Good phone

It’s 9 AM and Dennis is on the phone.  Or rather, the phone is on Dennis---he uses lightweight, professional headphones and looks like a telemarketer.  He walks around the house with the headphones on, opens the windows, feeds the cat. The headphones fold up and can go into his pocket when not in use. A collapsible black plastic halo. 

Dennis is not telephone-phobic. Unlike me, he does not clench his teeth when the phone rings.  The phone rarely ruins his concentration.  As a rule, he picks up the receiver happily---he’s a marketing rep, a salesman.  He can talk to anyone.  

His talent emerged early.  He sold walnuts door to door when he was about eight years old. He pulled along his stock of unshelled walnuts (packaged in 1 pound bags) in his Radio Flyer wagon.  Regular customers developed; he had a route. The family dog, a wire hair mix named Dusty, learned to eat walnuts---she cracked them open with her teeth.

Until, that is, she discovered a hammer. But that’s another story. 

For Dennis, the phone means money.  The damn thing rings all day long; unfathomable strings of numbers fill the entire caller ID screen.  A pause and then---crunch, crunch, crunch.  Sales orders inch their way through his printer cum-fax machine.  Orders pile up in the paper tray, interspersed with the daily Sudoku puzzle. Money plus entertainment. 

What makes all of this possible, aside from Dennis’s skills and energy, is that marvel of contemporary life, the computer printer.  It’s an HP Pro, model number 8600.  It prints in colors and on both sides of the page.  It copies, scans and faxes.  It has an embedded web server. 

But this morning all is not well. The HP marvel is silent.  No chug-chug-chug. No orders and no Sudoku. Today it will not fax or print. It will not scan or copy. You know what that means; time to call tech support.  

For me, a calling tech support means personal drama.  Stomach-churning equivocation. Kishka-twisting indecision. To pick up the phone and call my trusted campus IT guy, I struggle for an hour. And this is a guy I know---whose voice exudes confidence and sympathy.  Who makes house calls and once arrived on a motorcycle during his lunch hour. For whose expertise I have gladly shelled out the bucks for many years.  

But toll-free help on the phone? I am more than averse; I am a petulant child who refuses reason.  A highly educated professional with decades of work experience, I revert to infantilism.

Dennis belongs to another species.  He embraces phones and automated phone systems. He knows their tricks.  And he is fast. When the automated system asks questions about his printer model, he has all the numbers ready. Then he energetically presses zero for a human voice.  On occasion, he just says “wah, wah, wah”---with much rising and falling intonation---into the receiver.  Any sound pushes the system forward to the next option.  

(“Wah, wah, wah” also works when calling Delta airlines, by the way).

Once contact has been made, Dennis remembers precisely what he did on his first attempt to get the printer to work; he also remembers everything he tried afterward, up to the point when he dialed to tech support.  He recounts his sad story efficiently---without fury, indignation, pathos (that’s my specialty).

This particular morning, tech support seems to think that the shift to Windows 8 is the root of the current fax and printer problem.  Various fixes deep inside the system are tried.  The correct driver has been found online.  The printer has been uninstalled and re-installed. Two test pages have been run. All signs are positive and I am on my second cup of coffee. Some ten minutes have passed.

But Dennis is still talking on headset. The good part has arrived at last:  the chit chat and laughter of what Dennis calls “good phone.”   “Where are you?” Dennis asks.  “Ah, Manila,” he repeats with satisfaction. “How’s the weather?” I’ve learned that location and weather are first two conversational gambits of professional phone people.  

The weather topic is rich for exploration, since anywhere on the globe there’s more variety than in temperate Los Angeles, especially near LAX where Dennis lives.  Tech support is saying something about rain (in the Philippines, about 86 inches annually) and heat (average temperature of 88 degrees).  Dennis is laughing---LA has 15 inches of rain in a good year and the temperature at the airport ranges between 65 and 70 degrees. Earthquakes?  It seems the Philippines has them too.  

