Possessions and Liberation and Christmas

MY THOUGHTS THE OTHER DAY turned to my grandparents, and more specifically to my grandparents’ house. It was a farmhouse, wood framed, with a long front hall with the living room, which was seldom used except at Christmas.

There was a fireplace in the hall, with doors to two bedrooms on one side of the hall and one on the other. Two of the bedrooms had fireplaces that fed into the same chimney as the one in the hall. A door at the end of the hall opened to the sleeping porch and a large dining room, also used mainly on holidays or when my grandmother cooked for the farmhands, and a kitchen.

The kitchen, which seemed so large when I was a child, was no larger than the kitchen in our cottage in National Village. It had only a few cabinets, swing out bins for flour and cornmeal, a built-in pie safe, and linoleum counter tops. Yet here my grandmother cooked, often for a multitude, and canned the produce of her garden.

WHAT WAS STRIKING about the house, at least retrospectively, was the paucity of closet space. The house was, of course, built without an architect and perhaps without any drawn up plans, certainly none that my grandmother saw before the house was nearly complete. As children, we were told that Memaw, as we called her, had told my grandfather that one thing she wanted in the new house was closets, something many houses of the era did not have.

We were told she never even looked at the new house until it was finished or nearly finished. Her request for closets either had not gotten communicated or had been ignored. My grandmother was one of the gentlest souls I have ever known, but she was not spineless. She put her foot down, and the carpenters carved out closet space in the nearly completed house. The closets were tiny and the fact that they were added afterwards was obvious.

As it turned out, the closets were more than adequate after their children were grown and gone. My grandmother had maybe two or three Sunday dresses and my grandfather had maybe one suit and a pair of dress shoes.

The closets in our cottage are cavernous compared to the ones in that old house, and still we have clothing packed away in boxes.

WHEN WE DOWNSIZED our space, we did not downsize our possessions proportionately. We are still working through ridding ourselves of possessions we seldom or ever need. And we are trying not to add new stuff. I don’t think we ever felt more liberated than we did when we were younger and living for a short time on a boat with out two young sons. Space on the boat was finite, and if you added something new, it was necessary to get rid of something old. We remembered that lesson for a while after we returned to the “real” world, but gradually the lesson faded.

All of this came to mind was I was driving home from shopping for Christmas presents. Adelaide and I really had no great wishes for things this year, so we decided to buy gifts for the children at the Girls Ranch. Many of our National Village neighbors joined in the effort. Adelaide’s sister had said she has everything she needs, so we’re adding what we would have spent on a present for her to the money for the Girl Ranch residents.

I HAD GOTTEN a copy of the residents’ Christmas Wish Lists, and what struck us and our neighbors was how modest their wishes were. I guess that is what started my train of thought rolling. My grandparents did not feel deprived because their possessions were modest. Living on the boat, we found that there were few things that were truly essential. We are trying to re-learn that lesson, difficult though it may be. Meanwhile, if forgoing adding to our possessions and give a little happiness to some kids who have been dealt a pretty bad hand, it brightens the season for all of us.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Nostalgia for only 89 bucks

I was thumbing through a catalog the other day, one of those arrives around this time of year from merchandisers who must think we’re rich or heavy into conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me wrong, there was some really nice looking stuff, but not stuff that would keep me any warmer or dryer than items much less expensive. There were some things that might have made me look a little more suave, though my compulsion to be suave is about at its nadir. Warm and dry is good enough, thank you very much.

WHAT STOPPED ME, though, what made my jaw drop, was a Red Ryder BB gun. “Because he’s always wanted one,” the headline said. He’d have to really, really want one for the price tag of $89. That’s not a typo. Eighty-Nine Dollars.

The photo stirred memories of my own Red Ryder BB gun, but not enough to make me want to own another one. My Red Ryder figured in some pleasurable experiences and in some that could have turned out tragic.

IT COST A LOT LESS THAN than $89. In fact it didn’t cost me any cash at all. I simply sold enough flower seeds to my kinfolks to redeem my prize. It arrived in the mail; when our rural mail carrier had a package to deliver, he sat at the mailbox and blew his horn until somebody came out to pick it up. I lurked on my grandmother’s front porch every day until at last my treasure arrived.

No one thought it strange that a boy not yet in the first grade should have a BB gun. For that matter, no one seemed to have any scruples about kids shooting birds, either.

Fortunately for the bird population, that Red Ryder BB turn was about as lethal as a water pistol. Most of the time, anyway. A wave of guilt still washes over me when I recall the one time that it achieved lethality.

IT WAS CHRISTMAS and we had gotten one of those rare snows in North Louisiana that stuck to the ground. I had gotten a buckskin jacket and a coon skin cap for Christmas, and that afternoon I marched through the snow around the house, pretending that I was the great hunter on the prowl for supper.

Sparrows hopped in my footprints, trying to find something to eat in the packed down snow. I turned, aimed and fired.

A sparrow toppled over. I waited for a few seconds for him to pop up and fly, but he just lay there in the track in the snow. I’ve done many things to feel guilty about, but for whatever reason, the death of that sparrow has stuck with me for nearly 70 years.

THAT WAS THE LAST bird —or living thing of any sort—that the Red Ryder killed. It was responsible, though, for my cousin and I setting a the woods on fire and for my cousin scaring the liver out of my mother with a real gun.

But those are tales for another time.

Eight-nine bucks for a Red Ryder? No thanks. The first one created memories enough.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at 

bill@williamblakebrown.com

I've Got the Miseries

I had forgotten how quickly you can go from being someone full of energy and plans to a miserable hulk. I have been cruelly reminded.

