Tanya, the Cujo of Rice Avenue

(Cujo, of Stephen King fame.  We lived with a dog about like this one.)

I have had dogs all my life.  I would estimate that I am currently on number 9 or 10.  My first dog was some black mutt named Tag, which we had when I was four or five years old.  My parents had to get rid of him because he refused to stop chasing Mrs. Mumaugh’s chickens.  Mumaugh was a neighbor lady who was a Native American.  We have taken enough away from them over the past three centuries, so the dog went.  My first and only poem (circa 1952) was written about this dog:

I once had a dog named Tag,

And when I would call him his tail would wag.

If any of you proceed to publish that poem, please send me the royalties when they start pouring in.

The most memorable dog we had was a Border Collie mix named Tanya.  My mother acquired this one when we lived on Rice Avenue sometime after my father died, and we had the dog through my high school and college days.  Everything went smoothly for the first few years.  Tanya wagged her tail; we petted her, fed her, and watered her.  We tossed a ball; she fetched it.  She slept, she ate, she urinated and defecated, and she occasionally barked.  We provided food and shelter; she provided some company.  How complicated a contract do we need to devise? 

But then the problem started.  My mother always fed Gaines-Burgers to Tanya, which was a dog food that looked like a raw hamburger and came wrapped in individual plastic packages.  The production of this dog food ceased in the 1990s.  At first, Tanya would gobble up the burger as soon as she was given one.  But as she got older, she carried the meaty disc to a corner of the living room where she laid down with the prize like it was her baby, and she would threaten anyone who entered her personal space.  She actually bared her teeth and growled menacingly, and if you got even closer, she would snap at you.  I never wrote a poem about this dog, so maybe that omission planted some seed of insecurity in that puny Collie brain.

One day we hit a tipping point.  You see, Tanya would guard her burger for a couple of hours and look around the room to see if anyone was even watching her.  If you were, she bared her fangs.  (It was similar to my younger brother Jack, who hated it if you looked at him over the breakfast table in the morning while he ate his cereal.  He actually uttered a sort of a growl and bared his teeth, before he developed the habit of lining up all the cereal boxes in a semi-circle in front of him so he could not be seen at all.  Recently, Jack told me he was simply lining up those boxes so he could read the nutritional information.  Right!  I'm sure he couldn't even pronounce "riboflavin" at that age.)

But on one occasion, I got so angry about Tanya hoarding her food and holding the family hostage until she finished, that I got right in her face, pointed my finger at her, and screamed “Tanya, eat it!”  She snapped.  Tanya sprang to her feet and came at me with jaws and saliva flying and a growl that gives me cold sweats to this day.  I thought she was going to rip my JC Penney’s Towncraft briefs right off my body.  (It must have been a Saturday, because my brothers and I always spent the morning watching tv in our underwear.  In the weeks that followed this incident, we actually sat on the couch under a heavy blanket to protect us in case Tanya decided to attack.  We refused to give up the Saturday underwear thingie.)

Tanya’s weirdness provided my brothers and I with entertainment, however.  Whenever a new friend came over to the house, and they asked about the dog, we would tell them what Tanya liked the best.  “Just point your finger at her and say eat it.”  The reaction of the dog and the guest were quite amazing.  Many of these friends never returned.

I hated coming home to visit after I went off to Ohio State, because my mother would beg me to take Tanya to the vet for one thing or another.  No one else could even get her in the car without being attacked.  I think I may have suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) years later, and it wasn't from my military service. One time, I took her to a husband and wife vet office in a nearby town to get Tanya’s nails clipped.  I think we had become persona non grata with all the local vets.  Somehow I got her into the office on her leash, and explained to the naïve vets what we needed.  I told them to be really careful with this dog; they would probably have to put her to sleep to do anything with her, I advised.  Advice not taken, apparently.  The next day when I returned to fetch the dog, the husband vet had his right arm wrapped in a fresh bandage, and his wife had her left arm wrapped in a matching arrangement.  “Yep, she got us both”, he volunteered.

