This Is My Stop and I Want to Get Off

Some things you see, you don't forget.  Those are often the things you can't really say anything about, either, because your thoughts don't agree with tradition or with just the way things are done.

What I saw was while we were installing some routine added telephone and computer lines at Frey Village in Middletown, PA -- a nursing home.  And still I can't, or won't, bring myself to describe the people we passed by slumping in their wheelchairs in a hallway, in their rooms, or in a social area with others but still as alone as possible.  In a hospital, professionals are buzzing around, there is important-looking equipment flashing numbers and beeping, so despite what you see, you can think there's going to be some things fixed for some of the patients, if not, surely, for all.  There could be no hope for any of these ancients in the nursing home; it was as harrowing as a war scene.

A recent report from the Institute of Medicine made the news last week, and it stated bluntly that aggressive care prolongs dying without improving the quality of life.  Exactly what I've been thinking; even for those I saw so many years ago, who were completely out of it, the standard is to intervene relentlessly to keep them alive; trips made by ambulance from home to doctors' offices and hospitals and back, over and over.  While my father underwent this for nine months, from hospital to rehab to nursing home, the word that came to mind over and over was:  torture.

When a bipartisan group from the House and Senate proposed (in 2009) that patients could be counseled by their doctors about end-of-life care and be paid for their time through insurance or Medicare, the right wing noise machine blew up and hit the headlines with the "death panels" scare before the public even knew about that provision in the bill that was being considered.  The real reason for that dishonest outrage, other than predictable opposition to anything helpful to the helpless, was that no part of the healthcare profit machine should ever be contained, no matter how useless or unreasonable.  Since the largest part of Medicare is spent on the last few years of patients' lives, the prospect of bankrupting it as boomers flood the nursing homes, if nothing is done about prolonging the dying process soon, must have delighted the wingnuts.

Mark Evanier has written stories of his parents' lives many times on his blog (www.newsfromme.com), but the latest is relevant to considering the absurdity of pointlessly prolonging human misery:

When someone close to you dies, you look for that silver lining, however thin and fragile it may be -- some way to 'spin' the death in a way that's more comforting to you.  I had no trouble doing that...when my mother died because she really wanted to go.  She was verging on blindness and a life which did not contain one single thing that brought her any joy.

Mark's father, many years earlier, had seemingly willed himself not to live on as an empty shell after his third heart attack.  He knew he was not going to

recover to the point where he could walk and go out and get into his car and drive somewhere and do something useful.

Despite his own express desires, and the presence of a carefully written living will and clear health directives, there was nothing we could do to stop the endless and fruitless medical interventions during those bedridden nine months my father endured. Only twice were people candid about what the situation was.  Early on during that period, I talked to the rehab hospital care coordinator when everyone else was out of the office and the door was closed, making it clear I wanted her honest assessment apart from the official script of false comfort (Plaza West in Florida is part of a giant corporation).  She said quietly, "he's not going home.  This is it."  And on the last admission to the hospital after being moved here, while Dad was still unconscious in the emergency room, a young doctor took us aside in a shadowy corner and asked what we wanted.  ...He said we were right, and at that point everything changed: he recommended that hospice begin as soon as possible and Dad be moved to a quiet private room. Within a half hour, all the tubes, needles and lines were removed except for an increasing morphine drip.

But a peaceful end could not be found much earlier despite there being no hope of recovery.  Does that make any sense?








 


 

Lift the Veil, and...

...you just find another one.

Some things just become more ambiguous, not clearer, the more you look into them.  Mostly, to avoid these headaches, people either just accept things (like the frog who gets boiled without noticing that his future is changing for the worse as the heat under the pot is turned up very slowly), or they have beliefs that save them the trouble of thinking matters through.

So, recently Coca-Cola announced that they are going to go to a 100% bioplastic "plant bottle" which is made from plant materials instead of being petroleum-based.  Right now, their bottles are already 30% made from such renewable feed stock (petroleum being, for a fact, despite the claims of scientists such as S. Palin, both finite and non-renewable).  The other 70% is now PET plastic along with some chemicals for softening and flexibility. To make the project economically as painless as possible, they're partnering with a Wisconsin company, Virent, to refine the process of producing purer paraxylene from a byproduct of the biofuel production process.  Other large packagers are on board, such as Heinz and Proctor & Gamble, as well as Ford, which has already pioneered use of recycled PET plastic for interiors.  The Air Force is testing jet biofuel, and Honda and Shell Oil are in also.  Big corporate environmentalism?  Bring it on, since, let's face it, another article in the Sierra Club magine pushing the idea isn't going to move much on the global chessboard.

