The Hard Wait

In less than two weeks Pam and I will begin a five week adventure at this place. This will be our home for the first two weeks, then we will head to the other side of the lake to this place for the remaining three weeks.

The alert reader will notice that I have not chosen to show pictures of the actual houses we are staying in. That’s because it’s far less important, and less interesting to me than the lake and these views. This is Quantabacook, and I will be spending far more time on these docks and in that water than I will be spending inside. Don’t misunderstand. The houses are important. Neither of them are dumps by any means. Both are actually quite lovely. The thing is, houses in Maine during the glorious summer months are places you go when its raining or its time for bed. But if you insist on lake house pictures…

Here’s the view of the lake from house number one. we will be eating our meals here if it’s raining and/or at night.

This is where I will be writing this blog for three weeks and eating lunch I imagine.

That’s it. That’s all the important things to know about where we will spending our time.

Oh, and another thing. This second place will be where our kids will be staying with us for as long as their hearts desire to do so. Six of us getting to hang out together on this lake is the greatest of gifts in this life. It makes everything I had to do to make it happen worth the trouble. And one day soon, instead of five weeks it will be all summer, every summer.

Morning Conversation

It had been several days since I had texted my friend in Buena Vista, so I knew her guard would be down. I just couldn’t resist…

Me: Hey Pup. How have you been this week?

Pam: Doing ok my friend. How about you?

Me: Not bad…except I had a colonoscopy yesterday.

Pam: That go ok?

Me: You know me, I struck up a conversation with the anesthesiologist. I asked her, “How long have you worked at this clinic?” She said, “About a year. I’ve been with field medical teams my entire career. This is the first time I’ve settled down in a clinic and the first time I’ve been in gastrointestinal.” I relied, “I see. So, after all those years in the field, how do you like working in an orifice?”

Pam: Geez, Doug!

….long pause

Pam: Did you get a good report? No polyps?

Me: GOTCHA!!!!!

Pam: ……you are such a punk!!

Me: Seriously though, yesterday my daughter Kaitlin was telling me about cheetahs and how skittish and nervous they are. They require a lot of attention and sometimes in zoos they even have a companion dog to help keep them calm.

…another long pause

Me: Turns out, without a lot of care, cheetahs never prosper.

Pam: It’s awfully early for this nonsense, Douglas.

Me: You know, as I’ve told you before, poop jokes aren’t my favorite kind of jokes.

…yet another long pause

Me: But, they’re a solid number two!!

Pam: (twenty eye-roll emojis)

Me: Your kids ever play The Oregon Trail when they were little? Mine did.

Pam: …….???

Me: You meet a man on the Oregon Trail, the man says his name is Terry. “Terry? That’s a girls name”, you laugh. Terry shoots you.

Pam: ….sigh

Me: You have died of dissin Terry.

Pam: Ok, I’ve had enough.

What a great way to start the day!!

Russ and Baseball

Yesterday, Pam gave me my Father’s Day present early by taking me and her Dad to a Flying Squirrels game…

Great seats, great food, and a beautiful day. Of course, after attending a game in Nashville recently, I was reminded just how much of a dump The Diamond has become. The concessions are a mess, the bathrooms stink, and the scoreboard is uninspired and hard to read. But any hopes that we might get a new stadium are dead simply because this is Richmond, Virginia we’re talking about, a city with perhaps the most pathetic and inept government in the history of democracy…but that’s a topic for another day. Right now, I’d rather talk about my father-in-law.

Russ is in his 80’s somewhere. I won’t offer a specific number because it doesn’t matter. He’s not old, at least he doesn’t act old, which is the important part. He’s just a really smart, funny guy who is always fun to hang around. On the subject of baseball, he is one of the few people in my life who I can talk baseball with who…understands. He’s a baseball lifer and still follows his RedSox and the Nationals, mostly because they are on television a lot. But yesterday he told a fascinating story from when he was a kid. Pam had asked him if he could remember the first big league game he ever attended. Russ didn’t hesitate.

“I was around 14 or so and we had driven down to Fenway Park to see the RedSox play the Yankees. I was so excited that I was going to see my hero, Ted Williams. Only bad thing was when they announced the starting lineup he wasn’t in it. He had a cold that day so he didn’t play. I was so disappointed!! But later on my senior class in high school went to Fenway for two days to see the RedSox play the Kansas City Athletics. On Sunday it was a double header and Ted Williams had himself a day. In the first inning of both games he hit a three run homer!”

How great is that? First of all that his senior class trip was to Fenway Park, but second of all that he got to see Ted freaking Williams hit two home runs…and he still remembers the details?! When I asked him about the lineup that day he immediately mentioned that one of the guys on base for both home runs was Dom DiMaggio, Joe’s kid brother. 

There’s something about baseball that does that to you. It makes an impression that stays with you. Although its been over fifty years now, I can still remember the guys who played for the old Richmond Virginians from when I was like 7 years old…Joe Pepitone, Tom Tresh, and Al Downing. Then the Braves came to town and it was Hal Breedan, Shawn Fitzmorris, Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker. If I live to be 100 and all of my other faculties are gone, I’ll still be able to tell the nurses at the old folks home about who was in the starting lineup for the Mets in game five of the 1969 World Series.