There was one other personality in the mix---my blind grandmother.  My grandma had lived with us for years, and she was totally without sight.  The interesting thing was that Tanya often lay at her feet with one of those damn burgers, unbeknown to my grandmother.  When she moved her feet or began to rock in the chair, Tanya would start to bare her teeth and look threatening.  But Tanya never took it any further than that with the old woman who always thought that the snarky dog was as sweet as sugar.  Sometimes, what you don’t know, or can’t see, can’t hurt you.

Why my mother kept this menace so long after the dog went quirky is a mystery to me.  Perhaps it had something to do with wanting life to remain the same as it had been.  It was changing in our house.  I had left home already, and my brothers were not far behind.  Soon, our mother would be left alone with her invalid mother.  And Tanya would at least be there to keep them company, flaws and all.

The stress that university students endure

(University students are under stress that is more or less constant, but so much of it is self-imposed.)

The pattern was the same nearly every year that I taught.  Classes started in late August, students were full of vim and vigor, and mostly tan.  The honeymoon lasted about two weeks, and then the work load began to take its toll.  My field biology course was not difficult, but it included a hell of a lot of material, weekend field trips, tons of memorization, an outside research project, and keeping a field notebook of every walk in the outdoor environment the student took.   By late September, students were noticeably fatigued, as they stayed up later and later to do the work from all their courses.  Less sleep, colder and rainier weather, more stress from getting behind, even less sleep to try to catch up, and then the viruses.  By mid-October, my class looked and sounded like a tuberculosis ward of the 1920s---sneezing, coughing, hacking, tissues everywhere.  I could almost see the germs in the air.  Most years, at least one student contracted mononucleosis at this time, missed two weeks of class, and found themselves in one heck of a hole.  Some missed so much school that they had to drop out and lose the entire semester.

This process is probably repeated across the country at universities and colleges everywhere.  Generally, students inherently want to do well, and there is often tremendous social pressure, real or imagined, on them to succeed.  Their families are paying a huge sum of money to send them to the school and they have worked hard to get there.  Students believe that their entire future depends on their academic accomplishments; in short, they believe that life will be miserable if success is not attained in the hallowed classrooms of America's institutions of higher learning.

The following paragraph is an email message, reproduced here verbatim, sent to one of my Teaching Assistants near the end of the fall semester a few years ago.   The student was taking my field biology course, and the Monday deadline was due for handing in their field notebook, which was worth 15% of their entire grade for the course.  To get the full effect and tone of the message, you have to read it as though you were this student: female, slight Puerto Rican accent, high-pitched voice, and read extremely rapidly:

"Hi Viviana,
I recently emailed Emily and Florian about this but didn't get a reply.  I'm really freaking out right now because I woke up at 10pm tonight....I got back to Ithaca around 4am Monday and started doing work the minute I got back because I have a lot due this week, and then I decided to take a quick nap before field bio.  I don't know how I did this but I must have been so tired that I turned the alarm off in my sleep and just woke up at 10pm Monday night.  Needless to say, I am freaking out about the field notebook.  I've been trying to get in touch with a TA to see if I can hand it to one of you tomorrow morning/tomorrow sometime.  I will seriously walk over to your place tomorrow anytime or whatever it takes even if you live in the boonies---I'm just freaking out and Gavin's going to kill me.   And I worked so hard on this thing--it took so long to put together.  I don't have the species accounts from the project since those were collected with out project but I think you graded my project, so perhaps you have them already.  I understand if I lose points on the journal because it's technically late by several hours, but I don't want to lose 150 points!  Omg, let me know what I should do...Thanks so much."

Although this is a somewhat humorous message, you can hear the panic in this student's voice.  She must have been exhausted, because the "quick nap" turned out to be 10-12 hours long.  Needless to say, I was reasonably lenient on her missed deadline, and this student is now in vet school at Cornell.

