Category: My life

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What TV programs did you watch as a kid

What television programs did you watch when you were growing up? My Story Worth for this week.

The ubiquity of television
We were lucky to have two televisions when I was growing up, and one of them lodged in my room. On the downside, both were black and white and neither got good reception. If you have seen video of the moon landing you know what it looked like on our TV most of the time. My father did not watch TV much but when he did watch “Mannix” or “The Untouchables,” it was my task to stand near the TV and move the antenna as appropriate. It never really worked. I also functioned as remote control.
We got the big three networks, plus a local channel and PBS. I was always glad if a favorite program was on NBC-4, because that channel got the best reception.
Westerns
The TV was on almost all the time when I was home. Let me be clear, I turned my TV on. It was my own doing. I just like to have something. Still do, although now it can be computer screen. Usually it was just on and I was not paying much attention. I liked westerns, most of which I saw in reruns. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all and that is what I liked about them. The only way I can differentiate them is when I recall the theme songs. I remember “Bonanza,” “Rawhide,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Bat Masterson” & “Wyatt Earp.” My parents told me that I used to sing the theme song from “Wyatt Earp.” The chorus repeated, “Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, brave, contagious & old.” I learned later that Wyatt was brave, courageous & bold.
The “Rifleman” body count
The basis of many of these shows was absurd. Consider “The Rifleman,” staring the fierce Chuck Connors. The story is that he is an ordinary rancher who lives near a small town on the prairie. For such a small place, it attracts more than its share of bad guys who need killin’. By the end of most shows, the Rifleman has reluctantly dispatched these bad guys to the promised land – bad guys, plural. Besides the mystery as to why bad guys would come to that small town in general, is the specific mystery about why any of them would make trouble. The murderous alacrity of the rifleman surely would discourage them. Somebody on Internet counted and found that the Rifleman shot 114 men, or an average of 2 1/2 per show.
Star Trek
Better than westerns, however, I liked science fiction, but there were only three that I recall – “Twilight Zone,” “Outer Limits” & “Star Trek.” I got to know these mostly in reruns and I still watch “Twilight Zone” marathons. I was one of the few original “Star Trek” fans. I watched its prime time three years, their five-year mission to explore strange new worlds cut short by bad ratings. “Star Trek” found its audience – college kids – only when they started to do reruns in the early evenings.
Another Internet truth, so it must be true, debunks the myth that the guys on Star Trek with the red shirts always get killed. Of course, when Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the guy with the red shirt beam down to the planet, you know who ain’t coming back.
Risky red shirts
But there are evidently more red shirts than any other type. Some nerd has done the math. More red shirts died on-screen than any other kind of member of the crew (10 gold-shirted, which are command personnel; eight blue-shirted, who are scientists; and 25 red-shirted). However, those calculations do not take into account that there are apparently way more red shirts on the Enterprise to start with than any other crew type.
Out of 239 red shirts, 25 died, about 10%. Out of 55 gold shirts, 10 died, 18%. So you are more likely to die as a gold-shirted command officer. Only 6% of the blue shirted scientists didn’t make it back. So the gold shirted command types are the most at risk. Generally, working on the Enterprise is very dangerous, sure not as bad as making trouble in the Rifleman town, but worse than being in most modern war zones.
TV babes
I must add a special section on teenage TV crushes. Some TV shows I watched mostly because of the pretty women stars. My favorite was Dianne Rigg on “The Avengers.” Others included Samantha on “Bewitched,” Jeanie on “I Dream of Jennie” and Maryanne on “Gilligan’s Island.” These were objectively horrible shows, but I bet lots of boys 13-15 watched them anyway.
Here’s Johnny
I joined the swim team in HS and that changed my television habits, among other things. The workouts started right after school and we finished about 5:30. We used goggles, but the chlorine in the pool still irritated our eyes and swim workouts are physically tough. I used to lift weights too, and that was hard to do right after a swim workout. My adaptation was to come home, eat a fast supper and then take a nap for a couple hours to rest my body and let my eyes clear. I would wake up around 9 and do a little homework and then lift weights during Johnny Carson. I thought Johnny Carson was so cool. I especially liked guests like Rodney Dangerfield & Don Rickles.
The wonders of cable TV and the Internet mean that I can watch all those old programs just about on demand. My memory of them is better than they really were.