I awakened Monday feeling as if I hadn’t gotten enough sleep. (I hadn’t.) By afternoon I was a muscle aching, throat scratching, nose running, head aching bundle of misery.

I AM HOPING THAT it is a response to the flu vaccination Adelaide and I got last week. The nurse had said it could happen, and although Adelaide hasn’t had any symptoms, in the past I haven’t a reaction either. If that isn’t it, I hope it’s one of those short-lived bugs that mimics the flu.

If it persists, I may have to go to the doctor, but those places are full of sick people, and I hate to sit in a room with people who are wheezing and sneezing and coughing. We’ve been in several physicians’ office lately for minor reasons, and I am wondering whether I picked up some germs or viruses there.

Whenever we go come down with something like I’m suffering with now, we are reminded of our physician when we were early married and living in Bradenton, Fla., a place with a high percentage of retirees. Joseph Duke was a cardiologist and internal medicine doctor, and he had a very busy practice. But when you were in his examining room, you were the most important patient of his day, and he never acted as if were try8ing to rush you out of the room.

WHAT’S MORE, Dr. Duke was accessible. You could call his office and leave a message, and Joe Duke himself would call you back. He was well ahead of his time in not prescribing antibiotics for every little ache and pain.

You’d call and when he called back, you would say, “Doc, I feel terribly. My throat hurts and my head is stopped up and I ache all over.”

“Well, you can come in and we can do some lab work, and by the time it comes in next week, you’ll be well. Or you can take aspirin, stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids and gargle, and you’ll be well in seven days.” If you happened to be in his office, he would give the same advice, but he would hold up five fingers and say, “Gargle with hot salt water—as hot as you can stand—for five minutes by the clock.” In my case, I never found Dr. Duke’s diagnosis to be wrong.

JOE DUKE KNEW each of his patients, both their health and their personalities, well enough to judge whether their complaint required medical intervention or whether nature could take care of things.

So, for the moment, I am following that long ago admonition to stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids, etc. I hope it works again.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He and his wife live in National Village in Opelika. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Old Fashioned Fun

WE SPENTt last weekend at what has become one of our favorite annual events, the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention.

It’s a competition held on the campus of Athens State University in Athens, Alabama. It’s held on the first Friday and Saturday in October. But it’s more than just that. 

You see kids knee-high to a grasshopper playing a fiddle with flying fingers and a contestant in his 90s buck dancing with flying feet.

COMPETITORS PERFORM on a makeshift stage on the front steps of Founders Hall, The real fun is strolling around campus and stopping to listen to musicians clustered here and there. Some are people who play together regularly, but there also are players who wander around with their instruments and jam with different groups.

You don’t have to be a blue grass fan to enjoy it.

There is food, of course, most of it the kind your cardiologist would frown on, but I figure you get a dispensation on a fine fall weekend. There are arts and craft vendors, as well. Even though we have enough books to last us through the great flood, we always wander into the university’s used book sale. At the prices, we always find several books we have to have.

I BEGIN TO SOUND  like an old fogey when I say that the Fiddlers Convention is a wholesome, family event., but there you have it.

You set your lawn chairs out in front of Founders Hall, and leave them as you wander around, and overnight as well. They’ll be there until you’re ready to go home. And you won’t see litter on the ground, either.

This was our third trip to the Fiddlers Convention, and we’ve never encountered an obnoxious person, nor even a rude one. Perhaps the fact that there’s no alcohol contributes to the atmosphere.

Or maybe it’s because people who like bluegrass are just naturally in a good mood. In years past, the audience — there always are young competitors — has tilted toward the older set. This year, there seemed to be more younger fans, and there were many families together.

TICKETS ARE A BARGAIN — $10 for a one day pass, $15 to attend both days. You can find free parking if you’re willing to walk, and parking close to the site for $5 or so. There are plenty of motels within a short distance from the campus.

The drive from our part of the state is convenient — up 280 to Birmingham and then up I-65 to Athens.

We were among 15,000 people who turned out for the 48th edition of the event. If nothing interferes, we’ll be in Athens next Oct. 2 and 3 for number 49.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Girls Ranch: A Need and a Vision

I went Tuesday (9/23) to an appreciation luncheon at the Tallapoosa County Alabama Sheriffs Girls Ranch — Girls Ranch for short — and came away from the ranch, as I usually do, inspired  by the energy and enthusiasm of the staff for making the lives of girls who have been dealt bad hands in life.

The luncheon was an opportunity for the ranch to thank those who have contributed to the ranch with money, materials or hands on efforts and to give an accounting of its stewardship.

THE METHODIST MEN of First United Methodist Church in Dadeville, who sponsored the luncheon, fall in the category of those who have provided hands on help. Although we moved to National Village a year ago, there is only one traffic light between our house and Dadeville, and we have continued to belong to the Methodist Church, and I continue to participate in the men’s group’s projects. The men, as well as Christian Women in Action, the women’s group, have contributed a good deal of time and labor to assisting in ranch director Jimmy Harmon’s push to revitalize and expand the facility.

Jimmy has been at the ranch for only a few months, but he and the people working with him, have tackled a mountain of challenges and have gained far more ground than anyone expected. The ranch’s trademark white board fences have been repainted and the weeds along the fence line cut. Pastures have been mowed, deferred maintenance on some of the homes has been tackled, gardens planted and the grounds spruced up.

I kid Jimmy that if he were a football coach that he’d have the team breaking down the door to get back onto the field after his halftime talk. It was that way Tuesday. He ran down a list of people who have benefitted the ranch in one way or another and what has been accomplished. The achievements are impressive, especially considering that the bank account totaled only four digits when he assumed the job.

