Saturday, March 8, 2014
Remember, in the winter
far beneath the bitter snows . . .
h/t to Ol'Buzzard for reminding me of this song.
Friday, March 7, 2014
Anyone know any corrupt election board officials?
First, though, I need to clean off a remarkably thick layer of diesel oil smut. The machine was donated to the museum yesterday. It came, if I've got the provenance straight, from L'Anse Township, although I could be wrong. It could also have been the Village. I need to do a little more research before formally accessioning it.
In any case, it's been stored for quite a few years in the same building the local tourist and recreation association uses for housing the snowmobile trail groomer. It's been exposed to a lot of diesel fumes. When the guys first wheeled it in yesterday, I thought it was black. After I started cleaning the device I discovered it's actually a pale gray color on the top part and a darker color on the bottom. The black was just built-up diesel smoke. I stopped cleaning after going through half a roll of paper towels -- I'll bring in a bag of rags from home to finish it rather than burn through our paper towel allotment for the year. As far as I can tell, the machine has been closed up tight enough that there isn't too much dirt on the inside, but so far all I've been able to see is a compartment at the top in the back. That part doesn't lock; it flips open so you can get at the storage space for the crank that raises and lowers the machine.
I cranked it up to confirm that the main lock, the one on the front, was indeed locked. It was. So are the other locks. It's still got the seal on it from the last time it was used in an election, which is kind of neat. It's also kind of a nuisance. The key to the machine and the machine itself apparently parted company over a decade ago. I'm not sure when L'Anse Township switched to using optical scan machines, but I have a vague memory of using one in 2000. We either need to track down a locksmith (aka spend real money) or drill the locks out. I'd rather not destroy the locks if we can avoid it.
I did email the township clerk to ask if he had any keys kicking around the Township Hall that might fit the machine, but that's a really long shot. I'm willing to bet when I get a response email from him, the answer is going to be No.
Once the machine is clean and the snow is gone so we can actually get at our storage building, that's where the machine will go to gather dust for two years. When 2016 rolls around, though, it's going to be a star player in an exhibit on voting, voting rights, and politics. Maybe we'll even dress one our mannequins to match the picture shown above. For now, though, I just want to get it cleaned up, documented, and make sure the curtains don't need repairs.
This donation is, incidentally, one of the fun things about volunteering at a museum. You never know just what's going to come rolling through the front door.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
What if it was Texas?
Ukrainian internal politics are twisted, to say the least. Various politicians in the past have seemed quite willing to switch sides at the drop of a hryvnia, Ukraine itself has an ethnically mixed population, you can't always tell by the language spoken (i.e., Ukrainian vs. Russian) just who is who when it comes to loyalties, and the reason for the current unrest seems murky at best. There's a lot of talk in the media about "freedom" and cleaning up corruption, but it actually seems a lot more like one group of special interests was lusting after the opportunity to make money by aligning with the European Union while the other group was lusting after the opportunity to make money by sticking with Russia. In other words, one group of wannabe corrupt politicians decided to boot the already corrupt politicians out. No matter who gains control in the end, the average Ukrainian's everyday life is unlikely to improve much, at least not in the short term.
As for the billion dollars in aid that John Kerry just promised the Ukrainians, why does the above image immediately come to mind?
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
I'm not sure just what motivated Jennifer Fleischner to write Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, but, wow, Fleischner definitely despised Mary Todd Lincoln. She basically concludes that Mary was a totally self-centered harridan who made Lincoln's life hell and deserved to die crazy and alone. On the other hand, Elizabeth ("Lizzy") Keckly, the former slave and dressmaker who wrote a tell-all about her association with the Lincolns, was one step away from sainthood because of her pluck and business skills. Doesn't matter what Mary does, Fleischner figures out a way to put a negative spin on it. Doesn't matter what Lizzy does, Fleischner turns it into a positive. I don't think I've ever seen a biographer before who even seemed to begrudge the fact her subject managed to have a decent burial. Fleischner manages that neat trick by contrasting Mary Lincoln's current resting place (next to her husband in an elaborate tomb in Springfield, Illinois) with Elizabeth Keckly's (unknown) in a way that makes it seem like it's Mary's fault Elizabeth didn't end up in a high dollar mausoleum, too.