I have told the following anecdote many times before, but it is worth repeating, in brief, because it is relevant to this blog  I was an undergrad at Ohio State University in the 1960s during the Vietnam War.  If you were not in college, you were almost certainly drafted into the military by Uncle Sam, barring some kind of serious physical affliction.  In those years, the probability was very high that you would be sent to Vietnam, where there was risk of death or serious injury.  Also, state universities like OSU actually flunked out students who did not maintain the published minimum GPA.  I believe that nearly 1/3 of all freshmen left the university due to poor grades in those days.  I can distinctly remember going into a final exam with males whose GPA was on the borderline.  If they got a D on the final exam of that particular course, their GPA would fall below the minimum needed to stay in school, they would be drafted into the Army, sent to the war, and possibly killed.  In other words, for some students, their performance on a test was literally a matter of life or death.  Can you even imagine that kind of pressure?

I used to repeat this story to my field bio class every year, about the time I thought the stress was getting thick.  I asked them what is the worst thing that could happen to you IF you were not successful at this place?  You would be embarrassed?  Your parents would be disappointed? You would be physically separated from your boy friend or girl friend?  You would no longer get to play on the basketball team?  Or, you would never get a good-paying job and, therefore, not live happily ever after?  All of those things may be true, but compare that to having your arm or leg blown off, or being a parapalegic, or having mental trauma that lasts the rest of your life. I'm not a psychologist or a guidance counselor, although I often played one at the university.  But it is apparent that each of us tends to let our current fears and concerns become as large as all outdoors.  They can consume us as though we were the only human on earth who was feeling stressed.  But it is all relative, and a modicum of stress is probably adaptive.  Stress keeps us somewhat sharp, alert, and ready.  It is just a matter of balance, I suppose.

So, if you are a university student reading this, and you tend to let the work and the expectations get you down, ask yourself this question.  What is the worst that could happen?  An even more interesting question is this.  What is the best that could happen, even if I left school?  Remember that Steve Jobs dropped out of college during his freshman year, and he seems to know a thing or two about success.

DrTom gets an official warning from Facebook

(I thought the fine print on this warning would thank me for my contributions to Facebook, but no such luck.)

Today I opened my email to find the following warning from the administrators of Facebook:

Hello,

You made one or more wall posts that violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, posts that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down posts that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page at http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wposts.

The Facebook Team

I admit that I have been pushing the envelope on FB lately.  I found over 200 Fan Pages that I thought were relevant to items I am trying to sell on this site, so I placed blurbs about my stuff on those sites incessantly for the past few weeks: airline pages, travel pages, sites about dogs and hotels and cruise lines, etc.  I couldn't resist the tens of thousands of eyeballs on those pages (to get the number of people, divide by two).  I joined Fan Pages like "I Love Hugs", "Life With Dogs", " i love you. you love me. then why can't we be together?", and "Once you live in NEW DELHI u cannot live anywhere else in the world !!".  I  spammed the Fan Pages of Ellen deGeneres, The Mentalist, The Colbert Report, and other tv shows.  I placed "ads" on the Walls of The Ohio State University, Oregon State University, and Cornell.  I invaded various food channels and the Walls of many cities and countries found around the world.  In short, I was an aggressive advertiser, ambitious, assertive, and confident in my product.

Alas, I can report that all of that effort on my part has resulted in a big fat nothing.  Zilch.  No sales.  Nada.  No profits.  I accomplished very little with all that spamming, except the receipt of a warning from FB that they might disable my account.  I guess that was a blessing, because now I will have more time for direct contact with all my FB friends---to convince them to buy flowers (see cheery ad below) or designer cookies for your mother or wife.  But what does an aspiring capitalist have to do to make a buck in this world?

