Some Thoughts

Whiteflies executing an intricate dance in the sunlight of a winter's afternoon.

A Chinese family of seven gathered around a circular table in a small suburban restaurant, saying grace before their meal.

Blue, green, and grey recycling boxes strewn across neighborhood driveways after the bi-weekly collection truck has come through.

A clear shot of the Bay all the way across to the eastern shore; and beyond, the bluish cone of Mount Diablo.

A cup of strong Earl Grey tea on this cold afternoon.

Balancing a checkbook on the first try.

The Christmas tree already set up in the living room, alongside the boxes of ornaments and lights waiting to adorn it.

Polite drivers at a four-way-stop intersection, beckoning to one another to proceed.

News of a new baby in the Canadian branch of the family.

A comfortable chair, a good book, and remembering where I put my reading glasses.

The City Below

Holidays

And so we end our Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Our granddaughter was home from college to spend some time with us, and her sister and dad. We had some great meals, and then the womenfolk did some holiday shopping to take advantage of the bargains. The weather was fine till today, when the first rain finally arrived.

Like most men, I do not much enjoy shopping. If I needed to buy something, I'd go to the store that sold it, buy it, and come right home. The thought of wandering from store to store looking at shoes, or apparel, or household items is enough to tax my equilibrium to the fullest. Nowadays, of course, we can buy almost anything online. But the women of my acquaintance seem not to like that alternative. They like to feel the cloth, try on the shoe, and check the shade or color of this fabric against that accessory. They are able to spend many hours doing stuff like this. They enjoy shopping, especially at this time of year, when there are bargains galore. Why, just in today's (Sunday's) newspaper the sales ads outweigh the news pages and other sections by a significant margin. What joy it must be for our shoppers to negotiate all those department store aisles in search of bargains!

* * * *

Many homes in our neighborhood are already decorated with lights for the holidays. Some are really very elaborate. Not all are in the best of taste. Well, chacun a son goût. What else can one say?

Labels

As we approach the end of another year, I find once again that I have more than enough free self-stick return address labels than I can possibly use in two lifetimes (assuming that I remain at my current address).

These labels come from charities and other donation seekers who seem to multiply with time.

Yes, I know they DO send one another the address lists of donors. Yes, I know they are run like businesses with an eye to the bottom line (we hope). Yes, they do make you feel guilty if you use the labels without sending in a contribution.

It's a good idea to check out the charity or donation seeker before sending money. Heaven knows we would not want our hard-earned dollars ending up in the wrong hands.

http://www.charitywatch.org/toprated.html

Pins

I'm wearing a new shirt for Thanksgiving. It has a checked pattern, button down collar, and, for a storebought shirt, it fits quite well. The label at the back of the neck has a well-known brand on it. But, as with most apparel these days (at least the kind that I'm likely to buy off the rack), it was made overseas. In this case, Cambodia. The label tells me this in English, and also in Spanish ("hecho en Camboya"), the latter, we may suppose, for the benefit of the many people in this country for whom the Spanish language is the preferred medium of communication.

One could go on at length about the marketing of apparel with well-known American brand names, about the transfer of manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor costs, about perceived corporate greed for higher profits and an improved bottom line. But one chooses not to enter that arena.

Let us instead examine the shirt itself. Quality of the material is very good. The sewing of the pockets and the collar and the buttonholes and the sleeves happens to be fair. There are some hanging threads here and there, which must be carefully trimmed away with my wife's nail scissors. Sometimes the buttons are not sewn as securely as one might have expected, but that failing is easily remedied with thread and needle.

The shirt as it comes is neatly folded. A cardboard insert keeps the whole thing stiff and easy to handle. The problem though is that there are a number of pins that hold the fabric so that it retains its tidy rectangular shape against the cardboard. Some pins pierce the fabric as well as the cardboard, others may pin a sleeve to a breast pocket, and still others are hidden in such a way that an unsuspecting person could easily prick a finger in trying to find out how they are attached. Care has to be exercised to avoid such occurrences.

