A FEW THINGS
THAT
PISS OFF THE
OLD MANA FEW THINGS
THAT
PISS OFF THE
OLD MAN
News item:
Read on. I am doing my part.
Let me start at the top. There are three organizations that I hate. At the top of this list: the Internal Revenue Service. Who else makes you fill out their bill telling you how much money you owe them?
Next, AOL.They introduced me to the on-line experience, complete with too few modems, mid-chat dumps, spam, annoying pop-up ads, and completely inadequate support. I am amazed to watch the numbers of its subscribers and its stock price climb exponentially, a testament to the laziness of us all. Why did I stay with AOL for over two years (and, from this rural area, I was paying long-distance to access them!), and why do 14 million people continue to underwrite this inferior service when more efficient, inexpensive access to the vast resource that is the internet is available to all of us?
Third, my health insurance company. One year, quite a while ago, after paying in over $4,000 in premiums, my family actually made the deductible! At the end of the policy year I received a check for my total benefits for the year: $2.42. Do me a favor next time - keep the $2.42. It made me feel far worse than if I had simply been left alone on the wrong end of a one-way pipeline.
All three organizations exist for the sole purpose of taking our money without so much as a thank you, while providing us with minimal, if any, product or service in return.
A tip of the Old Man's hat, however, to my local life insurance salesman. Although I finally learned how to resist his siren call, so that now inflation has slowly eaten away at the excess value attached to my life, I still must marvel at the skill of one who was able to persuade me to place a wager on my own life... a wager which I can only win by dying!
To compound the absurdity of this gamble, without saying so much as a word, he is now playing upon my tendency toward superstition. With my children now educated and equipped to fend for themselves and my marriage long since dissolved, the reasons for this protection have largely disappeared. Yet, like the man who lets his fire insurance lapse only to have his house burn down the next day, I am afraid to cancel this insurance for fear of pronouncing my own death sentence.
As a kid I was a big baseball fan. I would have been a major leaguer, but I sucked. So I became a lawyer instead. Anyway, not being a very good baseball player as a kid, but being a big fan, I memorized the record book. Baseball lost me when the teams started moving around. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, this upset me. I mean, the Braves had already abandoned Boston for Milwaukee. The franchises were becoming itinerant. And the departure of the Dodgers and Giants for the West Coast broke my heart. But the thing that really did it for me was the expansion, when they added new teams and extended the schedule from 154 games to 162. The record book got all fouled up with asterisks and I wasn’t interested any more. Since then we have seen players strikes, a World Series canceled, players I never heard of whose statistics resemble the crummy ones I racked up in Little League earning outrageous salaries, and owners who have no commitment to the game or its fans. Screw ‘em! All of ‘em. I won’t even watch it on TV anymore (it really is a slow game, isn’t it?), much less think of inconveniencing myself by attending a game. One of the best things about going to a game (and I have seen games in Yankee Stadium, Ebbetts Field and the Polo Grounds, as well as Braves Stadium in Atlanta) was those ball park hot dogs. But that was when I was a kid. Now I know what’s in a hot dog.
McGwire, Ripken... bright spots in this former "National Pasttime," men of dignity in pursuit of seemingly unreachable milestones, even role models (except for McGwire's love affair with androstenedione)... but - after Mark or Sammy Sosa belts no. sixty-whatever - we can refocus our attention on the true National Pasttimes, those which feature 300 lb. men beating up on each other and seven-foot acrobats slam dunking.
I am looking forward to being on hand for the New Millennium. How many people have been able to say they saw in a new millennium? I mean, the population of this planet simply was not very big New Year’s Day 1000. And of course, it was not a new millennium for people not governed by the European calendar.
A thousand years ago people in China, India, and other places which have their own non-Christian calendars did not have to reckon commercial deadlines in the terms of the Europeans nor did they have to concern themselves with their computers breaking down when the year 1000 struck. Even in Christian Europe the few people who might have had calendars were using Roman numerals. Assuredly, the approach of the year “M” must not have been as intimidating as would the year 1000 with its neat string of zeroes.
And nobody even knew they were embarking on the First Millennium! It was 664 years years after the erroneously calculated birth of Christ, that the Synod of Whitby adopted the work of Dionysius Exiguus, a sixth-century monk, who had attempted to design a calendar around the event.
