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Look good? I didn’t think so either…

Hold on to your Mickey Mouse Club ears, readers: I’m going to write about life back in the day. I can remember when we got our first television in 1953, a huge black-and-white Muntz that seemed to take forever to warm up and which threw off enough heat to warm our little Cape Cod by itself.

My parents insisted that we had to turn off the television when meal time came,  and eat the meal with only ourselves as entertainment. (And we were fairly entertaining. I’m sure you know about dinnertime antics, particularly when boys were involved.) Some of the kids I went to school with talked about eating dinner in front of the set while Dinah Shore was on, but most parents we knew wouldn’t countenance such depraved behavior.

Then TV dinners came along and my parents caved and we joined the rest of the world, eating in front of the ghostly gray glow of the cathode ray tube, but not too close so we wouldn’t ruin our vision. (There’s some dispute about the origin of the term “TV dinner.” Some historians think that it was so called because it was shaped like some early televisions with the screen to the left and controls to the right. Others hold, as I’ve always heard, that it was designed to be eaten in front of the set. Wherever the name came from, this packaged semi-food had a lot to do with the death of conversation at meals).
I was thinking about multitasking when I thought about a typical lunch at our house. We have something to eat, of course, but generally the television is on and I am likely to be reading something. We manage to talk in there somewhere, and that’s important, but it’s not an intense exchange. With the lives we lead, that’s all right, but if I think about it, I have four things going on more or less at the same time: eating, talking, reading and watching. I wonder if we are driving ourselves around the bend with these incessant demands on our time and attention, most of which are self-inflicted.
I’ve been trying lately to give tasks my full time and attention, or just sitting and ostensibly doing nothing. But I’ve found some of my best ideas come during these times, including the idea for this blog. I hope you consider doing one thing at a time, and see what that does for you.

I don’t know a lot, but I thought I’d mention a few things.

I do know this topic is controversial, so bear with me. I’ll respect your opinion regardless of whether you respect mine. Talking about our differences helps us resolve them. I do know that as well.Here goes:
• I don’t know why senseless killings with handguns keep happening. All kinds of people have all kinds of ideas about how to stop them, but nothing seems to be working.
• I don’t know why good people of all ages have to die in such a violent manner, but especially the young ones. None of them deserves it.
• I don’t know why the media makes such a circus out of these tragedies, perhaps encouraging others out there to imitate them.
• I don’t know why legislatures can’t do something to stop this.
• I don’t know why we don’t have better mental health care in this country.
• I don’t know why we have such an affinity for violence whether in films, books, sports or on television.
• I don’t know how many more times this will have to happen before we come to our senses and figure out how to stop it.
These are just a few things I don’t know. There are more, but I’m too heartsick to add to them just now. I hope I don’t have to write another of these, but I have a feeling I will.
Sorry, friends. Be well and take care of each other. Please.

I must be the champion dilettante of the world. I know a little about a lot, and I’ve tried so many things I’ve lost count. Some might say I’m adventuresome, and that might be partially true. I think I’m not good at many things, but I keep trying for some reason. And because I’m not good at baseball, gardening, or woodworking (among many others), I make a lot of mistakes when I try. For example, I planted some tomatoes in a plot that receives almost no sunlight. My plants haven’t even bloomed while real gardeners are giving  tomatoes away as if they (the tomatoes) were radioactive. My “career” in baseball consisted of two years on a Little League farm team and then a year in minor league. I didn’t field well because I was afraid of the ball (it hurt when it hit me, after all) and I swung late and hit balls to right field as a right-handed hitter and not very hard because I weighed about 90 pounds. We won’t talk about my base-running except to say that I was thrown out a lot trying to steal second. But I kept trying.
Somewhere along the line I decided that if I were going to make mistakes I would look for the silver lining in the cloud of errors that followed me around like the dark cloud that hung over Joe Btfsplk in the Li’l Abner comic strip (yes, I know I am dating myself. Those comics were printed with—gasp—rotogravure, known if at all by the line in “Easter Parade,” “You’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure” That’s where I want to be). The silver lining is this: we learn from our mistakes, and nothing succeeds like failure. Examples are numerous and surprising. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company; Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison; and Abraham Lincoln failed in business, had a nervous breakdown, and was defeated in eight elections.

