Dr. Metablog

Oh No! What's Happening to Me?

So, a couple of days ago, we were watching some basketball on the HDTV, and despite the fact that Carmelo was going to the rim virtually at will, I was kind of down and depressed.  Trying to cheer me up, the companion of fifty-plus years says, "I'll tell you what.  I'll get you anything you want -- absolutely anything at all."  Meaning, of course, anything edible, anything from the kitchen.  We'll I'm not abstemious, I've always been a good eater, and I recognize that food has the power to confer good cheer, so I thought and thought, and finally I said, "I know what I'd like. How about a cup of decaf tea and two prunes."  And then after a few seconds, I screamed, "Holy moley, what in the living heck has happened to me?"  Is it now the case that outer limit of my imagination is a cup of decaf tea and two prunes?  So embarrassing, so downright geezerish.  What ever happened to ice cream sundaes, to rich and gooey lasagna, to late-night salami sandwiches on deli rye (not that we would have any of those ingredients stocked in our bland-healthful-but-tasteless-low-cholesterol-food refrigerator). It's all downhill, this septuagenarian eating.  Ou sont les pepperoni pizzas dantan?  Where are the bacon cheeseburgers of yesteryear?

Help, I Need Somebody Not Just Anybody

I did so write a check to register the car, it turns out, but since we have changed our residence, for some mysterious reason that I will never grasp,  the registration certificate and the little adhesive tab that you fix to the license plate never arrived here, and of course I forgot all about them.  Had no idea.   The upshot is that driving to the airport, I was stopped by a police guy who was lurking to pounce on such infractions and I was issued an expensive ticket.  Very annoying.  I'm generally a law-abiding citizen and I'm not used to being in trouble with the authorities.  

Not immediately able to figure out what went wrong, I hustled down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau out there on 33rd Street.  I took a number, sat down and rehearsed what I would say to the clerk on duty.  All I could think of was, "I need help."  

When my number was called, I walked up to the designated clerk, a woman of uncertain age.  The sign on her desk said, in rather large letters, "Rhonda."  And so I did it.  I couldn't help myself.  I said, "Help, help me Rhonda."  And then, of course, I was immediately chagrined. I'm sure you hear that all the time," I apologized, admitting to my appalling banality.  "Not all the time," she said, "but often enough."  

It could have been even worse.  I could have declaimed the entire poetic chorus to the Beach Boys' 1965 hit:

Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda, yeah.

ADH2*2 in My Life

I can't drink wine, beer, or spirits.  Alcohol of any kind makes me ill.  In this respect, I'm similar to my father and to one of my sons.  It's logical that the condition that people who don't know me very well take for  unsociability or asceticism is simply an hereditary trait.  

Now at long last the culprit gene has been fingered.  It's ADH2*2, "a rare variation of ADH2, which produces a more active form of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in alcohol metabolism."

Would you like to know more about alcohol dehydrogenase?  First of all, it's a plural:  "alcohol dehydrogenases are a group of seven dehydrogenase enzymes that facilitate the interconversion between alcohols and aldehydes or ketones with the reduction of NAD+ to NADH...." More succinctly, "they break down alcohols."  I don't know whether ADH2*2 digests alcohol too fast, or too slow, or just idiosyncratically, but the effect on me is stomach-ache, headache, and general queasiness,  Wine, "the merry cheerer of the heart," turns me sour. 

The eccentric allele occurs in 20 to 30 percent of Jewish populations, "suggesting that ADH2*2 is one of the factors explaining the low rates of alcoholism in this group."  Recent investigations have demonstrated "significant relationships between ADH2*2 and alcohol use ... in all Jewish groups studied."  "Those with the variant gene have been seen to drink less frequently, consume less alcohol overall or have more unpleasant reactions to alcohol." This analysis makes perfect sense to me, but Science is apparently unsatisfied: "the exact reason why ADH2*2 tends to discourage heavier drinking isn't known."  Well, Science, let me see if I lend a hand here. If you get sick rather than high from a few sips, you stop drinking, unless you're a Complete and Total Schmuck.  