I read a couple reviews of this book in which the reviewers seemed to think Fleischner painted Mary Lincoln in a sympathetic light. Well, maybe it's just me, but I don't see where calling Mary Lincoln self-centered or a narcissist when she breaks down with grief over the death of a child is a particularly sympathetic move on the part of a biographer. Her suggesting over and over that Abraham Lincoln never really loved his wife, that he was pressured into marrying her because he'd started courting her and couldn't figure out a way to extricate himself, also struck me as bizarre. It is true that Lincoln loved another woman before he met Mary. All his biographers agree he truly loved Ann Rutledge and was devastated when she died. That doesn't mean he was incapable of ever loving anyone else. I couldn't figure out just why Fleischner was so insistent on portraying the Lincolns as being trapped in a loveless marriage, especially when there's a fair amount of documentation showing that wasn't true. Not many letters between the couple survive (their son Robert burnt most of them in the 1890s), but the ones that do have been described by other historians and biographers as affectionate.
It is true Mary had a volatile personality. It is possible, if one wanted to indulge in retroactive psychoanalysis, that she suffered from bipolar disorder. She did seem to go through manic periods. Another possibility Fleischner suggests is that Mary had untreated diabetes. Both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia can affect a person's behavior. On the other hand, in Team of Rivals Doris Kearns Goodwin described many of the same situations Fleischner does and put an entirely different spin on them. According to Kearns Goodwin, Mary's spending spree on furnishings for the White House wasn't a mindless spending spree to feed her own ego but an attempt to refurbish the President's residence after several decades of neglect. She wasn't indulging in shopping for her own gratification but in attempt to make the White House worthy of its public role. Unfortunately, she was unbelievably bad with money. She never met a budget she couldn't destroy. She'd grown up in a household where money was never an issue, and, once Abraham Lincoln became a successful lawyer, hadn't had to worry about a budget before getting to the White House.
For that matter, Kearns Goodwin describes a number of incidents that Fleischner glosses over. Fleischer describes Mary as visiting wounded soldiers once; Kearns Goodwin notes that Mary volunteered at the hospitals many times and would spend hours talking with and comforting the soldiers. She wrote letters for them, read to them, put in long hours, and avoided having her visits publicized, which is hardly the behavior of a self-centered harridan.
The parts of the book that focused on Elizabeth Keckly tended to tilt the other way. Elizabeth is the plucky heroine coping with adversity, she endures the hardships of slavery as well as the indignity of being owned by people who are just unbelievably bad with money -- Virginia planters who by birth are the closest thing this country would have to an aristocracy but through incompetence and over-breeding (when you have a zillion children, a family fortune can disappear pretty fast) are the equivalent of the impoverished vicars and down-at-the-heel landed gentry in 19th century English novels. In a Bronte novel, the daughters would all end up as governesses. In the real world of antebellum Virginia, the women struggled as poorly paid schoolteachers trying to operate private academies out of their own homes and the men became lawyers with not enough clients to prevent them from continually falling into debt. One of the ongoing features of Elizabeth Keckly's early life is that her owners, the Burwells, seem to be perpetually dodging bill collectors or bankruptcy.
The fact that Elizabeth manages to avoid being sold down the river is fairly notable in itself, slaves being one of the easily liquidated assets impoverished Virginia planters had, but she does. The Burwells take great pride in not ever selling any of "their people." Of course, how much of that determination not to sell was moral fortitude and how much was reluctance to try untangling a legal entailment to the Burwell estate that prevented selling slaves easily is debatable. They may have just been reluctant to spend money on attorney fees if challenged by another family member. In any case, instead of being sold, slaves were lent or bequeathed to family members. Elizabeth goes from one member of the Burwell family to another; eventually she ends up in St. Louis, Missouri. The city has a sizable number of slaves who are rented out by their owners; Elizabeth persuades her master to do the same: let her work for wages in the city while returning a portion of those wages to him. She's a skilled seamstress; she quickly builds a reputation for being able to do the difficult fittings the fashions of the time dictated. Her clientele grows and eventually help her buy the freedom of herself and her teenage son. For reasons that were unclear in the book, she decides to leave St. Louis and moves to Washington, D.C. It is in Washington that her path crosses that of Mary Lincoln.
