Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1. Home, alone, accompanied by sleeping dogs. I am letting them lie.

2. Newman. “You have to learn to be yourself.” “Fast Eddie” Falcon, The Color of Money.

Some of us get here pretty quickly. At least learning the core part of yourself. For me it came early, in junior high school. While I was like pretty much everyone else, wanting to fit in, or at least not stand out (like the proverbial nail in the Japanese saying about getting hammered for standing out), I discovered that my normal “fit in” desires had limits. I’ve probably told the story before so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that the basic framework was up early, and I learned to fill in the spaces over time.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Purportedly Mark Twain.

This is the harder part of the process, at least in the earlier years of your “education”. How does one determine what “yourself” means without looking outward at others? Maybe trying on a little bit of, I dunno, your grandfather, the local football star or your family doctor? Still, at some point, once you have learned who it is that you believe you are, then it’s time to simply go about the business of being just that.

After that, without trying very hard at all, anyone who matters will come to know the same you that you’ve come to know.

3. Mulligan is a golf term. Essentially a “do-over”. While not to be found anywhere in the rules of golf (and therefore not allowed in competition), one not infrequently comes across the Mulligan in friendly rounds. It is especially common on the first tee, particularly if it was not possible to hit the driving range to warm up. See also: breakfast ball.

Beth and I watched a fun little movie a month or so ago; I might have mentioned it here. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. “About Time” tells the story of a family in which the men can go back in time and essentially get a Mulligan on a moment. It takes some care, of course, because anything that they change will remain changed when they return to the present. The moments when the son learns this is quite striking: he goes back in time to fix a mistake, but goes back prior to the birth of his beloved daughter. When he returns she was never born. This being fantasy he has unlimited Mulligans at his disposal, allowing him to both fix his mistake and do so without erasing his daughter’s timeline.

It’s really a lovely little story, with two of the sweetest father/son scenes I’ve ever encountered in a book or a movie. In both of the scenes father and son come together alone, and each is quick to realize that they are in time travel mode. They are careful–so very careful–not to alter anything around them, lest they erase the downstream lives of everyone and everything that brought them together, back in time. It’s not clear to me exactly where in time they’d left to go back. What they were, and what they were to each other in that present time. Only that each of them chose to go back to a time when all they knew of each other was love.

We never see them together again when we return to the story in the present. The father has died, and with his death his timeline is no longer there to be visited. We slowly realize that father and son had traveled back to that time of love to say their goodbyes. No one else was changed, but one is left to wonder if, in the choosing to experience that love again, so tender with one another in knowing what was to come, if they themselves were changed.

Alas, there is no time travel for the men or the women of any family, however careful those who might possess this power might be. Still, there are Mulligans to be had. Every new day is a kind of Mulligan. Each dawn the gift-wrap for a breakfast ball. We cannot return to an earlier time, but each day brings us a chance to return, again and again to how we felt in that time. To choose that. And if we are lucky, to choose that together.

Until one day, like the father and son in “About Time”, we run out of Mulligans, and only the memories remain.

I’ll see you next week…

Sunday musings (Memorial Day version)…

It’s the stories. The stories matter. Whether they died in the heat of battle or in the cold of infirmity, the warriors all have stories. The stories are all important.

It’s remarkable how difficult it is to get at those stories, though. The ones that were the most formative, the ones that turned that one soldier or that one sailor into who s/he became, they tend to be slow in coming, if they come at all. Yet those are the ones that matter most.

The warriors among us tend toward silence. It’s not so much a secret thing (although there is a small group who simply mustn’t tell their stories) I don’t think, as it is a continuation of the protector role our airmen, sailors, soldiers and marines assume. They don’t so much keep the stories secret as they shield us from the effects of the stories, so powerful were those effects on them when they happened. Yet again, to understand those who remain, and to try to know those who have departed, the stories matter.

I drive by a cemetery filled with the graves of those who fought, some who died while fighting, and I try to conjure their stories. It’s pure folly. Dead men tell no tales, eh? Humanity learns of conflict and war from the stories told about both, and humans learn about each other the same way. Asking to hear the stories is an act of respect. Listening to the stories can be an act of love. Telling the stories is a little of both.

The stories of the men and women who have fought our wars are important.

A friend from my youth, a coach not too very much older than I once broke down and cried over his story. A very junior officer, his story of leadership and loss comes to me every year on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. I know him so much better, understand who his is so much better because I heard his story. So, too, is my knowledge of the men and women younger than I who have served and fought and graced me with their stories.

Life is long unless you are unlucky, but even the lucky run out of time. We have no Civil War survivors, no one from WWI to tell their stories. Those few from WWII still here are reticent, and time grows short. Even Korea fades ever quickly to time’s passage. My Dad is marooned by his illness somewhere between 1947 and 1974; much of his “time” seems to be spent in Korea at the moment. The smallest of consolations for us, his progeny, is that we may learn his story.

This Memorial Day let us all remember not only those who served and those who died in that service, but let us all remember their stories as well. Let us ponder the lessons those stories teach about not only humanity but also about the warrior, the person we remember. Let us encourage those who still walk among us, especially those whose journeys have been long and must be soon ending, to tell us their stories while they still can. Let us listen to those who know the stories behind each headstone as we gather in their honor. We have much to learn from the stories, about war and conflict, about the people who fight, about ourselves.

The stories matter.

1. 64. Happy 64th Birthday to my brother Randall who is almost certainly on the upper deck of his home away from home, sipping coffee and dreaming avian dreams of glory.

2. Orioles. One of the wonders of our home here on the North Coast of the U.S. is the annual arrival of a flock of Baltimore Orioles, a real bird, not just a perpetually underperforming baseball team. This year our early summer visitors seem to be channeling their MLB brethren: they have failed to show up for the game.

“Where are my Orioles?” Beth and several of her birding friends have been lamenting the absence of our colorful friends. We’ve not been able to discern the reason, though we all surmise that it may be due to our unseasonably cold and wet spring. Perhaps they are channeling the “snowbirds” of NE Ohio, the smart ones at least who looked at the weather and stayed down south.

Plates of grape jelly sit unattended as we await their return.

3. Sprezzatura? Beth and I are prepping for our next great adventure, this one a trip to Italy with our great friends Bill and Nancy. We four were married a month apart almost 40 years ago. Bill has been after us to visit Italy, the country of his ancestors, for some time now. An experienced visitor to Italy, Bill has assembled an itinerary presented in a Powerpoint and outlining our agenda. Historic sites, restaurants, wine tastings, accommodations and logistics, all there.

