April 2022-Things got off to a rocky start when someone said, “Hey, remember pet rocks?” This sent everyone off into a research project that uncovered, among other things, the fact that there was an official “Pet Rock” invented by an advertising executive and sold in a cardboard box with ventilation holes in 1975. Most staff old enough to remember the fad thought pet rocks were just rocks that people found and gave to each other as a joke in the mid-‘70’s. The fad was briefly revived by the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. A discussion of whether or not pet rocks should have googly eyes attached quickly degenerated into everyone sticking googly eyes on everything.
May 2022-Most of staff time was dedicated to removing googly eyes from everything following complaints that the office looked “like a Marty Feldman convention”.
June 2022-The opening of a gyro truck on a nearby corner prompted staff to debate whether there are enough gyro places around to try and find the best one in Nashville. Some staff argued in favor of pizza with others saying pizza is too quotidian, which in turn prompted responses that it was just a gratuitous excuse to say “quotidian”.
July 2022-A debate over whether the word “gratuitous” can ever be gratuitous ended with staff going out for milkshakes.
August 2022-A spider was found in the offices. It quickly captured and gently placed outside by the team leader who described himself as “an arachnophile”. This led to everyone else laughing for at entire week while the team leader kept repeating, “I just mean I really like spiders! What is wrong with all of you?”
September 2022-This seemed like a good time to take a shower.
October 2022-Staff decided to take a ghost tour of the offices which meant everyone going through file cabinets looking for the oldest things they could find. The winner was a dot matrix printout of Umberto Eco’s short essay on the difference between DOS computers and Apple’s Macintosh in which he said “I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant.” The printout was then respectfully burned and staff swore they saw Joan Rivers in the smoke.
November 2022-Staff member Joe Bertman came into the office singing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” but he couldn’t remember the words so he just kept singing, “Whoa, we’re half way there, whoa, half way there, take my hand ‘cause we’re half way there, whoa, half way there…” over and over again. No one was able to accomplish anything for the rest of the month because we all had the song stuck in our heads.
December 2022-The holiday break was celebrated by everyone getting together because none of us could remember what we were taking a break from.
January 2023-Everyone celebrated getting back together to go back to work because no one could remember exactly what that work is.
February 2023-Staff member Joe Bertman came into the office singing Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” and no one was able to accomplish anything for the rest of the month because we all wondered how he managed to memorize it.
March 2023-Everyone celebrated the end of another successful year. No one could remember what exactly defined “success” was but after a thorough review of the year’s notes everyone agreed it was probably quotidian and gratuitous.
The incredible quality of many YouTube videos always amazes me, especially when I reflect on how I’m old enough to have seen the internet grow from, well, nothing–I remember when home computers were still a novelty–into an indispensable tool and a tremendous waste of time and everything in between. Because it’s my birthday here’s one of my own videos I made and published exactly ten years ago today:
And here’s another one published exactly eight years ago. The internet has changed and so have we all, but the idea hasn’t. I’m still wishing tomorrow brings everyone better things.
April 2021-The first team meeting of the new year started with assistant Joe Bertman bringing up the “Great Resignation”, the term for the large number of people reassessing their lives and leaving old, unfulfilling employment for new opportunities. Well, it wasn’t so much a discussion as just everyone sitting around thinking about a bunch of people quitting their jobs until finally someone said, “Well, anyway…” and normal work resumed.
May 2021-In previous years the team has tried to assess what exactly the best milkshake in Nashville is only to get bogged down by questions such as, should we pick a specific flavor? Should it be limited to strictly local places or chains as well? At least on the latter question everyone agreed that one fast food place—you know, the one with the creepy clown mascot, is out of the running because their milkshakes taste like the same grease they use for cooking their hamburgers and their tacos and, seriously, what kind of burger place also makes tacos? Pick a lane, creepy clown mascot.
June 2021-Carrying over the milkshake discussion the discovery that the best gyro place in town had gone out of business reminded everyone that there’d also been a previous goal of finding the best gyro in Nashville, which would be easier than the milkshakes because all gyros are pretty much gyro-flavored. But with the best place closed it didn’t seem fair to try all the remaining ones only to find the one that came in second.
July 2021-Did you know there are long-handled toenail clippers? Well, now you do. These were not actually needed for clipping toenails but the less said about that the better.