I think it instructive that Navajos deliberately introduce mistakes into their rugs to show the imperfection of anything made by humans. While the mistakes I make are not deliberate, they still show my humanity. In spades.

Sometimes mistakes can be charming. The school house I built for our local Little Library project was a typical woodworking fiasco for me: nothing was square, nails stuck out of the walls and glue was smeared all over the place. It looked like something an eight year old would build, but when the other people in the project saw it, they said it was perfectly suited to its purpose since we are trying to encourage children to read. Apparently they feel comfortable with something that looks like one of their friends could have built it.

So if you make mistakes, even if you don’t make as many as I do, rejoice! Think of all you’re learning and smile about how charming you are!

This week I finished reading Harper Lee’s latest, an unpublished prequel that now stands as a sequel to her deservedly iconic To Kill a Mockingbird. Confused? So are a lot of people.

The first half offers a delightful portrayal of Macomb, Alabama, in the ‘fifties, complete with relatives (some of whom are “half a bubble out of plumb”), a Methodist congregation  upset when the organist changes the tune of the Doxology, and rituals of food, gossip and social expectation familiar to anyone from the South. Jean Louise (Scout to you and me), home for two weeks on vacation from New York, finds her kinfolk fear that the people and culture in the big bad city may have warped her sense of propriety and judgment with their strange meddling ways. She takes up where she left off, though, squabbling with her Aunt Margaret, going out with Henry Clinton, her lower class boyfriend, and enjoying the company of Atticus and her uncle Frank. Lee portrays an idyllic (for some) existence with accuracy, sympathy and a kind of acerbic wit that had me laughing out loud.

And then, as hundreds of articles and reviews have noted, it all goes south (no pun intended). She discovers that Atticus has a hateful racist pamphlet in his desk and that he and Henry have gone to a meeting of Macomb’s own “citizen’s council” where an overwrought speaker spews the worst kind of vitriol about blacks. Jean Louise is literally sick to her stomach and, in a series of confrontations, tries to make sense of the changes in the people she has known and loved for years. The degree of her success and the overall outcome I will leave to the reader to discover, but suffice it to say that while Atticus’ rationale is faulty at best, it still is true to what many whites in the South believed at the time.

I believe this important, well-crafted book addresses issues we still contend with today. The characters are lovable and familiar, and while Atticus is no longer the super hero of Mockingbird, his struggles and solutions make him a credible if not sympathetic character. For my money, Watchman is better than Mockingbird, but that’s up to you to decide. Let me know what you think.

I’m slow sometimes.

Some things I catch onto quickly, others, not so much.

Take the gym I use. It’s big and up to date, well lighted and filled with, uh, “interesting” people. I enjoy going there and I love the machines that record everything about my exercise sessions. I wouldn’t call what I do a workout because so far I’m too slow and too puny to work anything out without a calculator. (That was a little gym joke for you–hope you enjoyed it.) But I’m working on it.

There are some down sides to such sophisticated technology. For one thing, I have become painfully aware of how much physical activity it takes to burn off 100 calories. You’d think that would put me off eating Twinkies, but it hasn’t. But I’m working on it.

I did catch on to how to use the equipment–I had been going to another gym and had a brief orientation to the machines. they even have pictures on them for heaven’s sake that explain how they’re used. I guess they want to include the illiterate–or the non-English speaking. You know how that works if you’ve assembled some self-assembly furniture lately.