In Italian!

Why “sprezzatura” (nonchalant, convention-flouting)? Bill is also an experienced packer when it comes to Italy. Conscious of the space limitations of the cars he will drive as he squires us around the “mid-south” of the country, Bill has reached out no fewer than 3 times to ask about our luggage status. He also had some “helpful” advice for me regarding appropriate garb for an elderly-adjacent American tourist in Italy. While very practical (“it’s gonna be hot in southern Italy in June”), his advice is hardly sprezzatura (“men don’t wear shorts”).

There’s a strong sense of deja vu in all of this. When Beth took me along for her grand Portugal riding adventure I was very concerned about looking like an American tourist. 57 years old at the time I made a bunch of purchases, many towards the effort to look like a “native”. Now, at 65 and facing the Italian summer? I don’t know if I will be able to describe my style for the trip as particularly sprezzatura, but I say for sure it’s gonna be practical.

Shorts take up less room in the suitcase, too.

4. Durable. My longstanding interest in health and activity monitors has flared once again, this time in a fairly comical way as has been my wont. When my Biostrap became non-functional–the company has decided that it is a research endeavor now, no longer interested in the individual customer–I found myself adrift. Honestly, as silly as that sounds, that’s really how I felt. I’ve come to really enjoy waking up and checking on some of the hidden aspects of stuff like HRV and basal HR, PO2 and sleep stages, and comparing them with how I feel upon awakening, and I without my Biostrap I kinda missed that.

This is not in any way a new phenomenon. Beginning with my beloved Nike Fuel band more than a decade ago, I’ve been deeply interested in not only the area in general, but also in the fairly meaningless minutiae about the differences between the devices themselves. For those not so afflicted, what matters is not so much the actual readings that one obtains from your tracker, but rather trends that you uncover and track to other parts of your Healthspan plan (diet, alcohol, exercise, stress, etc.). All you really need is a device that is unobtrusive enough to ignore, and the willingness to wear it.

Nevertheless, off I went on yet another “journey” into the weeds of tracker land. This time I had the dubious advantage of all things internet and search. Dubious, of course, because there is so much more opinion out there than anything that could be described as solid fact. I did manage to find a couple of reasonably knowledgeable folks who were close enough to me philosophically to be helpful and to save me a little bit of time. Fitbits and Apple watches and Whoops and Ouras, all mixed in with smaller niche players.

In the end it boiled down to Whoop vs. Oura. Wrist strap or ring. I promised myself just one. Honest. Really tried. But just like the reviews, all of which said basically the same thing (Whoop for activity, Oura for sleep), I found that just one wasn’t going to really replace the Biostrap. I started out with a Whoop, felt I needed more granular night time information, and ordered an Oura. Just in time to learn that the latest version of the Whoop would be out 3 days after my ring was delivered and would probably handle everything.

Foiled, despite my good intentions.

I have no idea how it’s gonna play out. For the moment I am parsing the differences in the information I’m getting from each and hoping that one or the other will be sufficient. Honestly, it’s still one part true intent as part of my Healthspan project, and one part pure hobby. I’ll keep you posted.

5. Friendship. Last week’s family wedding in the Low Country was all the more fun because it brought together bunches of friends, men and women, who got to enjoy the festivities together. If you’ve been reading my drivel over the years you know that friendship is one of my pet topics. I find reason to return to it again and again. I am very fortunate in that my siblings and their spouses are also my friends, so the wedding and surrounding activities brought together not just family but also friends.

Watching, I was reminded of some of the differences between male and female friendships. We’ve covered this before, but it’s always interesting how this particular truth bears up under the test of time: men and women enact their friendships very differently. In a nutshell, women tend to anchor their friendships around shared feelings. When you watch a group of female friends they spend most of their time interacting face-to-face. While close proximity always makes for stronger friendships and better interactions, the ability to share feelings over the phone, by text, and through any number of social outlets seems to make facilitating friendships a little easier.

Men, on the other hand, form friendships and bond over shared experiences. Yes, for sure as we age and (presumably) mature, we too solidify our friendships through the sharing of feelings, however sparingly. But it is in these shared experiences that our friendships blossom and grow. Indeed, if you watch men in the act of friendship, after the handshake or bro hug of greeting, we can most often be found standing shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face. Long stretches of silence are interspersed with breaks of high energy interaction. Watch us; it’s just like that.

This rather fundamental difference in both the orientation and “activity” of “doing” friendship is often put forth as the reason women are typically so much better at making friends as adults of any age. Once we’ve left the structured environments of our youth, the locker rooms and barracks and training grounds, we lose the easy access to experiences for us to share. This is one of the reasons that CrossFit found so much success with men (and women to be sure) of pretty much any and all ages: the shared experience of (mild) suffering in pursuit of a common goal, all occurring at the same time and place. Men and women worked out side by side (it helps us make friends with women, too!), and then we all talked about it. (IYKYK)

This week’s Sunday Times Magazine has a story about a man who has many guy friends, but wonders why they don’t hang out together. He takes an incredibly circuitous route to the conclusion that anybody paying the least bit of attention over the years comes to as soon as they think about it: he, we, put way too little emphasis and assign way too little importance on the blocking and tackling of friendships already made. It was so easy when we were younger. It just was. Everyone was there, all the time, doing the same stuff as you were, right there. We had school and class, sports or clubs, silly kid jobs which felt kinda like school or sports or clubs.

Real jobs with real responsibilities could be an obstacle for sure, and work friendships have all kinds of booby traps (hiring and firing, corporate hierarchy, etc.). Looking back, the stuff we all tended to blame, getting married and having kids, was actually really more of the same; we were just sharing a different space with the other men in and around our lives. We went to games and concerts and plays, they just weren’t OUR games and and concerts and plays. But we were still there, standing side by side, being friends.

It’s what happens next, after the kids have graduated, after you’ve become an empty nester that it really becomes an issue. No longer is there an institutional shoulder to shoulder experience. The garden analogy is an apt one for friendship. A garden requires tending and so, too, does a friendship. Left untended, left to chance, it is certainly possible for a garden to flourish. All too often both gardens and friendships ignored too long have a beauty that is but a cherished memory, seen only with the mind’s eye.

For all of my literary legerdemain when addressing the ongoing challenges of friendship in advanced adulthood, my prose can hardly be described as actionable advice. Today’s NYT column authored by Sam Graham-Felsen, is quite the opposite. Adrift and lonely despite a very happy home life with spouse and child, Sam enlists the help of a couple of podcasters, Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter, who provide a very practical “how to water your friendships” guide they call TCS: text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly. The hack as described by Karo is to create a regular event that happens automatically. It doesn’t matter what that event is, only that it happens on schedule.