Now, something about those pins. In a quality shirt, the pins are likely to have large round heads, so that they can easily be distinguished by clumsy male fingers from the sharp, pointed end. Cheaper shirts may have pins with old-style tiny heads. These are more dangerous.

On an average man's shirt, there may be as many as ten pins. In the past I have simply discarded the pins, including the large roundheaded ones, by dropping them in the wastebasket. Then one day my wife told me that she could use those pins, so now I collect them every time I open up a new shirt. I place them in an empty film canister (speaking of which, these are fast becoming a rarity with the demise of film as a photographic medium), and when enough of them are collected, the pins end up in the embroidered pin cushion (made in the shape of a colorful turtle) in her sewing box.

Here I will stop and wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving, as I put on my new shirt.

Election

This past weekend saw the election of my wife as the first woman president of our social club, which has nearly a thousand members. At first I had misgivings about her candidacy for the office, though I know full well that she is eminently qualified to undertake the responsibilties attached thereto. My concern had more to do with the extra demands in time and energy that will surely be required of her. She sought my approval and support before she accepted the job, and I, seeing that she was determined to give it her best shot in her inimitable fashion, offered both with a thumbs-up signal at a critical moment in the election process.

She assumes office on the first of the year, and is clearly pleased at the outpouring of warm encouragement from a significant portion of the association's membership.

Club politics can so often be a test of one's equanimity. Factions and cliques are common obstacles that have to be dealt with and opposing viewpoints must be given proper exposure with the grace and savoir faire of a skilled diplomat.

There is no question in my mind that the new president will fill the bill very nicely.

Fall in San Francisco

Conversation

The waiting room is small by the standards of an office with seven doctors' names on the door. There are about thirty steel chairs with fabric seats and backs, in color either black or blue, along with three plain black cube-shaped tables. Current issues of magazines are laid out in haphazard fashion on the tables. Some magazines occupy the chair seats where their readers have hastily left them upon being summoned into their examination rooms. The magazines to which the doctors subscribe may reveal as much about them as about their patients. There are the regulars: Time, Fortune, Business Week, US News and World Report, Sunset, Health, Sports Illustrated, Golf, which one tends to find in most doctors' waiting rooms. There are the ones that appeal to a younger readership: Wired, People, Entertainment Weekly, In Touch ("Who's Britney dating?'). Then there are the magazines aimed at a more affluent clientele: Vanity Fair, Esquire, Southern Accents, Cottage Living, Yachting. Powerboating.

The room is crowded when I first get there. I understand that Mondays are like that. Generally the patients are quietly reading, awaiting their summons. It's cold today, and most of them are warmly clothed.

Two women behind me are engaged in an animated, if one-sided, conversation. The subject is an accident involving a drunken teenager who had crashed into the parked car of a friend of one of the women. No one was hurt, but the car was totaled, and the young man was subsequently arrested. He had no insurance. What is odd about this conversation is that the woman telling it gets no chance to finish any sentence before her (supposedly) attentive listener cuts in with a request for elaboration, an unrelated question, a non sequitur, an inane aside, or some other meaningless interruption. Both women speak in loud tones, as if they were not sitting in a small quiet room, but outdoors on a park bench in the midst of traffic.

At first I do not risk a look in the direction of the conversing women. We are sitting back to back. But through the ruse of looking for another magazine, I get up and glance at them. The one telling about the accident is a large woman in her fifties, with black hair that is wild and frizzled and extends out to either side of her broad face like a woman in the Fusco Brothers comic strip. Her companion is perhaps a couple of decades older, stooped, with stringy blond hair and a beak of a nose. She is the Constant Interrupter.

