Yakkity yak....

So, what can I talk about now? I’ve thought about loyalty to a corporate job, my inability to drink more than four beers now or say psychological affairs.

I’ll do all three.


Years ago, and I mean YEARS ago. My dad was what you would call a “company man.” He came out of the Korean war, got a CPA degree from Bryant U and was hired by First Federal Savings and Loan down in Providence. He started as a teller and through time kept climbing the ladder; loan officer, operations manager, VP then was finally voted in as CEO by the board. He lived and finally died there.

I remember the contract he was given to sign before he was finally installed as CEO. In it, there was a mention of his “loyalty” and “perseverance” to the company. With that, he was knighted. He would tell me that with enough time, hard work and sincerity I could attain a position like his when I grew up.

My Dad would be rat meat in today’s business world. In all my dealings with large organizations, I’ve never seen loyalty ever being paid back. Today it’s “What you done for us lately?” Your career success seems to be provisional, week to week.

******

Drinking. I can watch others pour it down , stumble and fall and somehow keep going. I cannot even come close to that. They say alcohol is a depressant and god, it is ever for me. I get enough beer into me and all I want to do next is crawl into my bed. This is a good thing. I’ve seen how others careen their lives into one wall after the other with their ability to “stomach their liquor.”

I do like the buzz it provides however. Generally I’ll loosen up and actually talk more. But to throw up Maker’s Mark through my nose? Forget it!

Also…

I once witnessed this girl who was busted twice for DWI. It cost her Dad $12,000 to get her “off” on both charges. Jesus H. Christ…$12,000. I’ve made this black comment to others before and I do stick to it. I’m not worried about sliding my car into a school bus full of kids, I do worry about hiring an attorney to mitigate the awful circumstances the State surely would like to crucify me with.

　

*****

When I want to, I can sit and listen to anyone go on…and on…and on about their personal lives. This patience was taught to me from an old career where you learn not to automatically respond to whatever someone can throw at you. You become aware of your own reactions and learn to quiet them down.

At my age, I can come across marrieds or those in long term relationships where they can open up, connect and develop a tighter emotional connection with me versus their husbands/boyfriends. It’s something to see really. Relationships that are utter deserts with little or no feelings involved. The girl stays put due to the financial DIS-incentive to leave. It’s even worse for marrieds as the girl can end up on the short end of the deal in a divorce. Yet, even though they choose to stay put, they still seek out someone to connect to. Welcome to my couch, please feel free to free associate and you won’t get charged the $80 an hour at a therapists office.

The best relationship, the most successful one I’ve ever seen was this couple who were dating for over 10 years. They refused to get married or move in with one another. They kept each other’s apartments and visited each other when they felt like it. They were the most relaxed couple I’ve seen. She never came to me to bitch, talk or whatever about her life!

Here’s something I heard a few years back about a marriage vow that I though was very cool indeed. A friend attended an outside wedding in some fields up in Douglas, MA by a lake. A perfect day I was told. When they came to the part in the traditional marriage vows you hear all the time, they changed it from this:

“from this day forward I promise you these things. I will laugh with you in times of joy and comfort you in times of sorrow. I will share in your dreams, and support you as you strive to achieve your goals. I will listen to you with compassion and understanding, and speak to you with encouragement. I will remain faithful to our vows for better or for worse, in times of sickness and health. You are my best friend and I will love and respect you always.”

To this:

“from this day forward I do not promise you these things. I may laugh with you in times of joy and comfort you in times of sorrow. I might share in your dreams, and support you as you strive to achieve your goals. I might listen to you with compassion and understanding, and speak to you with encouragement. I might remain faithful to our vows for better or for worse, in times of sickness and health. You are my best friend and I will love and respect you as far as I can.”

The whole point behind that, was that in promising NOT to promise, if the marriage should die of whatever reason, neither party can feel gyped as there were NO guarantees ever made.

That let both of them off the hook. What maturity!

Anger Management 101

If you know me well enough you’ll know that if you comment on a personal fault that I know isn’t true, I’ll just brush it off and never give it a second thought because I know it to be false. If the comment is true, then I’ll stew over it for a good hour and be very quiet.