I realize fully that I was not trained to make money in this life.  I was educated as a scientist, a biologist, an ecologist, a conservationist.  Those people don't make money; they give of their life to try to understand and save the world and to teach others about all that.  But no one really listens to that message, because they are all out there making money.  In fact, the public thinks that conservationists don't need money because they know how to live off the land--to find wild edibles for food, to erect primitive shelters from hemlock boughs to get out of the rain and snow, to kill and skin wild animals to make clothing.  So you see, when we want to buy a new toaster oven or pay our electric bill, all we have are some beaver pelts or deer livers or hallucinogenic shrooms for those products or services.  Most of us have only seen a $100 bill when we visited the money collection at the Smithsonian Institution .  When we renegotiate our university contracts, we end up settling for an extra pound of acorns per month instead of a real salary increase.  We are so naive.

Given my friendly notice from the management at FB, I spent the past couple of hours hitting the "Unlike" button on about 150 Fan Pages where I was pumping my wares.  After all, what could I possibly have to say on the "Memphis" page if I weren't trying to get readers there to buy Cafe Britt coffee (see tiny micro bar ad above) or cigars from my site?  "Hey, anyone here seen Elvis lately?"  What could I contribute on the "Copenhagen" site other than wanting those Danes to come to my blog?  "Hvordan har De det?"  And what do I have in common with readers of the "Princess Cruises" site, unless I can get them to book their cruise on DrTom's Travel Shoppe?  (To be honest, I am really prone to motion sickness, so the thought of taking a cruise (see simple blue and orange ad below) with 5,000 strangers wearing plaid shorts makes me vomit for a couple of reasons. But I would gladly sell a cruise to anyone else.)

So, I am left with using my own Profile page on FB to entice potential customers to this site.  Just watch over the next month how clever I can be in getting my FB friends here.  Expect to see the following messages on my Wall soon.  "Would you like to be admitted to Cornell University and receive reduced tuition?  Then come to Life at DrTom's."  "Are you lonely and in need of a free companion dog?  .......DrTom's."  "Like to get rich quick?  Come to DrTom's for a list of FB Fan Pages that you can spam.  Results guaranteed!"  I am only limited by my own imagination.  And because people really do want to get rich quick, or they need a dog, they will be like putty in my hands.  Yea, that's the ticket.  I will just lie outright and promise the moon.  Then, after I make a big pile of money, maybe I'll take a cruise.  BLECK!

Thanks for everything! Anna Maria Alberghetti

(Anna Maria and I had such a good time together.)

It was the summer of 1967 and I was working as Assistant Tennis Pro at Scioto Country Club in Upper Arlington, Ohio.  I played tennis for Ohio State in those days and John Hendrix was the coach at OSU.  He was also the Head Pro at Scioto CC, so he hired me for the summer.  I mostly played tennis with elderly women who needed company and who needed someone to make them laugh on the court while hitting tennis balls.  I also ran tennis clinics for kids, strung tennis racquets, and I got to play quite a bit of tennis when I wasn't teaching.  Not a bad gig all-in-all.

One of the members of the club was a developer who was ready to have a Grand Opening of his housing development.  He and Coach cooked up the idea of having a tennis exhibition at the development as part of a gala opening, and Bob "Harry" Harrison and I were given the assignment.  Harry also played for OSU, so we were old friends.  But the exciting part of the event was the planned appearance of a celebrity that the developer had hired, or bribed, or coerced in some way to show up and mingle for a while with prospective buyers of his houses while watching our tennis exhibition match.

The celebrity was Anna Maria Alberghetti, a woman who is well-known to those of my generation.  Alberghetti started her career as an opera singer and a child prodigy at the age of 6, performed at Carnegie Hall at 13, and then starred in about a dozen movies in the 1950s and 60s.  She won a Tony Award for her Broadway performance in Carnival in 1962.  I specifically had remembered her in Cinderfella in 1960, where she co-starred with Jerry Lewis.  And she was on the cover of Life magazine twice.  Wow!

So Harry and I were to play a singles match in front of the famous Anna Maria and that was it--no other matches but ours, no other distractions for the movie star.  She could focus on our talent and our Ohio personalities, she would enjoy herself thoroughly, she would raise our praises in Rome when she returned to her homeland, and she would giggle and tease and horse around with us after the match.  In short, she would have an afternoon so entertaining that she would never forget it, nor would she ever forget us.

