The Innocence of Being Healthy

The title isn’t mine; I read it recently, and can’t remember the source. My apologies to whomever came up with the phrase, which is a very compelling one. I wish I could give credit where it is due.

There is a kind of innocence to being healthy. I wake up in the morning with all of my senses intact. I’m mobile. My brain is functioning, usually in the direction of deciding what to have for breakfast. My spirits are typically good; I’m likely to look forward to the day rather than dread or fear what is to unfold. I have no chronic aches or pains. Remarkably – and this is the innocence part – that’s what I expect. Other than an isolated immune condition that I was born with and which has been manageable, I’ve been healthy most of my life. I don’t take good health for granted; I have too many dear friends and family making difficult treatment decisions as we speak. Nor do I consider myself immortal; there have been too many sudden deaths around me for such magical thinking to take hold.

But I don’t focus on my health, don’t think about it much, don’t need to take health into account when considering whether or not to plan my annual trip to Panama. I sally forth, assuming from one moment to the next that I’ll be able.

That’s such a gift, and one that some people I love very much don’t have right now. My response can only be humility and gratitude.

Fort Hood Shooter

I’m not generally in favor of ordinary people having guns. I wasn’t raised in a gun-bearing culture, although one of my New Jersey cousins is a retired police officer, and my Iowa uncles may well have had rifles to shoot varmints or predators on the farm. If they did, I never saw evidence of it. Wayne La Pierre of the NRA and I would agree on relatively little in terms of the wisdom of having the general public bear arms. I’m not even a fan of hunting, seeing little beauty in blowing the head off a wild turkey or firing a mighty slug to take down a deer. Give me free range chickens, mercifully slaughtered, any day.

The Fort Hood shooter wasn’t among the general public when he began his rampage, but amidst trained soldiers in a setting where they were unarmed and unexpecting of violence and utterly vulnerable.

As with all mass killings of this kind, there will be a deep examination of what went wrong and whether the shooter’s eruption into violence could have been anticipated and avoided. That’s all to the good and we should improve what we can, but at the end of the day I think we simply don’t know enough about the human psyche. There are lots of people who live close to the edge, and some of them talk pretty openly about their murderous thoughts. Yet they don’t usually progress to the step of picking up a loaded gun and firing. A few do, and we don’t really know how to pick them out of their roiling cohort of kindred angry souls.

On the other side of random tragedy are people like the trained police officer who took down the shooter within five minutes of the first 911 call. Police snipers fire from relatively protected positions. SWAT teams often run toward danger as a group, and behind bullet-deflecting shields. Soldiers in battle wear body armor. This young woman had a revolver, her training, and immense personal courage.  As she and the gunman faced off, she was the better marksman by far.

I suspect the decision to shoot unarmed people is as much about power and control as it is about anything.  I wonder what will go through the shooter’s mind when he regains consciousness from his wounds and finds out he was taken down by a girl.

Closing Tastings

Two mid-to-high end Rochester restaurants are closing, swamped by red ink and the local market’s preference for chain restaurants like Applebees. Coppergrass Bistro has already shut its doors, to my great disappointment. Coppergrass offered fresh local foods in interesting preparations, a good wine list, and good service. Any entree could be ordered in half-portion size, and at half price. Dinner for two with an appetizer, entree, and a glass or two of wine could be had for $60-$70 dollars.

Tastings, the Wegman family’s foray into fine dining, will close at the end of November. They will open a new restaurant across the street without tablecloths, their signature multi-course tasting menu complete with wines, or $30 entrees such as rack of lamb. The fare will be more casual, and the final tab much lower than the $80-$90 for two that a nice meal at the current location might have cost.

My friend E., with whom I had dinner last night, may have hit the nail on the head. She thinks many Rochesterians would rather eat out three or four nights a week at the “two for twenty dollars” special than have one really good meal for the higher price.

That’s not my preference at all, and when an interesting restaurant goes under, I’m not happy about it. When the Cheesecake Factory opened here two summers ago people waited in line for a couple of hours to get in, and judging from the cars parked outside, the place still seems to be thriving. I just don’t get it.

