Getting to know me

 

This photo is what I used to believe was my first memory. I am sitting in my big brother's lap on a blanket in my front yard. My other brother is holding our dog Lucky's head.  The other kid is our neighbor from across the street. In retrospect, I may just think this photo is of my first memory because it is one of the few baby photos I have of me. I do recall my mom telling me that Lucky nipped me and my mom scolded him. She claims he would sit and protect me after that. Lucky eventually was sent to "live on a farm" because he had a habit of biting people. Lucky wasn't.

In the almost two decades I've been writing this blog, I've offered up quite a few biographical tidbits about my life. I have written about trying to interview my elderly parents about their lives before they died. Neither was very forthcoming. I think they had just settled into their old age and didn't really want to think about the past. Most of what I gleaned about their lives came from stories they would tell us as kids on long car rides to go camping or musings around campfires.

Unlike most children, I was actually curious about who my parents were before they became my parents. But since they are dead and most of the people who knew them when they were young are dead, I will never have more than a sketch of who they were and who they wanted to be.

My own children don't seem to really care about who I was or who I am. I accept this because they are immersed in their now and the complications of being teen agers. I generally try to avoid telling stories of when I was their age. I like to think I can tune into the clues given by eye rolls and distant stares and have stopped volunteering stories of my youth.  I come from a distant time that they can't relate to. And the things I used to be proud of (like being a drum major at a school with a "Braves" mascot and wearing full buckskins and a headdress) are now considered incredibly not politically correct. My daughter is particularly embarrassed that I participated unknowingly in cultural appropriation by dressing as a Native American Chief. 

My high school has since abandoned their inappropriate mascot image of an Indian brave if not the name. In 2019 they changed the name of the mascot from "Braves" to "Brave" (which they somehow thought was more acceptable). But when I visit their web page there is no mention of a mascot Brave or not. Their logo, however, is now a capital "B" for Boise. 

Still life?

 

So far, 2023 seems remarkably like 2022. Still, other than mind numbing inflation, COVID teaming up with the flu and other respiratory ailments, and (depending upon which expert you hear from) a looming recession, it is still better than 2021 and that dung heap of 2020 when everything spiraled out of control.

The significance for me this year is that I turn 65 in a few months. I finally gave in to the masses of junk mail urging me to sign up for Medicare and enrolled in the first level via the social security website. Like Dante's Inferno, there are several levels of Medicare, each more confusing than the last. Social Security does its best to add to the confusion with lots of legal mumbo jumbo and many links leading to attempts to simplify the language of bureaucracies (which even the Rosetta Stone has a hard time cracking).

It is not that I need Medicare at this point in my life. I am still working and have fairly decent health coverage. But in that not so distant future when I actually do retire I understand I'll need every cent of healthcare support I can get. Still the Social Security urges you to delay taking social security benefits until you are in your 70s so you can maximize the amount of your month allocation. I'm convinced they are actually hoping you delay taking it so the likely hood of you developing dementia and forgetting about it or dying and not collecting at all occur. 

And it is not that I think Social Security will ensure my survival after retirement. Even if I wait until I'm in my 70s to take it, the monthly payment is still about what I now bring home in a week. So I can only hope my 401K survives the bleak markets we are riding. I am sometimes afraid the only cruise I go on after retirement will be on an ice flow.

Another happy new year

 

I am not sure why Father Time is depicted with a scythe. It makes him look like the Grim Reaper without a hood. A quick Google search tells me that a scythe "represents the unstoppable flow of time that will, in the end, cut down all living things."

That is a cheery thought.

My family stayed up last night to watch a life broadcast of the fireworks they set off every year at the Space Needle. It is Seattle's version of the ball dropping in Times Square. I say they set off the fireworks every year, but at the beginning of 2021 and 2022, they were virtual fireworks and light shows. This was the first year they actually had real fireworks since the pandemic. And they allowed people into Seattle Center to watch the fireworks.

I only saw two masks in a sea of hundreds of spectators. The television hosts didn't even have masks on. And they ended the broadcast cracking open a bottle of Champagne and guzzling it on camera. I thought that was against FCC rules. But hey, it was New Year's Eve. 

They were kind of crappy television hosts anyway. One was host of Evening 5, a local human interest show that is broadcast weekly. He interviewed me years ago about an advertising campaign we were shooting at a local photo studio. It was themed "is you commute turning you into a monster" and featured classic movie monsters stuck behind the wheel of cars stuck in traffic. We hired a Hollywood make up artist to create the monsters.

Anyway we got the guy from Evening 5 to do a story about it. He didn't seem thrilled to be there and was a jerk during my on camera interview. When the story aired they had a few sound bites from me but never identified who I was.

Even then, on camera,  I was invisible.

I feel vindicated that the guy has to spend every New Year's Eve interviewing drunks at Seattle Center and I am watching in the comfort of my warm home.

The real fireworks were kind of a dud. They created so much smoke, you couldn't see the fireworks very well or the Space Needle. Oh, and this year they also had lighted drones that were programmed to write things in the sky next to the Space Needle. They would have been more interesting if they turned on the crowds like the drones in one of the last Spider Man movie I saw with my son.

The television commentators talked a lot about us being through the pandemic and back to normal. This was in between segments on the color of 2023 being magenta which coincidentally is the brand color of T Mobile, the sponsor of the fireworks. 

I hate magenta. It is just pink with an attitude.

I do hope that 2023 is a bit more normal than 2020, 2021 or 2022. I have grown extremely weary of COVID variants that are given clinic names that are impossible to remember. At the very least they could use the same naming convention they use for hurricanes and give them names like Frida or Bob. The CDC could even sell the naming rights to people wanting to find just the right gift for their in laws.

I predict that in 2023 I will continue to be a marketing marvel.

Happy New Year to all of my loyal readers! 

Hello, hello? Is this thing on?

Dis chord, dat chord

Country music singers
Have always been a real close family
But lately some of my kinfolks
Have disowned a few others and me
I guess it's because
I kinda changed my direction
Lord, I guess I went and broke their family tradition 

--Hank Williams Jr

I grew up without a lot of family traditions. Oh, we did the usual things white lower middle class families do like decorate Christmas trees, carve jack o lanterns, eat turkey and dye Easter eggs. We had barbecues with the neighbors and occasionally celebrated birthdays together, but in retrospect, it was all generic.

My family didn't come from recent immigrant stock so we had no old country traditions. My grandmother's (my father's mother) furnishings didn't come over on a boat. It mainly came from Sears and Roebucks. Some of it is considered antique now, but none of it was handmade or anything but functional.

My mother came from a family with 12 children. There was basically nothing passed down. At least there was nothing material passed on. They were poor and barely had food to eat. At times they lived in a tent. So the only tradition they passed down was survival and very little talk about what had been a hard life.

A couple of my mom's sisters would bring their families over for select holidays. They had followed in their family traditions of having lots of kids. So I had (and have) more cousins than I can count. My own mother had stopped at three (and one half sister I didn't know about until years after my mother died). My father was an only child who discovered he was adopted after my grandmother died.

So I guess family secrets are part of my family tradition. But I think it falls more into the category of things that no one talked about. Like my mother's nephew (son of her oldest sister) whose wife killed their five year old son (who had been born just a day before me in the same hospital) with a shotgun. The mother then turned the shotgun on herself. She left behind twin babies who later had mental struggles of their own.