But then...using switch grass or plant leftovers sounds efficient and good, but what if the major source of plant feedstock for this new plastic turns out to be one of the major monocrops of industrial agriculture, such as corn?  The effects of expanding its production on our battered, eroding soils or creating square miles of new sugar cane fields by bulldozing the Amazon basin even more would be as hard on the world environment as the PET plastics already are.  That's more diesel fuel use, and more herbicides and pesticides, when we have far too much of that now.  And the plant-based plastic might well include the same dangerous additive chemicals for softening that are currently used.

Recycling problems will not go away.  The current rate with PET petroleum plastic bottles is only around 24% (except in states with refundable deposit laws, where it averages 70%), and the recycling industry is not set up to handle bioplastic.  Coca-Cola and other giants oppose deposit laws, since that system requires some effort from them.  In Europe, companies are being held accountable for accepting back their materials, even whole cars, but as long as one lobbyist draws breath in the USA, that won't happen here.

Dilemmas like this remind me of what Tony Soprano would say: "Well, whatcha gonna do?" 
 

From Here to Where?

Elgo American plastic bricks.  Favorite indoor toy, not made since the 1960s.

Last week here at your favorite literary oasis we went from a western rural Kentucky county to Purgatory (which we found is in Ireland, surprisingly).  Today's trip is much more neck-snapping, so hold on.

In a blog that I read regularly, a mention was made of an article about why there is little variety in ketchup while mustard comes in hundreds of choices .  Malcolm Gladwell penned this information-packed essay for the September 9, 2004 issue of the New Yorker.  I didn't have all the time I do now to read about such things back then and so missed it, and of course I'm curious about the imbalance between the two standby condiments. 

That was only the beginning point to a fascinating short history of the successes and failures of food industry moguls, marketers and scientists.  And there is genius behind the genesis of some particular brands and styles of products that are enduringly popular with many people; all the research, investment, data and experimentation does sometimes go awry without the inspired insight that is only present in a few of us .  And the greatest of them all, after Henry Heinz (who completely changed ketchup from its insipid, thin original state into what is, and probably always will be, the standard) was one Howard Moskowitz.

Pepsi, when considering using artificial sweeteners in the early 1970s, asked him to find the perfect amount of sweetener.  It was already known to be somewhere between 8 and 12%.   Doing the usual research, Moskowitz found that the data was all over the place, which led him to the first of his eureka moments:  that there was no perfect one in this case; it's plural (the beginning of why there are 500 varieites of everything today).  Penetrating insight and creative thinking must run in his family; he's descended from The Seer of Lublin, Polish rabbi Yaakov Y. Horowicz, who was known for his exceptional intuition and miracle-working, with the added gift of repairing souls.  (But he died in 1815 after falling from a window -- didn't he see that coming?) 

Moskowitz went deeper with the problem he tackled for Prego spaghetti sauce, which was trying to compete with industry leaders.  He found segements of taste and preference which could be addressed only with new products.  People then divided in their choice of plain or spicy sauce; Moskowitz, thinking of how Heinz forever captured his market by making ketchup much thicker, recommended chunky spaghetti sauce after finding out that there were actually three general preferences, one of which no one in the industry had thought of.  Launched in 1990, it was, and is, very successful.  I highly recommend reading the article online to learn about how achieving the "unity of taste" makes a product universally popular.  Hint:  Coca-Cola starts with a dark vanilla taste and, like Heinz ketchup, rolls back along the tongue revealing other flavor notes in the most pleasing order.  Imitation colas hit a citrus or cinnamon note first and don't develop.

Here's the hook:  without the internet, I'd never have come across this, the science and psychology of which I think is pretty interesting, and pursued the subject so easily.  Even though the monthly bill from Verizon seems high, it really delivers a lot of value if you make regular use of it.  I think what the travel, time, expense and effort required would be to find odd items like a cartrige for your old printer, or just find things out, without our worldwide web.

