Indiana Oh Indiana

The term “oldster” irritates me, probably because it is supposed to represent that stratum of society of which I am now a member. The word sounds demeaning, at least to me, perhaps because it is the polar opposite of the word “youngster,” which as a ten-year-old child, I disliked because I was beginning to crave being taken more seriously. Both terms are meant to imply an affectionate dismissal with a pat on the head, as though for a puppy or a very old dog. Funny how our perspectives change over time, even though, in some ways, we end up pretty much where we started, if we live long enough.

Though I taught high school for thirty-five years, I have come to that juncture in my life, where I find it awkward to be around teenagers. A case in point was a dinner I attended three weeks ago at the lovely home of friends in downtown Denver, an interesting gathering including two vegans, the host and hostess (both gourmet cooks), my partner Jim and me, and two nephews of the host, one a high school junior and the other a sophomore. Jim managed to engage both boys in a surface conversation about gaming at War Craft, and Star Wars. The eyes of both boys lit up briefly. The rest of the evening neither boy said anything much, except an occasional “No” or “Uh huh,” despite the rest of us trying hard to draw them into conversation. Both boys are intelligent, doing all right in school but confined by what seem to be narrow boundaries of interest in or knowledge of reading or news about the world around them. This, of course, is not rare.

Maybe I’m complaining about something that has always been the case, though I do expect teenagers to know something about current events beyond the fluffy, personal revelations of Facebook. I didn’t want to grill the kids beyond asking what they liked to read, what they enjoyed best about school, and what their keenest interests were. Shrugs were the pat responses to those inquiries. I mean, teenagers have always been figuratively “a different species,” but I remember having wonderful discussions and debates with terrific feedback from the teens in classes I taught. Of course, it has been ten years since I was still a school teacher, so it may be that since that time teens have retreated ever more deeply into that tiny world of iPhones and the artificial preservative of texting that has, in many homes across the country (and world), replaced actual conversation and other human contact as we once knew it.

Then again, I do remember the dormitory in college. We didn’t have raves or crowd surfing, but much of what we did then wasn’t fodder for conversation with adults either. The rope harness my roommate created to sneak onto the third floor of the girls’ dorm, the contests in the study lounge to see who could break a wooden plank over his head, the chugging competitions with whisky smuggled inside dozens of English Leather men’s cologne bottles, and contests in the main dormitory lounge to see who could tumble over the big ottoman most like Dick Van Dyke ( one guy broke his collar bone in a valiant attempt to emulate Van Dyke). No, I too must have remained silent during many adult conversations with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and my parents’ friends, when asked what I was up to.

Maybe teens haven’t changed as much as I imagine they have. After all, the world of teens is still a citadel, where adults are foreigners, or at least tourists or trespassers. Even with a temporary visa, an adult can feel as dull in a teen’s environment as the teen can feel in the world of adults, where cocktails and politics remain alien territory.   JB

The Sun Coming and Going…

Sometimes we need music that stimulates the spirit so that we want to dance, sing, or shout with joy together with those we love. Then there are those times we are so overcome by the beauty of the moment that silence is what we need with perhaps no more than the sound of a bird singing, the quiet rush of a babbling brook, or a cricket chirping. It is those moments of monumental beauty in nature that stop us cold so that no words suffice, because we are humbled by a radiance and splendor that leave us speechless but somehow grateful for the gift of living.

As I age, I am becoming more deeply moved by sunrises and sunsets. Getting up to see the sky splashed with amber and gold is such a pleasant reminder of being alive to see another day. The birds are usually singing then too, and the glorious combination of the audio-visual loveliness simply makes one grateful to be here.

I often sit on the upper deck of the house in the evenings to watch the remarkable sunsets over the trees and mountains here in Colorado. The deep, rich colors and textures of the clouds catching the final sunlight of the day remind me of life’s finality too and that we are here for a while to enjoy the beauty of this world before our time is up, and the darkness comes. That cycle of the hours from morning through evening is a powerful prompt to inspire an acknowledgement of this gift of life and its relative brevity. There are times when the sun melting over the mountains is a kind of benediction to the day, and no one can experience such splendor without being profoundly affected, no matter what his spiritual affiliations may be.

I’m going to include here photos I’ve taken of several sunrises and sunsets, along with quotations I’ve collected from my reading.