Honest Day’s Work

I’m still obsessing about the rodent on my kitchen counter, and my quarterly visit from Bug Man – what I call the representative from the company that keeps my carpenter ants at bay – rolled around yesterday. Typically the person who comes is new to the house and working from notes made on previous visits, young, and fascinated by the behavior of creatures great and small who infest houses. I’m still trying to figure out whether I have mice again, or whether the chipmunks that abound in the yard and under the deck have made it inside. As the young man introduced himself I asked, “What do you know about droppings?”

He brightened. Here was a new challenge, one that would take him beyond the realm of ants.

Down we went into the basement, where I had spotted droppings that looked too big to me to have come from mice. We stood together, him shining a powerful flashlight on the small brown pellets. “Nope, you’re right. Too big to have come from mice. Could be chipmunks, or could be a rat.”

Ewww. Mice are at least small, and chipmunks are cute if destructive. Rats have no redeeming features.

Then the young man did something I’d never do in a million years. He got down on his hands and knees, and peered at the droppings with the flashlight from a distance of a few inches. He got back up with a big grin. “This is your lucky day. These look like droppings but they aren’t. They’re bug bodies that got eaten and left by the big spider over there.” Shining the flashlight a short distance away, he illuminated a fat juicy spider sitting in a small, compact web.

Problem solved. He went about the rest of his work, and I’m off to buy new mouse traps – he did find some mouse droppings in another part of the basement, and thinks that’s what ate my lunch bread.

While in New York I visited the Robert Franks photographic exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On a Guggenheim grant, Franks traveled across America by car in the 1950’s, photographing the lives and work of ordinary people. His photographs had a quiet strength and dignity, and I spent a long time looking.

Later in the kitchen Bug Man filled out the invoice and I wrote a check. He launched into a long story about the wisdom of critters in evading humankind, and out of respect for his honest day’s work, I was all ears.

Gropple

This is for my friends Phyllis and Art, who just moved permanently from Rochester to South Carolina, to remind you of one thing you’ve happily left behind. Wintry mix, anyone?

Most people know of rain, sleet, hail, and snow – all forms of precipitation. Rochester also has gropple, and some fell yesterday.

Rain comes in droplets and gets you wet. Gropple comes in the form of little pellets that pound your head and shoulders. They don’t really hurt or do damage, but they do bounce off your glasses if you look up to see what’s happening. Gropple isn’t hail, which is hard ice – gropple is softer than hail but harder than sleet. Gropple isn’t snow; gropple is round and smooth, and doesn’t have flake patterns. Sleet is a combination of rain and snow, and gropple is its own thing. There you go for Weather 101, Rochester, NY.

At this time of year the weather is quite changeable, and this weekend it’s supposed to go back up to 60 degrees – much too warm for gropple.

File this blog entry in the back of your mind and remember it; knowing about gropple might take you over the top in a Trivia game.

Viva Yankees!

My father loved the 1950’s New York Yankees, so I did too. I have fond memories of him sitting on the screened-in porch on Stewart Avenue in Kearny, listening to the game on the radio and having a Schaeffer’s beer. Mel Allen and Red Barber didn’t just call the game; they made the game come alive, as if you could literally see each play unfold through their eyes. Like my father, I knew every player, all their stats, and we cheered or groaned together as the Yankees made or missed key plays.

My father had been a left-handed pitcher and strikeout king with the Wisconsin Blues; he left semi-pro ball because you couldn’t make a living at it. I wonder, when he listened to Whitey Ford or Don Larsen taking the mound for the Yankees, if he imagined himself there, spurred on by the roar of the crowd and mowing down batter after batter. I doubt my mother would have been attracted to such foolishness. She liked a steady paycheck and a man who went to work in a suit. But nothing would have kept him from imagining it, just the same. Being a strikeout king for the New York Yankees might have had more flair than a mortgage, a car payment, and a job at The Plant – as we all called Dupont in those days.

Last night the Yankees won the World Series for the 27th time. I watched the whole game, knowing that today my father would have had an extra spring in his step as he put on his suit and left for work.

Who Ate My Lunch?

I like nature where it is supposed to be: outdoors.

Often I eat a sandwich for lunch, and I keep the plastic-bagged loaf of bread on my kitchen counter – so far without incident. Upon my return from New York, when the house had been quiet for four days, I found the corner of the bag chewed off, plastic shreds on the counter, and a considerable nibble taken out of the bread. Ugh.