Location and weather covered, the conversation’s moves on.  Dennis is telling about his time on a Navy carrier, the USS Coral Sea, during the Vietnam War.  About being stationed at Olongapo where the US Naval base had an “R and R” center.  About shore leave and water skiing off the base in Subic Bay.  The Navy had great speed boats.

The tech guy wasn’t even born then.  His parents weren’t even born then.  

But enough of the past.  Dennis has progressed to health care.  He once had a great experience with national health care in New Zealand.  “What’s it like in the Philippines?” he asks.  From Dennis’s end of the conversation, I learn that the Philippines have universal health care and national insurance; no tech guy opinion about its quality, however. 

Dennis explains that the United States is way behind; somehow the name Franklin Roosevelt has entered.  Does the tech guy know what the Tea Party is?  New friend across the sea breaks in to ask if Dennis will fill out a customer service report.  “Sure, happy to do it,” says Dennis.  Everybody’s happy now.  That’s what Dennis calls giving “good phone.”

Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

On the hunt for words

“We were staying in a remote part of Scotland and in the evenings we read aloud to each other as our entertainment.”  So recounts journalist and fiction writer Annalena McAfee.  She’s speaking in a video interview posted on Amazon, recalling how she began writing her novel, “The Spoiler.”  The kicker is that her evening reading partner and husband is novelist Ian McEwan.  Maybe they read the dictionary together too?  Evenings in remote Scotland might drive you to it. 

I read “The Spoiler” this summer and it was a page turner.  Aging, former wartime journalist named “Honor” (one of the “virtue names,” so English) confronts a young and brash interviewer, a tabloid writer named Tamara.  Think Ernest Hemingway’s Martha Gellhorn in loose slacks meets Rupert Murdoch’s Rebekah Brooks in frizzy red hair.
 

Nicknamed “the Marlene Dietrich of the newsroom”, Honor lives in her glamorous past.  Her heyday was adventure journalism, going to dangerous places to “get the story” behind historic events. The Spanish Civil War to Mao’s Long March.  But now---the 1990s---the trashy tabloids pass for newspapers.  A young, brash climber named Tamara gets to interview Honor by a mistake.  Turning an error to career advantage, the ignorant Tamara instinctively pursues the aging legend.  Secrets of a distinguished past emerge. A bloody last battle in the decade before both worlds of print---serious and tabloid---succumb to the electronic.

Annalena McAfee’s sentences were a pleasure of clarity and syntax.  But the diction---the words.  At first I thought these were just British expressions, surely I could easily intuit their meaning from the context.  But as the novel progressed, I encountered more and more of them. 

I was reading on a Kindle, my trusty travel companion.  Its electronic screen a fitting page while in the sky on the way to California.  Four and a half hours to read with no interruptions; a Bombay Sapphire on the credit card. But a bit tricky to highlight and flick to the e-reader dictionary.  A few bumps and bounces over the Rockies could threaten this fragile set up. Sketchy Delta service can’t be trusted for prompt replacement of gin. So I took to making a paper list.  Here it is:

Otiose, fug, blethering, oleaginous, titivating, gazump (ed), gawp, mote, boffin, poiumenon, japes, bint,  hared about, compère, banjaxed, susurration, poncey, duff, swots, suppurating, chthonic,  panjandrum, cumbrous, uncumber, oubliette, juju, juddering, gawpers, deliquescence, shambolic, chomolungma.

High school Latin helped with some of these; ditto college French.   There is a least on biblical term (mote), and some anthropology (chthonic). But “swot” and “poncy”?  Is this public school banter?  “Panjandrum”? Are we in Indja with the Raj?  

I am utterly banjaxed.  

So what is husband Ian McEwan’s vocabulary like?  I hadn’t recalled from the two novels I’d read long ago, but courtesy of the Kindle, I opened his most recent novel, Sweet Tooth. A month ago I’d breezed through it without issues, I thought.  Sure enough, out popped: squit, orotund, moue, canting, pargeted, plumminess, pollarded wood.