Once Elizabeth Keckly becomes Mary Lincoln's dressmaker, they see a lot of each other. Elizabeth becomes Mary's confidante; she's in the house with the family when Willie Lincoln dies from typhoid, and she's there almost continuously comforting Mary when President Lincoln is shot. She even accompanies Mary back to Illinois to help her get settled there. She had a thriving dressmaking business in Washington, which she neglects in order to help Mary Lincoln. She behaves, in short, more like a close friend or a family member than as a paid employee. She continues to be close to Mary until she makes a fatal mistake: in 1867 she publishes a memoir.
According to Elizabeth, her book was intended to counter all the harsh things being said about Mary in the press. She wanted to show Mary in a good light. Mary doesn't see it that way; the two women never speak to each other again.
This was an interesting book, especially with Team of Rivals still fresh in my mind. There was a strong contrast between Goodwin's nterpretation of events and Fleischner's. One thing that struck me as odd was that some of the social events that one would think would be particularly interesting to describe in talking about Mary Lincoln were barely mentioned in Fleischner's book but were detailed in Goodwin's, which was ostensibly a book about Abraham Lincoln, his Cabinet members, and other men in politics. It truly felt as though Fleischner deliberately omitted anything that would make Mary look good.
The details about Elizabeth Keckly's early life and her relationship with the Burwell family were intriguing, too. She was a slave, but was allowed to learn to read and write. As a young woman, she was sent to North Carolina with one of the Burwelldaughters after that daughter married sons and his new wife. While living there, she wrote letters back to Virginia to one of the daughters still living at home. The behavior was more like that of a sister (which she in fact was; she shared a father with the Burwell girls) than that of a slave and a household servant. After the Civil War, Elizabeth returned to Virginia to visit the Burwells several times and was a guest in their home; when one of the Burwell daughters visited Washington, D.C., she stayed with Elizabeth. It was apparently fairly common after the war for former slaves to visit their old masters, but usually it was a one shot deal. It didn't turn into a continuing relationship complete with friendly letters back and forth. It does highlight that the personal dynamics in any Southern household were a lot more complex than we can imagine today.
As for the usual question, would I recommend this book? Yes, with the caveat that a reader not take Fleischner's simplistic portrait of Mary Lincoln as the last word on the subject. I don't think either of the subjects of this particular book led lives that were quite as neatly defined as the author would have us believe.
Update: Corrected to reflect the fact I made a mistake. The first time Elizabeth Keckly leaves Virginia it's with one of the Burwell sons and his wife, not with one of the daughters.
I read a couple reviews of this book in which the reviewers seemed to think Fleischner painted Mary Lincoln in a sympathetic light. Well, maybe it's just me, but I don't see where calling Mary Lincoln self-centered or a narcissist when she breaks down with grief over the death of a child is a particularly sympathetic move on the part of a biographer. Her suggesting over and over that Abraham Lincoln never really loved his wife, that he was pressured into marrying her because he'd started courting her and couldn't figure out a way to extricate himself, also struck me as bizarre. It is true that Lincoln loved another woman before he met Mary. All his biographers agree he truly loved Ann Rutledge and was devastated when she died. That doesn't mean he was incapable of ever loving anyone else. I couldn't figure out just why Fleischner was so insistent on portraying the Lincolns as being trapped in a loveless marriage, especially when there's a fair amount of documentation showing that wasn't true. Not many letters between the couple survive (their son Robert burnt most of them in the 1890s), but the ones that do have been described by other historians and biographers as affectionate.
It is true Mary had a volatile personality. It is possible, if one wanted to indulge in retroactive psychoanalysis, that she suffered from bipolar disorder. She did seem to go through manic periods. Another possibility Fleischner suggests is that Mary had untreated diabetes. Both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia can affect a person's behavior. On the other hand, in Team of Rivals Doris Kearns Goodwin described many of the same situations Fleischner does and put an entirely different spin on them. According to Kearns Goodwin, Mary's spending spree on furnishings for the White House wasn't a mindless spending spree to feed her own ego but an attempt to refurbish the President's residence after several decades of neglect. She wasn't indulging in shopping for her own gratification but in attempt to make the White House worthy of its public role. Unfortunately, she was unbelievably bad with money. She never met a budget she couldn't destroy. She'd grown up in a household where money was never an issue, and, once Abraham Lincoln became a successful lawyer, hadn't had to worry about a budget before getting to the White House.