I’ve been slower becoming aware of all the gym has to offer. Someone asked me if I had used the pool. “There’s a pool?” I asked. I only walked by it for a month, but it didn’t register until someone mentioned it. OK, so there was a pool and exercise equipment and a locker room to change in and infuriating little safes for wallets, cell phones and other valuables whose locks never seemed to work for me. But there was also a basketball, volleyball and handball courts. And showers. I knew there were showers off the locker room, but it never occurred to me to take a shower after my “workout.” Last week I thought as I walked out after my exercise, “I sure could use a shower.” And there in the parking lot I thought, “There are showers in the gym!”

I’m slow sometimes.

So, I’m happy to report that I have been using the showers and have been thinking about that awful time in my life know as intermediate school when we were all introduced to the horror of showering with other naked people our age. I remember some fellows would hold a towel in front of their unmentionables the entire time so that part never got wet. And some of my women friends in high school told me about a terribly awkward young lady who showered in her gym suit, such was her modesty. How she dried it at school I have no idea.

In our culture we have lost traditional rites de passage which mark the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Used to be that boys moved from knickers to long pants about their thirteenth birthday, and girls started using cosmetics. That’s still the case, and there are more formal ceremonies still such as bar and bat mitzvahs.

Now our rites of passage tend to be institutional rather than cultural or religious, if I can make that distinction. The passage into adulthood is measured ostensibly by earning a drivers license or graduating from high school. But I would suggest that being able to shower in a shared space without too much self-consciousness is a true mark of adulthood.

I still don’t have the self-confidence to parade in my birthday suit through the locker room (and since I have a dad bod it wouldn’t be a pretty picture), so I wrap the biggest towel around me and make my way to the showers which are not communal, but arranged so that they’re semi-private and no one need see anyone else in the altogether. I just wish we had had such an arrangement when I was thirteen.

I sat down last week with Erika Walser, twenty-four-year-old local resident who became the manager of Prospero’s Books on Center Street in Manassas last month. And it didn’t take long to realize that she is a woman on a mission.

“Books are my life. It’s as simple as that,” she stated as mid-morning traffic passed by outside twenty feet away outside the store. She credited her family and her college experience for her love of books and reading. “I had an amazing professor at NOVA,” she smiled, “who really put me on to history.” She then transferred to Virginia Tech and found not all the education took place in the classroom.

“I worked in a dining hall and met local people. Blacksburg is smaller than Manassas, so I could go to Kroger at midnight and see someone I knew. There was truly a sense of community there.”

Walser worked at the bookstore starting as a fifteen-year-old in 2006, at the end of her freshman year. She was also an associate at Old Navy starting in 2009, and served as a nanny the same year.

“The more places I worked, the more I wanted to stay at the bookstore. I love independent bookstores. I have so much more latitude here than if I worked for a chain. Old Navy taught me that.”

She noted that she stopped reading books for fun in high school. The birth of her daughter Zoё brought her back to them in 2014. “I had the time to read for the first time in a while. And I rediscovered the wonder of reading.”

When I asked what she liked most about working at Prospero’s, she said, “The people. The people and their stories.” Regulars come in daily, and she remembers their names and their background. “Many of them are talkative older men,” she remembered, smiling at me, a talkative older man. She continued to greet customers warmly while we talked, with the signature personal touch of the store. She knows book preferences of regulars and all about their families.

She couldn’t think of much she didn’t care for about the job, but she did mention people coming in asking to see Pringles the cat, a long-time feature of the store, who died a year ago. “I figure if they don’t know, then they haven’t been in for a while. Some people ask about Pringles and when they find she’s gone, they leave. But that’s a small annoyance.”

The new manager has made some changes in the store. “We’re gutting the store if you will,and we’re more selective about the books we do stock. We want to make it a special place. We’re also paying more attention to inventory. Recently, we started a display of local authors’ books at the front of the store and sponsor book signings with various writers at different times, especially on First Fridays when the stores stay open later and offer food and special events. These benefit us and local authors.”