Jimmy operates with a lot of faith. When new roofs were needed on some of the homes, a gift appeared. Ditto money for a desperately needed tractor. So when he went down that ambitious list of future projects, I did not doubt that they will be accomplished. Nor that our men’s group will play a significant part in seeing them done.

THE FOCUS, OF COURSE is the girls who live at the ranch. They have been dealt bad hands in life. They have parents who died, or who went to jail, who abandoned them, or who otherwise could not take care of them.

Right now there are a dozen girls living at the ranch. There are girls out there who need a home such as the ranch can provide, and the ranch hopes to provide more housing before the year it out. The ranch is making a home for some girls attending college, too. It has been the practice for boys and girls to be considered grown when they graduate from high school, and they have gone from a very structured environment to complete independence. The ranch will help girls who continue their educations to learn the life skills they will need when they do begin living on their own.

Jimmy has a dream, too, and making a place for pre-adolescent boys whose sisters come to the ranch. He has observed, he said, that siblings who are separated early have difficulty developing the kind of bonds that sisters and brothers who live together do. When he accomplishes his plan, the boys will move to a an all-boys ranch when they reached a certain age.

ANOTHER, NECESSARY, PLAN is to make the ranch more self-sufficient, The ranch gets from the state (the girls are wards of the state) only $60 per girl per month for food. Can you imagine feeding any teenager for a month for $60. In the plans are gardens and fruit trees and vines, and animals. The girls ranch, Jimmy said, needs to be a ranch.

Giving money is a fine thing. Many organizations could not function without generous donors.

But there is something infinitely satisfying about investing your own energy in bettering the lives of people who cannot help themselves. I expect that if you call Jimmy, he will have something that you can do to make the girls’ lives better.

Bill Brown can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Tomatoes and Other Good Things

We were in the gate area at Atlanta airport a few weeks ago, waiting for our flight to begin boarding when my phone rang.

It was my friend Laeman Butcher. “I’ve been trying to track you down for a few days,” he said. “Are you busy this afternoon?”

“Well, we’re about to get on an airplane to San Francisco,” I said.

I’VE GOT SOME TOMATOES I’ve been carrying around for you,” he said. “I’ll have some when you get back.”

I gave fleeting consideration to going home. We’d had only a few really good tomatoes so far this year.

Laeman didn’t have time for gardening during his working career, and he has made up for lost time with enthusiasm, and his garden responds to his loving touch.

He was as good as his word, and after we got home he presented me with a box of ripe, red, juicy tomatoes, only hours off the vine.

“I know what I’m going to have for lunch,” I told him.

Another friend’s civic club sells Vidalia onions as a fundraiser each spring, and I already had my bag.  We already had bread, mayonnaise, and American cheese slides. All of the ingredients for one of the true treats of a southern summer lunch were on hand.

THERE IS SOME RITUAL to building the perfect tomato and onion sandwich. Mayonnaise is slathered on a piece of bread. Then comes a slice of American cheese (it helps keep the bread from getting too soggy), a healthy slide of tomato, topped with a little salt and pepper, a good slice of onion, topped with another slice of cheese and a piece of bread, also with mayonnaise.

That, along with an icy glass of tea, sweet tea, of course, is food for the gods.

After that, and perhaps another half sandwich, dessert is a nap on the couch with the breeze from the ceiling fan just tickling your cheek.

Some folks, I know, are willing the summer to hurry along, dreaming of the beginning of football season.

Me, I’m already mourning the coming end of tomato season.

Bill Brown can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Cacophony Will Pass

One day ours will be a quiet little street with green lawns, neat flower beds and young trees reaching skyward.

But not for a while yet. I write this from a rocking chair on the front porch on a Monday morning, and Double Eagle Lane is a bee hive of activity, has been since just after 7. Fortunately, I am an early riser and enjoy the morning quiet with a cup of coffee before the buzz begins.

A TRUCK RUMBLES by with a load of lumber, rattling the windows. Across the street, workers are swarming over what will be the homes of new neighbors. They are putting the finishing touches on a house across the street. Next to it, a framing crew is getting ready to erect walls and next to it, what was a vacant lot only a few weeks ago now is a house with shingles and siding.

When we left town a couple of weeks ago, another house diagonally across the street had just been framed up. Today workers are installing trim and are hauling shingles up to the roof.

One lot over from us, a slab has been poured, and the framers will begin there soon.

That leaves empty lots across the street and next door to us. A friend and former neighbor has the one across the street; she hopes to have a house finished by the end of the year. There are vacant lots farther up the street, but when work on them begins, it will be much less visible.

AT THE MOMENT, it is like I am sitting on the front row of a ballet with the music by Strindberg or Bartok. There are no woodwinds nor strings. A forklift unloading lumber from a truck provides a bass note, while its backup beeper counts time. The percussion comes from nail guns and hammers, and screaming saws hit the high notes. The small gasoline engine that lifts shingles to the roof hits a note just a shade up the scale from the forklift.

Workers calling to each other are the chorus.

We moved to National Village a little less than a year ago from Lake Martin. I greeted the mornings there in silence, watching the sun light the top of the ridge across the slough. On Sunday evenings, after the weekenders had departed and the boats disappeared, we sat on the deck, watching the stars appear and listening to nature’s background music.

I DO NOT COMPLAIN about the noise or the dust—at least not much. The lots around us were vacant when we built, and we knew that you can’t build houses without noise and dust and mud, and we look forward to seeing new faces. Meanwhile, we are living in the middle of a documentary on home construction, and we have given names to some of the continuing characters, the Lone Ranger and Tonto being just two of them.