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Running, being and artery disease

Running was a big part of my life.  I ran for the usual reason like fitness & weight control, but I mostly ran for what I can only call spiritual reasons.  Running was how I felt in touch with myself and the world.  The rhythm of my breathing & the sounds of my footfalls, especially on gravel, combined with the more acute consciousness of my surroundings enhanced by the exercise made the whole thing a kind of meditation in motion.
Running away or running to
I started to run earnestly in the late 1970s.  There were reasons in my personal life.  I broke up with a long-term girlfriend.  I was becoming disenchanted with grad-school.  It was just a time of uncertainty and running seemed to fill in.  I cannot discount societal factors, however.  Running was in style. Whole books were written about it.  But maybe the biggest factor was the invention of good running shoes. Nike came out with their “waffle trainers.”  Until that time, running was too destructive on your knees and feet to be practical for anybody over the age of twenty-five.  There was a kind of folk wisdom, “the legs go first,” and it was true.
The 30+ years run
For the next thirty-some years, I ran regularly.  I started on the lake trails in Madison and Milwaukee, along Mendota and Michigan respectively.  I started to push longer and longer, eventually joyfully going on twelve-mile runs.  When I got the job in the FS, I took my running international.  I don’t like eucalyptus plantations because they support little wildlife because nothing much eats the leaves, even bugs, but eucalyptus plantations in Brazil were wonderful places to run because precisely because there are not many bugs.  My favorite trail in Norway went through the King’s farm, open to all but with perfectly maintained gravel trails and ideal Nordic farm scenery.  They said that old King Olaf sometimes walked around those trails, but I never saw him.  Krakow featured trails through a beautiful beech forest culminating at a big mound dedicated to national hero Josef Pilsudski.  But probably my favorite trail was closer to home. I used to call it my “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” run.  A long run could encompass the Capitol, Jefferson & Lincoln Memorials, and the various wonders of the Smithsonian. Besides the area around Capitol Hill, it was mostly flat and over well-maintained gravel paths.  I much prefer to run on gravel over concrete or asphalt.  I could list dozens of other favorite trails, but I am likely already being tedious.
A really debilitating injury
I found a nice running trail in Brasília along Lake Paranoá, and it was there that my decades-long running adventure ended abruptly.  It was on February 2, 2012 – Groundhog Day.  I was accustomed to pulls and pains associated with running.  I usually could just ignore them, maybe limp a little, but no injury stopped me from running for more than a few days.
A new kind of pain 
This time was different.  I thought it was just a shin splint.  I stopped running and in a very short time the pain stopped. That was easy.  I started running again and the pain came right back.  It was feeling different from any I felt before.  It was not so much a pain as an extreme fatigue.  I decided to give up the run for the day and walk home. But walking was not less painful.  I could go only about 100 yards before the pain got acute. But it went away almost immediately when I stopped, only to come right back when I moved.  It took me a long time to get home.
Walking hurt so much that I started riding my bike even the short distances to the restaurants and grocery stores nearby.  It hurt to ride the bike too, but not nearly as much. It was bearable.
This injury scared me.  Aspirin had no effect on the pain. Not being able to run was bad.  Not being able to walk was terrible.  But I still figured it was some kind of pull or tear.  It gradually got better, but I did not try to run again for fear of repeating.
Happened again
Then it happened in the other leg.  I was not running this time.  In fact, I notice it while driving. I was headed to Georgia for a conference on longleaf pine.  I was looking forward to exploring Savannah on foot.  This was less enjoyable with the pain.  I had trouble on the field trips.  I felt embarrassed as people older and apparently more infirm were easily able to do what I had trouble. I limped along.
This time, I figured I should see a doctor
Turns out that I had an aneurysm knee behind my knee.  They did some ultrasound and found I had peripheral artery disease (PAD).  This seemed very unfair to me, not that nature is fair.  This is the kind of thing common in people who do not exercise much, often those who smoke or have high blood pressure.  I had none of the usual markers.  The doctor gave me a long explanation, which boiled down to a simple, “shit happens.”   I don’t think he believed me when I told him that I exercised all the time.
There were two options.  You can get surgery to bypass the problem and put in stents.  In time, this would restore much of the mobility and it would relieve the pain almost immediately.  The other option was to exercise enough to mitigate the condition.   My explanation is simplistic and no doubt wrong in detail, but as I understand it the exercise creates new channels for the blood, expanding arteries.
Surgery or not
The doctors told me that the choice was mine, although they seemed to favor the surgical option, since it would relieve the immediate pain.  I don’t think they had confidence that I would exercise enough to fix the problem.  I chose the non-surgical option.  They gave me some blood thinning medication and told me to come right back if the acute pain returned, warning me that ignoring the condition was very dumb.  The condition could result in amputation or death if left untreated. I had been twice lucky, but maybe three strikes and I would be out.  They also wanted to do another ultrasound in six months.
Painful progress
Progress was painful, as the doctors warned.  I developed a kind of a system. I would walk as far as I could tolerate and then rest for 30 seconds.  I timed it.  It was remarkable how much it hurt and how fast the pain stopped when I stopped.  The muscle was starved for oxygen. That is why it hurt.  The pipeline was just too narrow.  When it got a chance to catch up, the pain was done.
I walked every day using this system.  I am not sure exactly when it got better.  One day I just noticed that I was not stopping for those “blood breaks.”   My legs still were not as good as before, but they were functional.
The hiking challenge
Alex wanted to go hiking in Utah, but the friend he had planned to accompany him dropped out. I was second choice.  I was happy to go, but still afraid of my legs not working well enough. I had the hiking poles, so I figured that I would be okay.  Even if my legs had been perfect, I cannot keep up with Alex. Age does that.  With that caveat, I went.  I did not always feel great, but I did manage all the hikes, albeit not so fast.
Next time I went in for the ultra-sound, they told me that my legs were better, not great but better.   They said that I could go to a year between appointments.  Last year (2018), I was lucky enough to get a WAE assignment to São Paulo.  I walked every day to and from the Consulate. It took about an hour each way and sometimes I would have to let my legs rest, but generally it got better and better.
When I came back, I felt that there was a quantum change.  My now annual ultra-sound confirmed it. The doctors were surprised.  It was as good as surgery would have done, maybe better.  I just got a letter from the doctor asking me to make an appointment for this year’s tests.
Back to old habits
Returning to running, I am going to try to return to running.  October 15-November 15 is the best running season in Virginia, so I am resolved to restart my running program next Tuesday.  I don’t think I will take my watch, so as not to be too discouraged by the slow time.  I will never get back to what I was, but even absent the PAD problem my 64-year-old self would not be as fast as my 56-year-old self.  At least now I have an excuse.