For that matter, Kearns Goodwin describes a number of incidents that Fleischner glosses over. Fleischer describes Mary as visiting wounded soldiers once; Kearns Goodwin notes that Mary volunteered at the hospitals many times and would spend hours talking with and comforting the soldiers. She wrote letters for them, read to them, put in long hours, and avoided having her visits publicized, which is hardly the behavior of a self-centered harridan.
The parts of the book that focused on Elizabeth Keckly tended to tilt the other way. Elizabeth is the plucky heroine coping with adversity, she endures the hardships of slavery as well as the indignity of being owned by people who are just unbelievably bad with money -- Virginia planters who by birth are the closest thing this country would have to an aristocracy but through incompetence and over-breeding (when you have a zillion children, a family fortune can disappear pretty fast) are the equivalent of the impoverished vicars and down-at-the-heel landed gentry in 19th century English novels. In a Bronte novel, the daughters would all end up as governesses. In the real world of antebellum Virginia, the women struggled as poorly paid schoolteachers trying to operate private academies out of their own homes and the men became lawyers with not enough clients to prevent them from continually falling into debt. One of the ongoing features of Elizabeth Keckly's early life is that her owners, the Burwells, seem to be perpetually dodging bill collectors or bankruptcy.
The fact that Elizabeth manages to avoid being sold down the river is fairly notable in itself, slaves being one of the easily liquidated assets impoverished Virginia planters had, but she does. The Burwells take great pride in not ever selling any of "their people." Of course, how much of that determination not to sell was moral fortitude and how much was reluctance to try untangling a legal entailment to the Burwell estate that prevented selling slaves easily is debatable. They may have just been reluctant to spend money on attorney fees if challenged by another family member. In any case, instead of being sold, slaves were lent or bequeathed to family members. Elizabeth goes from one member of the Burwell family to another; eventually she ends up in St. Louis, Missouri. The city has a sizable number of slaves who are rented out by their owners; Elizabeth persuades her master to do the same: let her work for wages in the city while returning a portion of those wages to him. She's a skilled seamstress; she quickly builds a reputation for being able to do the difficult fittings the fashions of the time dictated. Her clientele grows and eventually help her buy the freedom of herself and her teenage son. For reasons that were unclear in the book, she decides to leave St. Louis and moves to Washington, D.C. It is in Washington that her path crosses that of Mary Lincoln.
Once Elizabeth Keckly becomes Mary Lincoln's dressmaker, they see a lot of each other. Elizabeth becomes Mary's confidante; she's in the house with the family when Willie Lincoln dies from typhoid, and she's there almost continuously comforting Mary when President Lincoln is shot. She even accompanies Mary back to Illinois to help her get settled there. She had a thriving dressmaking business in Washington, which she neglects in order to help Mary Lincoln. She behaves, in short, more like a close friend or a family member than as a paid employee. She continues to be close to Mary until she makes a fatal mistake: in 1867 she publishes a memoir.
According to Elizabeth, her book was intended to counter all the harsh things being said about Mary in the press. She wanted to show Mary in a good light. Mary doesn't see it that way; the two women never speak to each other again.
This was an interesting book, especially with Team of Rivals still fresh in my mind. There was a strong contrast between Goodwin's nterpretation of events and Fleischner's. One thing that struck me as odd was that some of the social events that one would think would be particularly interesting to describe in talking about Mary Lincoln were barely mentioned in Fleischner's book but were detailed in Goodwin's, which was ostensibly a book about Abraham Lincoln, his Cabinet members, and other men in politics. It truly felt as though Fleischner deliberately omitted anything that would make Mary look good.
The details about Elizabeth Keckly's early life and her relationship with the Burwell family were intriguing, too. She was a slave, but was allowed to learn to read and write. As a young woman, she was sent to North Carolina with one of the Burwell
As for the usual question, would I recommend this book? Yes, with the caveat that a reader not take Fleischner's simplistic portrait of Mary Lincoln as the last word on the subject. I don't think either of the subjects of this particular book led lives that were quite as neatly defined as the author would have us believe.