Perhaps because I'm a teetotaler (though a reluctant one), I have little tolerance for drunken excess.  I'm not amused by loss of inhibition, by sloppy speech, or by too-loud staggering enthusiasm.  I've honored my father's proverb -- "never get into an argument with a drunk" to the letter.  In actual fact, I try very hard not to engage the alcoholically-addled  in any discussion, whether serious or flippant. 

I regret that I can't participate in wine-tastings -- the stuff and looks smells so good.  But even there, I'm skeptical of the poetic language that oenophiles employ -- hints of rubber and raspberries and old leather and that sort of hyperbole.  I tend to sniff deeply, and then proclaim "tumescent but not rigid."

It's not hard to be witty when you're sober and your Falernian audience has been quaffing the pinot grigio.

My First Racist

There was this kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the 'Flatbush '50s.  I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can know him by his smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class.  For convenience, I'll call this guy K.   K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down in the nebbish area.  But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative.  He was not afraid to offend.  He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported.  I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security.  It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor."  This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a fact of life, a revolutionary improvement in quality of life.  Besides, wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month -- not enough to live on, but a great help, enough to pay her rent?  To argue against social security -- where in the world could K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus K was a Yankees fan --an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long.  He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe, and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most appalling racist remarks, one of which is engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you."  Whoa, daddy.  First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes."  And second -- "uppity?"  I had never heard the term before and was shocked beyond measure.  "Get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  Beyond my conception, beyond anyone's conception in our part of the universe.  Remember, dear reader, that the only person more sacred to the schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson.

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after that conversation.  Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classroom and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

I looked up K on the internet.  He's a retired professor of economics and is now a fellow at a right-wing  think tank.  He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills.  That dogged dullness has produced a number of books.  I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once greasy and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism.  The link is narcissism.  "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves."  For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism.  But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

Zucchini News

In our part of Vermont, the common wisdom is, "never keep your car unlocked in August, because someone will open your door and throw in a couple of zucchinis." Like most local gardeners, I'm drowning  in the  squash.  We can't eat our zucchinis fast enough.  And no matter how vigilant I am in picking them, I wake up in the morning to lift one of those huge hairy leaves and there it is --- another baseball-bat long, sumptuously fat zucchini, staring its one-eyed stare at me.  To make matters worse, this year I'm growing two kinds of zucchinis -- the standard green supermarket variety and a fancy striped "Romanesco."  Also another exotic squash, a buttery globe called "Ronde de Nice," most plentifully produced.  

Last week I was weeding in the garden when I had an unexpected visitor -- unusual for our dirt-road, off the beaten track neighborhood.  I can't remember having to deal with a solicitor since two barely fledged Mormons popped by, fruitlessly, in 1978.  This young man, who arrived noiselessly on bicycle was from VPIRG, and he came to tell me about the hazards of the Vermont Yankee atomic power station.  I told him right up front that I wasn't going to donate any money and I told him why --it all went to Obama.  But he was cordial nevertheless, and we chatted.  He's a Latin major, just graduated from UVM, off in the fall to join Americacorps.  Nice kid, I thought, but an easy mark.  After twenty minutes, he rode off with no donation but with  two substantial zucchinis and a Ronde de Nice in his backpack.  Also a large head of broccoli and a handful of beets.  . 

This Old House

We've left the old place for a slick new condo.

It was a good ol' house.  A 1912 arts and crafts bungalow, probably built right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog.  When we arrived, in 1973, she had been much abused:  some of her fir woodwork painted, some removed; the stained-glass window and the original prairie-style chandeliers long gone;  the handsome five-paneled living room window (prominent in the old photographs) replaced with an Eisenhower-era "picture window," the original fireplace mantle superseded by a monstrosity in native stone;  the brass registers covered with layers upon layer of paint, all those beautiful, then-fashionable pre-World War I built-in cabinets carted to a dump; the classic oak floors covered with wall-to-wall carpets.  Over the years, little by little, we did what we could for the old lady: insulated her walls and ceilings, replaced the primitive electrical wiring, stripped and refinished the woodwork and the registers, fabricated a "new old" mantle and "new old" bookshelves and cabinets, modernized the heating system, removed the asbestos, and (Boulder is hotter than it was a hundred years) retrofitted it with air-conditioning.  We updated the kitchen -- brought the kitchen into the modern world.  