So, to flip it over, what do you miss about the pre-internet world?  When there were only two to five broadcast channels, before cable, we certainly had a lot more time to spend otherwise than in front of a screen, and those activities probably involved more activity and deeper engagement.  The same goes for the use of all of our internet devices.  Now that I can, for example, find a book or record from my old "look for" list effortlessly and with a great chance of success, it seems to take the challenge out of it.  Found on a library give-away table a few years ago, an old copy of  the novel South Wind in excellent condition still makes me smile in a way that ordering it with two clicks on Amazon.com could not.  I also miss the relative anonymity one can maintain in an old world of paper records that might be inaccessible or lost.  Now, of course, everything about you isn't mostly yours anymore.  So, you get falsely personalized marketing and scam communications daily, and they can track you like a wolf following a rabbit.

Your average wired 11-year-old today probably won't agree (because they don't take these surveys), but the Five Best Toys of All Time (as of 2011) are:
           a stick,
           a box,
           a cardboard tube,
           string,
and...  dirt.

Say what you will, virtual dirt in a video game just can't compare.

 

My all-time favorite dirt-moving toy.  Real metal, too.

       






 

Going Down

I guess it's easy to take most everything for granted, but I enjoy looking for, and being surprised to find out, where things come from, or even the origin of names of things.  Hickman County, Kentucky, for an odd example, where my brother- and sister-in-law live, is named after a young Army officer who met an early end on the frontier; but digging deeper you can find that the surname originally meant "Richard's man," in that "hick" or some variant of it was a nickname for Richard.  What if you could find out who this Richard was, and when and where?  But that's probably going a little far.

Literary scholarship and history often consisted of hunches, apparent similarities, or guesses before discoveries, archaeology and other sciences gave hypotheses a firmer, more factual foundation.  We still haven't figured out about Shakespeare or the origin of the Etruscans or the Basques, but someone is still looking into it.  While we may never find any more written or recorded evidence about the real Bard, DNA is an astonishing tool for finding out where peoples came from and moved on to.  Another example:  I knew there was a significant area of Romania populated by Germans brought there for their faming and mechanical skills, and recently found out I'm related to them.  This particular descendant of migrants is probably fortunate to be in New Cumberland rather than there, but that's the luck of the draw.

If you think of what inspired the writers of timeless classics, it's often the Bible or the legacy of the ancient world rediscovered during the Renaissance.  Take the Divine Comedy.  We're aware that the ancient Greeks believed, and expressed in their myth and writing, in a descent of the dead into a dismal underground.  This was woven into Christian doctrine, like so many other pagan tales, and came to be regaded as unquestionable, revealed truth.  Since Dante had completed all of this work he was going to by his death in 1321, very early in the Renaissance, that would seem to be it.  The story's origins may not have such a clear line, though.

One of the few things we know about the Druids and religion of the ancient Celts, other than it being based on nature, is that they saw the universe as comprised of three circles:  heaven, purgatory, and hell.  When the first Christian missionaries entered Ireland, Wales and Brittany at the end of the Roman Empire, they could not dislodge these beliefs and so incorporated them.  Somehow they did manage to remove women and nature from any status in the equation over time, despite both being supreme in the native culture.  The churchmen of Ireland and the rest of the Celtic fringe were both educated and fearless travelers, and took their own hybrid version of Catholicism all over the European continent (even to uninhabited Iceland before the Danes!), especially to the centers such as Rome and the early universities.  So, the definitive and detailed work on heaven, hell and purgatory, by an Italian poet, may well have inserted Celtic myth/religion into Christianity permanently.

Entering St. Patrick's Purgatory

The was a real, physical Purgatory on an island in Lough (lake) Derg, County Donegal, Ireland, by a monastery that was active and occupied from the fifth century to the seventeenth.   It was a small cave, or pit, said to be only about six steps deep, and closed off by a heavy locked door.  Probably from ancient times it was feared to be the mouth of hell, after its orignal purpose as a storage pit or sweat lodge for cleansing and purging was long forgotten.  The legend is that St. Patrick, irritated that those he was preaching to wanted some proofs, gave permission for his doubters to enter in the purgatory pit to stay there overnight (for a total of 24 hours), and report back what they experienced.  And it not only wasn't just a cramped, damp stay, it was horrifying and made believers out of those who returned.  Not all did, they say; some were hopeless sinners and went right on to hell.

Many pilgrims followed, from the Isles and the continent, but the first written accounts are from the early 12th century.  One bad character, the Knight Owain, was either sent or got permission from his bishop to sample purgatory there, and his account (actually written by monk Henry of Saltrey) from around 1150 was translated into French and was popular over Europe.

There came there devils on every side,
Wicked ghosts, I wote*, from Hell,
So many that no tongue might tell:
They filled the house in two rows;
Some grenned** on him and some made moans.