Mornings here are lovely, too, and the cacophony eventually will disappear.

Meanwhile, I am just an observer of the spectacle.

Bill Brown, a retired newspaper editor, lives on Double Eagle Lane in National Village.

Slowing Down for Spring

Hurry is, I think, the enemy of spring — or at least of the appreciation of the season’s subtleties.

When the gray, dreary days such as we endured in the winter past yield to blue skies and puffy white clouds, and the azaleas and magnolias and a myriad of other seasonal flowers burst forth, our step lightens. But for many of us, the warming earth simply adds to the list of chores. Although there is pleasure in releasing pent up energy—we must weed the flower beds, prepare the earth for new beds, plant the garden, flush away the pollen  that has painted a mustard color on our cars and concrete, windows and porches—the demands of the rest of the world do not diminish.

WE MARVEL AT the earth’s renewal, but our attention to it is as brief as the dogwood’s blooming and the landscape fades into the background.

We are, as a former diplomat acquaintance put it, time burdened.

And it is our loss.

In the coolness of the morning, a mockingbird runs through its song, reprises it with variations and then repeats the whole thing. The performance merits applause. (Although we had many birds around our home on Lake Martin, there was an absence of mockingbirds, so its song is a particular treat.)

On many of the walking paths in National Village, wildflowers grow. Some are large and showy, others so small and delicate that the walker must stop and look deliberately at his surroundings. Many of them bloom only briefly, but they are no less beautiful than the domesticated flowers around our homes.

THE OPEN FIELDS, such as the large meadow near the Marriott, are awash with color. In the golden morning light they wave in the gentle breeze as if inviting one to walk among them. In the slanting light, the flowers on the thistles are a complex set of geometric structures.

As Housman noted in his paean to the cherry tree, we are allotted only a certain number of springs. It is a pity to waste one.

Doing Dumb Things Faster

A couple of ill-advised e-mails I’ve encountered lately resulted in unnecessarily hurt feelings. Written words unintentionally causing hurt feelings aren’t anything new, of course, but the internet does allow us to be dumb faster.

I write from experience. And I am reminded that you sometimes learn important lessons in ways you didn’t expect from people you didn’t expect to learn them from.

ONE OF MY most important lessons in dealing with people came from a copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times. Copy editors were the faceless, often grouchy, souls whose job it is to read stories before they are published, trying to guard against errors of language, fact or taste. For this, they got little credit, and, when some error sneaked through, more than a fair share of blame.

Chick Ober was one of those people. Early in my career as a reporter, Chick had taken me under his wing, perhaps because I was eager to improve, and he taught me more about respect for the language than perhaps anyone.

When I got promoted to running the newspaper’s bureau in Bradenton, Florida, I didn’t go to the main office very often, and I usually didn’t see Chick when I went to St. Pete for the monthly staff meeting.

As bureau chief, I was in charge of gathering news for the edition of the newspaper that served what we called the South Suncoast. I’d assign stories (including some to myself) and pictures. We sent our stories and pictures to the main office by bus and by Teletype. Along with the stories, we sent a budget — basically a list of stories for the next day’s with recommendations on their relative importance. Most of our communication with the main office was in memos that went with the bus package.

I had a lot of freedom and responsibility. I also had a lot of pride in what we did.

Sometimes when I picked up my morning paper, I was unhappy with the way a story was played or edited. I did not keep my thoughts to myself. When I got to the office, I would write a memo the copy desk saying what I thought had been done poorly.

ONE AFTERNOON, I passed through the newsroom and Chick asked me if I had time for a cup of coffee. If Chick wanted to talk, I knew I needed to listen.

Over our coffee, he delivered a short, gentle, but terribly important lesson.

“Bill,” he said, “most of the people on the copy desk now have come since you’ve been down in Bradenton. They don’t know sweet old Bill. They just know Bill Brown from the memos they read, and they think SOB means something else.”

In earlier days, whenever he had given me a word usage lesson, he always closed with, “you might want to look it up.”

This time he said, “You might want to read some of those memos.”

When I got back to the bureau office, I opened the file slowly read some of the old memos, trying to read them as if I’d need seen them.

SOB indeed, I thought. I tried to take the lesson to heart, not sending a memo criticizing anything until it had cooled down for a while and I had re-read it as if I were the recipient.  I learned that some things are best ignored and others could wait until I could have a personal conversation with the person.

I HAVE READ that Mark Twain was as good at writing outraged letters as he was at novels but that he let the letters age overnight and rarely sent them. I’ve read at least one that he did send, and it was a lulu.

With e-mails, it is temptingly easy to dash off a message without taking time to let it sit a while and re-reading it. It is even easier to click on reply and zap out a reply.

The internet is a wonderful thing; it certainly gives a note a quicker ride than the Greyhound bus did.

But it also allows us to do dumb things faster, too.

Mortality Comes Calling

We all are reminded of our own mortality from time to time — an illness or accident that could have been fatal, the death of a friend. When we are young, though the stark reminders that our time on this planet is limited, are quickly erased by the optimism of youth.

The passing of the years, though, brings the reminders more frequently.

A couple of events in recent weeks have touched me directly.

FIRST WAS THE DEATH of a friend and former colleague. He was half a dozen years younger than I, and when we first worked together he was in his early 30s. Our paths separated, and then we worked together again at another newspaper. Our careers, and our energy, were still on an upward trajectory, when he left for another opportunity.

We talked on the telephone every few months and saw each other only occasionally in the years that followed. But the friendship was one of those that that was not eroded by time and distance, and we always picked up with where we had left off. We did not dwell on aches and pains, and the barrier of distance leaves us picturing the other person as he was in days we were together.