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What are some of your special talents

What are some of your special talents? Story worth

There is an old saying that if you really want to flatter somebody, tell them exactly what they think of themselves.  Since this a self-assessment, please take that into account.

First the negative.  I am a talent-free individual when it comes to arts, crafts or music.  I could not learn an instrument.  They kicked me out of the music program in 6th grade and told me not to come back.  I did better in art class in 7th grade but showed no special talent.  I can remember the words to lots of songs and I like to sing but nobody likes to listen to me doing it.  I can fix the breaks on my bike. If I try to fix much else, there are lots of left-over parts and “improvisation.”

Improvisation.  That is a sort of talent and I am reasonably good at that.  I also think I can write well, or at least rapidly.  And I am an entertaining public speaker. It was one of my strengths in the FS. At one time, I could give presentations in Norwegian, Polish or Portuguese and was in demand. Of course, it may have been mostly because I would do it.  Many colleagues avoided public presentations for fear of getting in trouble for what they said.  I had a talent for avoiding trouble in public presentations.  I am not sure it is a good talent, but I can talk around an issue and give authoritative answers while not coming down to a single position.  I really do believe in pluralism, so it was not as much a challenge accepting many positions.

The work of art I have been working on for years is my forest.  It is shaping up in ways better than I imagined but also according to some of what I did or had done.  I was looking over some of my blog entries about conservation.  I kept notes. I travelled a lot, visited lots of forest types, talked to lots of people and came found lots of ideas to apply to my small patch of land, and took pictures.  I sometimes feel small when people talk about managing thousands of acres; my big plans often involve acreage in the single digits. On the other hand, I have put my feet on most of my acres.  I have put my hands on many of the seedlings.   Though I know that it is unrequited, I love the land and I think that makes a difference to what I do on it.  The passion for the land, the curiosity to learn and apply more, this is a type talent.  They result on the land is a symphony.

When I shuffle off this mortal coil, I will leave three legacies – my family, my work and my land.  None have been my creations, but I have been an interactive in each.  I rarely write about the family, even though they are most important because they have their own stories to tell.  My work once seemed the most important thing in the world, but the perspective of time shows that I just held a place that many others could have done.  The land will persist. The decisions will be evident for decades, even if nobody knows those choices were mine.
There is a beautiful burr oak on the playground at Dover Street School. It greeted me as a mature tree when I showed up for my first kindergarten class.  It is there still sixty years later.  I have no idea who planted it or when.  But the legacy of that person has given me joy for – literally – almost sixty years.  If I can have a legacy like that, I will be content.  That is talent and that is special.
 
 
 

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Growing up in Milwaukee

Some stream of consciousness thoughts about growing up in Milwaukee.
We were poor by today’s standards, although the comparison is unfair. Everybody was poor in the past, since progress and innovation has made once scarce luxuries into common necessities. Of course, it worked the other way around too. My father often pointed out how easy we had it compared to when he was growing up.

Like most Americans, we called ourselves middle class, although I think we would have chosen the description working class had it been available. Milwaukee was a working-class city. I could see a couple of steel mills and a tannery from our kitchen window. Within walking distance were factories that made industrial equipment, cement and very good bratwurst & kielbasa. The workers at these places could walk to work.