So related our reformed knight, after a preparation of two weeks of fasting, praying and sleep deprivation, which was the standard procedure.  No wonder he saw visions.

 

Station Island, Lough Derg, today.  The bell tower over Purgatory is on the grassy area to the left.

The cave was closed in 1632 by the English government, and is today covered by a bell tower, but the pilgrimages continue -- 8,000 people in 2011 alone.

So from storage pit, to sweat lodge, to place to be feared, to saintly legend, to literary work, and finally to dogma, we have the origin story of the idea of Purgatory. 

All the horrors thou wilt not get to know
Which Hell's inmates suffer.
Pleasant sins end in painful penalties:
Pain ever follows pleasure.



*   = I have seen
** = (?)


 

Trespassers Will Be Dealt With

I enjoyed a documentary on National Geographic Channel the other night entitled "Urban Jungle," about the spread of suburbia and the adaptation to it by wild animals.  There were 1,000 bear sightings in Tahoe last year, and as we probably already knew, it also stated that deer, coyote and raccoon populations were at record highs.  It's said the native Americans thought of animals as the equals, or betters in some cases, of humans.  We don't, but they proving to be so much smarter than us bipeds.  Think of that squirrel you can't stop from getting all the birdseed in your feeder, even if you haven't encountered the other three in your yard yet.  In California and the Southwest, people have learned the hard way not to leave pets outside at night or without safe shelter:  the coyotes will get them, and you will hardly know it.

There were two short segements about housecats defending their home territory that were pretty astonishing.  One faced down an alligator, and another went all medieval on a little bear, who turned and ran.  Cats seldom consider their small size when confronting a threat; in their minds they must be big and bad-ass when they need to be.

Our four-year-old cat Blackberry surprised us a day after the Nat Geo program.  He was in the back room at around 9 p.m., cooly resting on the floor and surveying his domain, when he suddenly got up into the stalking stance, close to the floor, with tail poofed and ears laid back.  He advanced on the back door and began a startlingly loud growl, then stood up and batted the glass with his paw.  We couldn't see anything out back on the deck until we turned on the light, revealing the white cat who lives a block away, just sitting there.  Mr. Berry was having none of that.  With the light coming on, the other cat slipped away, as Blackberry ran full tilt upstairs to observe from the bedroom window.  It took a while for him to calm down from this blatant invasion of his territory.

He knows exactly what's going outside, what is serious and what can be ignored, even though his only trips outside the house have been twice to the vet.  He has his own rules about what is permissible there, too:  he agrees to remain calm and polite after getting over the indignity of being put in his blue travel cage, but draws the line at getting his temperature taken.  That isn't going to happen.

Blackberry also has his own priorities about what constitutes a threat.  Unknown people -- and he knows a different vehicle pulling into the driveway immediately (big eyes, tail down) --  cause him to head quickly and quietly as possible down into the basement, where he opens the door to the storage room with his paw, to hide under the old bunk bed.  Other cats, well, that calls for a confrontation through glass or screen and full on ninja ready-to-attack mode.  He always knows when they're out there, even if still out of sight.  Squirrels, rabbits, dogs...to him, they're no big deal.  But he's our little hero.
  
 

Day Trippers

Well, you don't actually steal it, but you can help yourself.  At a "Little Free Library," that is.

I'd heard of these tiny outdoor libraries-in-a-box before, but an article in a local magazine about them mentioned that there are two around here, so I had to go see it.  Even better, I rounded up a half-dozen books to donate, since there are only a few thousand lying around at our casa.

The backstory is that in 2009, one Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin built a model of a one-room schoolhouse small enough to rest on a post as a tribute to his mother, a former teacher and a big reader, and filled it with books and placed it in his front yard with a sign reading FREE BOOKS for anyone to borrow from.  Sort of like the penny cup on the counter of a store, you take one or more when you need to and put one or more back in when you can.  He made several more to give to interested neighbors, and still makes them to send much farther away today, using recycled materials like the wood from a barn demolished by a tornado.

So a lady named Lois decided to become a L.F.L. "steward" (#10725, to be precise) and have one at her home in Mechanicsburg, set in front of her expansive and lush back-yard garden, like so:

I found room for my donations, and took out one by Ian McEwan, who writes some wicked mysteries with a jaundiced eye to the motivations, and bad behavior of, humanity.  Nancy got one of the yellow tomatoes.  So Lois and the more cynical Mr. McEwan represent very different approaches to life, mmm?