In the past couple of months, we’d talked more often. He’d smoked for far too many years, and this winter had been particularly hard on him, sending him to the hospital multiple times with pneumonia. He was weakened, but each time we talked, he was confident that he was going to get better — and I believed he would get better, too. I would come visit, I promised, when he was feeling a little stronger. 

PNEUMONIA STRUCK again, though, and I did not realize until the last few weeks that he would not come home from the hospital.

I was taking comfort in the knowledge that he embraced life fully when word came that another friend, a contemporary, who had cheerfully fought cancer to a standstill for many years now was seeing the contest edge in the other direction. He is a realist, and, having toted up the cost of expensive drugs that at most could add only a few months to his life, he has decided to take as much enjoyment as he can in the time that remains.

All of this leaves me saddened, of course, and more conscious that the horizon looms ever closer.

But if youth is optimistic, age is stoic, and the Latin expression Dum vivimus vivamus  — is a "While we live, let us live" — becomes more relevant.

The poet A. E. Housman, I think, was both the optimist and the stoic when he wrote that  “… since to look at things in bloom fifty springs are little room, about the woodlands I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.”

There are no cherry trees here, perhaps, but pears and dogwoods will do nicely.

Repenting the Arrogance of Youth

I had occasion to spend some time in the waiting room of a clinic in Florida recently and was reminded of the arrogance of youth — my youth.

Just getting older had already changed my perspective, as aging does for most of us. Thankfully, I wasn’t a patient, so I was free to watch the others around me without being absorbed by my own woes. As might be expected in an area that is a magnet for retirees, most of the patients were older, and they were the people I had too little appreciation for in my long ago youth. Some shuffled along, barely raising their feet off the floor, some were stooped, others rode in wheel chairs. Some were morbidly obese, others emaciated. There were more stories there than in the waiting area of an airport.

I was transported back to my first time in Florida, fresh out of college and beginning my career. I didn’t know anything about St. Petersburg until I was hired sight unseen over the telephone by the St. Petersburg Times. My rudimentary research before grabbing my diploma and heading out did not prepare me for what I was to find. There were old people everywhere. Data for the 1960 census, released not long after I began work, confirmed what I observed: the median age for the census tract comprising downtown was 65 years.

Webb’s City in downtown was a sort of Walmart before there was Walmart. The median age there probably was closer to 75.

I HAD BEEN AROUND old people all of my life, but they were part of a broader population. They were great aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. Even those older folks who lived alone were not isolated from those of other ages. Here, they were most often on their own. They had spent their working years in Detroit or Buffalo or Rochester, and they had come to Florida to claim their share of sunshine and warm breezes, often leaving kith and kin. Some of them lived in enclaves where children were not welcome.

Most of us on the reporting staff were young, and we didn’t think the so-called senior citizens were anything like our grandmothers or aunts. They shuffled down the sidewalk and lined up for the early bird specials at the restaurants. They wore pith helmets, plaid Bermuda shorts and black shoes and knee socks and waited for a weed to have the audacity to pop up from their plush grass. They crowded zoning board meetings to rail against spot zoning and filled the city council chambers to oppose tax increases. They talked to anyone who would listen — and to some who wouldn’t — about their children or grandchildren or their ailments.

We were not going to be like them. Somehow we believed that we would waltz into the sunset, slim and erect and energetic forever.

How arrogant we were.

Time has a way of eroding youthful arrogance, and we learn that there’s an awful lot we have little or no control over. No matter how lithe and erect we were, how many miles we hiked or how many rivers we paddled, time and gravity tug at us, and our genes betray us. Hands that could tie a fishing fly are gnarled with arthritis, and eyes that could see to thread a needle have difficulty making out the type on a page. Minds that could direct a complex business operation have trouble keeping a simple task in mind long enough to complete it.

TIME ALONE HAS broadened my understanding. Just observing those patients at the clinic pushed the process along. 

Carrying on into old age calls for a certain amount of bravery. Hopes and dreams can still burn bright in bodies that are enduring the storms that time brings. The will to live defies the gravity that bows the back or the cataract that dims the sight.

I am still youthful enough or arrogant enough to believe that aging does not have to embrace rigidity and bitterness and mean-spiritedness.

Perhaps living in a community of geriatrics is good for some, but I suspect homogeneity is not as conducive to maintaining a lively mind and an appreciation for diversity. Many of our neighbors fall roughly within our age range, but there are younger people in the neighborhood, as well.

We’re fortunate, too, that we live in a college community. Auburn University is a virtual picnic of cultural and entertainment possibilities, and the passion and energy of youth are a welcome antidote to fossilization.

Retching Over Reaching Out

If I hear one more television news person use the words “reached out” as a synonym for called, I think I will barf. My wife has become accustomed to hearing me yell at the television set when perfectly good words and phrases are sacrificed to ignorance or artifice.

Blame my high school English teachers and a newspaper copy editor named Chick Ober.

When a reporter says, “Channel X reached out to Mr. Smith for his comments, but he was not available,” it sounds as if the reporter was being a really swell person by trying to get Mr. Smith’s side of the story, but isn’t that what a reporter is supposed to do?

What the reporter did was CALL Mr. Smith or send him an email. Why not say, “Channel X left three telephone messages and sent two emails to Mr. Smith, but he has not responded.”

Reached out — yuck.

HOW DO THESE things start and spread so quickly?

I first began hearing “reached out” on local newscasts and dismissed it as an example of a lack of care for the language. Then ‘reached out’ began popping up everywhere. Several times recently I have heard a reporter on one of the national networks, supposedly staffed by educated people, use the term. Double yuck.