I really like everything about this. The garden analogy is one I have used often when discussing friendship. An ongoing need to work on friendships no matter how old or young they may be. All three of the available contact methods engaged: text, call, see. It probably doesn’t matter what intervals you choose (they go weekly, monthly, quarterly), only that you set up a general schedule and keep to it. Especially the “see” part, scheduled in ink in everyone’s calendar. I like that very much.

We men are still lousy at making new friends in adulthood unless we are somehow thrown together in a way that we can have those shared experiences. The women in our lives still crush us in this endeavor. For sure we should take advantage of any and all opportunities to make a new friend if one arises. You can never have enough friends. But we DO have friends. We have a lifetime’s worth of friends to call upon, many of whom are just as ready as we are to get back in and tend to the garden of those friendships. It’s not that we don’t need new friends, it’s that we cannot really say that we don’t HAVE any friends.

We all have a lifetime’s worth of friends. We just need to pick up that watering can and get to work.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Limerick. Last Monday was National Limerick Day. Really. We have a national day of recognition for limericks.

Can’t make this stuff up.

2. Recondite. Definition: little known; abstruse. Came up in a limerick “written” by ChatGPT prompted by my friend Monie who’d informed me of our special day of recognition.

3. Abstruse. Definition: little known; wait for it…recondite.

I just love that.

4. Mate. My daughter and SIL live adjacent to a little pond and nature preserve, each teaming with, you know, nature. This being the Low Country of the South Carolina coast this little kingdom is ruled by a rather large alligator the kids have named ‘Seabiscuit”. This queen is a rather prolific generator of next gen gators, each spring welcoming a new suitor of suitable size with no discernible fidelity to any particular partner. Sharing space in the pond are several pairs of Black Bellied Whistling Ducks, each of which is mated for life. They are as darling together as Seabiscuit is deadly alone.

We were brought to Bluffton for a wedding. Our nephew and his fiancé were married on the grounds of his parents’ new home, a place that he and his siblings seem to have quite quickly adopted as the family home (more in a moment). It was a lovely ceremony, officiated by the bride’s grandfather and witnessed by 150 or so family members and friends. “You are my person” was a very moving moment as they said their vows. Weddings can be pretty stressful events, and like most this one was not without its share of tensions and drama. But thankfully, like most weddings, the event seems to have gone off without a hitch.

And like those Whistling Ducks in our kids’ pond we wish for them a lifetime as mates.

5. Home. As I mentioned above my sister Tracey and her husband Steve moved their home from New Hampshire to South Carolina a couple of years ago. Steve’s career took them from MA to NH to Buffalo and back to NH. Their kids were home for both NH v1.0 and Buffalo, and judging by the number of friends they made and kept from their years in both I think the Godin family would consider that they had been “home” in both New London and Buffalo.

Home, of course, is more than just where you happen to live.

There’s no question that Tracey and Steve have found a real home in Bluffton. Like Whistling Ducks to water, they both seem truly happy. At home in all respects. It’s harder to know how it will feel for my nephews and niece; all three are in the very early phases of their careers on the small scale and their adult lives on the grander. Will they look at their parents’ home as just the place where their parents live, or will it feel more like the singular family home? It’s a fine point, perhaps even a bit of gilding the lily, and one that is likely a much bigger deal to those in my generation, if in fact anyone other than me even thinks about such things.

When Beth and I moved on from the house where our kids grew up, traveling the longest 7 miles I’ve ever traveled, everyone was so young that our little cottage seemed to naturally take on the mantel of the family home. Not just the house where Mom and Dad live. There were enough years before they married and moved to their own homes that Casa Blanco was still home. In our favor was the fact that those 7 miles didn’t seem nearly as long to the kids as they did to us, and we didn’t make a NH to SC magnitude move. Our “ancestral” homes feel more like “where we grew up” than “home” now that they are no longer home to ancestors.

Home is really about who lives there.

So it is that Beth and I find ourselves thinking about what home is going to look like as we embark on our third act. This week in Bluffton was about more than just a wedding for us as we prepare to build a wing on the southern side of our home. 10,000 steps through 1.3 million square feet of furniture showrooms (not a typo), walking through the electric plans and strolling “inside” the staked out lot made the winter wing of Casa Blanco start to feel very real, indeed. Real, but not yet a home. At least a full-time home, that is.

You see, I’ve actually been home all week. I am home right now, hurtling north at 80 MPH on I-77. Home is about who lives there, right? My person, Beth, is sitting right next to me. I am as “home” here as I am anywhere in the world. As home as I will be no matter where Casa Blanco may be at any moment because, like Tim and Kate, and so many other Whistling Ducks this weekend, I am with my person, and that means I am already home.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Root. As in Square Root Day. May 5th was Square Root day, when the date represents the square root of the last two digits of the year. 5 x 5 = 25.

I dunno. Just thought you should know that.

2. Gloaming. $0.50 word for “dusk”. Perfect for describing the scene last week as the 151st Kentucky Derby came to a close. Brought to you courtesy of one Tim Layden, sportswriter for NBC after a 25 year career with the nearly late, nevertheless much mourned Sports Illustrated.

A perfect word as the mud-caked winner, Sovereignity, faded into the mist after his conquest.

3. Parvenu. A person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity.

I have occasionally come across “parvenu” over a lifetime of voracious consumption of words of all types in every manner possible, and yet I just recently decided to discover what it means. It would have been fun to toss it around over the years, if for no other reason than a descriptor for the destination for a life’s quest, if you will.

You know, like “Sorry, but I can’t be your huckleberry. Too busy trying to be a parvenu.” Or something like that.

4. Success. Two weeks ago I enjoyed what was likely the most successful large conference experience in my professional career. I got to do some stuff I never dreamed I’d get to do (interview a Hollywood celebrity!), and provide support for colleagues as they worked to see their creations come to life. Accolades for past contributions were sent my way so often it seemed liked it happened hourly, and I was mentioned in the same sentence as folks I’ve always looked at as being generational leaders. It was all heady stuff, all the more so because it was so unexpected. It was very nice, and I am very grateful.