We left the old dear in far better condition than we found her. Trust me on this. 

And let's not forget the backyard garden.  Where there was once an incoherent jumble of thorny plants, there are now peonies both herbaceous and tree (Including my favorite, the ever-larger Joseph Rocks), irises bearded and Siberian, a variety of multiplying day lilies, climbing roses, a thriving weigela, a Rose of Sharon, an abundance of clematis, and fences draped with thick healthy ivy. I'm sorry to report that I never did get around to replacing the sticky, aggressive bear-berries.

Are we sad to leave?  A little, but only a little.  We did well by the old house, and the house did well by us.  We leave with a good conscience.  But the time has come to move along.  It's only an object, after all;  a machine for living. 

So here we are now, in this bright shiny new apartment.  Floor-to-celing windows.  Fancy new appliances.   A "great room," a "master bedroom."  An elevator.  It took almost a full month to move, but in that month we progressed from the turn of one century to the turn of the next.

And it feels right. It's OK.    

The Big Seven-Oh

In the course of the Great Downsizing, a long-buried letter emerged from the "archives."  It's from my long-gone father, and was written in December of 1974 on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.  A most fortuitous discovery -- inasmuch as I am now exactly the age that Pop was on the day that he wrote to me.  In his letter, Pop reports that he is taken aback by the person whom he has become.  Who is this guy with the gray hair and the "little paunch" who "takes a day or two to recover from any physical activity" and who "finds events repeating themselves." 

"In my mind," he says, "there is another me, a real me," who looks upon this present self as a "stranger and an interloper."

It appears as though my father's self-image was lagging behind the reality of things

I hadn't remembered reading the letter -- it sat in a box for thirty-five years -- but I'm not surprised by its content.  My father was a strong, athletic, handsome man who didn't easily accept the inevitable changes that come with septuagenarianism.  I vividly remembering him saying, at eighty, "I hate my body." 

I'm with him, but only a part of the way.  Of course I'm dismayed by the decline.  The gray hair, the thickened figure, yes.  The deterioration of memory, certainly.  But I don't share Pop's sense that my real or better self is somewhere in the past. True that I can't jump as high -- yet, paradoxically, I feel more like myself, more comfortable being me now than ever before.  (I'm also more cheerful, on the whole -- although not at nighttime, when i sleep just as badly as ever my father did).  When I look in the mirror, I don't see a face ravaged by age -- I see a face that now looks like it was always destined to look and finally got there.  I have become more like myself, so to speak, every year.  But how long until the me-ness starts to plummet?  It must happen eventually. Time will tell.

My father used to say, "You're entitled to your biblical three score and ten.  But after seventy, you're in extra innings."  To which I would respond, "In some sports, extra innings is known as sudden death." 

But hey, let's not forget that the extra innings are frequently the most exciting part of the game.   

Worst Nightmare Yet

I was a night game, and I was playing left field,  The batter hit a long fly my way.  I saw it clearly as it came off the bat, studied the trajectory, and knew that it was nothing more than a loud foul  --  only to hear the ball plop down not more than ten feet behind me.  The huge crowd of spectators broke into wild laughter.  Runners were circling the base paths.  I turned to run after the ball, but my feet were lead weights, perhaps because I was wearing hiking boots instead of spikes.  Eventually, I retrieved the ball and tried to hit the  cut-off man, but the ball skittered out of my hand and carried only a few feet.  The crowd laughed again, uproariously.

It was horrible. I woke up with a nosebleed.