Our neighborhood was “blighted” during part of my childhood, at least that is what the city told my father. My parents worried that they would punch a freeway through our neighborhood. They tended to do that to blighted neighborhoods. I-94 ended up about a mile to the west. That is another thing we could see from the kitchen window. Cars used to make a lot more pollution in those days and so there was a yellow smudge line along the western horizon except on windy days. The air was not clean generally. We forget sometimes how it was in industrial cities during the 1960s. Besides the cars, the steel mills to the south and the Solvay Coke & Gas plant to the north ensured that we got a variety of flavors added to our air. The Solvay Coke & Gas plant flared methane as a byproduct and the eternal flame glowed day and night. The east wind that blew cool air off Lake Michigan brought the smell of the sewage plant. We did not have any fresh air and got used to that. When I came back to Milwaukee from college in Stevens Point, Wisconsin is the first time I noticed the special smells of my native city.

But I do not want to leave the impression of dirt and blight. It was not like that. Milwaukee was a great place to grow up. Those same factories that produced that pollution also provided plentiful jobs. We had lots of parks and back then Milwaukee was very peaceful. We had almost no crime and families were generally stable. Kids used to “fight” all the time, but never with the intention of hurting each other significantly and we stopped fighting if there was any blood or sign of real injury. Our schools were crowded, but competently run and students were reasonably well behaved. We had good local libraries, so everybody who wanted had free access to the accumulated knowledge of the world. Our Milwaukee Public Museum was a true gem and our zoo was great. We had public pools and you could swim in Lake Michigan if you could tolerate the cold.

We rarely went anywhere and few people moved in or out during my childhood. We could wander only as far as we could reasonably walk in one day. We had stability.

We were baby-boom kids and there were lots of us, the biggest generation in American history. Schools were crowded and the cities strained to build more. Our elders and the authorities were not sure what to do with us, so they often tried just to chase us away.
The cops were always chasing us out of parks, out of businesses or just asking us to move along when we got together in groups. There was a curfew for kids and you had to be home by 11pm. The cops enforced the curfew. I do not recall being afraid of the cops generally, but I do remember that we just ran away when we saw a squad car. We used to play football in the road. The cops would – justifiably – chase us out. We used to play football in nearby empty lots. The cops would chase us out of these places only after someone called them, but someone always did. That meant that our games usually lasted only around 20 minutes.
Most people did not call the cops on us unless mightily provoked but there were three who always did, maybe because of their proximity to fields where we played. The only one whose name we really knew was Mr. Reiner. He disliked kids in general and would call the cops when we walked anywhere near his house. The cops would come and kick us out, but they would sometimes explain that it was only because of him. He took the extraordinary step of painting in block letters on the side of his own garage – “Mothers watch your children.” A little down the road was a guy we just called “The Crab.” He was odd. He lived with his mother and was friendly to individual boys, but hostile to groups. My mother told me stay clear of such guys and I did. He called the cops as soon he spotted us, assuming we would soon be up to no good in his eyes. The last guy we called the “God D**M Man” because he would always come out swearing at us. He tended to yell and swear before he called the cops, so we would withdraw a little until he went in and then come back. The cops were usually okay to us. They would tell us to go to the park and play, where other cops would tell us to go home if we hung around too long.

Just as we were unaware that our baby-boom status was a departure from tradition, we did not know that we were the tail end of ethnic America. A generation earlier, our parents had been members of ethnic groups. They spoke different languages at home and were vaguely or openly hostile to other groups. Our generation remembered the ethnicity and would respond to surprising frequent question, “What are you?” by describing our purported ethnic heritage, but it didn’t make much difference.

I do recall a funny case of prominent ethnicity involving my father and our neighbor John Domelewski. They were arguing because John D accused us kids of making a mess in the alley. My father jumped to our defense, since he thought that he should enjoy a monopoly of yelling at his kid. John D and my old man were yelling loud enough to attract the attention of Mr. Gebhardt. Mr. Gebhardt was proudly German and a former Marine. He had the thickest white hair I have ever seen, trimmed to a flat head crew cut. I always thought he looked like a bald eagle. I think he would have been pleased.

Anyway, my father was calling John D a dumb pollock and John D was calling my father a stupid pollock. I don’t doubt that Mr. Gebhardt thought that both were right. They would not have come to blows. My father and John D were not that sort. But they calmed down and when they did they discovered that we kids were indeed guilty as John Domeleski said.
We had been playing in the alley and catching bubble bees in peanut butter jars. The trick was to catch the bee, shake the jar to make it mad and then release it close or onto a nearby friend. They rarely stung, but if they did it was just a temporary pain. If you cried about it, you suffered the greater pain of being ridiculed, but the anger option was available. I do not recall all the details, but someone had broken the bee jar in the alley and then, as often happens, we made a bigger mess. We had to clean up the whole alley, even though our mess was localized. My father and John Domelweski retired to their preferred activity of drinking beer as they watched us work.