But the thing that made the conference a true success is something much quieter and much more personal. Some 30 years ago, during a time when I pretty much just went to work and did the job of tending to patients in the office and the OR, I noticed that the decision makers in the world of eyecare didn’t see me or the other eye doctors who just went to work. Policy was made based mostly on the lived experience of academicians who were often little more than clinical hobbyists. Decisions made in the C-Suites of industry were likewise informed by “experts” who did not really represent, let alone understand the experiences of doctors who spent 95% of their time simply taking care of patients.

It was readily apparent to me that no one in my role as a “working doctor” would ever have any influence in academic medicine, even though training programs were working to create my future colleagues. We “country doctors practicing in the villages” were thought of as potential referral sources (pre ACA, that is) if we were thought of at all. What bugged me about industry was the sense that the denizens of the C-suites were failing their products and their companies by not seeking the insights and counsel of the thousands of doctors “in the villages.” We were prescribing medicines and implanting lenses at a level that was several orders of magnitude greater than the academicians.

Why wouldn’t they want to know what we thought about their products and their place in our practices?

So began a decades long quest to lead an invasion of the C-suites of companies large and small in the eye care industry by “regular” doctors. I started with regional executives and slowly moved up the ladder. Over and over I said that it didn’t have to be me, but they should be asking somebody LIKE me how their stuff was, or wasn’t working in the real world. What we wished they would add to our quivers. Slowly, over almost 3 decades, we came to what I saw two weeks ago in LA: roughly half of the doctors on the teaching podiums and seated around the tables advising those senior executives were doctors who have spent the overwhelming majority of their time taking care of patients in the clinic and the OR.

It is and was a very personal quest, one that was likely being carried out by others unbeknownst to one another, but one that has made my professional world better at the core task before it: save vision, make vision better. It’s a story that won’t be told, but it’s real and it happened, and I got to see it in Los Angeles during the best convention of my professional life.

You don’t get stuff like that very often, and I am very grateful that I got to see it.

5. Mom. It’s Mother’s Day in America. That one single day when we pretend that it’s all about Mom. At the moment I am sitting at the counter of our daughter’s house in Bluffton, in town for a big family wedding. It’s another first for our family, the first Mother’s Day without my Mom here for us to celebrate. Like my niece’s wedding in September we will all have a big hole in our hearts today. A big open time slot that each of us set aside on Mother’s Day to call her, to retell favorite stories, to tell her how much she means/meant to us and that we loved her.

We still have a whole bunch of Moms to celebrate today, though. My own darling Beth, the woman who made me a father, is here with me chez Megan and Ryan. We’ve circulated through the five moms in our generation via texts that reached as far as Mexico to the south and Connecticut to the north, and as near as down the street here in Bluffton. Closer to home I will do precisely what I have tried to do for almost 36 years of Mother’s Days in my own house: find a way for Beth to do pretty much whatever it is that SHE wants to do today! Unlike Father’s Day, a day on which I believe each father should totally give himself over to being Dad for every minute his kids will have him, Mother’s Day should be one where Mom gets to choose how she will spend each moment.

And if she chooses “being Mom” for some of those, we should let her have that, too!

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day seem to line up differently for me. In homes manned by both a father and a mother it seems as if fathers mostly get a pass; any dadly stuff we do gets Oscar-level praise. On the other hand, Mothers, at least the ones I’ve known and loved, are entirely engaged in being a Mom pretty much every waking hour of every day. On the long drive to South Carolina from Cleveburg Beth and I were listening to Smartless, a very funny podcast series in which Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes surprise each other with a mystery guest each week. Amy Poehler was the guest on this particular episode (aside: I was Friday years old when I learned that she and Will are married), and she had some pretty cool things to say about her journey as a Mom.

Amy and Will have kids who are about to fledge. Not surprisingly, she described the process of parenting them in show business terms. When they are young you function much as a producer on a movie or TV show set would, organizing and facilitating for the actors and directors. Once your kids become teenagers this is no longer how it works. Now you are more like a consultant invited onto the set by the actors, your kids, available to give advice on demand but expected to simply dwell quietly and unobtrusively on the sidelines until your counsel might be requested. It’s a jarring transition, and in Amy’s telling one that comes without warning and on someone else’s schedule.

The other description shared by Ms. Poehler was also really spot on. She describes the life of a Mom as being inside a series of short stories that begin and end without any rhyme or reason. You find yourself a part of a new story arc after a couple of chapters have gone by. If you are lucky it’s a nice story, one in which you would be happy to spend a very long time. And then, just when you’ve got the hang of it, when you have figured out how your part interacts with the other characters, it’s over. Amy describes the sadness: ” I don’t want this one to be over. I’m good at this one.”

Until one day all of the other actors are gone, and you sit in repose with your memories and hope for an occasional cameo in a chapter here and there.

That’s what I always tried to give my Mom on Mother’s Day each year. A few memories of how wonderful it was being her son. Those calls were really quite lovely. Like watching a re-run of a favorite episode from your favorite TV show, only edited to take out any of the scary or tense or sad parts. We had lots of those calls all year long, actually. It just seemed like they were, I dunno, happier or something on Mother’s Day. I’ve probably reached for my phone a dozen times today to remember a story, or 10, with my Mom.

So Happy Mother’s Day to each and every Mom I know, especially my darling Beth, our sisters and sisters-in-law, and the mothers of our growing collection of grandchildren. I hope each and every one of you gets to do exactly what you want to do today. Tears and only the happiest of memories for the orphans among us, like me, for whom only the memories remain. We all had a mother; Happy Mother’s Day to all of you fortunate to still have a Mom. Time flies by until one day your Mom is no longer there, not even for a cameo appearance.

It’s Mother’s Day. Pick up the phone. Call your Mom.

I’ll see you next week…

1.Pulchritudinous. Beautiful. Funny, such an awkward, and frankly not terrifically pretty word to say “beautiful”. A favorite for Bugs Bunny, I’m told that it is the longest word for “Beautiful”.

No reason. My buddy Ken told everyone at dinner they were pulchritudinous last night. Not sure if I’ll be able to work it in but the reactions he got make it worth trying!

2. Gathering. Every year there are two large national meetings in the world of my day job. This weekend I find myself in Los Angeles among a few thousand folks who do pretty much the same thing that I do for a living. While LA is not my favorite convention setting, the presence of so many people I know, repsect, and like makes the venue almost irrelevant.

Kinda like an annual family reunion in the town you couldn’t wait to leave.

3. Maya Angelo. “When someone shows who they are, believe them the first time.”

I have to admit, until I read this quote some time ago I thought Ms. Angelo was kinda soft. Digging just a tiny bit below the surface of her life, writing, and speeches and it is clear that I was wrong. Indeed, just this single, simple sentence is indicative of a person who has been forced to learn this lesson in some type of hard way, and likely more than once. It is a lesson worth learning, but as is the case with so many lessons, one that can be challenged by nuance.