Most of my life people have remarked on my vocabulary.  The sole offspring of educated and somewhat intellectual parents, I was the child audience of adult debates that were better than TV. Especially 50’s TV.  Family friends often commented on my advanced vocabulary.  I secretly relished this distinction from grown-ups.  OK. I was pridefully complicit in appearing to be an amateur prodigy. But I was observant. Quick to mimic sounds, to move verbally in pace with my elders. Alert to the significance of context even when not understood. 

So with some chagrin---and after decades in academia---I now find that the real vocabulary grown-ups are the Brits.  And they are way beyond me. 

Understandably, of course.  They have their own lexicon and turns of phrase.  But still, the ones I read are not obscure.  Ian McEwan and Martin Amis adorn the Anglo-American best-seller lists; younger British aspirants, outside the snooty class, are worthy too.  Here’s a little list from Harriet Lane’s Alys, Always: frowsty, cornichons, benison, tetanque, groynes, skirls, knackered, spliff, lappet, hellebore, pongee, weir.

Now I’ve turned to the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker.  Staples of educated (but not erudite) American readers and what do I find?  Tinnital, orisons, estivating, clinquant.

In my defense, I should say that I am a good guesser.  Some of these words suggest faint associations just shy of true recognition.  But that’s not enough anymore.  “The game’s afoot,” as Sherlock would say.  And I am on the hunt.  Searching for words.  I’ve signed up with “Dictionary.com” for a daily word fix. Bookmarked the thesaurus.  I refuse to be banjaxed. Which, by way of online Merriam-Webster, means damaged or ruined.  The usage is chiefly Irish.  Wouldn’t you know.  Now if I could just get some attendant to deliver a gin and tonic.

Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

My family clock

Winding the clock was my Dad’s Sunday morning ritual, done while still in his pajamas. He’d already brought in the paper, had a smoke, and plugged in the Farberware coffee pot.  It’s an eight-day mantel clock that strikes the hours and dings the half hours.  Eight inches wide by twelve inches high. Decades of dust and polish have darkened its mahogany housing. 

My Dad opened its glass door by its brass rim or bezel and reached for the double end key that lay on the top of the clock.  He inserted the larger end of the key first into the shaft on the right side of the face, just under the number 4.  This wound the hours. Then he moved the key over and inserted it into the shaft on the left, under the number 8, winding the hour strike and the half hour chime. Gently, but deliberately. Not too tight---that could be fatal.  You never want to wind a clock too tight, everyone said. 

Then my Dad padded over to the black telephone in the far corner of the dining room and dialed “Time.” “At the sound of the tone, the time will be  . . . .  and thirty seconds.”  He returned and nudged the hour and minute hands into place.  The smaller end of the key could be used in a tiny pinhole in the center of the clock face---to adjust if the clock ran too fast or too slow.  That would be determined later in the week. 

He snapped the glass door shut and then gently tilted the clock to the left, setting the pendulum in motion. The tick always began. Then, just as deliberately, he returned to his chair---the sections of the paper rustled slightly and slid a bit under his slippers.  He lit a second cigarette.   Ready for another week.  

The clock is a centenarian. Manufactured by Seth Thomas who, come to find out, was a promoter of  mass production for clocks in the nineteenth century.  Clock factories were big in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kept the industrial North running on time. 

The clock is in my house now.  My Dad’s handwriting in pencil on the back of the clock reads:  “Windsor So 10072.” Maybe a model number? No idea. The brass bezel around its glass door is tarnished. But the black Arabic numbers are still graceful against the yellowed, creamy enamel surface of its face.  I checked on eBay and found a dead-ringer going for $125. Its shiny rosewood housing surely refinished. In Flint, Gunther Gerholz found me an additional key.  I felt prepared for the future, but then Gunther’s shop closed.  We are on our own now. 

Nothing in my parents’ house was new or “store bought.” Most objects had a point of origin that provided a name. Enhanced the object in a child’s imagination.  My family called this mantel clock “the Coughlan clock.” The back story was that it had been a wedding gift to my father’s uncle, Timothy Michael Coughlan, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Cavalry.  Around 1900 Timothy Michael married Helen Gardner.  Someone gifted the couple with this mantel clock, evidently an appropriate gift for a new household. Kept domestic life orderly. 