A few nights ago in my watering hole I was talking general business, politics and whatnot to the owner when he made a comment that I vehemently agreed with.

T says, “College today isn’t worth it. The kids coming out of Boston are $100,000 in debt at a rate of nearly 9%…You could do better by becoming a plumber.”

That’s when I nearly rose out of my seat, sticking my finger in T’s face and rather forcefully said, “YOU’RE RIGHT! Those greedy bastards, those banks, are the ones who love enslaving you forever with their debt!!”

My reaction, to others, seemed over the top. To me? It was right in line with my leftist political ranting. Angry young man of my youth is “angry approaching 50 man.” Believe me, my life in whole has toned down a lot now that I’ve hit soft middle age. But…BUT…my views on how this country should operate are still hot.

“For fuck’s sake Ron, I’m only talking here…” says T.

Yeah, he was right…we were just talking. This wasn’t a pulpit to be preaching from.

I wasn’t always like this…

I have a friend, who was a Commander in the Navy and had taught me the art of “barking.” When an officer feels like dressing down a subordinate, you raise your voice and very clearly say what you wish to say. It’s not an emotional, off the handle yelling tirade. It’s a controlled, reason-filled near shout. You keep unbroken eye contact and never swear or you‘ll blow it. I have watched my friend turn to mush nearly everyone he’s managed to set his sights on. It can be pretty devastating. His having a career in the Navy as a bridge officer gave him much experience to do this correctly.

This trick has come in handy as I rag on bank managers, auto mechanics and any other person who manages to push that one button I have. And that ONE button is hard to push. But that’s another story…

Not only was I taught this, but I got to see him use it in so many instances I realize that he can be an angry fuck looking to unload on someone. Ah well, we all have our faults. I noticed I was beginning to ape this behavior in him. Uh-oh!

I had better choose my time and place more carefully when my revolutionary zeal fires up.

Mother Nature

The above photo is pretty cool, huh? Now you know what a miles and miles of smashed forest in Massachusetts looks like from 500 miles up.

I’ve never been, seen or even been remotely close to a tornado touchdown. Though the curious, twisted 12 year old boy in me would like to see one, from a good mile away. I guess it’s like watching a NASCAR race crash up. Rhode Island isn’t known for these storms, are they?

My only close brush with nature that nearly killed me happened when I was eight years old. My friend at the time Rick W. and I were on my street, trying to one up one another about the fact neither of us were afraid of a thunderstorm that was rolling by above us. That’s was pretty common as the boys in our neighborhood tried to prove we weren’t afraid of nuttin’.

It was strange thunderstorm, there was no rain nor any heavy wind, but plenty of cloud to cloud lightning strikes that boomed like God’s Own Bell. I think they used to call these “electrical storms” back then, if there ever was such a designation. This storm just flashed and banged for a good fifteen minutes before the “event” happened.

I can clearly remember. I was turning towards Rick’s house when I heard a weird snapping sound and seeing sparks explode from his bike that was lying on the lawn. I then remember I then turned toward my house and ran home SCREAMING like a little girl. As I was turning the corner of my house, I ran into my Dad who reached out his arm and scooped me up a bit and I fought him like a tiger to get into the house. I was yelling how I was nearly hit but it was obvious he didn’t see it and didn’t believe me. I made it inside and found Mom and spastically told her what had happened. She brushed it off thinking I was just plain scared from the storm itself.

About a minute later, Peggy Burns, who lived next door called up and asked my Mom was I alright. Finally, I had proof I wasn’t making the story up. Peggy said she saw a thin bolt of lightning hit the telephone pole and a second even thinner branch hit Rick’s bike. My Mom had turned towards me with this look of shock as she was getting the real story.

“SEE! SEE! I WAS NEARLY HIT!!” I kept saying.

My brother, on the other hand, just teased the hell out of me for acting like a little girl about it. Ah…what does he know?

To this day, I don’t like those storms that spray lightning all over the place, I still count out the flash to thunder in seconds to wonder how damn close it is.