August 2021-Absolutely nothing happened in the month of August, and I mean nothing. Zip, nada, zilch, zero, nihil, nix, nowt, diddly, bagatelle, bupkis, the second half of Sartre’s best known philosophical work. This caused some panic among the staff until everyone realized how many different ways there are to say “nothing”, and everyone just kind of sat and thought about that until someone said, “Well, anyway…” and normal work resumed.
September 2021-When did every magazine in the grocery store checkout become a commemorative issue? Maybe I can find out from this copy of Entertainment Today’s special edition, “Magazines: Remember When They Printed Stuff That Happened Last Week?” that I picked up while I was buying milk.
October 2021-Slowly the shadowy figure advanced. In the gloom we could see glistening ichor, and the stench of putrescence was overwhelming. It had positioned itself between us and the cellar doors. There was no escape. It dragged itself forward across the dirt floor. I glanced up at the small window. Even if we could reach it the figure would be upon us before we could get through it. One more step and it could touch us. Reaching out with a large, claw-like hand, it said, “Can I borrow a dollar?”
November 2021-Winter officially settled in. Then it went back to fall. Or maybe it was kind of like spring. Anyway there was a short burst in there that felt a lot like summer. And then it was winter again. And then it rained and that could have happened at any time.
December 2021-Very little got done with the approaching holidays, but spirits were high, leading to an inter-office memo reminding everyone not to let spirits smoke during work hours. A sign-up sheet was sent around for anyone who wanted to donate an appendix.
January 2022-Avant de sortir de la douche, rincez rapidement vos cheveux a l’eau froide pour sceller les cuticles et preserver l’eclat de la coleur. Tout le monde y a pensé jusqu’à ce que quelqu’un dise : “Eh bien, de toute façon…” et le travail normal a repris.
February 2022-Staff decided to skip Valentine’s Day in favor of calling up radio stations and suggesting that in addition to Two-fer Tuesdays they should have One-Hit Wednesdays, Three-fer Thursdays, Fiver-Fridays, Super Saturdays, No One Listens On Sundays, and Meh Mondays.
March 2022-The final team meeting of the year started with assistant Joe Bertman mentioning that there was an American sitcom called Lab Rats and pretty much the entire cast was born after the whole senior staff graduated from high school. This prompted an emergency discussion and assistant Joe Bertman is no longer part of the senior staff.
It’s my birthday today and, well, I always have trouble with the question, “What do you want?” Obviously I appreciate the thought and I want to be realistic, but if I could be completely unrealistic I’d want to take a train trip from Portugal to Singapore. I realize that’s not completely unrealistic since it is now possible, but I don’t want to wish for the impossible or even nonexistent.
The world’s longest train trip. For now, anyway. Source: BoingBoing
A three-week train trip sounds amazing to me. Maybe parts of it would be tedious or boring but part of the fun of train trips, and, I think, adding to the romance of train travel, is that there’s a constantly shifting landscape out there. Trains also offer a certain amount of freedom within their confines. Unless you’re the conductor you’re not driving so you can wander up and down the cars. There’s usually more space than there is on an airplane, and it’s easier to change seats.
And consider this: if an airplane’s engines stop working that’s it. The pilot or pilots will do the best they can to make a safe landing but it’s still at the mercy of gravity. Even a boat has its downside—specifically if it goes down and you end up hoping there are enough lifeboats to hold everyone. I don’t mean to downplay the severity of train crashes, which can be terrible, but if a train’s engine breaks down or it’s just stopped by leaves on the tracks then you still have a pretty good chance of walking away. Train travel may be slower but keeps you close to the ground.
Thirty years ago I took an overnight train trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg, Russia, specifically—a train trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Florida would have been more than just one night, not to mention a spectacular feat of engineering, but that’s another story. It was an old style train, mostly wood, rickety, and a tall, thin gentleman came by and brought me some tea in a glass cup with a metal holder.
I read some but I also spent a lot of time just watching the snow-covered countryside, dotted with lights of small towns off in the distance, slip by, and I wondered what was going on in those homes that kept their fires burning all night. I slept some, and at one point I went to the end of the car and stood in the cold, wintry air. I could look down and see the tracks and gravel, and how fast the train was moving, but when I looked out at the snow it all seemed impossibly still.