Did it start way back with AT&T’s commercial urging viewers to “reach out and touch someone”?

So many depredations of the language seem to begin in advertising.

It was in an automobile commercial that I first heard a perfectly useful term — begs the question — under attack. After the commercial established a beachhead, there was no repelling the assault, and “begs the question” no longer means what it once did. Now, if a writer uses the phrase correctly, the reader is not likely to understand the writer’s intent.

In its previous usage, to “beg the question” meant to carry on a false argument where one assumes as proved the very point that is being argued, or more loosely, to evade the issue at hand.

IF, FOR EXAMPLE, someone asked why Donald Trump gets so much attention, and you said, “He’s in the news a lot,” the response would be, “That begs the question.” At least it would have been.

I spent a career trying to communicate clearly. Whatever success I had is due largely to those teachers and to Chick, who took a green young reporter under his linguistic wing.

I did not really appreciate those English teachers at the time. They had markedly different personalities, and only one of them inspired affection. All of them were demanding, and anything you got was earned. If you were motivated by grades, you worked.

At the St. Petersburg Times, where I began my career, the editors on the copy desk were generally an older and more experienced lot, and they saw themselves as guarding the gates of English usage against the barbarians on the reporting staff.

One of those guardians was Chick Ober. He had a round face and round glasses and he wore a bow tie. He looked like nothing so much as a toad frog terribly pleased with the fly it had just swallowed.

The newspaper had a tough, three-month probationary policy, which a good many people did not survive. Chick claimed not to learn the names of any of the new staffers until they’d passed probation. “No use cluttering up my head with the names of a bunch of people I won’t ever see again,” he said.

IT WAS SOME TIME after I was safely beyond probationary status that Chick stopped by my desk only long enough to say quietly, “I notice you used the word ‘evidently’ in that police short,” he said. “I think the word you wanted was ‘apparently.’ There is a difference. You could look it up.”

I looked it up in the big dictionary that was on a wooden stand in the newsroom. He was right, of course. I don’t recall whether I thanked him that time or whether he just saw me go to the dictionary, but he stopped my desk to talk about other word choices, always ending his brief visit with “you could look it up.” I always did, and I found myself looking up other words before I even turned a story in. (I still prefer a printed dictionary to one that pops up on the computer screen and gives only a bare-bones definition.

It is apparent, perhaps even evident, that local television stations and national networks don’t have room for a Chick Ober any more. Nor do many newspapers, for that matter.

The language — and clear communication — mourn the loss.

Readjusting the Way We Shop

Moving affects the way you do things in ways that you didn’t anticipate. Grocery shopping, for instance, involves a different strategy, one that we have not yet adapted to.

When we lived on Lake Martin, there were grocery stores near enough at hand to gather in the everyday necessities. But if  we wanted to try out a recipe that called for something a little more esoteric — say ginger preserves to make ginger-glazed shrimp or kalamata olives to make tapenade — we needed to plan ahead and make a trek of 30 or 40 miles to collect the necessary ingredients.

AS A CONSEQUENCE, we tended to stock up on those items that weren’t always available closer to home. And, because we had plenty of pantry space to store things, we’d swing by Sam’s and pick up bulk quantities of paper towels and toilet paper.

I can’t blame the grocery stores we had at the lake for the selections they offered. Their shelf space is more limited, and they have to use what they have to stock the items that most people buy. Although we could find most things we regularly needed, it was frustrating to find an item one time and find only a bare shelf the next time we looked. Sometimes we could find 2% cheese or Quaker oat meal squares, but often we couldn’t. (Of course, the large supermarkets are not totally exempt from this complaint, either).

NOW, HERE WE are living in that wonderland of having Kroger, Publix and Earth Fare only minutes away. There’s a multiscreen movie theater nearby, too, but for now the grocery store is more fun. We’re like sailors on shore leave after a long voyage. Instead of looking at girls, we’re gazing at fresh herbs and grass fed beef.

When we were early married, our budget consisted of a series of envelopes: Rent, utilities, gasoline, groceries. Each week, the budgeted amount was deposited into the envelope. If the grocery envelope were empty, we simply got by until it was replenished. A shopping list was essential.

We still have a budget, and we still have a grocery list. Neither is adhered to quite so rigorously.

WE WILL STOP by the grocery store for bread and milk and walk out with three full bags. Grocers have a way of making everything look so appealing, and we will eventually use all those things we buy, though from a diet standpoint we should pass some of them up.

Sometimes, though, we walk out of the grocery store with things we already have in ample supply. We somehow wind up with two containers of mayonnaise or ketchup in the refrigerator, both open, and perhaps there’s another one in the pantry. Because pantry space is limited, not everything is readily visible. Sometimes we’ll buy a couple of cans of beans and then find that there already were cans hidden way at the back of the shelf.

Eventually, we will adapt to the fact that the grocery store is close enough so that we don’t have to fill a shopping cart every trip. We’ll make a shopping list and do a better job of sticking to it.

Right now, though, we’re just counting trips to the grocery store as part of the entertainment budget, too.

All Stimulus, All the Time

Mobile phones, especially smart phones, are, among the great technological breakthroughs, rivaling the invention of the telegraph and the original phone.

 But they are not all blessing. I am persuaded that they are rewiring our brains, making us more connected but less social, shortening our already shortened attention spans, enfeebling our imaginations, and eroding our social graces. These same devices that have so much utility can be as addictive as alcohol, tobacco or drugs. We just can’t seem to keep our hands off of them.

THIS IS NOT A SUDDEN revelation, but a realization that has grown through observation and experience.

We no longer can bear to be alone, even briefly. Isolation is not something to be relished but rather something to avoid.