And now, my son has taken up watching baseball videos on YouTube and sending them to me. Dad, have you seen this catch and throw?! Crazy!!
 

Writing Stories

For the past ten years or so I have taken up the hobby of writing novels. It’s not unlike any other conventional hobby in that it is fun, done in your spare time, and serves as a distraction from the demands of your day to day responsibilities. But writing long and complicated stories takes a long time to complete, especially if its a hobby. But no matter how long it takes, you never get tired of the story or the characters you’ve created. In fact, you find yourself quite attached to them as the weeks become months, and for my latest…the months become years. I started writing this current story in August of 2020 and I’m still probably only halfway done. When/If I ever retire from my real job, I plan on trying to see if I can get one or all of them published. But for now, its just a cool outlet for my devilish imagination doing something I’ve always loved to do…write. Here’s what I’ve written so far:

A Life of Dreams

This is a story about a gambling savant whose gift destroys his life and eventually leads to a suicide attempt, after which he begins seeing visions of his still living ex-wife, which leads to a pseudo-reconciliation as the two of them go on a search for her long absent father. They find him, a successful but tortured attorney who himself commits suicide after meeting his daughter after 30 years of abandonment. When her dying mother shows up on her doorstep months later, all kinds of weird semi-supernatural stuff begins to happen, some of which involve a stray dog.

Saving Jack

Jack’s wife gets murdered in the parking lot of a convenience store by a deranged drug addict. This random act of violence leads Jack to abandon his life and business and flee to his cabin in Maine to attempt a recovery. While there, a stranger from his past shows up with the news that his wife’s murder may not have been so random after all. Both of Jack’s grown children become concerned and suspicious of this stranger and her motives and race up to Maine to intervene. What is ultimately revealed has the power to destroy the family. 

Reardon’s Walk

This is a strange tale about a traumatic event of betrayal that leads to a bizarre time travel episode that takes the protagonist back in time to the year of his birth. In the year 1962 Charlie meets his mother who is pregnant with…him. Back in real time, Charlie is dealing with the fallout from the witnessed betrayal and the disturbing information he has learned from his trip back in time. More strange semi-supernatural things begin to happen with the appearance of a kind but weird old lady with a connection to Charlie’s mother. Every detail of the story seems to center around the ornate beach house on Hatteras Island named Reardon’s Walk, built by Charlie’s estranged father not long after he was born. 

Each of these stories were super fun to write and all three of them were completed in roughly 8 months. The one I’m writing now has no working title and as I said earlier is only half done. But by far, it has been the most difficult and disturbing to write. It concerns a man who is living a perfectly fine life with lots of success and happiness when he suffers a nasty face-plant fall while out for a run. The blow to the head causes at first subtle changes to his personality then everything goes off the rails as he loses almost all impulse control which causes him to disappear without a trace one afternoon after a business lunch. His elderly and oppressive mother hires a private detective to find him and bring him home after coming into possession of evidence that her son has written a six figure check to some random woman in Mississippi. Conflict is everywhere, between Danny and his angry and abandoned wife, between Danny’s wife and her overbearing mother-in-law, between Danny’s feuding  business partners, and between Danny and this new, post-fall version of himself. There’s an encounter at a bowling alley, a hitchhiker with a gun, and a female private investigator with tons of issues. I am totally invested, all in on this group of characters, but at this point I can’t even figure out who the hero is and who the villain will end up being. All of them have each impulse within their personality.

At my current rate of progress, I’ll wrap this story up sometime next year.

Where are the Workers?

I keep seeing a lot of stories in business publications with headlines like this:

Jobs are back, but where are the workers?

Well, from all of my reading on the subject my answer is..its complicated.

There is no single reason why jobs aren’t being filled. One of the laziest answers suggests that people aren’t going back to work because the combination of enhanced unemployment along with stimulus checks make returning to work equivalent to taking a pay cut. I’m very sure that this is true in some cases, but this assumes that the average worker is a lazy freeloader with no self respect who takes pleasure in shafting the American taxpayer. This describes almost nobody I have ever known and is an insult. I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to my objections to the American safety net turning into a hammock, but I don’t think that is what is happening here. What, then? Here are some suggestions:

People have discovered that they really enjoy working from home and don’t want to go back to the hassle and expense of commuting.

Working from home has also solved the financial burden of childcare for many young families, who are not eager to go back to shelling out thousands again.

Then there’s this. This morning I ran across this line in an article, “Retailers are reluctant to raise wages and erode their thin margins—and are losing workers to employers who pay more.” Who would have thought? You mean the labor market is working exactly how it is supposed to???