You meet someone for the first time. Someone to whom you’ve never been introduced, with whom you’ve never spoken, but of whom you have heard. Perhaps your foreknowledge is mostly quite positive, or maybe there is conflicting information, not all of which is quite so laudatory. Has this intel gathered from third parties informed you of who the introductee really is? Or rather, are we to take Ms. Angelo at, a writer noted for the precision of her words, at her EXACT words? That is, when the person shows you themself who they are?

Not gonna lie, if I am introduced to a new someone by a trusted friend with nothing but good things to share during the introduction, I find it easier to take Ms. Angelo’s exhortation a little on the softer side. To extend a little bit of grace if my first impression is less positive for whatever reason. If my friend thinks highly of someone I am inclined to let this new person offer up a couple of efforts at telling me who they really are.

Funny, though. As I get older and meet more folks, it’s the ones I may have heard less favorable things about prior to our introduction to whom I am inclined to offer a bit of grace. For me at least, in these circumstances I tend to wait for the person to tell me who they really are themselves. To try as best I can to withhold my ultimate accounting of the person before me until I hear it from them.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and one could do much worse than taking a broader view of Maya Angelo’s advice. One can never have enough friends; waiting to meet one in person, rather than via third person, has brought me friendships I might have missed had I not done so.

4. Everything. My professional world is filled with intelligent and kind people blessed with extraordinary talents that they choose to share with not only their patients, but also with each other. Roughly half of them, other in the larger sense in and in my closer personal circles, are women. It has been my great privilege to be a various times best friend, big (or little) brother, confidant, and provider of counsel. As with so many other worlds, in my world of eye surgeons the women typically carry a greater workload, a larger share of life’s burden if you will, than we men do.

So it was that once again I found myself with a young friend, alone together in a large, noisy gathering, trying to help her maneuver through the maze of “everything” that confronts these women in my life. For our “conversation” here on “musings…” this morning it doesn’t matter who she is where she lives, of the granular details of her problem. Like so many others who have asked for at sympathetic ear she is extraordinary in every way. An accomplished, busy eye surgeon. An internationally recognized expert whose counsel is routinely sought by our professional organizations and industry partners. A wife and a mother. How could she possibly keep all of this going? How was she to handle the sense that she was letting someone down? What was she to say to that nagging voice in her head that everywhere she found herself, there was someplace else she was supposed to be?

“There’s no balance between my work and my life. What if I stop? What if I just step away from everything that takes me away from home? I can’t stop feeling that I am missing too much, that my kids are missing their Mom too much. Will people understand? Will they forget me?”

Seriously, it was heartbreaking.

Once again I return to the concepts my daughter Megan I and worked so hard on some years ago. There really is no such thing as “work/life balance” because there isn’t really a “/” between the two; work is simply a part of life. No more, no less. What we should be seeking is harmony between all of the aspects of our life. Our job, our family, and what it is in ourself that makes us who we are. The trap that my dear young friend has fallen into is the canard of “having everything” where everything is, well, literally every thing.

You can, indeed, have everything, but to do so you must carefully define what constitutes your own personal everything. Having done so it IS possible to have everything, with one very important caveat: you can’t have your everything all at the same time. In fact, most of the time you will find that harmony lies in only having a portion of your own collection of everything right then. It is only over time, perhaps even only over a lifetime that you will realize that you have had “everything”. Indeed, some parts of everything will only harmonize at a very certain point in time. Think Little League baseball or Junior Prom. The first tooth under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy. Easing your new associate into the practice.

Some stuff only fits into the symphony at a very specific part of the music.

It was a very quick chat. We only had a few minutes to share before the rest of the crowd noticed us. I hugged my friend and told her that she already knew the answers to all of the questions. If all she needed was for someone she trusted to say “yes”, to follow the music she was hearing, that I was there to help. How could anyone not understand? Who could ever forget such a wonderful, caring, loving person?

Just before we let go I told her I won’t.

Reserve. Every few meetings I run into my friend Mark. His story is extraordinary, and I love telling it. Here is a story of hearts with a deep reserve of love to give.

How much space do you have in your heart? We talk here about work capacity, but I’m wondering about the capacity to extend your heart to others. Let me tell you a story.

Some 40 years ago a young man was struck by a car and suffered a concussion. While he was hospitalized his mother became ill and died in another hospital. For reasons too complex to share here, the young man’s father was not capable of raising the boy and his older brother so they were taken in by their uncle, the mother’s brother, and his wife and 3 kids.

A little extra room in that house, but not really enough. Ditto money. What they did have enough of it turns out was room in their hearts for two boys suddenly without a family. Room it turns out to treat the nephews as if they were their own children. They sent all 5 children to college, and all 5 have graduate degrees if memory serves. All supported by a couple who found that they had enough room in their hearts to simply make enough room everywhere else.

Fast forward 30 years or so from that fateful day in the hospital. The brothers are sitting with the only parents they have (the father died long ago), celebrating the first day of school for a son. The aunt and uncle who took them in said they had but one regret, that they had not formally adopted the boys when they took them in. The boys, now men, had clearly learned the lesson of the untapped capacity in one’s heart. At age 40 and 45 and with the blessings of their cousins, they arranged to be adopted by the uncle and aunt who found room everywhere else when it was clear they already had room in their hearts. A next generation now officially has grandparents.

Each and every day we learn that our physical boundaries are artificial, self-made restrictions on our capacity. Indeed, the more we expand our physical capacities the more unbounded they seem to become. The lesson in my friend’s story, I’m sure, is that we have a similarly broad and probably untapped capacity in our hearts for love. Like that aunt and uncle, each of us has more room in our hearts than we imagine, just waiting like our broad fitness capacity, for that time when its needed.

With that much untapped capacity in our hearts I’m sure that somehow we, too, would find enough room for everything else.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Who. Why is the word “who” for some reason different from, like, every other vowel in the English language. I mean, aside from stupid spelling stuff (stough?) routinely ridiculed by writers of all ilks (see: “enuf”), this one just strikes me as some kind of combination of silly and wrong.

“Who’s” means “who is”, as in “who’s going to mass tonight?” Totally get that. Not unusual in the least. It’s the possessive that runs afoul of literally every other vowel I can think of at the moment (no bonus points for finding another example unless it’s in your own 1000 work weekly missive). “Whose”. Why? Why do we need another way to assign ownership when [‘s] works perfectly well for every other noun?