Colonel Coughlan served in the Great War.  Afterward, the Army established regional Corps Areas across the country to facilitate future national mobilizations. Colonel Coughlan belonged to the Artillery Group, 9th Corps Area, headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco. Perhaps he had ambitions; he wrote a pamphlet entitled, “Mobilization in Retrospect,” bound in simulated leather and printed at his own expense in 1926. His family, now with four daughters, lived near the Presidio in the Richmond district in a three-story house on 16^th Avenue. Someone snapped my first baby picture on its stoop. Leaning over me is Aunt Helen, in a long-sleeved black dress, a strand of pearls dangling, the marcelled waves of her short gray hair to the camera. 

The clock must have been in the living room of that house, though I don’t recall it there.  Every year, my two cousins and I spent family Christmas celebrations roaming its upstairs floors. I remember a Prussian spiked helmet and a saber that tumbled out of a closet.  A panoramic photograph of a mounted cavalry regiment stretched across a bedroom wall.  A sewing room lined with windows that was still used. Bibelots from China, supposedly shipped home in a camphor chest after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. 

We kids ate our Christmas dinner in the breakfast room off the kitchen.  An aproned Black maid specially hired for the holiday served us turkey and grits. The grown-ups milled around the dining room; tap, swoosh, thwack went the swinging pantry doors as parents, aunts, and uncles refilled endless cocktails.  One year the turkey hit the kitchen floor, my mother said later. 

When Aunt Helen died, the last of the family belongings---long since jumbled into an apartment---were parceled out. In the 1960s suburbs with wall to wall carpeting and pastel refrigerators, who wanted an old clock you had to wind?  My Dad claimed it. He placed it on the left side of the fireplace mantel in our living room.

I carried the clock back to Michigan on a plane, swaddled in towels, in a canvas bag resting on my lap. Now it stands on the left side of my fireplace mantel.  In the beginning, I was afraid of the clock, of the dreaded “winding it too tight.”  But I’ve learned the feel of the tension, when the turns of the key have stored just enough energy to carry the mechanism through the week.  I’ve grown into the task, it seems, inherited a satisfying Sunday ritual, a weekly recollection---timely, you might say, since all the religious ones have lost their hold and fallen away.  

The strike may startle if you’ve not lived with a clock that has a mechanical movement. Overnight guests are forewarned. In this century’s electronic soundscape, its clear tone is distinctive.   In bed, I often hear the clock striking---first two, then three am; the chime floats across the darkness, separating the sections of the night, assigning each hour its number. I’m hearing the same sound heard by my dead but once sleepless parents and a generation before them as well.  If it’s Saturday night and the strikes seem slow, well, tomorrow will be time for the morning ritual.  

 Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

How I learned to love stories

“Jesus Christ!”  I said---with heavy intonation on the first syllable.  “Jee-zus.“  I had hit the dashboard and then crumpled to the floorboard of the car.  It was a 1940’s Chevy coupe, creamy beige with a red pin stripe along the sides. Tweedy tan upholstery with slender black and red threads pressed into my face.  I was six years old. 

My mother was driving and must have slammed the brakes.  No seat belts and I was small. Not that I really remember the event, but the story was repeated so often and I knew the context so well.  It was 1951 and before growth of full-time life in the suburbs.  My mother often drove into the city (San Francisco) from the small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge where we lived.  Medical appointments on Sutter or Post Streets.  Window shopping around Union Square.  A trip to the city entailed hat and gloves, some kind of coat.  Clothing that all went together, planned for an urban appearance.   Appropriate for walking on sidewalks (no sidewalks out in the unincorporated part of the county where we lived).   Old Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat and matching hat that my mother had sewed.  And white gloves.

What always embarrassed me when this story was recounted was my spirited and easy usurpation of adult behavior.  I must have been stunned.   My head must have hurt.  Mortified in a child way to have fallen off the passenger seat in my best clothes.