Update: Corrected to reflect the fact I made a mistake. The first time Elizabeth Keckly leaves Virginia it's with one of the Burwell sons and his wife, not with one of the daughters.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Another author I cannot read
Joyce Carol Oates. The woman is one of the most prolific American authors around. She's published a gazillion short stories, been featured on Oprah's Book Club, and received multiple awards. I'm not sure how I had managed to avoid knowingly reading anything by her until this week, but I had. So the last time I was at the library I decided it was time to remedy that deficiency. I checked out a recent collection of her short stories, Dear Husband.
Okay. She can write. She is really good with a pen, a master wordsmith. But depressing? Words fail me. I don't expect every book I read to be super upbeat or have a formulaic happy ending. After all, I like Russian novels. I read the short stories in The New Yorker. I even have a subscription to The Sun. But there are limits. The characters in the stories in Dear Husband don't lead lives of quiet desperation. They lead lives of such total despair that the reader finds herself wanting to join them in a warm bath while chugging a whole lot of Xanax and Jack Daniels with a nice old-fashioned cut-throat razor on the side.
You know, this baffles me. "This" being the gazillion publications. If Dear Husband is typical Joyce Carol Oates, why on earth would any reader ever buy more than one of her books? Do people think that if a book makes them feel horrible it is somehow great literature? Do they view reading as punishment, some sort of penance they endure to prove to themselves they're smart? Are they trying to impress the librarian or the Barnes and Noble cashiers when they pick up something by Joyce Carol Oates instead of Janet Evanovich? It's a mystery.
Okay. It's time to go read something light and escapist to purge the memory the Oates book. Maybe I'll re-read Crime and Punishment. After reading Oates, Dostoevsky will seem like P. G. Wodehouse in comparison.
You know, this baffles me. "This" being the gazillion publications. If Dear Husband is typical Joyce Carol Oates, why on earth would any reader ever buy more than one of her books? Do people think that if a book makes them feel horrible it is somehow great literature? Do they view reading as punishment, some sort of penance they endure to prove to themselves they're smart? Are they trying to impress the librarian or the Barnes and Noble cashiers when they pick up something by Joyce Carol Oates instead of Janet Evanovich? It's a mystery.
Okay. It's time to go read something light and escapist to purge the memory the Oates book. Maybe I'll re-read Crime and Punishment. After reading Oates, Dostoevsky will seem like P. G. Wodehouse in comparison.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Mortality
“Getting older isn’t easy for a lot of us. Neither is living; neither is dying. We struggle against the inevitable, and we all suffer because of it. We have to find another way to look at the whole process of being born, growing old, changing, and dying, some kind of perspective that might allow us to deal with what we perceive as big obstacles without having to be dragged through the drama.” – Ram Dass, Still Here (©2000)
Back when I was younger, I used to laugh at my aunt Ingrid's reactions to the news that someone had died. If the decedent was older than her, she'd sound relieved. Yep, he's dead, but, heck he was two years, five years, ten years or more older so it was no surprise the old dude had bought the farm. Yeah, he's dead, but he was ancient; I've got lots of time left. On the other hand, if the dead person was younger there'd be a kind of surprised, almost fearful response: but she was so young! This is such a shock! Even if the age difference wasn't great, like if she was 70 at the time and the decedent was only 69, she'd start looking worried. Time was obviously running out.
Well, now I'm in my 60s reading obits and seeing life spans shorter than mine -- and I'm starting to have a similar reaction. Oh, shit. I'm not going to live forever after all. It's one thing to recognize that fact intellectually when you're in your 30s or 40s, but it feels a little different once you start wondering if you really should buy those green bananas. You start to hope you're one of the lucky bastards who drops dead unexpectedly and inspires bad jokes (hit the ball, drag Harry) and not one of the poor saps tethered to an oxygen bottle at the nursing home.
Most of the time I don't think about it much, but this was one of those months where I wound up having conversations with my primary care physician about glucose levels, cholesterol, weight, and all the other things health care providers love to fret about. My blood glucose was a number that is now considered too high: they moved the goal posts a few years ago, so what was perfectly okay a decade ago is now Ohmigod-you-need-to-take-metformin. Ditto the cholesterol. The numbers haven't changed in years, they always hover right around just over the line, but every time my PCP sees them it's ohmigod-you-need-to-take-Lipitor.
