My wife: her smart, nay brilliant solution

I started getting nervous

smartIt was the day before I retired. My wife was done with school for the semester; she’s an ENL (English as a New Language) teacher.

I got back home from the allergist, with plans for us to see a play that afternoon. She asked me if I would help her move the sofa so she could vacuum underneath. I say, “No.” Actually, I said, “NOOOOOOOOO!” I had a stack of time-sensitive tasks to do involving making sure my insurance, and HER insurance, were in place on July 1.

My work-related insurance would term out when I went on Medicare, and I was dealing with three different insurance vendors, plus the Social Security Administration. I didn’t finish the process until the following week.

So I started getting nervous. She’s going to be off all summer. I am too, for the first time since 11th grade. How is this going to work out? I’d heard stories about clashes between other married couples when she was not working outside the home and he retired from his job.

I have boxes of “stuff” to sort through after a quarter century of employment with the same entity. Where am I going to put those extra books? What do I keep and what do I chuck?

Then my smart wife did something brilliant: she left me. And she took our daughter. It was only for three days, July 2-4, to New York City, but it was long enough to get through a pile of paperwork, write a few blog posts (including this one), and start the decluttering process.

I don’t know if it was a strategic move – she DID invite me to go with them – but it was extremely helpful in getting settled in the post-employment mode. I also got to listen to the music at a slightly higher decibel than would be suitable in a family setting.

So, thanks very much, dear. I DO need your help putting up the pictures, because my eye for putting them up straight is quite terrible.

And happy birthday!

La fete Nationale, Quartonze Juillet

Declaration of the Rights of Man

Bastille DayIt’s the 230th anniversary of La Fête Nationale, Le Quatorze Juillet, or, as I learned it growing up, Bastille Day in France. It “commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789. The French Revolution transformed France into a land of equality and democracy with the Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789, which I assume also now apply to women.

I don’t really know much about that document. What did it say, anyway?

DECLARATION

“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” I’m reminded, via the musical Hamilton – which we’ll finally see in August 2019 – that while the French aided the colonists in the American Revolution, the news nation remained neutral in the French conflict with the same George III of England.

“Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.” This appears to be an intractable fight in the United States, from abortion rights to gun control.

“The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.” May we apply this to our use of social media?

“The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.” The lessons of Eisenhower seem forgotten as certain Americans are wowed by the “military parade that is a high point of the national holiday celebrations,” and wish to emulate in the US.

Of course, democracy is never a straight line. While the French Senate was founded in 1799, by 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte had declared himself the first Emperor of France. Americans should be aware that we’re not immune to such demagoguery.

Songs from the year I was born

Tony Bennett is STILL performing

orioles
Orioles, 1948
The next prompt is “A song from the year you were born.” Now, THAT is a nicely specific framework. I know at least two people born in 1966 who know WAY more about the music of the year they were born than I do about 1953. I suppose it’s because I was born in the “pre-rock era.”

There are tons of titles I recognize that were performed by others. Ebb Tide, an instrumental by Frank Chacksfield (#2); Your Cheatin’ Heart – Joni James (#2); P.S. I Love You – the Hilltoppers (#4). Cryin’ in the Chapel – June Valli (#4) and several others.

Most of the ones I know, I own on a compilation disc someone gave me for my birthday about a decade ago.

(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? – Patti Page, #1 in March. My mother would reference this song when I was a child.
You, You, You – Ames Brothers, #1 in September. One may remember Ed Ames from the Daniel Boone TV show in the mid-1960.
Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes – Perry Como, #1 in January. Como had a variety show that started before I was born and lasted until 1963. I saw it occasionally.
Eh, Cumpari! – Julius La Rosa, #2 in November. LaRosa was famously fired by Arthur Godfrey that year.
Rags to Riches – Tony Bennett, #1 in November. Bennett had a “comeback” in 1993 and is still performing.

Istanbul Not Constantinople – the Four Lads, #10 in December. I heard the They Might Be Giants version from 1990 first. I have this on a Cadence Records compilation; that was the label of the Everly Brothers, among others.

Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt, #4 in December. I answered a Quora question about this: Who originally recorded and sang “Santa Baby”? Eartha Kitt, one of the women who played Catwoman on the TV show Batman in the 1960s. I have the track on an album called Billboard Greatest Christmas Hits 1935–1954, which came out in 1989… But the first version I heard was by Madonna on the original A Very Special Christmas from 1987.

Crying in the Chapel – the Orioles, #11 in September, #1 for five weeks on the Rhythm and Blues charts. The disparity between the pop and RB chart action partly explains why various charts exist.

Jim Bouton, Karen Hitchcock, Rip Torn, RIP

“certain flaws in my make-up”

Jim Bouton

Jim BoutonJim Bouton’s birthday was the day after mine. I used to religiously read the backs of baseball cards.

He pitched for my beloved New York Yankees beginning in 1962. He pitched well in successive World Series. Against the 1963 Dodgers, he lost despite giving up only 1 run in 7 innings. Then he won 2 games over the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals. The Yankees lost both series.