I think this stands out in my memory for a few reasons. First, my father never got angry like that. This was odd. Second, parents, neighbors, cops and teachers – all adults – usually stood in solidarity against kids. If we were accused, we were usually thought to be guilty or at least culpable.

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Stevens Point, Lizard Mound, Hero Poles and good beer

Not ready for college
I was not ready to go to college when I went to college. My father was very supportive, but he had no experience with higher education. I didn’t have any close friends or older siblings who went to college. I was a stranger in a strange land with only a vague notion, not even a formed idea, about what I should do.

So I drank beer and “partied.” It is hard for me today to understand the young man I was. I had no real concept of my future, or even that there was a future that would include me. The odd thing is not that I felt like that, but that I don’t recall that it even bothered me. I guess I kind of lived in the present and had confidence that the future would sort itself.

I think today the school would have wanted to do some sort of intervention and sort me out. My 1.6 GPA would have been one indicator of trouble. But I am glad that I got to sort it out myself and with the help of friends. I don’t trust professionals on this sort of thing.
I stopped off at Stevens Point today and walked around on the campus and in the woods. They have done a good job managing the woods and wildlife. The forests and fields north of campus are the laboratory for the students. There were bunches of kids looking for bugs. They were assigned to find and study the diversity.

Lizard mound and ancient Native Americans
Some things we will never know in detail and maybe there is not all that much to know. We don’t know who build the lizard mounds. We can speculate about why, but we really don’t know. Some things are lost to history, or in this case prehistory.

Lizard Mound park doesn’t get many visitors, although it looks like they bring school groups here. There was one guy sitting at the picnic table. He was making art out of pieces of birch bark. Seemed a pleasant enough guy. He said that he had previously lived in his vehicle, but now had a place to live. He said that he works enough to make money when he needs money, but does not need to work that much. I asked him if he needed anything, but he said no. Maybe he is just content. He gave me a flower made of birch bark and I gave him one of my tree farm mugs. The park includes mounds shaped like animals. What significance these had we can never know.

Never know. That is an interesting concept. We like to think that in the fullness of time, with new technology etc, but absent the invention of a time machine, we will never know. And maybe it does not matter. It is nice to have a feeling of mystery.

We know that these mounds were built between AD 500 and 1000. No mounds were build here in the last 1000 years. What happened to the people is unknowable. Well, we might be able to speculate if we took DNA. I walked around the mounds. There are few markers. If you didn’t know they were mounds you would not think much about them. It was very quiet, however.

The birch bark guy told me that I was lucky to come this week, since until a couple weeks ago the black flies and mosquitoes made a comfortable walk impossible.
My walk was pleasant. Pictures are from around the walk. I like the old fashioned pump. You don’t see them around very much anymore.

For your freedom and ours
On the way into Stevens Point is a monument to Casimir Pulaski, hero of Poland and America. For those unfamiliar, Pulaski came to America to help us during the revolution and was killed by British grapeshot while rallying troops in Savannah. He volunteered to fight for America and died in our cause.

I stopped off for a closer look. It is mostly about Polish-Americans who found for Poland during WWI. About 300 from Northern Wisconsin and Michigan went to fight for the old country.

Point Special Beer

A visit to Stevens Point would not be complete w/o a visit to Point Brewery. I drank a lot of that beer when I was at UWSP. I did not much like it, but it was cheap and available. It is not great beer, but it is one of my traditions. I have some rituals.

They do make a decent IPA. I bought a twelve pack of Point Special (tradition) and a six pack of IPA (actually good).

Good fast food
Speaking of actually good, I went to Rocky Roccoco and A&W. They share the same building, so I can have Rocky’s pizza and A&W Root beer. I like Rocky’s pizza a lot and I would go there even if it was not a tradition.

I am staying at Comfort Inn on County Trunk V near Baraboo. Tomorrow I will meet people at Aldo Leopold. The exit at County Trunk V has the Rocky’s, A&W and a Culver’s. A little bit of heaven.

My pictures show the Pulaski monument. Next is the Point Brewery and then Rocky’s and A&W. Last picture is a pine and a birch. This is relevant because Aldo Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand” talks about birch and pine.

WPA builds parks
Just a few more pictures.

I visited Iverson Park in Stevens Point. It was created during the 1930s and the structures were build by the WPA. Very attractive.

The first three pictures show Iverson Park. When I first went to UWSP, we had a party there and I swam in the Little Plover River. I was so surprised that you could swim in a river. At that time swimming in the Milwaukee rivers would have been unthinkable. Penultimate picture is the College of Natural Resources at UWSP. Last is a white ash tree beginning to turn. As I mentioned in previous posts re ash trees, the green ash and allied tend to turn brilliant gold. The white ash turns more purple.