Anna Maria showed up in a limousine, exactly befitting a famous person.  She was surrounded with 4 or 5 men who wore sunglasses; I assumed they were body guards.  Anna Maria also wore large sunglasses and a large, wide-brimmed hat.  Her arrival was anticipated by the crowd with great excitement; Harry and I giggled like 3rd graders before the match.  The only problem was that she arrived AFTER we had finished our match.  She got there in time to see two tired, sweaty, and smelly wannabes gawking at the black entourage, and I mean black.  The limousine was black.  All the bodyguards were dressed in black.  They reminded me of a scene from The Sopranos.   Everyone wore dark sunglasses.  And Anna Maria never said a word the entire 30 minutes that she was there; I mean she never uttered a sound-not in Italian, not in English, not a moan, not a sigh, nothing.  She signed autographs, while the ends of her mouth were turned up ever so slightly in what could be defined as a smile.

It then occurred to me that maybe the guys in black were sent there by the tennis coach from Purdue, the only team in the Big Ten Conference that we could beat in those days, to whack Harry and me.  This whole thing was just a setup to eliminate one-third of OSU's team.

By sundown I realized that the entire episode was just another of life's disappointments.  We had a lot of those in Ohio.  Anna Maria came and she went.  She saw nothing, said nothing, sang nothing and, I am sure, remembered nothing. 

But I'm much older and more sophisticated now.  I think that next spring I will go to Rome; I love Italy after all.  I will call Anna Maria and have her meet me for coffee at the Piazza Navona.  She can bring along those other hot Italian movie stars of yesteryear--Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.  I'm sure they all know each other.  And Anna Maria and I can relive old times, and reminisce about Columbus, Ohio, and we will throw our heads back in gleeful laughter, and Gina and Sophia will wish they had been there with us.  Ohhhhhhhhh hum.

Is your life's path determined at 17?

(The choices that young people need to make are daunting, and possibly made too early.)

When we were kids, I distinctly remember asking my younger brother what he wanted to be when he grew up.  We were sitting on the basement stairs at the time, so he looked around the basement, and answered: "A clothes dryer".  I laughed at him, and attempted to explain that was impossible.  He was a young human being and when he grew up he would just be an older human being, but what would he do for a job as an adult?  I'm sure he didn't understand my logic at the time.  But I have often wondered at the perspective that allowed this young boy to think that he could become a mechanical, inanimate object later in life.

Last night, I had a drink with four of my former undergrad students, all of whom will be graduating in May.  The conversation focused mostly on what they would be doing after graduation.  They are all very bright students and they had been applying to various grad schools around the country.  Should I work on population ecology modeling with Professor X at Penn State or on a topic somewhat less mathematical with Professor Y at University of Georgia?  Should I study fish management at Oregon State or do a study on white-tailed deer at Ohio State?  Should I work on obtaining a M.S. degree now, or go straight for the Ph.D.?  Should I become a clothes dryer or an upright vacuum sweeper?  The conversation with my brother from more than 50 years ago came streaming back into my head.  Was the topic of last night really all that different?

Perhaps the reason I feel somewhat apprehensive about the topic of our beer banter was because I am not at all sure that I would follow the same path again in my professional life, knowing what I know now.  I would likely not go into academia, would not get a Ph.D., and would not have focused so intently on wild animals and ecology as I did.  The details of my thinking will eventually end up in another blog; those details are not germane to my point here.  I have the benefit of hindsight, and these young people do not.  They are pursuing what they THINK will make them happy, but they can not possibly know for sure until after they have spent many more years working on degrees, getting a position, and working at that job for some time.  By then, they will be in their 40s, and it will be tough to turn back.  "You rolls the dice, and you takes your chances", as that old saying goes.

The problem is that these students haven't lived enough yet.  The world has so much to offer, and there are so many interesting challenges and opportunities.  They are bright enough and ambitious enough that they could choose any path they wanted, but they can't possibly know now about more than 1-2% of those potential paths.  They are following the logical direction based on what they chose as an undergraduate major at university.  Think about that.  A 17-year old high school senior picks a major for college based on what they think their interests are at that time, and it generally predicts their life's path for the next 40 years.  Astounding!