Jim Bouton continued to pitch for those mediocre/bad Yankees teams the rest of the decade until he was picked up by the expansion Seattle Pilots in 1969. Writing the book Ball Four, a diary of that season, plus recollections of his time with the Yankees, Pilots, and Astros that has made him memorable.

“The book was a frank, insider’s look at professional sports teams, covering the off-the-field side of baseball life, including petty jealousies, obscene jokes, drunken tomcatting of the players, and routine drug use, including by Bouton himself.

“Upon its publication, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn called Ball Four ‘detrimental to baseball’, and tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying that the book was completely fictional. Bouton, however, refused to deny any of Ball Four’s revelations.”

Ball Four was updated several times, including the chronicling of his brief return to Major League Baseball in 1978. I’ve only read the original, and it was both revealing and entertaining. It changed the sports biography/autobiography forever.

Rip Torn

Rip Torn was one of those great names like Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter that you figured was made up. But the surname was real -he was born Elmore Rual Torn Jr.

I noticed him in episodes of TV dramas when I was growing up. He was on seven episodes of 30 Rock. But he was best known for playing Artie on the Larry Sanders Show. I also saw him in movies such as The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Men in Black. Whatever I saw him in, he was always good.

An interesting item: “Appearing as an interview subject in Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral-history book Working, Torn confessed, ‘I have certain flaws in my make-up. Something called irascibility. I get angry easily. I get saddened by things easily.'” I definitely relate to that!

Kren Hitchcock

When I noted the death of Karen Hitchcock, the former head of the University at Albany, I checked out her Wikipedia page. While it correctly points out some difficulties, it seemed rather one-sided. It failed to note her concerns that provided to be spot-on.

The piece discussed tensions between Hitchcock and the SUNY Chancellor Robert King, the latter whom I distrusted over unrelated concerns. Their fight was over the eventual separation of the College of Nanoscale Sciences and Engineering from the University at Albany. She had opposed spinning it off for reasons I found academically credible. I thought the division gave CNSE head Dr. Alain Kaloyeros way too much autonomy.

All three died in the past few days.

Arthur says: “You should write a book!”

The readings MAY involve the consumption of alcohol

write a bookArthur, who is experiencing that brutal Kiwi winter right now, was the first person to both Tell AND Ask Roger Anything.

TELL: You should write a book!

ASK: What obstacles would you have to overcome, and/or what would you need in place to write a book?

Back around my birthday in March 2019, I thought what I might do in my retirement. Writing a book was not even a consideration. What would I write it about? Me? I wasn’t feeling it.

Then in May, I came around to maybe writing about the house in which my mother grew up. I’d actually floated this to one of my cousins a couple of years ago. She was doing some genealogy about our common ancestors. It was beyond the scope of what she was working on, but I spent a lot of time there myself.

Moreover, my sister Marcia has a LOT of photos that she’s scanned. the pictures are mostly of the exteriors, but also a lot of people over a roughly 60-year span.

There’s another book that I thought about, involving the year I turned 19. A momentous year in my life. The problem is that I’d have to reveal my own shortcomings publicly.

The good news, however, is that I had kept diaries as far back as March 1972, so I have detailed accounts of at least some of what I did. And I mean OVERLY precise. What I ate, and where, et al.

I think I got the idea from my college roommate in my freshman year, a grad student named Ron, who wrote down EVERYTHING he spent, a candy bar or going out to dinner. One day, he spent $1,000 on a car, which really skewed his daily averages.

My diaries, and there are about a dozen of them, continued to about 1986. It’s not the entire period, because several of the journals were destroyed in the flooded basement of the apartment building I was living in c 1997. I genuinely don’t know what I have and what was lost.

At the time, I was quite upset, but now I am somewhat relieved that at least part of my ever-present past has been obliterated. It means, though, that EVENTUALLY, I’m going to read those remaining chicken scratching. Thus, the advantage and the obstacle are the same.

Some of it will be great. Is THAT when I saw that concert! I’ll get to relieve some of the history of FantaCo, the comic book store where I worked in the 1980s.

Some of it will be awful. My, was I petulant? Or unkind! Or oblivious! I’ll probably get to relieve heartbreak that I caused, or received! Oh, boy.

And, ha! now I’ll probably have time to read the damn things. The readings MAY involve the consumption of alcohol.

From that mess of a life, I’ll have to figure out what the STORIES are. 1972, which I remember surprisingly well even without the prompts, has a certain dramatic arc. Other than that year, I’m not at all sure about a narrative. And how do I write about other people I’ve mentioned, many of whom are still around?

Once I DO start writing, if I start writing, I realize that I need to do it when I’m mostly alone, when my wife and daughter are asleep, or downstairs watching some dance show on TV, or off to work/school. I work best in the presence of semi-loud, generally familiar music.

Ramblin' with Roger
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