The arbitrary relativism of calendars bothers me. I should check with the Chinese. They have had a bunch of millennia.
Also disturbing is the fact that, technically, the second millennium includes the entire year 2000. The third millennium actually starts January 1, 2001. That sort of ruins the poetry of the whole thing, doesn’t it?
Another exciting phenomenon which we get to be a part of is the wild demographic ride in the wake of World War II. I am 53, on the cusp of the Baby Boom (OK, so I am not that old, but sometimes I feel old. Does the Old Man get any credit for that?). It is interesting to notice the ways we respond to this demographic engine that we all make up. I am a country lawyer, and when I first started I often wrote wills for people. I had people in their 80’s come in who had never before written a will. “Why now?” I would ask. “Aren’t you feeling well?”
Many of us don’t like to think about things such as our mortality and its implications.
Now when people, even much younger ones, contact me about a will, even with the more generous slack cut from the federal estate tax which simplifies post-mortem tax planning for many, the exercise quickly becomes a more comprehensive estate planning endeavor. Durable powers of attorney, living wills, health care powers of attorney, etc. We have been educated by the deaths of our own parents and/or their placement in nursing homes, and sensitized by middle age’s subtle reminders of our own mortality.
Both my parents died in 1993, well into their 80’s. Once when visiting my mother in a nursing home after my father’s death, I listened to the background music. Elevator music: heavy string sections rendering up barely recognizable Beatles or Barry Manilow melodies. I mused upon the day when my own children would visit me in a nursing home with the Stones and Jimi Hendrix playing softly in the background.
The demographic wave rolls on. So what is it about all this that pisses me off, since that is the page we are on? CNN brought it to my attention. For years I was a CNN junky. I watched the entire Gulf War like the most dedicated soap opera aficionado. But then one day I noticed that the mature, wise, gray-haired anchors were being shunted aside, and replaced with youngsters barely older than my own children. There is something that upsets me about a person half my page pontificating upon the assassination of JFK, the Beatles, or the agony of Vietnam. I REMEMBER these things. They made me or changed me. You weren’t even born then. I can’t listen to you. Oh God! I am getting old.
In another couple of generations, something that will be regarded as a quaint, antiquated study will be genealogy. This is something that remains important in this corner of rural New England. A few families still live on the property lived on by their parents, their grandparents, and so forth, and in a few rare cases on property originally settled by their ancestors. The written histories of some of our area towns include genealogies of the families that have inhabited them over the years.
You can engage in a fresh-air study by a casual tour of a cemetery or two, referred to in days gone by as “burying grounds.” Tombstones render up a sterile history of the family trees growing in that town, and you can let your imagination and the whispers in the pines fill in the gaps. Families were buried together. Personal tragedy can be inferred from the tiny gravestones for infants who - still innocent - passed on to become tiny angels. Other stones testify to incredible longevity as especially durable men or women outlived multiple spouses.
One monument mutely suggested two restless, wandering souls to me: a stone with a husband’s name inscribed above the years of his birth and death, and next to that his wife’s name and the year of her birth, the year of her death still waiting to be inscribed more than one hundred years later. What happened to her after she buried her husband? In her old age was she cared for by her family who had been swept westward by the Great Migration? Did she remarry and find her final resting place next to another man? Did she die a pauper at the County Farm and find herself in a common grave? I have a poignant vision of these two lost souls still searching for each other.
By and large though, typically a nuclear family lived together and they were buried together. And the next generation did the same. But these days this sort of lineage is becoming obsolete. Even in this conservative area, multiple marriages and illegitimate births are increasingly common. What happens to genealogy when a father has several children by a first marriage as does his wife, and then they have a child or two themselves? Then one of the children has an illegitimate child or two, and another has children by a couple of different marriages. Many of these families do not even know each other as they scatter geographically and disperse culturally. One day genealogy will be like trying to trace the pedigrees of mongrels roaming in some back alley.
While we are on the subject of dying, there is a gravestone in Boston that reads, "I told you I was sick."
When the time comes, may I stare my own mortality in the eye with a trace of humor.