Plain old cell phones made it possible to reach out and touch someone far more readily than AT&T could have imagined when it adopted that slogan in 1979. It is if there was some pent up demand to talk, and now that we could banish aloneness except in those uncivilized regions where cell phone towers do not rise above the landscape.

Nowadays, if I walk down the aisle of the grocery store and hear people talking to themselves, or meet someone walking alone down the sidewalk talking and gesturing, I no longer assume they’re lunatics. If the car in front of me sits long after the light has changed, I assume the driver’s mind is on his telephone conversation.

Sometimes, when I am standing on a street corner waiting to cross, I count the number of drivers talking on their phones as they pass. It is nearly always a majority. I have never been much of one to spend time on the telephone, and I wonder what all those people are talking about.

But there is something worse than being alone. It is being bored, even for a microsecond.

Smart phones came along, and to borrow a Steve Jobs word, they are insanely useful — and addictive. Everyone could amuse themselves around the clock.

I AM NOT SOME LUDDITE wanting to smash the new looms. I have a smart phone, and with it I can check my and my wife’s calendars when I’m making an appointment, keep a shopping list, find the time and direction of the sunrise on Aug. 16, take a photo of my granddaughter, and look up the rules for a game. I can check my e-mail and the latest sports scores. There’s no end of apps that can do marvelous things. One person reviewed a 1991 Radio Shack ad and found that he would have had to spend $3,054.82 for the gadgets that are incorporated into his smart phone.

 Now to the downside: they suck us in and make us mindless. Many of us have laughed at the video of a woman walking right into a shopping center’s fountain while she was busily texting. We’ve seen people at restaurant tables playing with their telephones instead of paying attention to the person across the table from them. We’ve been put off by the bright light of a telephone screen in a darkened theater.

And most of us, I suspect, have felt the frustration of trying to have a conversation with someone while they were paying more attention to their phone than they were to us.

One person I know sits down to play one little game on her telephone and loses all sense of time.

It has been my experience that boredom often leads to creativity. When your mind is not occupied with some stimulus, it is free to wander in new directions and make new connections between old realities. I doubt that any significant idea has come to anyone’s mind in the middle of playing a game on their smart phone. I wonder if those who have become as habituated to constant stimulus as a crackhead has to his crystal will know what to do with themselves if the stimulus goes away.

I HAVE SKIRTED close to that addiction myself. I am trying to refrain from checking for e-mail more than a couple of times a day, and I am telling myself that I do not have to check the news headlines a dozen times a day. I’m even deliberately leaving my phone in the car at times.

As any recovering addict will tell you, it’s not easy.

But I am holding up as a goal an observation from Cicero: I do not consider any man to be truly free who does not sometimes do nothing.

Don't Make Eye Contact

FROM MY CHAIRr at the dining table, I watched a cat trot up the street in that sort of stiff-legged gait they employ when they are in only a minor hurry. The cat was on the opposite side of the street from the house, and in the gathering darkness I could not see much of its features. When it was even with our driveway, the cat turned left across the vacant lot and disappeared into the darkness. I could see that it was small and dark, perhaps all black.

There was no way of knowing, of course, whether the cat was someone’s pet. Cats are not respecters of property lines.

I was just as glad that I was inside and not in a position to invite  it to come sit for a spell and get acquainted. I — we actually — have a long history with cats. And we are determined at this time not to have another one — or any other pets. I claim that Adelaide has forbidden me to make eye contact with any stray animals.

I had dogs when I was a kid, (cats, too) but the dogs were always mutts, and they stayed outdoors. Not long after we were out of school and married, we adopted our first kitten — two kittens actually — and kept cats almost ever since. They were good pets for people who worked long and often odd hours.

From my observation of dog owners, if you get home late, the pet is likely to be waiting with a leash and saying, “Where on earth have you been? I’ve had my legs crossed for hours. We need to take a walk.”

A cat is more likely to affect disinterest, as if to say, “Oh, you’ve been gone? I hadn’t noticed.”

Cats seem to be determined to entertain or please you only on their own terms. If you cannot accommodate to a creature that shamelessly uses you, you’re not cut out for providing a home for a cat. I did not say own, because nobody truly owns a cat.

IN EXCHANGE for tolerating eccentricity and independence, we got years of entertainment, and, yes, companionship.

One of our first cats regularly greeted us from the roof of our small cottage when we arrived home from work. She would mew plaintively until one of us fetched her down. Poor thing can get up there but can’t get down, we thought. We thought that until Adelaide got home one day just in time to see the cat scampering nimbly down the tree that grew next to the house. Got tired of waiting for us to come home, we guessed.

Another cat — Ivory, the one which helped us civilize our two sons — decided that I was the devil incarnate. When I came into a room, she would slink out as if she feared for her life.

Our younger son opined that Ivory had just made up a game to amuse herself, an opinion bolstered by the fact that when I was the only one in the house, Ivory had no qualms about jumping in my lap and purring while I read a book.

After Lightnin’, our last picked cat, disappeared I vowed I wanted no other. Lightin’, my favorite of all the cats we have lived with, was part Manx and all smart. He also, I am chagrined to admit, behaved much like a dog without any of demands a dog makes on your time.

He was the only cat that actually came when I called. He sat by my chair while I read and jumped up in my lap on invitation. He asked to go out each evening (he neither wanted nor needed a chaperone), and in 30 minutes or so he would jump on the kitchen window sill and wait for me to open the door.

ONE NIGHT, after the rain had stopped, he went out. He never came back to his spot on the window sill.

I searched that night and the next day. No sign of him. We speculated that he’d been caught by the very large dogs down the street. They seemed to escape from their fenced yard with some frequency.