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Chicago 2

Wandered Chicago a little and met Michael W. Fox for a few beers and pizza.

We passed the statue of a giant Boomer, so Mariza can see in the first picture.

Christine Johnson will be pleased to know that we went to the original Pizza Uno, as you can see in the second picture.

Picture #3 shows the Trump building. He insists on putting his name on the side. Bad form.
I took the Metro into town from my hotel near O’Hare. I like to take the train better than driving. Driving in the cities makes me nervous. Last picture is from the Metro window.

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Chesapeake Porter at Gordon Biersch

Went to Gordon Biersch for a party featuring Chesapeake Porter, beer made according to an old recipe.

We got a short lecture about lagers and ales. Lagers are made a lower temperatures and have a crisper flavor.

In the old days, beer was generally dark. A big reason was that technologies were not well developed and the darker beers were easier to make. They also hit impurities better. As tech improved, it because easier to make lighter beers.  As clear glass cups came to replace mugs or steins, people could see their beer and liked it clearer.

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Busch Gardens

Went to Amber Ox in Williamsburg with Mariza & Brendan. We will go to Busch Gardens tomorrow.

We have enjoyed Busch Gardens since the 1980s. I still enjoy the roller coasters, but I find my advancing age pounds me harder, so I cannot stand to go time after time. A nice thing is that Busch Gardens is pretty. It is a garden, as the name implies. I also appreciate the landscape planning. The park is compact, but you get the impression of significant distance as you pass from one of the theme areas to another.

Whole family went down to Busch Gardens. I like Busch Gardens more than most amusement parks because it is really a garden. They do an excellent job of keeping the trees and plants healthy. In one of my pictures you can see their horse pasture. I noticed that the large white oak in the middle is very robust.

It has a European theme, going from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Italy & France, including New France, i.e. frontier Canada. It is well laid out, giving the impression of more space than is actually there. Such parks are good places to test out theories and practices of urban planning.

We spent a lot of time in the Festhaus in Germany with the beer and brats.

I enjoy the roller coasters. Unfortunately, my body is not as resilient as once was and if I go too much I get queasy headache. But I enjoyed twice on Apollo’s Chariot, once each on the Griffin and Invader. Apollo’s Chariot and Griffin both feature an exciting initial plunge. You go straight down and cannot see the tracks. It is worth the extra wait to be in the front car for that reason.

We stayed overnight in Williamsburg. Watched “Fast and Furious 7”. I generally dislike car movies, but this one was fun because it was self-aware and made fun of its own excesses. In one scene, the cars drop out of an airplane and the drivers seem able to steer while falling through the air. In another Dwayne – “the Rock” – Johnson needs to help his friends. He has a broken arm, but flexes his massive muscle and breaks out of the cast. After that, former broken arm not hindering, he takes a 50 caliber machine gun and shoots up various bad guys.

Brendan seems a real expert on these movies and his commentary was useful. Chrissy & I are now going to watch “Fast and Furious 8,” which is widely acknowledged to be the best of the genre. And we have on the list to watch “Hobbes and Shaw”, where the Rock (Hobbes) teams up with erstwhile bad guy Shaw to stop a rogue British agent, who coincidentally is Shaw’s sister. Can’t wait.

“Hobbes & Shaw” is designed to further the “Fast & Furious” franchise while icing out Vin Diesel. The word is that he and the Rock get along poorly. Vin rightly sees the Rock as a bigger and better version of himself. The Rock has real charisma, while Vin is just ersatz. Who knew there was so much to know?

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What do you admire about your parents

My story worth for this week. A little repetitive but I think still good. “What do you admire about your parents?”

My father Never missed a day at work

My father went to work every day. I do not remember him missing even one day of work for any reason at all. He went to work when he felt good; he went to work when he felt bad. He never needed a “mental health day.” His job was physically hard and not fun intellectually, yet he persisted to support his family. He taught me that all work deserved respect and that you earned self-respect by the work you did. He lived simply and did not take much for himself, and he did not complain. His hard work and frugality made me think that we were rich when I was a kid. Only as an adult did I come to realize that we were comparatively poor. My father never finished 10th Grade, yet his constant reading gave him an admirable education, so he could hold his own in intellectual discussions with guys like me with fancy pants educations.

Heroic experiences
My father served the USA in World War II in the Army Air Corps. He got seven battle stars and a purple heart in the Battle of the Bulge. Yet he talked about it so little that I was only vaguely aware of his record. He was a union steward (longshoreman) when I was a little kid. He later soured on the union. I have no idea why. But never on the “working man.” He had that quiet dignity of the greatest generation. Don’t brag about the things you have done and certainly do not claim credit for things you are “gonna do.”