Yeah, I definitely want three weeks of travel like that.
Live theater’s had a rough couple of years obviously, and it’s something I miss even though I didn’t really think about it until I read that the Nashville Children’s Theater is celebrating its 90th anniversary. So it’s almost as old as I am! And it’s really responsible for instilling a love of theater in me. Or maybe I always loved theater and the NCT just gave me what I wanted.
My memory is hazy but I think from kindergarten through sixth grade we had a school field trip to see at least two shows a year there. One of the earliest, maybe the earliest, was a production of Pinocchio that I saw in kindergarten and remember vividly because, much as I hate to say it, it was awful. Pinocchio was a whiny little jerk, and while the point of the story is that he starts out bad and ultimately redeems himself, thus becoming a real boy, the stage Pinocchio was still so annoying even at the end I wished he’d stayed a puppet. The Fox and the Cat, the story’s main villains, weren’t outsiders but life-size toys Gepetto had made and that somehow turned evil, and the giant whale that swallows Gepetto and Pinocchio wasn’t giant at all. It was another toy that Gepetto had built and was set against the stage wall. To go inside it Gepetto and Pinocchio had to get down on all fours and crawl in through the mouth, and it was about then that I started wondering why Gepetto had filled his workshop with psychotic toys that were all out to murder him, but that’s another story.
Fortunately the theater redeemed itself with a production of Really Rosie! that I loved even without knowing that it was a collaboration between Maurice “Wild Thing” Sendak and Carole King, whose album Tapestry is almost as old as I am.
Every other play I remember seeing at the Nashville Children’s Theater was great. They put on a wide range of plays, from standards, like an adaptation of The Emperor’s New Clothes, set in China and, if I remember correctly, with an all-Asian cast, to a contemporary drama about a girl dealing with her widowed father dating a new woman, to a series of extremely avant-garde mime sketches. And again and again the plays I saw taught me that, with a bit of suspension of disbelief, anything is possible on stage.
And even if they hadn’t been great they were still field trips so they got us out of school for a couple of hours. That made them something to look forward to even though we usually came back more wound up than when we left, so I’m sure the teachers dreaded that. I remember coming back from one and as I stepped off the bus I said, “I’m so happy to be back I could kiss the ground!” Then I got down and kissed the ground and got up with dirt on my face.
“Aren’t you too old for that?” my teacher asked.
Never.
Check out some scenes from their amazing production of A Wrinkle In Time which I didn’t see because I was too old.
There’s been a major revival of interest in the detective series Columbo, and since I’ve been a fan ever since I was a kid and discovered late night reruns watching my black and white TV in my bedroom, and since September 16, 2021 would be Peter Falk’s 94th birthday let’s talk about it and why the possibility of a reboot needs to die. Right now. Even if I have to kill it myself.
What hooked me from the very beginning, and why I still love Columbo, is really Peter Falk’s charm. He was rarely angry and had a quiet, unassuming demeanor that set him apart from other detectives of the era, which is also why I think he’s still popular today. Other ‘70’s detectives—Kojack, Rockford, McCloud!—were darker and grittier and, well, there’s a lot of that around, which may be why they don’t get as much attention. It’s telling that one of the other exceptions, Murder, She Wrote, is also getting a new surge in popularity, with its stories of a mystery writer who lives in the quaint New England town of Cabot Cove where the leading cause of death is living in Cabot Cove, maybe because Angela Lansbury is also the woman who murdered Sweeney Toddput Sweeney Todd’s customers in pies, but that’s another story.
There’s also Columbo’s appearance. He spends most of his time in a shabby raincoat and smoking cigars, although at least once he switched to cigarettes and coffee when he was up all night doing research. Some people point to the show’s fashions as being very ‘70’s, but some of the same looks are still around today. I think it’s more a sign of when it was made that Columbo could smoke indoors and there was an ashtray every three feet. He’s also different in that he pretends to be absent-minded, wandering around, frequently talking about his wife, whom we never see, and, as an aside, I’m going to say Kate Mulgrew deserved better. And got it, first in space, then behind bars.
The fact that we never see Mrs. Columbo has spawned a fan theory that she doesn’t exist, which is funny, but the evidence doesn’t back it up. Other people in the series also talk about her and, once, she tries to replace Columbo’s trademark gray raincoat with a bright yellow slicker that he “forgets” and leaves behind several times.