My dad swore.  That’s where my startling profanity came from.   He was from New York and Irish.  A born story-teller.  Expletives regularly erupted in my dad’s language, but their range was circumscribed.  It was all theological:  “Jesus Christ,” “Jesus H. Christ,” “hell,” “damn it,” “God damn it.”  Calibrated to the occasion and never casual.  I don’t recall ever hearing him use scatological terms.  Words like “shit” or “fuck” were unthinkably vulgar.  I never learned those words until much later, in the 1960s.  

My outburst of juvenile impiety took its place on the roster of family stories.  Storytelling was important in my family.   Dinner party conversation depended on stories.  I listened.  Partially grasped words and events stretched out as if along a tightrope of suspense.  The narrator---like an acrobat, red parasol in hand--- teetered step over step, the end just in sight.  I watched the grown-ups as any weave or wobble in the narrative elicited a flutter of surprise, a gasp , or groan.  I relished the listeners’ visible anticipation---what would happen?  Development, digression, denouement, and the devious pleasure of irony, seeped into my young understanding. 

Stories held other pleasures too, I learned.   The real secret of my father’s influence was not his firecracker profanity.  It was stories he told to me at bedtime.  My father’s stories always inched their way to a hilarious climax which I anticipated with a shiver of excitement no matter how many times I had heard them.  “Tell me the one about camp,” I’d beg.  The story about camp hinged on a description of my doting New York City grandmother packing trunks for my dad Frank and his younger brother, Howard---an uncle whom I’d never met.  The two grade school boys were sent off somewhere in upstate New York for the entire summer.  Two months’ worth of clothes and socks, underwear, plus two-piece jersey swimsuits---all in neat stacks. It was the late 1920s. Camp was a ritual for city families.  For me, a kid in California, the whole idea conjured up an exotic world:  the customs of the urban East where children were dispatched annually to the countryside. 

The boys were shipped off with their trunks, as the story went.  The only activities at camp recalled in my dad’s telling were swimming in a lake and baseball.  Digressions featured my dad’s mimicking his younger brother Howard’s whining falsetto.  “Frankie’s trying to drown me!”  “Frankie’s pitching me bean balls!”  “Frankie’s trying to kill me!”  Of food, counselors, or any edifying activities, nothing.  Just two skinny city boys playing in the sunshine until exhaustion.  An older boy brushing off his younger brother always trailing along---“Aw, Howie, don’t be a pest.”  My dad’s sole reference to the wonders of nature was that the constant whir of crickets kept him awake at night.

The denouement in the camp story was the boys’ return to the city.  My devoted grandmother who had packed the trunks with such care opened my Uncle Howard’s trunk (dramatic pause):  empty---except for one old shoe and a tree stump.  No description of what was in my father’s trunk.  This story was entirely at the expense of the pest.  

My father’s stories were a special good night ritual.  He did not tell them every night, or even very often, as I remember.  Whatever were the exceptional occasions for them, I don’t know any longer. But I can see the outline of my Father on the edge of the bed, on my left side.  I can see the bed’s frame, a Jenny Lind style spooled bedstead.  My father’s face is a shadow; I cannot see his features.  But the lake glistening in summer sunshine, the shouts of the boys, a distant baseball diamond, and the empty trunk are all there.

 See more personal essays in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Community debate: moving the Flint Farmers' Market

Twelve Truisms about Moving
with gratitude to Sheldon Kopp’s Eschatological Laundry List

1.     Moving is hard

2.     It could have been done sooner

3.     Fear was part of it, from beginning to end

4.     Habit is comforting

5.     After two months, new habits developed

6.     Friends who were against the move got used to it

7.     New friends appeared

8.     Some places I left did not improve

9.      Other places I left look better now

10.     Even moves not of my own choosing turned out well anyway

11.     All the consequences of either staying or moving could not be known in advance

12.     Over time, fewer people shared my nostalgia; some moved, others died.

 Read more about the Farmers' Market controversy at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/