“How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?”
― Margaret Atwood

“Sunrise over the mountain-forest was gorgeous – Aurora brushing out her golden tresses with a comb of dark-needled pine and bare-limbed oak.”
― J. Aleksandr Wootton, The Eighth Square

“Far over the Great River, and the Brown Lands, leagues upon grey leagues away, the dawn came, red as flame. Loud rang the hunting horns to greet it. The Riders of Rohan sprang suddenly to life. Horn answered horn again. Merry and Pippin heard, clear in the cold air, the neighing of war-horses, and the sudden singing of many men. The sun’s limb was lifted, an arc of fire, above the margin of the world. Then with as great cry the riders charged from the East; the red light gleamed on mail and spear.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

                                                          Emily Dickinson

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Harry looked down and saw deep green mountains and lakes, coppery in the sunset.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn,” he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. “And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.”
― Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember

“The redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless underground
Falls the remorseful day.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils.

Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold….The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

John Bolinger

I don’t know why I have become so utterly fascinated by the television shows, HOARDERS and DOOMSDAY PREPPERS. I can say only that as someone who is mildly OCD in terms of caring for my own home, I see the hoarders and “preppers” almost as creatures from another world altogether. There is something so obsessive and unworldly about their fears, that I look at them the way folks used to look at exhibits of freaks in old traveling carnival shows of the 19^th Century.

I ask myself how it is possible for anyone to allow his or her home to become a nest of contagion through sheer piles of trash, often covered in vermin, not wanting to discard any of it. That seeming lack of awareness of one’s environment builds over time, not just in a week or two and reminds me of an eight-hundred-pound man looking into a mirror suddenly one morning to say, “Gee, I’ve really let myself go!” The cause, as far as I can determine from the experts, who so sensitively and judiciously deal with the hoarders, is a tragic loss, so often the trigger for the hoarding behavior, a behavior that the hoarders themselves often refer to with unintended humor as “collecting” or “accumulating.” They become so terrified of losing anyone or anything again, that they hold on to every bottle cap, rubber band, and empty toilet paper roll with the false hope that the item will serve some purpose later on for a “craft project.” In the end, it’s all about control. In losing a loved one, there is a sense that the world is falling apart, and there can be a terrible need to hold on to something that is left in some wildly irrational grip on whatever is in one’s environment, even if it’s an old band-aid or a dead cat.

I love the episodes in which the hoarders begin to see why they have been accumulating irrationally and actually change in ways that get them back their dignity and joy in living. The before-and-after shots of those homes are gratifying to watch and leave the viewer with a sense of hope for hoarders, whose lives seemed so hopeless earlier in each program.

The other sense of gratification I get from each episode I watch is that after turning off the television set, I can look around my own house to feel content that, even if there is a coffee cup on an end table, or a cereal bowl in the sink, I have no feeling of being overpowered in any way by something and can easily remedy any feeling of being untidy. My house always looks especially good after watching one of those TV episodes.

There are three million hoarders in the United States, according to the statistics given on the show, and there are also three million “doomsday preppers.” Unlike the show HOARDERS, the DOOMSDAY PREPPERS program doesn’t attempt to change the behavior of the preppers, perhaps because their fears and obsessive behaviors don’t affect other people in the same ways, and there is no sense that the result of their cause will be the spread of dangerous disease through nests of rats or unsanitary conditions. No, the obsessions of the preppers have some other level of dignity and safety. In fact, safety is the main idea, a need to feel safe in a world in which these people feel horribly threatened by a coming, even if only imagined, holocaust, doomsday, or Armageddon of some kind.

The irony of their behavior for me is that they spend every waking moment in preparation for something unspeakably horrendous in order to achieve a sense of safety and inner peace. In fact, it seems that they live in constant fear, just like the hoarders, of losing what they have, often passing this sense of terror on to their children. It strikes me as a dilemma based upon sacrificing the joy of this life in preparation for the next one. It seems almost like preparing to live in a hell they feel is inevitable. I wonder too, what kind of life a destroyed world would offer, that would make one spend all his time preparing to live in it. Finally, both programs show us people, who have an almost pathological need to be in control in a world which they feel is taking from them or is going to take from them something precious. Perhaps what is precious for them has already been lost, that sense of joy, peace, and gratitude for who and what are here right now, but whatever the reason, I suppose people have to find their own level of inner tranquility, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon that of others. I am at once sympathetic with the hoarders and preppers, while being awed by their somewhat twisted devotion.    JB

In the world of fashion for men, I’m pretty sure that I would be considered a genuine country bumpkin. As someone who was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, I’ve kept what I’d like to call a down-to-earth, practical view on what men wear. Of course, we men generally have a different, perhaps more comfortable view on this subject from views that women have. Though we can be very competitive in other areas of endeavor, most men, if they’re being honest, consider clothing a necessity for warmth, coolness (regarding temperature), and modesty. Often, women are the ones who choose our neckties (those silk items that add a hint of color and interest to suits that otherwise all look pretty much the same). If we could, we men would wear faded blue jeans and flannel shirts to weddings, funerals, banquets, cocktail parties, ball games and church. Swimming might be the only activity for us that could require different attire.