And while Peter Falk became a producer, working hard on the show behind the scenes, Columbo deliberately makes himself small, staying out of the way, often hunched over. Even the show itself frequently makes use of long shots in big rooms or outdoors, making Columbo appear even smaller. When asked what his first name is he only says, “Lieutenant,” although sharp-eyed fans know his first name is Frank, from one of the few times he flashes his badge.
The show also has a not so subtle anti-establishment streak, which I think is a product of its time but also part of the show’s ongoing appeal. Most of his suspects are wealthy, powerful people, and though there’s always a deeper motive—a fear of losing their wealth or their position, mainly—they still feel they can get away with murder, and it’s satisfying to see them get taken down. In spite of that Columbo does seem to like, or at least respect, some of the suspects he trailed. In “Any Old Port In A Storm”, when the murderer is a high-class winemaker played by Donald Pleasance, Columbo seems to enjoy showing off his newfound knowledge of wine. Drinking while on duty—and, let’s face it, Columbo is always on duty, even when he’s on vacation—may be a violation, but in every other respect Columbo stays well above the law. And, okay, he goes out drinking again in “The Conspirators”, when he joins the Irish poet (and IRA sympathizer) Joe Devlin, and tries to impress him by reciting some limericks, including “The Pelican”:
A rare old bird is the pelican. His bill holds more than his belly can. He can take in his beak enough food for a week. I’m damned if I know how the hell he can!
And then there’s “Swan Song” in which the murderer is played by Johnny Cash, who starts with a good performance of “I Saw The Light” and ends with him being arrested for sending his wife down in a plane crash. But what also makes the episode memorable is how Cash and Falk have such natural onscreen chemistry, complimenting and complementing each other, that it’s not hard to believe actor and singer hung out together after the filming.
Even in “Murder Under Glass”, which is notable for being one of the few times Columbo comes out and says he dislikes his suspect, a professional food critic, but still wants to impress him with veal scallopini a la Columbo.
I’ve been using all this to lead up to why I want to kill a proposed reboot. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reboots in general—I even think some have been great—but, while Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and even Sam Spade, among other famous detectives, have been played by other people, and while Peter Falk didn’t originate the role, he made it his own. It’s hard to imagine the producers originally wanted Bing Crosby, and I just can’t picture Columbo as a blue-eyed sophisticate standing over a corpse crooning, “Bet she was a beautiful baby, buh buh buh…”
It’s because of Peter Falk that Columbo makes such effective use of the inverted detective story in which we know from the beginning who the murderer is and how they did it. How the detective unravels the mystery is supposed to be what draws us in, although, really, it’s just the pleasure of hanging out with Columbo for an hour or two.
What would a reboot look like? Even the innumerable Law & Order clones that have firmly planted the idea that most crimes are committed by the special guest star look ridiculous when we have darker, more complicated dramas like Broadchurch and The Sinner that explore how crimes don’t happen in a vacuum and are never really resolved, especially after just an hour.
Source: Atlas Obscura
And let’s not forget that part of the appeal of Columbo is that it’s always funny, or at least tongue-in-cheek. The murders may be serious but Columbo isn’t. He drives a broken down Peugeot, and occasionally brings along his Basset hound named “Dog”—I’m pretty sure Mrs. Columbo has given their pet a more elegant name. Columbo and Dog both are immortalized in a funny statue in, of all places, Budapest. Columbo even has his own amusing theme song, “This Old Man”, which he occasionally whistles to himself. Outside of Columbo Peter Falk is best known for comedic roles–the grandfather in The Princess Bride, opposite Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, and an aging performer in a made-for-TV remake of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys.
The show also sometimes really strains credibility with Columbo picking up on farfetched clues like a pair of not sweaty socks, or an episode like “Troubled Waters”. While it’s a great story with a great cast that includes Robert Vaughn and Dean Stockwell, what are the odds someone would commit a murder on the same cruise ship where a great detective just happened to be taking a vacation?
A reboot would almost certainly heighten the comedy, but then it would be too much like the MAD Magazine parody “Clodumbo”, where the punchline is that twenty-seven innocent people have turned themselves in just to get away from the detective pestering them.
Source: Columbo Site
Columbo himself says it best at the end of the best episode, “The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case”, when he’s asked if he’d ever consider another line of work. ““Me, sir? No. Never. I couldn’t do that.”