My late next-door neighbor, Mrs. Cather, lived in her home until her death at the age of 99. She often told me that it was keeping up with the odds and ends of what needs to be taken care of in a house that kept her mind sharp. Point taken, but it still feels exceptionally gross to have had a rodent on my kitchen counter.

If I wrote about this on my Panamanian blog today the family there would be reading quizzically, wondering what had taken me aback. “But Tia Pamela,” they would say, “mice are everywhere, and trying to get at our food is what they do.”

Trifecta

Times Square last Saturday night was a trifecta: the World Series was being shown on one of the Jumbotrons, it was Halloween, and the city was filled with people anticipating the NY marathon to be run the next morning. After the 8pm theater performance I walked back to my hotel through Times Square, and couldn’t resist sitting on the new red bleacher steps to soak up the vibes.

Everyone around me was speaking a language other than English. That doesn’t happen in Rochester, and it made my home town feel incredibly provincial.

A little girl dressed as a princess walked along, candy bag in hand, with her hijab-clad mother. Children want to do what the children around them are doing, regardless of heritage.

Every time the Yankees made a play there was an eruption of cheers.

A hockey team dressed like the NY Rangers and carrying a trophy skated smoothly by. Who knows, they might have been the NY Rangers.

People at the tables sipped coffee and soda. The open container law applies here, so there is no alcohol. That makes Times Square a family-friendly spot.

The marathon runners were all home by that hour, presumably resting for the big day ahead. Marathon runner wannabees, dressed in workout suits and running shoes, abounded. Many wore jackets or shirts advertising previous runs. There was lots of chatter about what effect rain might have on the runners, or wind, or the route changes from last year. People seemed to agree that the NY marathon is THE marathon, but that might have been the locals speaking.

The range of costumes was astounding. Top prize in my view went to four young guys with Marge Simpson-beehive hair, classy make-up, short sexy dresses, and high-heeled sequined shoes. The only discordant note: between the shoes and the short skirts were four sets of very male legs – albeit shaved.

I have to do this NY-weekend thing more often.

Travelling Betties

[This blog entry is for the Travelling Betties: Mary, Emily, Lynne, Laura, Sister Alice, Margaret, Fran, and our sister in memory, Bredeen.]

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was a mere half block from my hotel. There are relatively few things from my Irish Catholic upbringing that retain any ritual significance, but I do love to light candles in front of saintly plaster statues and am quite willing to come up with the recommended offering of $2 at the Big Cathedral in order to do so.

Up one side of the immense church and down the other, there are many choices: Polish saints, Italian saints, various incarnations of the Blessed Mother, Irish saints, and of course the Sacred Heart. The Virgin of Guadalupe has a larger array of candles than most, given the many Latino parishioners of the diocese of New York.

My choice, however, was clear. There could have been no other. I stopped in front of the statue of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the original Travelling Betty, and stuffed in my two dollar bills. I sent all of you warm thoughts as I was lighting, and only wished the candle was – as in a former day – more robust so it would burn longer. My warm thoughts are not limited by the size of the candle, and I hope some of the good vibes came through.

Lining Up

[This entry is for my much-loved sister and brother-in-law, Amy and Will, who really were hippies. You two would have had many useful suggestions for improving the authenticity of the look-alikes. ]

I arrived for the matinee showing of Hair about ten minutes before the theater doors opened. Other ticket holders were waiting, several my age and several much younger and dressed as they thought real hippies might have dressed back in the day. The attire wasn’t too far off but the short hair on the guys was a dead giveaway, even though they had flowers stuck behind their ears.

Some people from both age groups were standing randomly in front of the theater doors, and others from both age groups were lined up in orderly fashion to the left of the first door. As newcomers arrived, some joined our random group and others said, “There’s a line. We should get in it.”

I was fascinated. No one from the theater seems to have asked that a line be formed; indeed, no one from the theater was outside. When it was time to go in all the theater doors opened at once. The people in the line moved one by one through the door closest to them. The rest of us entered randomly through all the rest.

Some people line up without even being told, and some people don’t – told to or not.