Memorial Day

Given that irony is the new national pastime, it's not surprising to see various media types noting that we memorialize our countrymen who died in military service by going to the beach, barbecuing, and drinking heavily. One more thoughtful commentator, expressed that at no time of the year is the gap between the military and the non-military among us more apparent.

I have no military connections in my family. My father and uncle on one side were both born too young for World War II (though my dad was born on Memorial Day) and too old for the Korean War. I'm the oldest of my generation in my family and I was in the last year of the Vietnam War draft, which was the first year nobody was chosen (I got a lottery number and that was all). I hardly know anyone who's ever been involved in the military in any way.

So what is this holiday for me? Should I feel obligated to watch Saving Private Ryan tonight? Should I watch one or more of the many fine, moving speeches given today? Should I go jogging with a little flag in my cap like the woman I saw earlier? How do you relate to something you have no relationship with?

It's a similar problem with any kind of decontextualized empathy. Darfur? Oil spill in the Gulf? Haiti? I can look at pictures and maybe even talk to someone who visited, but the fact remains that none of these things is directly connected to my life, so how am I supposed to feel?

This was never a problem back before the age of instant communication. Just because we can know what happened somewhere far away does it really do us any good to know?

Adventures in Dentistry

I'm hungry and half of my head is numb. I was chewing on something the other day and got a telltale unexpected crunch. I felt around my mouth with my tongue and felt a rough spot on my left bottom "pre-molar," what we used to call a bicuspid back in the day.

I have terrible teeth. Both my parents have terrible teeth and I was born just before they started making fluoride widely available, so my teeth all but melted in my mouth. Ultimately, there are no teeth in my mouth that are 100% tooth. This particular tooth was more filling than tooth, and my dentist, who I think is superb by the way, said, "I can patch it, but it's not a happy tooth." OK, so he's British.

We decided I would put a crown on the tooth. You can tell the teeth in my mouth that have crowns because they're the only ones that look like regular teeth- all white and pearly. Yeah, those are the fake ones. Getting a crown means drilling everything else away, so I had to get a novocaine shot. Novocaine certainly beats the alternative (that being intense pain), but this one numbed the entire left side of my head. Yes, today I am literally a numbskull.

He drills, drills , drills and finally stops to take a look. Tells me there's not much tooth left, but enough that I don't need a root canal. This is the best news I've had today. He tells me this is especially good because this tooth has a curly root, which makes doing the root canal more laborious. Well, I certainly wouldn't want to put him to any trouble.

After doing the rest of his dentist thing, he's starting to clean me up. My dentist has a good sense of humor, but I've found that dentists don't find it funny if you ask them things like, "When you were in dental school did you have funny or sadistic nicknames for the tools?" So I ask him if anyone has ever invented something to un-numb you. He says yes, but it requires a second injection which makes you sore which makes you wish you'd stayed numb. He then informs me that his grandfather was one of the pioneers of local anesthetics and that the original chemical used was cocaine. This is interesting trivia, I think.

After relieving me of $1500 (! - the receptionist looks embarrassed saying the number) he sends me on my way. I'm starting to be able to feel my left eye again and I'm looking forward to having lunch soon.

Unfair!

Why do mothers get Mother's Day to themselves, while fathers end up as the lesser half of "Dads and Grads?"

Maybe it's because every father now has plenty of ties, after shave, and golf and fishing accessories, and what else is there? Hey! Guys want lots of stuff! Big screen TVs, beer, chain saws, power painters, and soft reclining chairs to sleep in. What's the problem?

Connecticut Travels

A funny thing happened to me while I was visiting my mother in the hospital. Everybody dies, so there are many people who might have the opportunity to write a sentence like that, but I rarely see one. My mom has ALS and has been very sick for almost 10 years. She's in the hospital now and we don't really know what the outcome will be, except that with the later stages of ALS you're choosing between only unpleasant outcomes. I could write lots more about this, but not now. I left home around 3 and fought traffic up to the hospital in Connecticut.

My mom was stable, so we left the hospital at around 8:45 and since my father doesn't keep food around for anybody but himself I stopped at the supermarket to get some cereal and coffee. I also picked up some beer because I wanted some and I'm old enough to purchase it. So I headed to the checkout and all the lights went out for a a couple of seconds. This caused all the cash registers to reboot, and by the time they came back up, it was 9:03 and they don't sell beer in Connecticut after 9:00 on Saturday night.