April 2020-After a relatively productive March the weight of the lockdown hit all staff like a ton of bricks. This left everyone pretty down until team member Joe Bertman asked, “Hey, how many bricks would it take to make a ton?” Everyone leapt into this new research project and quickly determined it would be about 305 bricks. Additional questions were raised about whether it was a standard ton or a metric ton, and if it were a metric ton shouldn’t it be spelled “tonne”? Anyway the answer for a metric tonne turned out to be between 333 and 385 so that was pretty much a month wasted.
May 2020-Staff gathered to determine whether it would be feasible to once again try to find the best milkshake in the city of Nashville with the usual debates over whether the search would include chain restaurants or only local places and how “local” would be defined. Then the realization that lots of places were still closed and no one was going anywhere anyway hit everyone like a tonne of bricks so that was pretty much a month wasted.
June 2020-Everyone continued to focus on their new responsibility, sitting in a closet eating Funyuns and reading Edgar Allan Poe, so that was pretty much a month wasted.
July 2020-Team member Joe Bertman suggested turning all those cardboard boxes filling the recycle bin into miniature models of houses and neighborhoods and either painting them or covering them with construction paper to make a charming village. When asked what the next step would be Joe said, “I dunno, set it on fire?” For some reason no one could get excited about this so that was pretty much a month wasted.
August 2020-The team ran out of Funyuns and no one really wanted more so that was pretty much a month wasted.
September 2020-Everyone got briefly excited about the question, “What Hollywood legends would be the funniest people to sing classic ’80’s songs?” Everyone thought James Mason doing an understated cover of “Tainted Love” would be hilarious, and that Shelley Winters doing “You Give Love A Bad Name” wouldn’t be funny so much as just awesome. Then team member Joe Bertman suggested “She Drives Me Crazy” sung by Katherine Hepburn, and everyone sort of drifted away thinking about how that wouldn’t sound that different from the original, so that was pretty much a month wasted.
October 2020-The annual team Halloween party was held via Zoom. No one showed up so that was pretty much a month wasted.
November 2020-Staff realized the CEO had been wearing the same hoodie since March and set off on a research project that ultimately determined that a hoodie worn for eight months by a man in his forties had the same accumulation of dirt and oil as a hoodie worn for eight hours by a teenage boy. The hoodie was then placed in the washing machine but then escaped, leaving a soggy trail, so that was pretty much a month wasted.
December 2020-Staff celebrated Hanukkah, the Solstice, and Christmas by sitting in a closet eating peanut brittle and reading Dylan Thomas, so that was pretty much a month wasted.
January 2021-No one could remember when January wasn’t pretty much a month wasted.
February 2021-Staff decided to revisit and earlier issue and a contest was held to see who could do the best impersonation of Katherine Hepburn singing “She Drives Me Crazy”. First place went to the CEO’s hoodie which showed up just for the event but then abruptly left, so the prize, a homemade milkshake, was given to team member Joe “Mudhead” Bertman. Staff had accidentally bought sorbet which it was soon discovered makes a terrible milkshake, so that was pretty much a month wasted.
March 2021-Staff began receiving vaccinations and there were signs of things returning to normal until everyone started wondering what “normal” looked like and then everyone just sort of drifted off to go and get wasted.
So it’s my birthday and I decided to start celebrating a little early by opening a bottle of port wine a friend of my parents gave them to mark the annus mirabilis, and which they gave to me when they moved to Florida because some wines improve with age and this one had a recommended shelf life of at least fifty years, and there was also a hope that I’d improve with age because for a while there it seemed like I couldn’t get any worse, but that’s another story.
No one knows who first got the idea of aging wine but it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer where the idea probably came from: someone set aside or forgot a few bottles of a particular vintage then pulled them out some time later and discovered it tasted even better, or they pulled the wine out a really long time later and that’s how vinegar was invented. There have even been some cases of people drinking really, really old wine. Jacques Cousteau, my childhood hero, because I was a weird kid, and his crew found some wine in a Greek shipwreck that dated from around 230 BC and decided to drink it because of course that’s what you do and said it was “very sweet”. And in 2010 a bunch of champagne bottles were found off the coasts of Finland and Sweden and the divers drank some of it it because of course that’s what you do and said it was “pretty good”. Scientists also found 170-year old beer in a shipwreck and tried it because why not and said it was “terrible” because beer might improve with age but not if seawater gets into it.