The World at 3 MPH

“Nobody Walks in LA.” A song done by Missing Persons came to my mind today. I had to drop off my car on Broadway in Pawtucket to get some work done and walked the two miles back home. I never walk now and haven‘t for years. I drive the four blocks to the Pakistani store if I want Tic Tacs.

You miss a lot when you drive. I think most of us have driven routes so familiar that we can do it thinking about what we need to do tomorrow and pay no attention to what we drive through. I can.

But, walking back home, I got to see things at a slower pace and up close. I passed by an old cemetery that was populated by people whose first names that are never used now. Edwin, Jedidiah and there was one Percival that was buried there. These guys died before 1920. Then as now, you can tell who had some cash and who didn’t. The larger and more ornate the headstone, the more bucks. Then you’d see a crop of little limestone headstones with just the first initial of the person followed by the last name. That entire poor family was buried about 30 feet from a main road and train tracks. The last one died in 1902. The headstones were no bigger than desktop computer.

As I went on, I walked past the rail depot of Teknor Apex. They were using these huge vacuum hoses attached under the train that sucked out the powdered polyvinylchloride into three 100 foot silos. You see rusting steel latticework , old hurricane fences and dandelions sprouting up alongside them. For once I didn’t smell plastic. I could as a kid when air quality measures were a joke. Teknor Apex is probably that last of the old sprawling acreage type factories here. The other businesses I saw were smaller, hole in the wall types. I had no idea there was a small apparel shop dedicated to evening gowns for beauty pageants. That and someone still trying to make a dollar doing typing services. That was odd to see.

What I see driving around here but pay no mind to are the young mothers walking their little kids. I passed a few and they talk to you! “Good morning!” one Mom said and I halted for a half second before I responded, a bit surprised. Wow, people you pass on the road can sometimes greet you.

And the smells. The only smell I get in my car are stale cigarettes, transmission fluid leaking from a quart bottle and that faint hint of gasoline. On the streets I was walking I was hit with smells I knew as a kid. There is a house here where the same rhododendron I remember as a kid is still growing and it’s in bloom. I had forgotten about that creosote smell railroad ties have, but it was drifting up to my face as I was stepping from one to the other. Finally, when I reached my neighborhood, that house on Legris St still has that huge pine tree oozing sap, and that was fuming in the morning air. I used to walk by that each morning on my way to school a few hundred centuries ago.

There is a world out there within a two mile radius of this house, and I had forgotten about it.

(and on a happy note, the tire place called me to let me know that the price they’re charging me for two tires and an alignment, is actually pretty fair!)

Battle Hardened Kids

How Did We Survive?

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes. My Mom smoked. Then after birth, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints with bars wide enough to stick our little heads through and strangle on.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, no locks on doors or cabinets. I can remember as a kid the product “Janitor in a Drum” that looked like wonderful lime-ade that was under the kitchen sink cabinet. I never drank it though but it was accessible. When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. My friends envied Evel Knievel and we built ramps to jump garbage cans with our bikes. More than a few of us landed badly. Cars of that time had no air bags whatsoever and the seat belt in the back seat was stuffed under the back cushion as it was an annoyance.

I drank the awfully chlorinated Pawtucket water from a polypropylene hose. Bottled spring water from Maine then? Never heard of it. Four of us would drink Coke from the same bottle and I don’t remember anyone contracting anything.

We ate those pink Hostess Snowballs, white bread and real butter and everything was full of sugar, but we weren't overweight because......

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. Mom’s of that time thought we were “underfoot” and shoved us out the door at every chance. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem. Trial and error didn’t kill us.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes nor video games at all. We had three major networks and fuzzy UHF channels. We had no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms. We had friends and imaginations instead.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. We played in the dirt and probably had numerous microscopic thingys crawling on us from that. As kids, we all should’ve received Purple Hearts for wounds. I can remember falling off a 40 foot railroad trestle into a disgusting algae filled river. I was sideswiped by a moving car when I was eight while riding my bike. Mikey fell off his bike and smacked the pavement so hard he was knocked out.

We made up games with sticks and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes. The same goes for BB guns.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Everyone was not a “winner.“ Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. There were no “Thanks For Participating” trophies then. Imagine that!!