Who’s going to tell me whose dumb idea this was?

2. Semiquincentennial. The unabashedly awkward word for 250th anniversary. Yesterday was the 250 Anniversary of “the shot heard round the world”. 250 years ago the American Revolutionary War tipped off with the Battles of Concord and Lexington (Massachusetts). If my math is correct that means Paul Revere careened across the (then) verdant fields and deserted roads of Greater Boston crying out “the British are coming”, his historic ride ending with two lanterns alight in the belfry of the Old North Church.

The British would come by sea.

T’was a time when every person educated in America learned the story of Paul Revere’s ride in grade school. We all learned that he earned his living as a silversmith; everyone could tell you that it was “one if by land, two if by sea.” The concept of American exceptionalism was introduced in grade school, Manifest Destiny in Jr. High, and the American Dream that came of these was the collective pursuit of our lifetimes. Generation followed generation. Even the schism that was our Civil War became taught as a single narrative, one that became more and more singular across the nation as we moved through two World Wars.

It wasn’t until the 1960’s that folks began to question the narrative. Largely, it seems, in response to the Viet Nam War and the “question everything” mantra in vogue, especially in our universities. Veils were parted and we were privy to an unvarnished view of contemporary leaders and historical figures alike. Our history, and with it the mores and behavior of our historically important figures were reexamined. Initially this reexamination was simply in the revealing of more facts about these (mostly) men, facts largely un-recalled in the shared history books or our youth.

Eventually, though, through the application of present day customs and mores to actions taken by individuals hundreds of years ago in worlds that bare only glancing resemblance to our modern societies, we have begun to forget just how singularly unique this American Revolution was at the time, and quite frankly for more than 150 years thereafter: we were the first people to shrug the yoke of imperialism in revolt, and to resist re-cloaking ourselves in anything that resembled it for 250 years. Unlike England (Oliver Cromwell), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), or Latin America (too many to mention), America did NOT slide back into dictatorship.

And yet, over the last 75 or so years we seem to have forgotten that ours is a nation that has continued to grow closer and closer to achieving Jefferson’s famously declared rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rather, we have seem to have chosen to emphasize failures of our forebearers to live up to both the written principles on which our country was founded, and our more modern interpretation of those principles. Ours is progress that has hardly traveled a straight line toward success. Time and again from the founding of our country until today we learn of the hypocrisies of our leaders. Washington, Jefferson, and even Franklin were slave owners. Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Clinton and Trump, all serial philanderers. Our quest for racial equality has hardly been a straight line race from the Confederate South to the present.

Here is Allen C. Guelzo in yesterdays WSJ: “But the failure to live up to principles is a common human failure. It may be precisely the loftiness of the Revolution’s principles that gives us high expectations of ourselves and then triggers a woe-is-us sense of disgusted resignation when we fall short.”

But principled progress we have had, and principled progress we seem to be destined to have. We need not ignore historical hypocrisy or mistakes. Indeed, we most assuredly should not forget or ignore either. We should rather acknowledge the inexorable history of success, however crooked the timeline has been, and use this as enduring fuel to drive us over the next 250 years. It is the principles of our nation’s founding, the principles that drove Paul Revere on his ride, the principles that gave fire to those first patriots in Lexington and Concord that should drive us through the haze of invective and rhetoric of our day.

We should be listening to the echo of that fateful shot 250 years ago, and directing our gaze to the trigger of its source.

3. Easter. A friend posted a very funny video of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show beseeching his fellow Jews to “step it up” in the battle between Easter and Passover for the hearts and minds of children. Look for it. It’s just full of funny lines. For example, Stewart laments that Christians can count on luminaries such as (former) NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to spread the word, while there has yet to be a superstar Jewish NFL quarterback. As an aside, as a Catholic, I would reply that Mr. Stewart’s people are killing it in the comedy realm vs. Christians, but you get the idea. He lays down his trump card right at the beginning: chocolate vs. matzo. Coulda dropped the mic right there.

There is certainly a much, much deeper meaning to both of these religious days of course. The death and subsequent ascension of Christ is the single most significant aspect of the Christian faith: humans are saved and a path to Heaven is opened through the miracle of Christ rising from the dead. Passover is also a story of salvation, albeit a less ephemeral, more concrete one: God, through Moses, leads his people out of slavery through the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. Both stories invoke a God who is present in the daily life of his people. Both religions celebrate this on holidays around which a part of their calendar revolves. All who follow either religion are asked to believe that the stories are factual.

Are they? Could they be? Are the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ and the parting of the Red Sea by Moses the AP news accounts of their day? Or are they allegorical, fables meant to teach the underlying principle of a kind and gracious God who awaits us at the end or our days? Here, I would say, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you are poor, powerful, or somewhere in between, because it is the viewpoint that matters, not necessarily the facts. You either believe in something that came before and will be there after, or you don’t. The facts, in this case, don’t really seem to matter.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

On this day when Christians join in worship to celebrate an empty tomb while Jews gather around a table with an empty chair in the hope that Israel will join them, today at least we see the best of what religion can offer to people of faith. There is a certain hopefulness in both Easter and Passover, a hope that there IS a God, and that there IS something to come. Faith, though, is not limited to the Christian or Jewish religions, nor is it limited to these highest of holy days. The religious have faith 24/7/365, right? So, too, do those of faith who are not necessarily religious in the Judeo-Christian sense. One thinks of the deep spirituality of indigenous peoples around the world, for example, Islam, or the other great religions of the East like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the like. In all there is a deeply felt faith that there is more, in the end, than 3 squares and a place to lay your head.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. I’ll see you next week…

1. Blogviate. To bloviate via a blog.

Today is the 16th anniversary of this silly blog. I’ll circulate the original post this week. Launched on this day in 2009 for the sole purpose of emptying out my “internal hard drive” so that I could refill it with more drivel. It’s been a great ride!

Thanks for coming along.

2. Adumbrate. To report or outline. Not at all what I was expecting.

Seems to me the “dumb” in the middle should have more influence. You know, like the “reporting” you’ve found here.

3. Healthspan V. Connection is the last piece of the Healthspan puzzle. Originally noted by the researchers of the Harvard Happiness study that followed the Class of ’55 through their post-collegiate lives, close personal connections are strong predictors of health and happiness as we grow older. This remarkable study was later combined with an equally wonderful cohort of young men from the public high school in nearby Revere, and subsequently has been expanded to include their spouses, children, grandchildren, and so on.