The port wine I had was, for many years, stored in a narrow crawlspace behind the basement wall—the sort of thing that, under other circumstances, might have been forgotten and discovered years later by the next homeowner, or lost at sea and recovered centuries later if our house had been a ship, but it was where we went during several tornadoes and where some old paint cans and I think potatoes were stored. And then I kept it in the basement where my wife and I live now and it’s a pretty small basement so I’d see it pretty regularly as the years ticked by.
Opening it was a little intimidating. It’s marking a transitional period, and I probably could have aged it longer, but I thought it was time to move on. And I also had some other beverages handy in case it turned out 1970 was a good year for salad dressing. Maybe this is a good sign, though. It was smooth and pleasantly sweet and extremely good and worth waiting almost a halfcentury.
Maybe I’ll get anotherbottle for the next fifty years.
April 2019-The Freethinkers Anonymous fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 30, because dates are arbitrary anyway and it’s not like this blog makes any money. And here’s a fun fact: the word “fiscal” comes from the Latin fiscus, meaning “the imperial treasury or privy purse of the Emperor”. My grandfather had a privy. It was out back and had a hole in the door in the shape of a crescent moon. I don’t recall there being a purse in there, although it wasn’t a place you wanted to linger. Speaking of lingering this was the month that staff were confronted with a pileup of approximately three thousand coffee cups in the office sink. Plans to either have a group washing activity or outsource the cleaning to someone with a dishwasher were considered then rejected in favor of smashing all the cups while dancing to the theme from Zorba The Greek.
May 2019-A shortage of coffee cups resulted in staff spending an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen putting creamer and sugar in their mouths before pouring coffee directly from the pot into their mouths. A decision was made by management to use the petty cash to purchase new coffee cups. Staff agreed on the condition that the petty cash purse never be placed in the privy.
June 2019-Someone in the office mentioned that the punctuation mark “colon” is sort of a separator the same way the colon in the intestine is and everyone just sort of drifted off for several hours thinking about that.
July 2019-The annual attempt to find the best milkshake in Nashville once again was disrupted, this time by the realization that there are approximately nine thousand gyro places within five miles of the office. This led to the decision to try to determine which was the best gyro in Nashville, or at least within a five mile radius, and in the interest of fairness the decision was made to test them all at once. This led staff to attempt to answer the question, how many gyros can one person eat in one sitting? The average was three, with a record set by Alex who ate seven and was out the rest of the week.
August 2019-Staff were surprised and overjoyed when it was discovered that ukuleles could be checked out from the public library. The mood was dampened slightly when the boss said, “Hey, did you know I could borrow a ukulele?” and the boss’s wife said, “YOU can’t.”
September 2019-Planning for the book went ahead as usual. Proposed subtitles include:
Never pick apart a golf ball or it will explode and other lies our parents told us
The true story of a boy and his aardvark.
Don’t pick up this book—you don’t know where it’s been.
Chuffed, Naff, Barmy, Wanker, Git, Bollocks, And Other Words I’d Use Constantly If I Were British.
Contains Material Not Included In Previous Editions.
A shoe, a canoe, and a didgeridoo.
Or It Will Be If I Ever Get Around To Writing It
A helpful guide to just read the damn book already.
October 2019-Plans to build a trans-office zipline were put on hold after the only material staff could find was some regular string and no one could get the windows open.
November 2019-No one in the office could remember anything that happened in November and queries resulted in everyone just sort of drifting off for several hours thinking about it.
December 2019– The annual office holiday party was held, as usual, at the Sheepshead Pub on 27th Avenue. As usual no one showed up.
January 2020-Everyone got really excited about the symmetry of the new year and how those novelty glasses you can get that are designed in the shape of the numbers “2020” look really cool. Someone brought up that those number glasses for the previous nine years must have looked pretty stupid, especially 2011, and everyone just sort of drifted off for several hours thinking about that.
February 2020-Valentines and flowers were exchanged by all staff, as usual, with everyone receiving something, except Kevin, as usual.
March 2020-Staff handled the need for self-isolation and working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic with great aplomb and everyone was about to drift off for several hours thinking about the etymology of the word “aplomb” when management announced that we were out of coffee.