Why? Am I going to live longer? Well, no. Lots of studies have been done showing that if you're one of those just over the line people treating a condition that's borderline doesn't do a thing to increase your life span. Will it reduce risk of heart attacks or strokes? Ah. . . no. There isn't a statistically significant difference in outcomes for people whose cholesterol falls in that just over the line area. Well, what about quality of life? Are they going to make me more physically fit, help with aching joints, make it a little less scary scrambling up step ladders or easier to get up if for some reason I've decided to kneel on the floor? Nope, not at all. The only thing that helps with activities of daily life is exercise to retain mobility and flexibility.
In fact, there are no good answers that justify taking drugs for a borderline condition, at least not for me. You go from knowing your total cholesterol is just over 200 to knowing it's just under while at the same time enjoying all the fun side effects, like gas that practically makes you jet propelled, diarrhea that has you wishing you owned stock in Kimberly-Clark, and giving up foods you like because they can interact in a bad way with the drugs. You haven't actually gained any years; it's just going to feel a lot longer because you're miserable. The line between "you're okay" and OMG is a fairly arbitrary one; it had to drawn somewhere, but that area on either side of it is a fairly fuzzy one.
I can understand why physicians and other health care providers are reluctant to face the truth and admit that the stuff they're prescribing might not actually do much: they're dedicated to saving lives. It sucks that they can't offer their patients immortality (or even a comfortable old age). Handing a patient a prescription lets them feel like they've done something even if they really haven't. I don't know if I'll bother arguing with my PCP about this or not; I might just let her write the prescriptions and then not get them filled. She's talking about leaving L'Anse anyway (the winters are pushing her away). Odds are that a year from now I'll be dealing with someone new so the current PCP will never know how thoroughly I ignored her advice.
I figure that at my current age, if all goes well, I've got a 50% chance of making it to 86. If the odds are only 50/50, I think I'd prefer to spend that time enjoying a decent qualify of life instead of shuffling pill bottles and wondering if I should invest in some Butterfly Body Liners. After all, nobody lives forever.
Well, now I'm in my 60s reading obits and seeing life spans shorter than mine -- and I'm starting to have a similar reaction. Oh, shit. I'm not going to live forever after all. It's one thing to recognize that fact intellectually when you're in your 30s or 40s, but it feels a little different once you start wondering if you really should buy those green bananas. You start to hope you're one of the lucky bastards who drops dead unexpectedly and inspires bad jokes (hit the ball, drag Harry) and not one of the poor saps tethered to an oxygen bottle at the nursing home.
Most of the time I don't think about it much, but this was one of those months where I wound up having conversations with my primary care physician about glucose levels, cholesterol, weight, and all the other things health care providers love to fret about. My blood glucose was a number that is now considered too high: they moved the goal posts a few years ago, so what was perfectly okay a decade ago is now Ohmigod-you-need-to-take-metformin. Ditto the cholesterol. The numbers haven't changed in years, they always hover right around just over the line, but every time my PCP sees them it's ohmigod-you-need-to-take-Lipitor.
Why? Am I going to live longer? Well, no. Lots of studies have been done showing that if you're one of those just over the line people treating a condition that's borderline doesn't do a thing to increase your life span. Will it reduce risk of heart attacks or strokes? Ah. . . no. There isn't a statistically significant difference in outcomes for people whose cholesterol falls in that just over the line area. Well, what about quality of life? Are they going to make me more physically fit, help with aching joints, make it a little less scary scrambling up step ladders or easier to get up if for some reason I've decided to kneel on the floor? Nope, not at all. The only thing that helps with activities of daily life is exercise to retain mobility and flexibility.
In fact, there are no good answers that justify taking drugs for a borderline condition, at least not for me. You go from knowing your total cholesterol is just over 200 to knowing it's just under while at the same time enjoying all the fun side effects, like gas that practically makes you jet propelled, diarrhea that has you wishing you owned stock in Kimberly-Clark, and giving up foods you like because they can interact in a bad way with the drugs. You haven't actually gained any years; it's just going to feel a lot longer because you're miserable. The line between "you're okay" and OMG is a fairly arbitrary one; it had to drawn somewhere, but that area on either side of it is a fairly fuzzy one.