Through all of these generations the results have been consistent: the presence and maintenance of close personal relationships is strongly associated with an increase in happiness, and a delay in the onset of the effects of chronic disease and aging. The conclusion of the original Harvard study was very specific: happiness and its effects were present if one of the men had 3 or more close personal friendships. Interestingly their wives did not count toward the 3 (Note: I could find no mention of same sex partners). As the study expanded and examined the health and happiness of all family members it became clear that ANY close personal relationships counted, the more the better.

It should be noted that the most recent reportage in the book “The Good Life” reviews data that includes only the first few years of our new age of “remote connection” through the various tools of the internet. The influence of these relationships is therefore predicated on proximity: they took place “in real life” as we now say. The relationships that show a beneficial effect on Healthspan take place side-by-side and face-to-face. Perhaps the addition of our myriad new modes of communication enhance this proximity effect. It remains to be seen if our very new world with all of its “together while apart” connections will have a similar effect.

For now the final key that unlocks our Healthspan potential is creating and nurturing close personal relationships with family and friends. That this should be so seems obvious. Nonetheless, it is fascinating and more than a bit comforting to see it objectively confirmed over 4 generations.

4. Next. Consistent with this, Beth and I made a quick trip to Cincinnati last weekend to see our friends Bill and Nancy. Outside of our siblings and their spouses they are the couple with whom we have had the longest continuous friendship. We met in grad school, and for almost 30 years lived less than an hour apart as we raised our families and marched through our careers. Those families shared something like 28 or 29 consecutive Christmas night dinners. Married a month apart, the four of us have celebrated most of our anniversaries together; this year we will travel to Italy for our 40th.

So much of what we’ve experienced together has occurred pretty much on schedule. “What comes next?” was almost as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Kids were born, went to school, and fledged. Mostly on schedule. Both couples became empty nesters at about the same time. Bill and I went through the phases of our surgical careers, again, mostly on schedule. Each of us made one very major change in our practices here in Cleveland, and we expected that our glide paths to retirement would also be fairly similar. Bill opted to step off the practice carousel in favor of a medical director job with one of the big industry players in early 2020, but even so, it appears that we are still running side-by-side as we come to the finish line.

And so it was that we four found ourselves returning again and again to the question of what comes next. None of our parents really asked themselves that when they still had some control over the answer. Only Bill’s Mom is left of our 8 parents and sadly she was not any more receptive to the entreaties made by Beth and Nancy to the other parents that they proactively decide what the last third of their lives might look like. “Big Red” has channeled Beth’s parents and my Mom, digging in her heals and insisting that she is completely capable of handling life on her own in the family home. It was a hard landing for all of our folks, and terribly difficult for the rest of us to watch.

What about us, then? We have watched our parents fail to plan for what inevitably comes next. Retirement, for example, just happened. Even my father-in-law, so fixated on retiring at 55, spent very little time thinking about what that would mean and what comes next after retirement. More problematically, he also failed to effectively communicate whatever he may have been thinking with my mother-in-law. She never really made clear her desires or plans, leaving them in separate row boats, adrift on the same ocean, miles apart.

I don’t think this is really the case with either Beth and me or Bill and Nancy. From our discussions with one another last weekend it is clear that both couples are intensely engaged in the back and forth necessary to be in the same row boat headed toward the same beach. After a couple of days chatting and a week or so to digest the conversations, it appears that we have all learned the lesson so painfully taught by our parents’ endgames. The decisions we must make are all fairly obvious; make the decisions you must make when you still have the ability to make them for yourself.

What’s next for us is retirement. When and then where. In all likelihood “when’ will be the kicker; where can be changed at almost any point. Both Bill and I have toiled in worlds where our work has brought us great measures of respect. Indeed, if anything our results have continued to improve over time, and the respect accorded us therefore not simply due to our longevity. We have remained relevant, contributing to the continued development of our respective fields, even at this later stage of our careers. Interestingly this actually makes it harder to retire. Meaningful relevance and the respect it brings is heady stuff, no matter what kind of work you do. How else to explain the Jamie Dimon’s of the world, let alone the Buffet’s and the octogenarians shuffling in the halls of government?

When to retire seems to be the first of a series of “whens” awaiting, and perhaps the easiest. Neither one of us wants to stay beyond the point when we are no longer relevant or, Heaven forbid, discover that we have stayed too long. After that comes the hard parts. When do we leave our homes? When do we accept help in the basic blocking and tackling of daily life? When do we relinquish our agency? Having seen the end of our parents’ journeys will we have the perspicacity to decide when it’s “when”? Will we have the courage?

In the end “next” always arrives, we just don’t know when.

I’ll see you next week…

It’s Masters weekend in the golf world. Today, for one day of the year, I will allow myself to want.

You see, golf, like baseball and other games, is woven into the fabric of certain families. Taught either game by our fathers, we are filled with memories of times spent in and around our game. Mileposts are tagged with golf-related markers for the men in my family. Some are from outings of our own, and some from trips to watch others play. Most simply revolve around the simple act of watching a tournament together on TV. Fortunate are those who have something like this.

My Dad was very generous with his sons when it came to golf (one sister took up the game after she grew up and got married). Generous with access (club, equipment) and generous with his time. The golf course was the one place where we knew he’d be OK with us. Oh sure, our shenanigans and occasional tantrums provoked every bit of his Dickensonian parenting style, but still, the golf course was where we eventually bonded as 3 adult men. Joined by my sister’s husband we made up a very special foursome, indeed. We 3 younger men repaid my Dad for his generosity by taking him on epic golfing boondoggles, and by sharing that space in front of the TV as often as we could.

What does this have to do with ‘want’, you wonder. Alas, no one needs to play golf, save perhaps for a few hundred pros of course. Over the years our family foursome was buffeted by the economic winds of life, just like all other families, but we were able to sail through and continue our odyssey. We all wanted to play, and our respective families wanted it for us, too. In time, at least for two of us, our bodies failed and what it would take to play impinged on true family needs. Worse, my Dad’s mind has failed him as well, and the memories that tie this story together are as lost to him as the proverbial duck hook into the woods.

There, in a nutshell, lies the ‘want’. I’ve long since lost the desire to play golf, and I can honestly say that I do not miss the game itself. I’ve played thousands of rounds; I’ve had a good run. The game of golf owes me nothing. No, it’s not the act of playing that I miss, the physical aspect of the challenge that I allow myself to want on this one day. What I want, of course, is one more round with my Dad, my brother Randy, and my brother-in-law Steve.

