclear arms race and the term “the atomic age”:  “Go ahead and call it the atomic era if you want but leave off the age business.  When two nations take up for the conversational peace; “My atom bomb can lick your atom bomb,” the only age likely to ensue is the stone age for a return in one of the swiftest transitions from one age to another, on record.”

Rummaging through another box of relics some months back I found something else that he held dear; his books.  Some I donated to the library but others, the older leather bound collections I kept.  Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens have all been rescued from a dusty garage, their faded bindings and yellowed pages now resting comfortably on our bookshelves.  I kept Ernie Pyle’s Here is Your War, remembering that dad very much admired the famous journalist.  I’ve boxes and files yet to go through.

Dad gave me his values.  I was reminded of that as I read some of his columns that took to task the bigoted, the narrow minded and those who would stifle personal freedoms.  I imagine that if the Reflex hadn’t been a small town weekly, dad might have found himself on Joe McCarthy’s radar.  Many years later dad would take days off from his work at GTE, a defense contractor, to march in the streets against America’s misguided military adventure in Southeast Asia.  I recall his fear that his picture might chance to appear in the news at one of those rallies and that his employer might see him figuratively biting the hand that was feeding him.  Like me he was a student of war, found it fascinating, read about it voraciously but hated it nonetheless.  He never spoke of his service in World War Two.  He often talked to me about history and its relevance, stopping to explain about the historic sites we passed on our many road trips.  Dad didn’t suffer bigots, the muzzling of free speech, incursions of religion into politics or those who would generally seek to stifle progressivism.  He saw the rampant fear of Communism that characterized the fifties and the sixties as so much irrational paranoia.  And living in Utah he harbored a rather untenable dislike for the LDS (Mormons) or more properly that organization’s ability to insert itself into the lives of everyday heathens like himself. 

                On a neighborhood protest against the opening of a local package store (liquor store); “I would suggest that all liquor stores be moved to some isolated and little accessible spot outside the city.  Also make it a law that (liquor) can be purchased only on dark moonless nights”…”The words whiskey, gin, rum and even vodka are all in the dictionary.  You can either tear out the offensive pages and burn them or destroy the entire book”…”Well kids, keep up the valiant crusade.  I’m going to the ice box and if nobody is looking I’ll mix myself another (cocktail).” 

I’ve finally managed to put aside his last years and recall the times when we were buddies.  Like the Friday afternoons when he would come home from work and pack the station wagon for one of our weekend camping trips in nearby Memorial Park; just him and me.  We fished, shared camp duties, lounged during the day and played chess in the evenings under the light of a Coleman lantern.  On warm summer nights, dad would pull out a couple of fold out cots and we would sleep in sleeping bags on the back patio, looking up at the stars and talking until one of us fell asleep.  In what my mom might term our less dignified moments we would spend a Saturday afternoon in front of the television watching Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges.  I recall one afternoon when the two of us were literally howling with nonstop laughter and tears running down our cheeks while my mom looked at the two of us shaking her head with uncomprehending scorn.

                On the free spending of taxpayer dollars by legislators; “As taxpayers it is our role to be meekly generous with our dough and remain stoically silent while the boys in Washington romp around with it at will.”

And so 13 years after my father’s death, I come to realize that we had the same passion for writing.  We just didn’t have it at the same time and so we never got the chance to share it.  Many years after he had quit writing for that little newspaper dad would continue to write.  He would sit up late of an evening, pipe clenched between his teeth; maybe a bourbon and rocks off to the side, and hammer away on an old Smith Corona typewriter.  That late night tapping of the keys drove mom nuts; quiet computer keyboards came much too late.  I don’t know what became of any of that work.  As for my own work, I’d not yet developed an interest for writing.  That would manifest itself years after he was gone. 

Walking the dog early on this chilly morning I thought about what it might be like if he was still around, still writing.  Would we critique each other’s work?  Would we share ideas?  Maybe even collaborate?  I can but imagine the long, late into the evening conversations that might have been.  I’d like to think he would favor my writing and maybe recognize some of his influence in my work.  But I suppose that even if he found it to be outright trash he would be proud and happy to see me plug away and to know that his love and respect for expression through writing had been passed on to his only son. 

So what comes of all this?  Before you think that this is a lament, remember the title; this is about a reconnection, a discovery.  The bleak years are gone.  And I guess looking back at my dad and then to my son and daughter I see that the good things span generations.  My kids are both, in the end, reasonable and logical; two virtues that were at the core of their grandfather. I’d like to think that I was the conduit.  Both are clever, witty and when they need to, can turn a clever phrase. Is there something of the writer in each of them?  Happily and with some measure of surprise (No offense meant Jess) I often see my daughter on the social networks deploring the decline and abuse of the English language.  Somewhere her granddad is looking at her with pride and flashing a knowing smirk.  And of course when I look at my son the physical resemblance is unmistakable.  I still don’t know that much about my dad.  He was inscrutable and my feeling is that was largely by choice.  Not that he had something to hide; he was just introverted by nature.  The scrapbook was a small window into the man before I was a “glint in the eye.”