I taught high school for thirty-five years, collecting over fifty silk neckties as gifts and personal purchases by me. I wore those neckties mostly with sport coats and sweaters and occasional dress suits over those years, but when I retired, I had a friend quilt those ties into toss pillows, which the dog and cat both enjoy now as cushions for napping. I saved one black silk necktie for funerals and another more colorful tie for any dress-up emergency for which I am expected to be more formal without looking too much like a Puritan minister.

The world in general has become much more casual, especially here in Colorado, where there are horses and ranches everywhere, so I seldom see suits and neckties, except as the iron maiden apparel of bankers and lawyers, who evidently feel more trustworthy through the stiffer dignity of Armani ensembles than through the relatively looser and more casual comfort of the Pa Kettle look, which happens to be a favorite of mine.

My real surprise comes from my occasional reading of publications based mostly in New York City with ads for Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Versace, Dior for men, and Hermes. Simple suits in these ads cost many thousands of dollars, and even a silk necktie can cost more than I’ve paid for some of the cars I’ve owned. Prestige is perhaps the most expensive commodity on earth and something for which many people are willing to pay almost any price.

This morning I saw an ad for Versace slip-on sneakers that looked for all the world like ones I’ve also seen at Target for less than $80. The Versace price tag was $1125. My Hoosier, homespun common sense kicked in, and I felt revolted. My apparently corn-fed value system saw this and other such ads as useless excesses in a world of starving children and abandoned pets needing rescue. Something strongly Midwestern grabbed my conscience and unsophisticated sense of fashion. There’s no hope for me, I guess.

Maybe I should be more grateful that there are at least some creative deviations in men’s clothing, which otherwise has not really changed much during the past century. I should also be thankful that we are no longer expected to wear knee britches, powdered wigs, or buckled shoes. Finally, men’s fashion for me is a kind of spectator sport, one that I observe happily from a distance, and at which I observe $700 silk neckties and $1200 sneakers as through a Hubble telescope…from many light years away.     JB

SPINACH SQUARES

4 T butter
3 eggs
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 10-oz. pkgs chopped frozen spinach (thawed and well drained)
1 lb. grated Monterey Jack cheese (or combination of your favorite cheeses)
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 cup buttermilk

Cook spinach and drain well.  Melt butter in a 9X13 pan.  Beat eggs and milk together.
Add flour, salt and baking powder.  Mix well.  Mix in spinach, cheese and onion to egg mixture.  Pour into pan and spread evenly.  Bake 40 minutes at 350 degrees F (preheated oven).  Top will be slightly brown.  Cool a little and cut into squares.

*  It takes a pretty big bowl in which to mix everything. Here is what the mixture looks like when placed in the oven:

There was a time during the history of our country when scaffolds were used to display people, who were for sale. This practice was accepted across much of our nation, even just 151 years ago. “Good Christian folks” deluded themselves into accepting slavery as a “natural” institution, one that was condoned even from pulpits almost everywhere in the United States. Awareness of the true reality of this heinous custom came only gradually to most people, but the shock of its former existence should also make us wonder if there are yet injustices that are calmly and legally accepted in our own time, injustices that deeply wound many.

I would like to point out such a lingering injustice, one that is still accepted, perhaps because it doesn’t affect everyone directly and, in fact, may not even be noticed by many citizens. As someone who is directly and unfairly affected by this law, I want to expound upon its meaning and effects upon my own life and the lives of countless others.

When I turned sixty-five years old, I was automatically given Part A of Medicare. As Part B would have cost $104 monthly, I opted to postpone it, because I already had health insurance through my domestic partner and the company where he worked. James and I have been together for seven years, and the company, Liberty Global International (largest cable company in the world) recognized our partnership in legal terms, giving me one of the best health insurance policies on the planet. When I turned sixty-five, the law stated that there would be no penalty for delaying Medicare Part B as long as the scheduled recipient could prove that he had valid health insurance during that period of delay.

I am now sixty-eight, and Jim has decided to retire in September of 2014, which means that our health coverage through Liberty Global will end on October 1. Jim will have a cobra policy for $950 for himself, but for which I will not be eligible. When I contacted Social Security and Medicare, I was told that a new law had been passed in June of 2013 stating that health insurance for those aged sixty-five or older in domestic partnerships would no longer be valid. Only those couples in “legal marriages” would be allowed without penalty to enroll in Medicare Part B outside the usually mandated time beginning in January of each year. I was told by both agencies that my health insurance coverage since age sixty-five would, therefore, not be recognized, and that I would not be allowed to sign up for Medicare Part B until January, 2015, the coverage of which would not begin until July, 2015.