On this one day I allow myself to want the surgery that would return me to the game regardless of all the needs that would suffer because of it. Just for one day. I pretend. I imagine the joy on Steve’s face as he shoots even par on the the back nine of the hardest course we ever played together, winning the family grudge match. I can see the evil grin on Randy’s face as he gets deeper and deeper under my skin and beats me for the 1000th consecutive time, his game as flawless as ever. I hear my Dad cackle as he drops yet another long birdie putt on top of one I’d just sunk, sure that I’d beaten him this time, cringing at the thought of him telling and retelling the story for years to come.

In the end that would be enough, I think. When I call my Dad late today and we “watch” the back nine of the Masters together it would be enough to know that he remembers. We’ll talk about our adventures with Randy and Steve, and we’ll pretend that he remembers those times when we marked our journey by the exploits of the golfers on TV. Jack’s putt on 15. Tiger’s improbable chip in on 16. Ben sobbing on the 18th. Pretend that he remembers laughing at me after dropping that putt on top of mine, that one fine day when all we wanted was to play golf together.

Today…just today…club in hand, phone to ear…I will want.

A note from 2025: This year is like every year since I first wrote the above. Have I returned to the game? Meh. Hardly. I walk the course with club in hand and play at playing golf, solely for the pleasure of the company of men who feel about golf the way my Dad, Randy, and Steve did and do. I will want this weekend as I have wanted since my Dad fell ill. Of that I am sure. Perhaps my sister Kerstin’s husband Jimmy will join the family foursome, and we will make new memories together. I do miss the company of golf.

I do want to experience that again.

1) Collabrity. Collaboration among celebrities. Used to describe a bunch of my colleagues at a conference.

Should be a word.

2) BLUF. Bottom Line Up Front. Mandatory strategy when presenting to the Department of Defense. Probably not a terrible strategy for slightly lower pressure presentations like our discussions a couple of weeks ago about how to educate our colleagues on mite-eradication.

Lower pressure, that is, unless you see a mite.

3) Beaker. Wordless Muppet’s character with hair that looked oddly similar to frozen vertical gummy worms. Strangely and consistently hilarious.

And apparently the inspiration for the most au courant hairstyle of the young male.

4) Healthspan 5. Supplements. The Holy Grail of longevity, right? Just give me a pill. No exercise. Eat whatever you want. Sleep when you’re dead. 300 yard drives until your 80, right out of a bottle. People have been talking about this since I was in grade school. Every single longevity “expert” has at least one chapter on this. Some, like Sinclair, have made their biggest marks doing research with this as the ultimate goal.

For the moment there is no magic bullet; what we have at the moment is supplements.

No reason to embellish, this is a pretty straightforward area at the moment. While there is literally a laundry list of stuff you COULD use, the list of stuff that is reasonable to add in at this stage is actually rather short. Over 40? Take one baby aspirin per day. Got any reason to take a statin? Just say yes. Metformin, the ubiquitous medication for Type 2 Diabetes has been shown to lengthen the telomeres, the end caps on chromosomes. Longer telomeres mean a younger chromosome. 500 mg/day, 1000 if you have an abnormal HbA1c or fasting glucose. There are almost no side effects and Metformin is so old that it is usually free.

How about stuff that is singularly associated with longevity and Healthspan? Nicotinamide Mono-nucleonside (NMN) is an NAD facilitator, increasing the efficiency of cell metabolism. 1000mg/day. Tirmethylglucolyte (TMG) facilitates the activity of NMN (500mg/day). Resveratol, the antioxidant made famous by 60 Minutes is somewhat controversial, but in my reading it is either beneficial or neutral; add in 1000mg/day. Round out your kit with 4-5000IU of Vitamin D3, 180-360 IU of Vitamin K2, and ~2500mg of re-esterified Omega-3 fatty acid and you have a cutting edge but conservative longevity supplement strategy.

Note that none of this is FDA-tested let alone approved. I am not providing medical advice or writing a prescription. This is my take-home from extensive reading and it is what I am doing at the moment. I am investigating “Fatty-15”, a newly discovered omega fatty acid found in healthy dolphins and will return someday with my thoughts.

I mean, if you could be as cool as a dolphin just by taking a pill…

5. Discoarse. Conversation or communication that is uncouth, unsavory, and impolite. Should be a word.

I think discoarse as I have defined it is a very apt description of the state of our national conversations. All of them. I find almost all of them to be lacking politesse in all ways. My granddaughter Lila once asked me what it sounded like if you were “reading cursive”. I really love that. The speech writers who backed people like JFK and Reagan spoke in cursive. Heck, Churchill THOUGHT in cursive and simply told the world what he was thinking. Now? There’s no elegance or style. Everything is a full-frontal assault. It’s as if everyone we read about on all sides of government is speaking in the big, bold, not very precise block letters we see in kindergarten homework.

It’s all so very coarse.

And so very personal. Vindictive and personal. It’s as if all of governance has been distilled down to nothing more than one zero-sum game after another. A policy installation is only successful if it knocks out an incumbent statute, a “game” that makes the writer of the new rule the winner at the expense of whoever wrote the prior one. As if a signature goal of every new policy is to turn the creators of the older policy into losers. What ever happened to working toward a common good? You know, something we would all rally around. I seem to remember that non-zero pursuits, the rising tide lifting all boats and all, I remember when that was how our leaders talked to one another and to us.

It’s been a very long time since all of us peasants out here in the villages were entirely in the dark about what actually went on in D.C. That all probably went away in the late ’60’s with Viet Nam and all that came with it. Would we have thought about “Camelot” in such romantic ways if we knew as much about what was going on as we came to know about the Nixon or Clinton administrations? Doubt it. But come on, they at least made an effort at smoothing out the bad news. Now? Language as if drawn by the literary equivalents of brutalist architects, laden with invective and shouted in ALL CAPS from the social media site of the moment. Next thing you know we’ll have a Senator channeling Khrushchev and pounding a podium with his shoe, or a couple of Members paying homage to Jackson era political battles by throwing down MMA style in the aisle during a House session.

Good idea, bad idea, idea you simply don’t care about, the discussions are toxic. Honestly, it just makes all of us Chez bingo unhappy; I don’t think we are alone in that. It’s ugly and unseemly and it reflects poorly on all of us, not just the folks who are supposed to be looking out for the common good. You can argue about who started it all and when, but whoever and whenever, it is now so coarse that it makes many (most?) people unhappy just from the listening.

Our public discourse has become coarse bordering on vulgar. We are all the lesser for it.

I’ll see you next week…