I'm even willing to wager my next Social Security check that if these four students did something else in the world for the next two years, that at least two of them would not proceed down the route they are now planning to take.  They might still decide to attend grad school, but the thesis topic they chose, or the major prof they selected, or the degree they pursued would be different than it will now be.  And then, their professional life would become different than it will now become.

Students who read this essay may be disturbed by these ideas, but I think they know there is some wisdom here somewhere.  And by reading this, it will probably only increase some doubts they already have.  I make no apology, because my role in life is largely to make people question.  I guess that is the teenage decision I made all those years ago.  My only advice is to realize that what you currently know or think is only a tiny fraction of all you could know or think, and you don't need to be a prisoner of those limited thoughts.  Perhaps, becoming a ball pene hammer would not be nearly as rewarding as becoming a 5/8 inch socket wrench, but you can't know the answer to that until you have tried them both.  My advice: take the time to explore, investigate, and experiment broadly before you Super Glue your life's map on your chest.

Does God watch the Rose Bowl?

(When you see military jets doing a fly-over during a football game, it should cause you to ask some questions.)

I watched the Rose Bowl yesterday, or as much of it as I could, because Ohio State University was in the game. I was an undergrad at OSU in the 60s, so I thought I had some sort of obligation to participate in the festivities. I watch almost no sports on tv whatsoever, but I made an exception for this one. I actually lettered for three years in tennis at OSU, so when they won the game, I guess my status ticked up a notch. I still have the scarlet and gray jacket to prove that I'm not just anti-sports.

But I was thinking about what I saw before and during the game. It is all very curious to me. We typically play the National Anthem before most high school, college, and professional sports. How did this custom ever come to be? What does this nationalistic/quasi-militaristic song have to do with sports? At about that same time yesterday in Pasadena, four military jets did a fly-over past the stadium, adding to the battlefield aura of the entire spectacle. (By the way, do the taxpayers pay for this flight time?)

And then, military veterans were prominent during the ceremonies, with the Wounded Warrior representatives in attendance. It reminded me of stories you hear about the early days of the Civil War, only in reverse. Apparently, citizens from the nearby town would come out with their picnic lunches to watch a real battle between the North and South from a hill overlooking the battlefield. Pass me a watercress sandwich, please.  But now, real soldiers come out to watch civilians battle it out on the gridiron.  (In fact, they kept referring to the game between Oregon State and University of Oregon to decide which team went to the Rose Bowl as a "civil war".)  Can it be that combat with an opposing force is so ingrained in our genetic code that we have to reenact a facsimile of it over and over again?

Religion is even incorporated into the pageantry of these sporting events. Each team, or many members of each team, usually pray to their god just before the game starts. I assume they are praying for victory over the other team. In the case of OSU and University of Oregon, I have to assume that they are each praying to the same god. Now, I don’t believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful god for one minute, but apparently these players do. Therefore, I find this pre-game prayer the most pretentious and selfish behavior I have ever seen. There are tens of millions of people on this planet struggling for survival every day of their lives, millions of babies starving to death each year, and millions more suffering from malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, and water-borne parasitic diseases. If this god had the power to grant you the winning of a football game while he/she/it allows all this human suffering on earth, I would have to conclude that this deity was pretty sadistic.

I don’t really want to begin the new year by bashing an activity as American as a college football game. But the behaviors that humans display are not just some random actions that have no meaning or history. They all come from some place and they had, or still have, significance for us. We may have forgotten from whence they came, so this essay is simply a reminder to ponder what we see and hear. As I’ve said many times, human behavior is about as interesting as it gets. It ranks right up there with bobolinks.

The 60s, and other memories of the way it used to be

(They were radicals, but they were correct.)