I am also being penalized retroactively back to the year 2011 (for not having a crystal ball?), when I turned sixty-five. I will be paying ten percent extra per year I was not enrolled in Medicare Part B, even though the law was not passed until June of 2013. This penalty will be for the rest of my life, even though the law didn’t exist until I was sixty-seven.

All this goes back to the issue that same-sex marriage in Colorado and Florida is not legal. The result is that I am being denied something about which even other same-sex couples in other states needn’t worry. They will not be penalized, because their marriages are recognized as valid. If this isn’t an ugly form of snide discrimination, I don’t know what is.

I’ve contacted twenty-three health insurance companies, not even one of which will furnish an individual policy to anyone over the age of sixty-five, who doesn’t have Medicare Part B. This is the law under Obama Care.

The result of all my communicative struggles with Medicare and Social Security have come to nothing, and I’m exhausted. I will be without health insurance, except for Medicare Part A until July of 2015. That’s nine months without coverage during which any doctor visits or medications will have to be paid for entirely out of my own pocket. I can pray only that I remain in good health. Maybe I can be placed into a plastic bubble?

If I were an illegal alien, it is likely that I would receive more respect, dignity, and care than I am to receive as a life-long citizen of this country. If I were a convicted criminal, there would be no question about my receiving lodging, food, and health care in prison. Instead, as someone who has been paying taxes for fifty years and jumping through the endless number of hoops thrown at me by my nation’s government, I am still paying for all of the above, yet feeling more and more abandoned, like a man without a country.

When I hear those words that used to make me feel safe and proud, those same words now stick in my throat, because their meaning and truth have faded into some awful abstraction not even remotely connected to reality for me. The terrible irony is that freedom and dignity are only for some people here, you see…not all of us.

“My country ‘tis of thee…sweet land of liberty…”

                                      Or

“One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Really?

JB

ON RETIREMENT

I’ve been retired now for ten years but remember that in 2004 I was worried about whether I had saved enough and invested enough to make it into “old age,” which, by the way, keeps leaping about ten years beyond where I am at any given moment. It turned out that I had no financial worries and needed instead to concern myself with how I would spend my time in the most productive and entertaining ways. My alarm clock became a physical anachronism whose digital dial began to glow on my night table in a much friendlier way than it had during all those years that I had to get up at five every weekday morning.

The hobbies of painting in oils, playing piano, reading, cooking, gardening, and travel were all wonderful ways to pass time in meaningful ways, but it has been writing that has given me the most pleasure and pride over those ten years. One of the greatest fears that people have is that they will not be able to fill all that “free time” in fulfilling ways, but I believe if there’s a secret to having a good retirement, it may be to try new things, have creative outlets, and simply not to worry about not doing what others think is necessary in being “free.” Nobody said that you have to win a Nobel Prize, climb Mount Everest, or save a third-world country by yourself. It’s really about following your heart and not being afraid to take a different path once in a while.  Make new friends, and nurture your old friendships.

Being a responsible citizen in terms of going to a traditional job for eight to ten hours a day for forty years is wonderful, but retirement changes that ethos by allowing more choices and liberty to make your life mean whatever you want it to mean on a daily basis. You aren’t locked into anything. Hedonism becomes only one of many possibilities after retirement, and no guilt should weigh you down, even for a moment about all those doors you want to open. One of my favorite anonymous quotations is, “Life is filled with doors we haven’t opened, and rooms we can’t go back to.” Have no regrets.

I’m not sure that anyone has captured in a more amusing or meaningful way the significance of retirement than the poet, David Wright, whose poem for his friend on this topic I’d like to share:

Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear

by David Wright
for Richard Pacholski

Avoid storms. And retirement parties.

You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will

offer, when they really want your office,

which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still

untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask

for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen

more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your

youngest child the most, regardless. Back to

storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass,

don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling

down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will

see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear

you over all the thunder. But you’re not

Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what

you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves

the stage in character—we never see

the feather, the mirror held to our lips.

So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel

the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,

the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace

your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.

Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.

Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers

into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.

If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as

if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold

beer. So much better than making theories.

We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.

My sister Connie (February 12, 1953 – May 8, 2011) would have turned 61 This year.  She was always proud of sharing her birthday with Abraham Lincoln.  She is in my thoughts today, and I think she would appreciate the poem I composed for her.