I can understand why physicians and other health care providers are reluctant to face the truth and admit that the stuff they're prescribing might not actually do much: they're dedicated to saving lives. It sucks that they can't offer their patients immortality (or even a comfortable old age). Handing a patient a prescription lets them feel like they've done something even if they really haven't. I don't know if I'll bother arguing with my PCP about this or not; I might just let her write the prescriptions and then not get them filled. She's talking about leaving L'Anse anyway (the winters are pushing her away). Odds are that a year from now I'll be dealing with someone new so the current PCP will never know how thoroughly I ignored her advice.
I figure that at my current age, if all goes well, I've got a 50% chance of making it to 86. If the odds are only 50/50, I think I'd prefer to spend that time enjoying a decent qualify of life instead of shuffling pill bottles and wondering if I should invest in some Butterfly Body Liners. After all, nobody lives forever.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
This does not surprise me
Back when the Younger Daughter was still living in Texas, on one of our last visits, we noticed the Many, Louisiana, Walmart had moved. At the time, she worked in Hemphill so would run over to Louisiana to shop occasionally. We'd been to Many before when we'd visited. Anyway, the Many Walmart used to be fairly close to downtown (such as it is; Many's not a real huge town); the last time we were there we discovered the Evil Empire had moved itself up the highway far enough that you pass a fair amount of farm fields and not much of anything else before you get there. This move was no doubt right over a legal boundary of some sort, like the city limits, so they could talk the parish into giving them tax breaks because the deal they'd cut with the town had run out.
It struck me then that it I lived right in Many, I'd be shopping at Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Brookshire Brothers more often rather than hop in the car to run several miles out to Walmart for cheap toilet paper. I'm not kidding -- when we headed north on US-171 out of Many, it was starting to feel like we'd hit Shreveport before we found the Walmart.* Once you make the drive long enough, the prices at the end had better be pretty damn low to justify burning the gas. According to the report, more and more people are concluding that they're not.
This is just common sense on the part of consumers, although sometimes it takes awhile to sink in. When the Houghton Walmart first opened, we did shop there a lot. Gas was a lot cheaper, there was a novelty effect, and it was back when Sam Walton was still alive and the company hadn't turned into the Evil Empire it is today. But you know, I don't think we'd shop there today even if it wasn't the Evil Empire unless we happened to be in Houghton for other reasons. It feels too far now to make it worth the trip on its own.
I do know a few people who will drive from L'Anse up to Houghton to shop at Walmart, but I really wonder why. It's got to be at least a 30 mile drive, maybe more like 40 or even 50 (it's about 45 for us, but we live about 10 miles east of L'Anse). Even with my fuel-efficient Focus, I'd be burning 3 to 4 gallons of gas every time I drove up there and back. That's (at current local gas prices) anywhere from $10 to $15 gone and for what? The opportunity to save a few cents on a package of toilet paper? What's the point? It's fairly simple math. Maybe my groceries are going to cost me a couple dollars more when I shop in L'Anse and Baraga, but I'm burning less gas. In the end I've saved more by shopping locally than if I gone up the highway pursuing bargains. Now multiply us by a whole lot of other [former] Walmart customers, add in the drop in revenue when Food Stamp benefits got cut (not surprisingly, quite a few Walmart customers rely on SNAP), and it starts becoming obvious why Walmart's got problems that go way beyond its public relations headaches over the company's personnel policies and reliance on third world sweatshops for its products.
*Walmart was the Younger Daughter's preferred source for dog chow. At the time, she thought The House of Satan had the best price on 50-lb bags (which is now a 42.5 lb. bag as pet food suppliers shrink the size of the packages to avoid raising.prices in a more obvious fashion, but that's a subject for a different post).
Friday, February 21, 2014
Where have all the Girl Scouts gone?
Odd thoughts in the middle of the night
Sometimes I wake up thinking about the most inconsequential things. Why? With everything that's going on in the world, why on earth would I wake up wondering how the parents in large families manage to come up with names for their children?
One of the things I do as part of volunteering with the local historical society is dabble a bit in genealogical research. People contact the museum asking for our help in tracking down death certificates, marriage licenses, and other records. Sometimes I'm able to find what they need; sometimes there's nothing. But in any case I have been noticing just how large some of the families were. We've had a couple requests come in for information on one of the local well-known pioneer families, a family that stands out for multiple reasons, but that I find particularly notable for the remarkably good health of the matriarch of the clan. The woman had at least seventeen children who survived into adulthood, or close to it. The matriarch herself was probably in her nineties when she died.