Nightmare Made Worse by Critique

Last night -- another horrible dream.  I was riding in the passenger car of a old-fashioned train and there was this big puffy guy, a smaller version of Oliver Hardy, who was brandishing a pistol.  He was about to take hostages and shoot us folks.  I grabbed his gun arm and wrestled him to the floor, but he was mighty strong.  I called out to the other passengers, "Help me!"  Eventually, a couple of people came to my aid and started to twist his arm. Then I yelled out, "Hit him!" and a couple of people started to bang his head with books.  Heavy books.  Then I shouted "Kick him!" and a crowd gathered and started in with their feet.  After a while, I realized that the gangster/terrorist/kidnapper was dead, but I continued to punch to and kick him. I woke up with my heart beating 180 or so.

It took a while to regain my equanimity, but it wasn't long before I returned to sleep,  I dreamed that I was reporting the dream to my daughter and son-in-law and that they were totally uninterested and bored by my story.  Which I took to be a critique of my ability with narrative.

So if I tell any more dreams, I'll abbreviate (as I did above, where I left out all sorts of interesting details) for fear of losing my audience.

Descendants and Ancestors

While I was cooking up some breakfast for him, the seven-year-old grandson, Mr. O, asked me if I wanted to hear a funny story.  "Sure,' I said.  "I'm game."  Here's his story, just as it came from his mouth. "I was playing Penguins and I clicked on Tour Guide and suddenly my penguin went from being forty-five years old to zero years old." A truly astonishing occurrence, we agreed. Then he added, "Did you ever play Penguins when you were a  boy?" I allowed as to how I hadn't, on the grounds that there weren't any computers back then.  "Oh yeah," said the boy. He'd heard.

There have been all sorts of changes since I was Mr. O's age, and the advent of computers is certainly one of the most revolutionary.  But despite the tv and the dvd and the MRI and the GPS and the frequent flying, young Mr. O. and I grew up in recognizably the same universe.  We both come from stable middle-class households and we've always had enough to eat. We're both speakers of English and attended, or attend, secular public schools. Both he and I were pointed toward a college education right from the start.  The overarching pattern is similar, even though the details differ.  It seems like a long way from the straight pen to the word processor, but it's not, taking into consideration the larger context.

This last week, while marveling at the grandchildren, I've also been reminiscing about my own grandparents and about some of my "elderly" (that is to say, people the age I am now) relatives.  There was, back then, let me tell you, a social and psychological gap between grandparent and grandchild that was neither trivial or circumstantial.  They, the grandparental generation, had begun life in the Ukraine or in White Russia, not knowing from day to day whether there would be an adequate supply of turnips or radishes to keep them going. They had had to contend with the Easter pogroms and dodge the Cossacks, the draft and, to hear them tell it, the reactionary rabbis.

When I was Mr. O's age, the innumerable members of the E and L Chafetz family circle gathered once or twice a year in someone's crowded apartment over the store.  To this destination, scrubbed and polished, I was semi-annually dragooned and put on display.  Who was this band of strange people? They were all homely (or at least appeared so to my juvenile eyes), they were no larger than seventh-graders, and they were almost uniformly childless; they smelled of overcooked chicken and mothballs, and they spoke a language or languages that I couldn't understand.  Uncle Joe and Uncle Nahum and Uncle Usha and Aunt Becky and Aunt Lifscha.  All of them had come to America, one after another, in the first years of the last century. I, of course, was indifferent and impatient. I had no interest in them nor could I understand their interest in me.  And they were intrusively curious.  They wanted to know everything -- school, play, friends, interests, hobbies, sports, lessons.  Conversations were stilted and halting and I fled from them as quickly as I could.  It was uncomfortable, inexplicable, and boring.

It took years before I came to understand why they inspected and prodded me so.  It was for me that they had left the Pale of Settlement and the Czar, left behind their farms and land (though technically they were not allowed to own any land), left behind their businesses and their families, travelled twenty to a room in steerage so that I, the scrawny kid with the outsized ears, could go to public school, find a mate, raise a family, eat three square meals a day, and live a fuller life than any of them had had an opportunity to do.  I was their emissary to the future.  What they wanted, more than anything, is that some day, I would be in a position to joyfully rustle up some pancakes for young Mr. O, the cheerful, promising child who is their great-great-grandson and heir,