We fought one another. Boys vs. boys and girls vs. boys. There was plenty of equality between the sexes then when it came to dirt yard scuffles. Over some argument when I was nine, I had smacked Gail S. across the face. She responded by gut punching me when I wasn’t looking. I saw Carrie M. swing a pool skimmer into John’s face about something I forget now. Yes, we were a violent bunch of rug rats at times then.

None of us died, no of us became deathly ill and we had FUN.

I’m 47 years old, not quite 50. There are times when I am startled by that fact, if I live, that I will turn 50. For some reason, I never thought it would happen!


What a landmark birthday that can be. I suppose being 50 is a lot easier than turning 50. Then again, most of the excitement or dread at turning a certain age was forgotten the next day. Life isn’t that different when you cross an arbitrary line drawn in the sand.


What have I noticed about this age? You pile on such experiences that you can read people’s faces and discern the truth pretty quick. Also, you can easily see the authenticity in another person even if they’re unaware of their source of who-they-are. You can’t help but recognize the same ol’ facial expressions or speech people use again and again. People are people and they repeat things a lot.


Fun is different now. When you’re a kid, you can have fun with wild abandon without any judgment. There’s nothing wrong with getting filthy or imagining your day away.
Then, you hit your teens and you and everyone else seems to be hell bent on being seen having fun. Never mind the joy itself, as long as you can prove that you did have it. How many stories did you tell or hear others tell about weekends? Each weekend seems to be more berserk than the last. This doesn’t really abate till your in your late 30’s I swear, from what I’ve said and what others my age then said as well. Now, I could care less what others think of my idea of “fun.”


My idea of fun is more in tune with what I want versus any conformity to the people I know. I can be on my roof toying with an FM antenna array even though I look like some ham radio geek. So what… I LIKE IT.


Now I can care a little less how fashionable my clothes are, how I’m supposed to behave or what I can talk about or even if I’m cool. This is the compensation I get for getting older. I can publicly sneeze and have a clot of snot unexpectedly come flying out. Oh well, those things happen. Had I been 25 in a nightclub and did that, I’d be banished to Siberia.

I’ve had a conversations with someone who has a similar desire as I do, to live away from the insanity of the city and pressures of a career dominated life. Traffic, other people, things everyone wants done yesterday and having to fix other people’s problems that contaminate your own life, be it work or home seem never ending.



His is to live by the ocean that is slightly populated. Mine is to live by a lake or at least deep into the woods in similar fashion. This has been pulling at me since I was ten years old.


I was reminded of this last night when I watched a movie called Black Robe. It’s about a Jesuit priest trying to form a mission among the Hurons in Quebec back in the 1600’s. There were appealing shots of canoes paddled along high cliffs and scenes of deep woods. Above all of this, everything was hushed. Saguenay Quebec seems wonderful!


It’s funny how movies, with me at least, can invoke that feeling of peace. I’ve had this feeling with several other movies showing similar landscapes. Never Cry Wolf showed the Alaskan tundra, Jeremiah Johnson displays the Grand Tetons and The Last of the Mohicans opens up with a fog covered Shenandoah Valley. My just looking at a film of it can make me contented.


Have I actually experienced it? Sure. Don’t think I just live vicariously via movies. One time a ways back I was on an escarpment of Mt St Helen’s mountain. It was the south side, the side that wasn’t blown to little bits and still had a forest. It was a late July afternoon and I sat down among this field of alpine-like flowers and grass and looked south along the Cascades. The only noise I heard was the wind. After about an hour I had forgotten about many things in my life. My job, the need to drive back to Portland later or the worry of getting to the airport to drop off the rental and bolt to the concourse to pre-board. These things slipped away, for a while at least. If I had a blood pressure cuff I can bet my BP had dropped to slightly below normal then.


Dreams are free, that’s what is great about them. But they remain just that, dreams. They have as much consequence as the thin air. But, and thanks to my Dad for this piece of advice, if you want to create something in your life, plan it. Break it down to manageable pieces and work towards it. Realize you’ll be hampered by obstacles and the like but always focus on that goal. Eventually you can realize it.