So do I wonder about how she managed that? Good genes, clean living, sheer dumb luck? Do I think about the changes she witnessed over her lifetime, which spanned approximately 1820 to 1910? No. I wake up wondering just how the heck she and her husband came up with names for the kids. The first couple of little barracudas would be easy. As good Catholics, they'd just do the usual Apostles and a Mary or two. But once they hit the 10th or 12th they'd be starting to run out of the better known saints. And by the 17th? I can't see a priest being willing to baptize "Jesus Christ Not Again."
Then again, by the time they hit the 17th, the older kids would be leaving home, so maybe they just started over from the top of the list.
This particular family was so large that the descendants who are several generations away from the original pioneer couple do not realize that their great-great-grandparent was one of 17 siblings. I don't know why that surprises me -- with one exception, I have no idea how many siblings three of my grandparents had, and I actually knew one grandmother -- but it always does. Maybe it's because the family is so well known in local history that it always seems odd that more information didn't get passed down in family folklore after the descendants moved away.
I've always kind of wondered about naming traditions in general. I've known people who were determined that each child have the same first initial, there are others where one particular name seems to get repeated over and over, and of course we've all seen the sorry influence of soap operas, movies, pop stars, and cultural icons. One of my friends was named Mercedes, and, yes, it was the car that was the inspiration. Even better, the family mispronounced it.
I can't get too judgmental, though. Both my kids have names inspired by books, and relatively obscure books at that. My older daughter is still annoyed that I happened to read Zuleika Dobson when I did, and the younger daughter has spent half her life telling people that no, Tamar isn't Biblical, it's a river in a Victoria Holt novel. I keep telling them to count their blessings. I could have been reading Podkayne of Mars when the nurse asked me what to put on the birth certificate.
One of the things I do as part of volunteering with the local historical society is dabble a bit in genealogical research. People contact the museum asking for our help in tracking down death certificates, marriage licenses, and other records. Sometimes I'm able to find what they need; sometimes there's nothing. But in any case I have been noticing just how large some of the families were. We've had a couple requests come in for information on one of the local well-known pioneer families, a family that stands out for multiple reasons, but that I find particularly notable for the remarkably good health of the matriarch of the clan. The woman had at least seventeen children who survived into adulthood, or close to it. The matriarch herself was probably in her nineties when she died.
So do I wonder about how she managed that? Good genes, clean living, sheer dumb luck? Do I think about the changes she witnessed over her lifetime, which spanned approximately 1820 to 1910? No. I wake up wondering just how the heck she and her husband came up with names for the kids. The first couple of little barracudas would be easy. As good Catholics, they'd just do the usual Apostles and a Mary or two. But once they hit the 10th or 12th they'd be starting to run out of the better known saints. And by the 17th? I can't see a priest being willing to baptize "Jesus Christ Not Again."
Then again, by the time they hit the 17th, the older kids would be leaving home, so maybe they just started over from the top of the list.
This particular family was so large that the descendants who are several generations away from the original pioneer couple do not realize that their great-great-grandparent was one of 17 siblings. I don't know why that surprises me -- with one exception, I have no idea how many siblings three of my grandparents had, and I actually knew one grandmother -- but it always does. Maybe it's because the family is so well known in local history that it always seems odd that more information didn't get passed down in family folklore after the descendants moved away.
I've always kind of wondered about naming traditions in general. I've known people who were determined that each child have the same first initial, there are others where one particular name seems to get repeated over and over, and of course we've all seen the sorry influence of soap operas, movies, pop stars, and cultural icons. One of my friends was named Mercedes, and, yes, it was the car that was the inspiration. Even better, the family mispronounced it.
I can't get too judgmental, though. Both my kids have names inspired by books, and relatively obscure books at that. My older daughter is still annoyed that I happened to read Zuleika Dobson when I did, and the younger daughter has spent half her life telling people that no, Tamar isn't Biblical, it's a river in a Victoria Holt novel. I keep telling them to count their blessings. I could have been reading Podkayne of Mars when the nurse asked me what to put on the birth certificate.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)