The swimming pool had two diving boards over the deep end. There was the low diving board that hung about three feet above the water. The only difference between jumping from the low diving board and jumping from the edge of the pool was that the low diving board put you a little farther out over the water. And it was kind of springy so you could bounce at the end of the board and it would propel you upward slightly. I liked to jump from the low board into the deep end and swim all the way to the bottom, twelve feet down, and look up. The watery surface overhead was like a shimmering screen, and the sun was like a sapphire. Then I’d have to come up. Or, on slow days when the pool wasn’t crowded, I could jump off the low board and swim all the way across the pool without surfacing. The first time I did that it was exhilarating. I felt like I’d really accomplished something, and what I accomplished was nearly hyperventilating at the edge of the pool because I was breathing so hard, which reminds me of the time I was at my grandparents’ house and my grandmother picked up the phone. She listened for a moment then said to my grandfather, “All I hear is heavy breathing.” My grandfather grabbed the phone and began sternly lecturing the person at the other end about decorum. Then he got quiet and listened and said to my grandmother, “Jim’s car broke down and he just pushed it two miles uphill to the service station.”
Anyway the high diving board, twelve feet high if I remember correctly although it seemed like it loomed a hundred feet overhead. It might as well have been that high. I wasn’t going up there. Well, I did. After all it was there, a mountain to be climbed, or rather a ladder to be climbed and jumped off of. I told myself that I was interested in swimming, not airing, and that if I really wanted to drop twelve feet I could by going from the surface of the pool to the bottom. It drew me, though. I had mastered everything else at the pool—not that there was much to master. After swimming from one end of the pool to the other without taking a breath about the only other thing that was left was talking the guy who ran the concession stand into letting me have a full cup of orange soda without ice so I got more orange soda and spent about half an hour sitting in a beach chair feeling bloated and miserable, but that’s another story.
The same summer I made the first swim from one end of the pool to the other I made up my mind I was going to jump from the high dive. The worst that could happen, I figured, was that I’d fall in the water.
It was about that time, on a slow, hot afternoon when there was hardly anyone around, when even the lifeguard was barely paying attention, that another kid walked out to the end of the high dive, bounced a couple of times, lost his balance, and fell sideways. He landed flat on his back on the concrete below. I didn’t see it happen. I just saw him stretched out as though sleeping, and the emergency team with the stretcher that took him away. He survived, and word got around that he recovered, but he never came back to the pool.
Later that summer, on a busy day when the pool was crowded, I got in line with all the other swimmers who were going off the high dive. I climbed the ladder, walked onto the board, and gripped the handrails. The handrails ended about halfway. Beyond them was just the board and open air. I stood up there holding the handrails for what seemed like an hour, then climbed back down. No one laughed or made fun of me. The next person in line, an older guy, just nodded at me, climbed the ladder, and did a spectacular dive off the board.
The next summer I watched a couple of my friends go off the high dive. Sometimes we’d do synchronized jumps, me going off the low dive and, of course, hitting the water much sooner, or I’d wait and try to time it so we’d hit the water at the same time. And finally one day I decided I was going to do it. I climbed the ladder. I gripped the handrails as I walked out toward the end of the board, then let go. I didn’t bounce and I walked slowly, and when I got to the end of the board I jumped, feet first. It wasn’t an impressive dive, or even a dive really, but I plunged into the water. That was all I wanted—to make that leap.
Twenty-six years ago, on June 27th, 1993 I married my wife. It wasn’t as frightening, probably because the justice of the peace who performed the ceremony looked so much like John Cleese that my only regret is that when he read the vows I didn’t say, “What was the thing in the middle?” It was really her by my side that assured me, though, and every day I look forward to a new leap.
April 2022-Things got off to a rocky start when someone said, “Hey, remember pet rocks?” This sent everyone off into a research project that uncovered, among other things, the fact that there was an official “Pet Rock” invented by an advertising executive and sold in a cardboard box with ventilation holes in 1975. Most staff old enough to remember the fad thought pet rocks were just rocks that people found and gave to each other as a joke in the mid-‘70’s. The fad was briefly revived by the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. A discussion of whether or not pet rocks should have googly eyes attached quickly degenerated into everyone sticking googly eyes on everything.