Another year, another birthday.  What the heck?  I'm now 63 years old, but I don't feel a day over 62 1/2.  I attribute this amazing youthfulness to eating properly and exercise.  And, of course, a scotch and a cigar a day probably contribute as well.  I will go so far as to say that if you smoked one cigar a day and drank one scotch per day, you would also not feel a day over 62 1/2, even if you are 30 years old.  That combination of alcohol and nicotine has amazing restorative properties, and I am living proof of that.

Having lived this long, I have witnessed some interesting changes in practices and attitudes in many aspects of American life.  For example, I started school at age 5 in the first grade.  We lived in a somewhat rural area about a mile from the school.  To get to school, we walked.  But to do so, we walked along a country road, crossed a busy highway, and a set of railroad tracks.  Years later, the fathers of two of my friends were killed driving across those same tracks, so it was no joke.  After a couple of weeks of my mother walking with me, I was free to make the walk alone both to and from school.  There were some other kids making the same walk, but can you imagine parents letting any kid even twice that age do this today? 

I loved baseball when I was 9-12 years old, so I wanted to play on the local Little League team.  I tried out for 3 years and was cut from the team each year.  It was done like this.  The day finally came to announce who made the team.  The coach read the list and those of us who did not make the team, turned our backs and walked home while the coach started passing out the team shirts and caps to those who made it.  I distinctly remember the cheers of joy from those guys who had made the team, as they tried on their new gear.  I was devastated each time.  Our parents were not there.  We always faced these events on our own.  However, after the third turn down, one man started an additional team with those of us who did not make the Apaches team.  Our Sioux team then actually beat the Apaches during the regular season, which was one of the sweetest days of my life.  In those days, we always knew that success was not guaranteed, and that you had to prepare extremely well in a competitive world.

When I was in junior high school, I got paddled by the teacher in front of the class at least once each year for some infraction of some rule.  Usually this involved talking in class when we were not supposed to be doing that.  I was not alone.  Today, that kind of corporal punishment would be definite grounds for a law suit.

Then, there was the decade of the 60s, which was amazing in so many ways.  When we were first married, my wife worked full-time as a nurse and I was a student.  She could not get a credit card issued in her name in those days; it had to be issued in the husband's name.  Crazy, since she was making the money and I wasn't. Of course, now, we don't open the mailbox without there being an offer for her to accept a new card.

I mostly remember worrying about the military draft during the 60s.  It was all any male thought about.  Would I be called?  Could I escape it somehow?  If we stayed in university, we were safe until we graduated.  Maybe the Vietnam War would be over by then.  I remember a couple of guys when I was attending Ohio State whose grade point average (gpa) was right on the cusp of flunking out of school.  (In those days, universities actually flunked students out and they went home.  Seems much less common today.)  I distinctly remember these particular guys taking an exam in a course we had together.  If they got a D on the exam, their gpa would dip below the minimum needed and they would flunk out.  In the mid to late 1960s, that would almost certainly mean you would be drafted into the army within months, probably sent to Vietnam, and possibly killed or injured.  Talk about pressure when taking a math or biology final exam.

I was lucky.  I graduated Ohio State, got drafted, and ended up in Korea.  All in all, that was a valuable and interesting experience, and not dangerous.  In Korea, I was in military intelligence and lived undercover as a civilian, but I mostly spent my time playing ping pong, bridge, and third base on the softball team.  I had been sent to language school for a solid year before deploying to Korea, so I was nearly fluent in the language at that time.  My wife and young daughter joined me there, we lived with a Korean family in the village, and we learned a lot.  The army did not want my wife to come, but there was no law against a U.S. citizen going to Korea, and my wife would not take "no" for an answer.  This was pretty much SOP for my wife during our military years.

So times have changed for the better in some ways, and probably not for the better in other ways.  I often wonder, and even predict, if the last half of the 20th century may have been as good as it ever was in human history and perhaps as good as it will ever be, all things considered.  In time, I will build this argument and present it for your critical analysis.  But several centuries will have to pass before this idea can be tested fully, so you will have to let me know how it comes out.  Just send me a text message.