She praised store owner Gary Belt. “He’s here at 6:30 in the morning sweeping the sidewalk in front of the store. He also works at home (we all do) and travels to acquire books.” She paused. “He saved the store and of course I’m happy about that.”

All this effort adds up to a place that Walser wants customers to experience as “an amazing place.”

“I want to help people learn through books and give them a fair price for the books they buy and also the ones they sell to us.” If books are not suitable for sale, she donates them to area churches.

“I hope people will understand the importance of supporting local independent businesses. Sure we all shop online and at the big chains, but stores like this one offer a unique experience.”

“This job does a lot for me,” she concluded. “I work with books all day; I’m with interesting people, and I’m helping to sustain and improve our community. You can’t do much better than that.”

Walser is clearly not a typical Millenial. And she has never used an electronic book of any sort. “They’re hard to read; I can’t write in them easily; and I can tell what other people are reading when they use ‘real’ books. Without that, I have less of a sense of who they are. And that’s important.”

Another customer came in and Erika Walser, a woman on a mission, walked out from behind the checkout counter to greet another customer and find out more about her story.

Once More into the Breach.

Mata’s Story.

Lessons Learned.

Lies. All lies.

Having a car entails a lot of expense and time. I found out again about the time this past Friday when we discovered that we needed an emissions inspection for Becky’s car. I couldn’t do it Friday, but I figured I would get up early Saturday and have it done in half an hour.

Wrong.

Since I usually had the inspection done early in the month, I didn’t know about the hordes of procrastinators who descended on inspection stations all over the area. When I pulled up to the Exxon about 7:15 (it opened at 7:30), there were two lines of about five cars each. The person I had talked to at the station the night before said an inspection took 15 to 20 minutes, so, thinking there were two inspectors (one for each line), I anticipated an hour and forty minute wait, tops, a small price to pay for putting it off. I had my laptop and sat in the grass beside the line of cars, calmed by a cool breeze, and worked on my latest novel. (Mata’s Story, if you’re keeping track.)

Wrong.

First of all, there was one inspector, so my anticipated wait time increased to three hours twenty minutes. The cost/benefit ratio was sliding toward the unfavorable side, but I stayed on. I’d have it done and not have to worry about it, right?

Wrong.

Whoever I talked to hadn’t been watching the inspection line, because each inspection took more like half an hour. One lady’s car was in the bay for 45 minutes. My wait time increased as I watched. By 10:30 I was number five in line, with a wait time of two and a half to three and three-quarters hours. At worst, I would be done by 2:15 and would have spent much of the day in line. I called Becky, and she sensibly said to give it up and come home, which I did. I found out the station was open the next day, Sunday, and figured the line would be shorter.

Wrong.

I drove over after church the next day about 12:15, and my spirits rose when I thought I saw three cars in line. I thought I’d be done in an hour and a half.

Wrong.

Driving up, I couldn’t see the line of cars that snaked around the perimeter. There must have been twenty of them, and I didn’t even want to calculate how long they would have to wait. However long it was, they’d be there past the closing time of 2 PM, and I wondered if the inspector would accommodate anyone in line or send them home. I didn’t want to wait around to find out, so I resolved to come over early the next morning, risking driving the mile and a half on expired tags. I had heard that if the police stopped you, all you had to do was explain that you were going to have the inspection done and they would let you go on your merry way.

I thought thought there wouldn’t be much of a line, but I’d thought that before. There couldn’t be that many lawbreakers, could there? I came upon the station.

I was right.

There was one car in line, and although the inspector was 15 minutes late, I was done by 8:30 and on my way home.

What did I learn from this experience? First, have the cars inspected early and often. Second, never underestimate the ability of people to procrastinate. Third, I’m a terrible judge of human behavior. And fourth, if you think you’re going to be a while, take something to amuse yourself with. Or, failing that, take a pillow and have a nice nap. You’re going to be there for a while, so you might as well be comfortable. And good luck.