One memory vignette – As I said, he never much talked about his war experience, but there was one time when I saw the memory affect him. I had a Pink Floyd song called “Echoes.” It started with the sonar ping sound. This upset the old man, and he was rarely upset. It evidently reminded him of being on a troop ship crossing the Atlantic infested by Nazi U-Boats. He would not elaborate.

Love of education
Despite his own lack of formal education (maybe because), my father just assumed I would go to college and passed that to me. This is something I did not appreciate until I was an adult. Most people in my socioeconomic group did not go to college. We had no family history of higher education, and the old man knew nothing about it in practical terms, but he managed to boost my sister and me beyond what he could do or even understand.

My mother
Giving her a fair shake
I worry that I don’t give my mother a fair shake. A lot that I know about my father I learned when I was an adult, but I never knew my mother when I was an adult, since she died when I was seventeen. My impressions are a those of a child, at best teenager, but I can see a lot to admire with my adult experience.

Do for others and make it look natural
My mother was a very generous and unselfish person. As with my father, I only really understood what she did for me, sacrificed for me after I was an adult and after she was gone. As I wrote elsewhere, all I needed do was to mention an interest in a subject and a book about that subject would soon appear. Before I could go there alone, she took me to our neighborhood library – Llewellyn – and introduced me to the books there. When I got old enough to go there myself, she still always looked at the books I brought home and asked me about them. This was harder than I thought. She had to do some research about the subject, a much harder task in those pre-Internet days.

She always put others before herself, but she did it in such an unselfish way that the recipients were not always aware. She would work very hard on something and then make it look like it was no trouble. It took a lot of work for her to make things look spontaneous. I am not sure this is a good thing in working life, since you don’t get credit. I give her credit now, but that is a little too late. I would castigate my childish self, but there is no point. All I can do now is “pay it forward.” I think she would have been content with that, since it is behaving like she did.

The family ecology – sisters Florence & Lorainne

I have talked about my mother and my father individually. That gives an incomplete picture. As a couple, they were a team and as a team they were part of a bigger ecology of our extended family, mostly my mother’s sisters and my cousins. The total of this system was much greater than the sum of its parts. This became very clear after my mother died. I was almost an adult, going into my last year in HS. My sister Chris is two years younger. We were old enough to be autonomous but not old enough to take care of ourselves, especially emotionally. My mother’s sisters Florence and Lorraine (they don’t give kids those sorts of names anymore) stepped right in. They helped make meals, helped my father adjust emotionally, helped my sister and me adjust. They finished the job my mother had begun.

Intellectual life
My aunts, especially my Aunt Lorraine, were very well read. My aunt Lorraine and I often discussed history. More a debate was when we discussed biology. My aunts had serious doubts about the theory of evolution. Me on the other hand … the only “advanced” course they ever put me into was advanced biology. My teacher told us that it was impossible to understand biology w/o reference to the theory of evolution and I thought he was 100% right. Suffice it to say, we disagreed. You can disagree w/o being disagreeable. My aunts made arguments that I thought were completely wrong but very well presented. I respected them and their faith. They respected of me and my heretical ideas. Usually at the end of the discussion they would praise my knowledge and persistence but point out that I didn’t know everything. My erudite Aunt Lorraine would sometimes quote Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I would joke that my name was not Horatio, and then would wander off back to school or wherever I was going.

My pictures are not part of the story. They are from Mosaic this morning. Chrissy & I went to a morning movie and then lunch. Last picture is a tiger swallowtail on Chrissy’s flowers this morning.

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What were you like when you were 60?

This story worth is out of order, but I thought it was a good follow-up to the last one.

What were you like when you were 60?

People long for and look back to the glories of their youth. I was a happy man when I was young. I am happier now. My 60th years was the best of times, at least so far. To explain, I will go a little before my 60th year.

Bookends
I was 59 when I finished up in Brazil. This was the bookend of my career. My first foreign post was Brazil, and my last. As a young and green officer, I had more energy and confidence than I did competence. I think I did a decent job, but it always nagged me how much I could have done better. When I got the opportunity to be public affairs officer in Brazil, I grabbed it with both hands. The FS gave me Portuguese training again, but my 20-year-old Portuguese came back quickly. I was able to relearn the language much faster than I learned the first time and to take it to levels I had never before reached. Easier to get home when you start off on third base. I could devote my time to studying real topics in Portuguese, not just the language itself, and really get to know the country. I fell in love with Brazil and just wanted to get to know it better. I think Brazilians could tell and their enthusiasm for the USA often matched mine for Brazil. I had a great time from the time I landed In Brasília until I left. I visited much of the country from the São Paulo and Rio to the remote part of the Amazon and met friendly & cooperative people wherever I went.

The wisdom of puppies
Why do people like dogs so much? Because they like us. Not to trivialize it, but diplomats can learn a lot from dogs, especially in public diplomacy. Of course, you must follow up with something substantial. I was truly interested in Brazil and eager to find places where Brazilians and Americans could benefit mutually. Suffice to say that I felt that I did the best job I could and having done that, I could move on to something new.