Initially, the goal was to have as many of these miniature libraries worldwide as the 2,509 free public ones established by Andrew Carnegie, but as of the beginning of this year, there are 15,000 of them.  Next time we're back in town, I'll try to remember to return the one I picked up.  Maybe it will still be tomato season.

We had another destination a few miles away later in the day.  My grandparents' former home site was being auctioned off by the heirs of the last owner, who was the widow next door.  My brothers and I had sold the then-existing house to her after a not very successful experience renting it out, and she wanted it for her daughter to move into.  I guess its maintenance proved too much for her, too, and sometime in the past ten years she had the house demolished.  The garage, which did not have moisture and other problems, still stood and housed her son's two tractors.  It was one of those sad but inevitable things that transpired, as first the widow's household items were sold, then her house and 3-acre lot, and finally our grandparents' former property (one acre).  There wasn't much interest in the real estate, and a sole bidder got the first for $100,000 and the second for only $32,000.

The area is now zoned commercial/industrial, so with the house now gone, I don't think one can be rebuilt there.  We'll keep an eye out for developments, but won't be walking on that long green lot again.  I covered it all, remembering what had been there, and what remained.  The cherry, pear and apple trees were long gone, I already knew, but the horse chestnut planted around 1960 was huge and healthy.  The outlines of the large but long-gone garden were visible if you knew where to look.

A quote from W. H. Auden at the beginning of the book I picked up at the LFL box said it all:

   "The friends who met here and embraced are gone..."

 

 

 



 

Call It Home

Who would think a radical idea in housing would have been adopted so successfully in very conservative (until recent decades) Richmond, Virginia?  They not only built co-op housing in several neighborhoods in the late teens and twenties of the 20th century, but they did it so well they are thriving today, if not a big news item anymore.

The main place we think of as the place for this social experiment is New York City, and that mainly in the form of extremely exclusive and crazy expensive co-op high rises, but the idea was originally developed, along with co-op farm enterprises and co-op banks, to benefit the working classes who were not exactly getting a fair shake back before those days (T. Roosevelt and Wilson finally did give them a couple breaks, and social activists and writers brought awareness to the nation).  Richmond being itself, though, built English Village for the upper middle class.  Of course, there's more money there.

 



English Village, 3400 block of Grove Avenue

Completed in 1927, this group of 17 attached townhomes built around a U-shaped courtyard and set back from the street was modeled on rural English Tudor and built for economy of living and durability (a concept lost on homebuilders since).  It was not an apartment building, but a multi-family planned community, featuring individual garages, ample common and smaller private spaces, with a central shared boiler room to provide radiant heat and hot water.  The by-laws are still in force, and the "corporation," that is, the owners' association, is by charter not to make a profit.  Slate roofs, board-and-batten heavy wood doors, stone decoration and stained glass all make a strong Arts and Crafts impression.  Except for the loss of the courtyard fountain the Village remains well-maintained and unchanged today.

Last year a two-bedroom, 1 1/2 bath unit of 1536 square feet sold for around $230,000, which is unfortunately no longer in the upper-middle class stratum.  Unfortunately, the Depression put an effective end to the co-op projects in Richmond, and only one of the original owners did not lose his home there by 1934.  The commercial condominium developments of today, the heirs to this excellent idea in housing, do not measure up to the original, but the spirit is alive in university towns in places like upstate New York and the Pacific Northwest.

Other co-op neighborhoods in Richmond include Ingleside (1916), Byrd Park Court (1922), and Laburnum Court in the Northside (1919), which is as well-kept and attractive today as English Village, but consists of 24 individual homes instead of one building.  It too originally shared a radiant heating plant and even a discounted central electricity system, but these were abandoned in the 1970s as too expensive to maintain.  It is still a co-op corporation, though, built not in one but in several styles such as Colonial, Mediterranean and Arts and Crafts.  Common purpose must continue the feeling of neighborhood through the succeeding generations of owners and families.

 

Laburnum Court home

...

I used to think the name "Laburnum," which is used for this neighborhood and the area's main thoroughfare, was an unpleasant-sounding word and not a great choice, but found out that it's the name of the lovely Golden Chain Tree, which has cascades of yellow flowers and a beautiful and useful dark wood.  So, with that association, it seems pretty attractive.  Now I have to find out why in the world they named a town in Louisa County "Bumpass" ....

 

Pretty, but it is poisonous