By then we were spending part of our time in Montgomery and part of it at Lake Martin. No more cats, we said.

There are two kinds of cats, however, ones you pick and ones that pick you.

Hendry (that’s not a typo) and Yellow Cat picked us, so theoretically at least, they were not our cats. Hendry belonged to our son and his family when they lived next door to us. When they moved to a new neighborhood, they took Hendry with them, but Hendry kept coming back to his old haunts. We reluctantly accepted responsibility for him.

When we moved full-time to Lake Martin, Hendry came, too.

Later came Yellow Cat. He apparently had been a pet at one time but had lived on his own for quite some time. He hung around our place — in sight but out of reach — until I began feeding him. We had a more formal sort of relationship: I fed him and took him to the vet when necessary; he did what he darn well pleased.

(The stories of both cats are detailed in Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines). Yellow Cat died of what the folks at the Vet School at Auburn said was a heart attack. Hendry went out one night and never came back, probably the prey of some wild critter.

Though neither was technically our cat, we were attached to both and we saddened by their loss.

Thus the dictum about not making eye contact with stray animals.

As I watched the little cat disappear into the darkness, I acknowledged it wasn’t just Adelaide’s dictum. It is mine, too.

Getting to Where We Are

ADELAIDE AND I have never been ones to chase trends. I think we've become part of a trend, anyway. We are among those who have figured out they would be happier with fewer things and less space. We may not be in the vanguard of that movement nationally, but we are at least riding the early waves that are landing at National Village, a housing development at Grand National in Opelika, one of the courses on Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail developed by the Retirement Systems of Alabama.

Our cottage is on the second street of cottages to be built in National Village. Some houses on the street were  already occupied when we chose our lot last spring, but there were more vacant lots. Since we joined the neighborhood at the end of August, several more houses have been completed. A house is nearing completion on the lot next door to us, and I'm told that the lot on the other side of us has been sold. A friend—actually the person responsible for us being here—has reserved the lot across the street from us.

We lived in our house on Lake Martin longer than in any house since we have been married, and we loved living there. The lot was steep, and the house was tall. It was on a point, and in the mornings I sat in the little reading room off our second-floor bedroom, drinking my coffee and watching the sun's first light catch the ridge across the slough. In the evenings, we often sat on the front deck, drinking in the solitude. Visitors, especially children, were intrigued by the widow's walk, where you could lie on your back on a clear night and stare straight up into the Milky Way.

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, we talked about downsizing in an abstract sort of way. We were happy enough where we were. We had good neighbors and a good community, and no place was calling us. We also had a tall house on a steep lot, a house that was built with children and grandchildren in mind. When the children and grandchildren (and their friends and their children) could not come as often as they once had, we realized that we were heating and cooling and cleaning and maintaining a lot more space than we truly needed.

Finally, with our impeccable sense of timing, we put the house on the market just about the time the housing market fell right off the dock. Homes on the lake fell into the category of luxuries, and no one was chomping at the bit to buy ours. After a year without any serious action, we let the listing lapse. We appreciated our good fortune at living in a place where many count themselves lucky to spend a few precious weeks of vacation, and we faced no deadlines for taking the next step in our lives.

At the end of last winter, we decided to try again. We did not have a plan for what we would do if someone actually bought the house and didn't feel pressed to make a plan, a lack of optimism, I suppose.

Then somebody bought the house. It all happened more quickly than we had anticipated.

ONCE WE REALIZED that we weren't likely to find something that met all of our requirements on the water, the Auburn/Opelika area entered the picture. We shopped and ate and went to entertainment and cultural events here, but we had never thought seriously about calling it home.

We had visited several times with an eye on it as a place to live. But that was considering it as a place to live for a friend, also a lake dweller, who was looking to downsize.

Of the places we looked at with our friend, the only one that had any appeal for us was National Village. 

So facing the reality of moving, we paid several more visits, this time viewing it as a possible home for us

There would be tradeoffs, of course. Less space, but less time and money allocated just to housing; less privacy, but more convenience. The fact that Retirement Systems of Alabama was the developer added to the appeal. I have observed RSA for many years, and it does not do shabby.

So we picked a plan and signed a contract. And  after disposing of an awful lot of possessions—it is not in Proverbs, but it is a truism that as long as you have a place to put stuff, you tend to keep it—we moved into an apartment in Auburn.

THERE WERE SOME bumps in the construction process, of course; no building project is without vexations. None of those vexations were major, though, and the builder, Conner Bros., has been responsive when we've found a problem.

We moved in at the end of August, and are mostly, but not totally settled (more about that latter).

We like that fact that everyone we've met is pleased to be here. We like the fact that it is not a gated community. We like the fact that the community isn't made up exclusively of retirees. We like the fact that there are community activities to engage in but that there's no pressure to do so. We like the fact that although lot sizes are small, the housing areas occupy only a small part of a larger, undeveloped space.

It is, we think, the right place for us.

 SOME LESSONS from our experience:

Give away or burn your possessions. No matter how much stuff you get rid of, you will move too much. Furniture from a larger house may be out of scale for a cottage. Think about some of the things you have held onto, not because you like them  but because you inherited them from someone. Liberate yourself and spare your children a burden.

If you are building a new home, keep careful notes of your meetings with the builder, and write down all of the things you have selected, from paint colors to trim, to fixtures. I don't suggest this because I think builders are crooked or incompetent. It is just that so many people are involved in building a house that missteps are too easy. And it is easy for you to forget some of the choices you did make.

Consider getting professional help. We hired a decorator to help us with colors, materials selections, design modifications and furnishings. We are happy with the result.