Listen, I know that a lot of people out there don’t like competition and think it’s destructive to the human spirit or some such thing, but if I own a business that cannot make a profit unless it can pay its workers X, and the guy down the street has figured out a way to make a profit paying his workers XX, guess what? My workers will figure it out pretty quickly and jump ship. If that happens I have a couple of choices. I can either figure out a way to increase productivity, raise my prices, or go out of business. Nobody has a God given right to stay in business if they can’t make a profit. That’s what bankruptcy laws are for. I know that sounds harsh and unfeeling but this is business we’re talking about here. You might say, but Doug what about inflation? What about it? The race to the bottom of pricing brought about by the Walmart’s and the Amazon’s of the world has been a boon to consumers in this country. That’s great. I’m personally thrilled to death that I’m not held hostage and forced to pay exorbitant prices for consumer goods down at Mom and Pop’s Five and Dime because they’re the only choice I have. But everything, even every good thing comes with a cost. Its one thing for the American consumer to demand low low prices out of one side of their mouths but then demand higher and higher pay for retail work out of the other. If we want employers to pay more competitive wages at some point we…all of us…are going to have to be willing to pay higher prices. Yes, that’s called inflation. 

Of course, there are other thumbs on the scales in our economy that muck everything up too, like government subsidizing some businesses at the expense of others, government red tape making it so much harder to start a business than it should ever be, stupid and counter productive labor union work rules, insane CEO pay, etc..etc. But for me, the bottom line on all of this is if you want something good, whether it be a good job, a good product or a good business, you’re going to have to be willing to pay for it. A good job is going to require a marketable skill so train yourself to do something well. A good product will require imagination and ingenuity and excellent marketing, and a good business will have to be one that can offer a product people actually want at a price they can pay, while paying their employees a competitive and attractive wage.

If you can’t do any of these things, go get a job with the government.

The Gates Divorce

Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce. I don’t care. You shouldn’t either.

Practically every day for the past month a story has popped up on one of my news feeds offering the latest salacious details. I have steadfastly refused to click on a single one. When news first broke that the famous couple had filed for divorce, of course I read about it. It’s not every day when one of the most obnoxiously sanctimonious billionaires on the planet files for a divorce so sure, I was curious. But that first news article was all I needed to know about the two of them. They are nothing more than a long-married couple who now hate each other and are parting company, joining the roughly 2.4 million other couples who file for divorce every year in the United States. Why do we need to know all the gory details? Imagine what it would be like if you and your spouse were going through a messy split and you woke up one day and every single failure of your marriage was plastered all over the front page of the Times-Dispatch?

So why are Gates Divorce stories all the rage? Because we want to read about our blessed celebrities at each and every milestone of their ridiculous lives. If nobody cared, they wouldn’t print it, people. In other words…we are pathetic!

Now for something more uplifting:

Why does YouTube constantly recommend videos of dancing former Vice Presidents to me??

Must be a bad Al Gore Rhythm ….

The Post-it Note Wall

A few weeks ago at my church there was a pen and post-it notes under every chair in the auditorium. It was the first Sunday after the Covid social distancing and mask requirements had been lifted. Towards the end of the service our pastor asked us to write down something that had happened to us during the COVID pandemic that was memorable, either good or bad. It could be something happy or sad, or maybe just something that the COVID experience had taught us. Then he asked us to stick pour notes on the wall in the foyer. It was up to us whether or not we wanted to put our name on our note. They are still up there three Sundays later, hundreds of them, and every week I stand there reading as many as I can. It has been an amazing experience.

I lost my job.

I found this church.

My father and both of my in-laws died. Deep dark depression.

We lost our dog.

I’ve learned that I love working from home.

It has been the loneliest time of my life.

My church is like most others I suppose, we clean up well, lots of smiles everywhere, and that’s a good thing. But its never all smiles in life at church or any place else. Under the surface human beings are conflicted and complicated. Few of us let anyone else see the vulnerability, we work hard at managing our image as a well adjusted, put together person who is getting along just fine. Deception is much easier to pull off. When someone asks, How are you, we answer fine, not because it’s necessarily true but because it’s more expedient than telling the truth about yourself…actually, I’m a mess. But with these post-it notes, our pastor had given us permission to tell the truth without the social awkwardness. The results were stunning and in a small way, comforting. The most brutally honest notes admitting depression and worse were surprising but shouldn’t have been. I’ve been in church long enough to know that Christian people are just as screwed up as anyone else. Maybe I had been lulled into the notion that this particular group of them were somehow different. It’s hard to fight that impression sometimes when I see all the smiles, all the wealth and comfort there. But there is no amount of money, privilege or comfort that can wash away the human frailty we were all born with. The wall of post-it notes serve as a reminder of this truth. My church family is filled with all kinds of people and many of them are carrying around massive burdens. It makes me love them a little more, reminds me to pay closer attention to those to my right and left and the lonely looking man across the way.

I hope they leave them up. I hope they are a permanent fixture in the foyer. I think it would do every church some good to have a wall of post-it notes. Here. This is us. This is who we really are. We all need salvation. We are all starved for grace. If not, why are we even here?

So, to whoever came up with the post-it note idea, thank you from the bottom of my heart.