The two do not appear to be related, except perhaps that the dark-haired one may have brought the older woman for her appointment at this office. By this time the conversation has transmogrified to a discussion about a television soap opera, and the new satellite TV service that the blond woman has just installed at her place, and about how the remote controls that used to work on her TV now no longer work. This is the Constant Interrupter speaking in a complaining tone, and it is the dark-haired woman's turn to interrupt her with 'Did you try doing this or that?' and 'Was it the black remote or the one with the yellow buttons?'

Finally the nurse calls out a name, the blond woman cackles once, rises, is followed by her companion through the door held open for them, and a deathly stillness descends again upon the waiting room.

Getting There

Our fall days here have been just glorious. I'm sure they are in other places as well. But the Bay Area is hard to beat. (So much for Chamber of Commerce promotion.)

* * *

The ol' back is still not one-hundred-percent, but I'll live.

* * *

Started reading 'Mysteries of the Middle Ages' by Thomas Cahill, subtitled 'The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe"'. An absolutely fascinating book. Scholarly yet light in tone, an eye-opener upon a period in history that most of us don't often read about.. The 4-color illustrations and pithy footnotes are delightful. Some years ago I read Cahill's `'Desire of the Everlasting Hills', a study of Jesus in a historical context that was another page-turner.

By the way, did I mention Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower — Al-Qaeda and the Path of 9/11'? Another must-read.

Pain in the Neck

Thanks to all who have looked in from time to time, and apologies for having left my blog unattended for a while. Truth is that I've been physically out of commission (and condition) the past couple of weeks, beginning with the virus I mentioned earlier. Now with antibiotics, the initial problem seems to have been taken care of. I say "seems" because I've yet to check in with the ENT guy following the ten-day course of medication he prescribed. I see him Monday.

How does one describe pain? Not easy, is it? Sometimes I think that the worst kind of pain is the kind that takes over your nervous system, which no positional adjustment can alleviate. Low back pain, the proverbial 'pain in the neck', joint pain, muscle pain. I'm not talking just average, plain vanilla, once-in-a-while pain. I'm talking serious, sharp, piercing, constant, can't-hold-your-head-up-because-your-head-feels-like-a-ripe-watermelon-about-to-be-separated-from-the
thin-vine-that-is-your-neck kind of pain.

So, what did I do? I visited this acupuncturist. Young guy from China, has a small store-front office on a shopping street not to far from where I live. Had seen him before for back pain. Had gotten some relief. Getting in and out of the car took some careful maneuvering. Two sessions with him. Four needles on the back of each hand, another couple on the instep of each foot. Twenty minutes lie-down. Needed help to get on and off the exam table.

Relief was brief. Pain returned not long after I got home. At the second session he tried to stretch and twist my neck. Mistake. I ain't going back to him no more. Or at least I don't think I will.

Finally I called my ENT guy to see if I could resume a medication that had previously been prescribed for pain relief. Thing called gabapentin, used for control of seizures and nerve pain. It's working so far.

This is the longest session I've spent at this keyboard in over a week. Better not overdo it.

Will try and check in later.

Virus

Inevitably it had to happen, I suppose. It wasn't the flu, although the season has already arrived. It was something else. It started with a sore throat and then mutated into something rather more alarming. Had difficulty swallowing, and overnight the side of my throat grew into a large, fleshy lump which was unsightly, to say the least. Threw the perfect symmetry of my countenance into a lopsided caricature of a double chin that seemed to be in the wrong place. Did I say it was alarming? Yes, all right, it was.

My E.N.T. doctor took a look and prescribed a course of antibiotics. Two days later, the thing has subsided a bit, and no longer looks quite so horrible. The doc did provide a modicum of assurance that he thought my deepest fears were unfounded, but he also said that he'll take another look when I finish taking the pills. We hear nowadays about people who get a virus, and in a very short time, it's curtains. Without the doctors even knowing what sort of virus it may have been. That's the world we live in nowadays. A world of nefarious and dangerous things sharing the air we breathe.

So this is my reason for not posting to this blog. You'd think that with all this sitting around at home, I'd think of something to post other than the foregoing. But so far I have not.

Stay tuned, though, won't you?