Senescence sucks: Prologue

(DrTom feels sort of like this man looks, but his body doesn't know that.)

senescence: a biological term that basically means aging. It encompasses all of the biological processes of a living organism's approaching an advanced age (i.e., the combination of processes of deterioration which follow the period of development of an organism). The word senescence is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning "old man" or "old age" or "advanced in age".

Physical work is more difficult to do, takes longer, and hurts more now than it did just 10 years ago.  How is that for a lead-off to get you to read more?  Terrible.  Who wants to read about senior citizens and their aches and pains.  I have always been a very active person, but recent years have taken their toll.  I'm a biologist, so I know this is a normal process, knew it was coming, and felt it when it started, but I hate every minute of it. 

Senescence is so weird, because in your mind you still feel like you are about 30.  When I walk across campus, I still gawk at long-legged coeds wearing short skirts, and I enjoy every minute of it.  In fact, now that I am retired and I won't be having any of these girls as students, I can gawk even longer.  Who gives a damn?  It is a challenge to see if I can gawk just up to the point where they would call Campus Security, but not longer than that.  It is a little game I play.  I do keep my hands to myself, however, but I can't promise anything 10 years hence.

But the severity of the situation crystallized for me about two years ago.  Let me set the stage for the anecdote I am about to tell.  A few months prior, my wife turned her ankle in our basement.  It was a really bad sprain; she heard a loud pop when it happened, and she could barely move for weeks.  For about a year after that, the ankle would occasionally "lock up" for no apparent reason, making it almost impossible to walk.  Then, my wife severely damaged her eye, possibly from using a commercial eye product, by chemically burning the cornea so badly that she was blind in that eye for many months.  After a couple dozen visits to the optometrist, she finally had laser surgery in Syracuse to repair the damage.  In my case, I have suffered from severe leg cramps since I was a teenager.  Whenever I do physically exhausting work, like cutting firewood for six hours, or hike a long distance, I tend to get leg cramps so badly that I double over in pain, unable to move until the cramp relaxes.  In the 1960s, I played varsity tennis for Ohio State, and leg cramps were a major issue for me during long matches. 

On the day in question, Robin and I had to go to the drug store to pick up a prescription for Robin's eye problem.  In fact, Robin was wearing a patch over her right eye to protect it from the sun.  We pulled into the Rite Aid and parked very close to the front entrance.  At that very instant, her ankle locked up and I had to help her exit the passenger side of the car.  She leaned heavily on me, given that she was half-blind and lame, as we started to make our way to the entrance of the drug store.  After moving only a few feet, I got tremendous cramps in my legs, which brought me to my knees.  I literally could not move at all.  Robin was still holding on to me and I was now holding onto her, in a mutual fight-for-life embrace that must have been pitiful to witness.  We were both in pain and completely unable to progress forward.  I tried to encourage us: "Robin, we are only 15 feet from the front door of the drug store.  If we can just get inside, I know there is a registered pharmacist in there who can help us".  She looked down at me with her good eye (still on my knees), and I looked up at her (still blind and lame), and we began to laugh so hard it incapacitated us all the more.  A passer-by would certainly think we were two drunks on our way to pick up an Alka Seltzer.

We managed to get inside eventually, my cramps subsided, Robin's ankle came unlocked, and we got her eye medicine.  It was as though the Rite Aid was some kind of healing temple of the gods.  Almost as soon as we got inside the door, half of our ailments went away magically.  If someone ever initiates Sunday morning religious services from this drug store, I will be the first to attend.

This incident was hilarious in many respects, and we have laughed about it many times.  I guess we can find it humorous, in part, because it was only a temporary problem.  We are not permanently disabled the way we appeared to be on that day.  If we were, it would not be nearly as funny.  The incident helped us to appreciate those elderly people who really are that immobile all the time, kind of like putting on a blindfold to appreciate what non-sighted people have to contend with every day.  As a result, I now go out of my way to help women cross a busy street.  However, it doesn't hurt if they have long legs and wear a short skirt.