"Don't I get a grace period for the power failure?" I said. "Sorry, we get in trouble if we sell beer after 9. But you can go to New York." "I don't want to go to New York," I said. But I had no choice. Fortunately, I remembered a store just over the New York border not far from the house and was ultimately successful.

Another comment or two on the taser

I hear a lot of comments on this whole incident containing the phrase "in this day and age." I guess I'm supposed to understand that because there are occasional violent incidents in the world that it's okay to use a stun gun on a teenager running around on a baseball field. I'm sorry, but even if you accept the premise that life is more dangerous now than it was 10 years ago, a premise I do not accept by the way, there is no logical connection between the general situation and the specific incident.

Let's think about going to the ballpark. What's the actual disaster scenario? Someone plants a bomb somewhere and thousands of people die, right? Aside from making sure that you don't smuggle alcoholic beverages into the stadium, anybody see any real security at the gate? Have there been a lot of violent incidents where people run into the middle of a public place, make a spectacle of themselves, then start killing people?

Looking at it from another angle, I go to games a lot. There are always security people stationed around the field. Am I wrong in presuming that the part of the job description for those people is to a) prevent people from running onto the field, and b) if they do get on the field to catch and remove them? Is it really that hard to get security people who can move quickly? I mean, you go into this job knowing that you may be called upon to run after and try to catch someone, right?

All in all, I can accept that tasers can be a useful substitute for deadly force to subdue someone who's getting violent. But I can't accept them as an easy shortcut to avoid actually doing your job properly or as something to use because you're annoyed at someone's behavior. It's way too subjective and it's becoming much too prevelant.

Disgusting

I don't know what's more upsetting, the fact that the cops at the ballpark tasered that guy for running on the field or hearing people cheer it on. People (usually stupid drunk people) have been occasionally running onto professional playing fields for as long as I can remember. In the 70's when streaking was a fad, people sometimes ran on the field naked. Never, in the 40+ years I've been watching baseball has a player been injured or even threatened, nor have any spectators been hurt. The security guys chase the guy down- sometimes it takes a long time (although not as long as it takes them to catch a cat) and the crowd laughs- and eventually he's caught and arrested.

Is there some reason this is no longer sufficient? Because some terrorist wannabe failed to set off a bomb in Times Square we can shoot 50,000 volts into a teenager a couple of day later? All the guy did was run on a baseball field. He threatened no one. He hurt no one. He had no weapon of any kind and was running away. And tonight people were mimicking it in the crowd and it was shown of the scoreboard. Ha-ha. Very funny. Until they do it to you because they don't like what you're doing or maybe because they don't like the way you look. And then just hope you don't have any electrical irregularities in your heart or it might kill you.

On second thought, disgusting isn't strong enough. Horrifying is more like it.

Brothers of the brush

My wife has never seen me without my beard, and of course neither have my kids. Nobody in the family has ever expressed any desire to see what I would look like, nor am I particularly curious. I've had a beard since I was 17. My hair is very dark and (was) thick and grows quickly. This meant that from the time I was 16 or so, no matter what I tried, I still had stubble (we used to call it a "four o-clock shadow). Safety razors did better than electric, but I have a scar on my chin from doing the classic 'kid goes backward over rocking chair and does a face plant' thing, so I would cut myself constantly. Add in a dash of adolescent boy laziness and, Presto! Instant beard!

The last time I was completely clean-shaven was in 1975. I was working for our family cable TV company in Brunswick, Georgia for the summer. I shaved the left side one day and the right side the next day. I think it was during summer vacation. Between the Georgia heat and the Georgia culture, it seemed best to be shorn. Maybe if I'd still had the beard, the born-again types I was hanging out with down there (not a lot of choice) wouldn't have kept trying to convert me, which turned out to be the major dynamic of the summer.

The beard returned and remained until I started looking for jobs in the spring of 1981, when I was graduating from business school. I decided to shave the beard and leave the mustache. Looking at pictures from back in the day, I would have to say that this was a regrettable decision. The effect was more cliche Mexican bandito than anything else. The interviewing process concluded at the end of March, 1981 and so did my beardlessness.