You ought to be in a museum
State Department had another gift for me in the form of an assignment at Smithsonian as Senior International Adviser. My job, as the name implies, was to advise. It meant that I got to meet museum directors, scholars and artists and tried to find ways to be useful. One of my assignments was to get to known Smithsonian, a task I eagerly undertook. Most of my practical work involved connecting Smithsonian folks with State. It was simple for me but nearly impossible for them. State can be opaque to outsiders. I knew who to call, what to say and where to go, or at least the path to get there. We underestimate the value of connectors. I realized that while I rarely DID anything, I enabled others to do a lot. Acting as connectors and catalysts is the essence of diplomacy.

Ready to go, but no place to be
The year I turned 60, I was living a dream. After that, what was left? I had already been public affairs officer in Brazil. I could do similar work elsewhere, but these were lateral moves and I might not be as lucky as I had been in Brazil. I was unenthusiastic about most domestic jobs. I am not a good bureaucrat, and I knew I would not be a very good “high official.” I had neither the temperament nor the desire.

The bridge to the end
I took a bridge assignment as Senior Adviser for Think Tanks & NGOs. This was also a gift assignment. As a retired man, I love to go to talks at think tanks and talk to the people there. This WAS my job. My assignment was to write a report about how think tanks and thought leaders influence developments in things State Department thinks important. As usual, I found that I would be breaking no new ground. I spend my first weeks just reading what had been written on the subject. Then I started to reach out. Spoiler alert – if you want to know about think tanks and how they work, you can start – AND pretty much finish – with James McGann and the Think Tanks and Civil Society program at the University of Pennsylvania. I went to visit McGann in Philadelphia. He was very helpful, and he has a whole team working on the subject. Supplied with that information and the pathways to get more, all I needed do was fill in specifics to our needs.

I had no real deadline to finish my report and in most ways the process of researching it was the most important part of the job. Once again, I was falling into the connector role, linking State officials with scholars studying things we needed to know. It was a satisfying job, but it was a kind of “Land of the Lotus Eaters” satisfaction. My father once warned me that the worst thing young men could get was a good job with no future – good enough to hold you but not taking you anywhere. It goes for old men too. In State there are people who are just there. They sometimes perform useful services, and many had glorious pasts, but they have not future.

Don’t hang around like a fart in a phone booth
This I didn’t want this to be my fate and I felt I was no longer adding significant value to State Department. When I got my final promotion, to Minster Councilor (this means something to FS colleagues if nobody else), I decided to retire. The speed and determination of this decision surprised me. If you had asked me a minute before I got the word, I think I would have been diffident. But I decided in that minute and immediately called HR to get retirement moving. The woman at the other of the line was surprised. “You just got promoted,” she said, “Nobody retires just after they get promoted.” But I did.
Take Jerry Seinfeld’s advice to George, “Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, say goodnight and walk off.”

On the plus side, this gave me a deadline. I had a couple weeks to finish my report on think tanks and I finished. I sometimes wonder if anybody read it, but I finished it and I thought it was good. I learned a lot in the process. On the downside … well there was no downside, except that I was afraid.

As I wrote elsewhere, FS is a totalitarian system. My identity was that of a Foreign Service Officer. I had not stood alone for more than 30 years. Could I still do it? Thinking like the public diplomacy professional I had become; I knew I needed a title. Retired would not do. So, I developed the tripartite title I still have – Gentleman of Leisure, Conservationist & President of the Virginia Tree Farm Foundation. The last one I had just acquired. It was the only part of my title that required ratification by anyone besides myself. Since I still sometimes do short-term assignments for State, I thought of adding “sometime diplomat,” but so far have no added that to my titles.

End and beginning
I went to the retirement transition seminar at the Foreign Service Institute. It is a really great thing State offers its soon to be former employers. Having the chance to talk with colleagues and hear the talks of experts is a useful way to decompress and adapt to the changed life. In theory, State Department gets to reabsorb some of the knowledge acquired over the years, but I don’t know how much that worked. My seminar was March-April 2016. This is the best time to take the seminar, and not just because springtime is glorious in Northern Virginia, since most of the people in it are retiring voluntarily or because they have reached mandatory retirement age. If you take it in fall/winter, there are more people who were pushed out in our up-or-out system. I understand that it is a less happy group.

My last official day as a Foreign Service Officer was April 30, 2016. I had been an FSO for 31 years and 7 months. Because I had almost never taken any sick leave and you can apply unused sick leave to retirement, my official length of service was something like 32 years and 9 months.

In May 2016, I turned 61 for the first time in decades with no place I had to be, but lots of places I wanted to go.