10 Things Your Veterinary Staff Person (Probably) Won't Tell You

I have a subscription to Reader’s Digest magazine.  Yes, the paper version.  Call me old-fashioned.  I am an avid reader, and Reader’s Digest makes for good bathroom reading.  One feature they have been doing recently is “50 Things Your ______ Won’t Tell You”.  For example, “50 Things Your Nurse Won’t Tell You” or “50 Things Your Airline Pilot Won’t Tell You”.  I find these fascinating, because they lift the curtain on certain professions.  Often, a professional, because they must act professionally,  is rarely able to directly explain why they do things the way they do, what rules they have to follow, or how they feel about certain things.  Nonetheless, those factors impact all of us as consumers in one way or the other.  It's not that they won't tell you, it's mostly that they really can't, for one reason or another, though they'd like to.

I work in a veterinary hospital.  There are some who think that my job is nothing more than glorified play with doggies and kitties.  There is more, much more to it than most people outside the profession could ever know.  Almost every single thing we do (and don’t do) with you and your pet is due to a law, a professional protocol, or from some past experience that has influenced our practices.

Instead of clogging this blog with 50 things your veterinary staff person won’t tell you, I am going to limit it to ten for now.  This posting, for the record, is NOT sanctioned by my employer!  It all comes from little old me and the observations and experiences I have had.  And while these are based on my veterinary clinic, I feel safe in saying that they apply to almost all of them, wherever you are.

1.       Your cat may indeed be the sweetest feline known to mankind.  However, with the stress of a vehicle ride and the strange sights, sounds, and smells of the vet’s office, they may not be themselves.  Please put them in a cat carrier for everyone’s safety, especially theirs.  You can even borrow one from us.

2.       And your dog may indeed be the sweetest canine known to mankind.  However, with strange sights, sounds and smells of the vet’s office, they also may not be themselves.  (Plus, the other animals they could go up to greet in the waiting room might not be as friendly as they are.)  Please keep your dog on a leash for everyone’s safety, especially theirs. We have leashes on hand if you don't have one or forgot yours.

3.       If the veterinarian recommends blood tests or x-rays, it is not a way for us to get more money from you.  If anything, it is more work for us.  However, the veterinarian would only order them if she didn’t have enough information to make the best possible medical decision for your pet.  And after all, isn’t that what you want for them?

4.       If you sense that there is something seriously wrong with your pet, don’t wait until 4:55 on a Friday afternoon to call us, especially if it has been going on for a while.  It will save you money, save us time, and save your pet needless suffering if you nip a problem in the bud when it first emerges.  And please, don't call the vet at 1:30 in the morning because your dog is itchy. That's not an emergency. (It has happened more than once!)

5.       Ours is a real medical facility, just like your own doctor’s office.  Unless it is an emergency, we probably won’t be able to schedule you for an appointment the same day you call, just like your own doctor’s office.  That day’s appointments were made by people who called several days before.

6.       We know that prescription diets are often very expensive.  We are embarrassed by it ourselves. The prices are set by the manufacturer, and we make virtually no profit on them. However, they are “prescriptions” and are therefore medically necessary for treating whatever condition your pet has.  The upside of them is that they contain higher-quality ingredients and less filler (No eyeballs and toes in there!), so your pet should be eating less of it to meet their nutritional needs.  

7.       Unpredictable animals, medical emergencies, unpredictable animals, equipment troubles, unpredictable animals, lack of staff some days, and unpredictable animals are going to cause delays.  (And did I mention unpredictable animals?) We like to avoid these things, we really do, but that’s just not always possible.  We don’t like making you wait any more than you like waiting, rest assured.

8.       By law, only a licensed veterinarian can diagnose your pet, give a prognosis on the possible outcome of their condition, do surgery, or issue a prescription.  The other staff members are there to assist the vet in doing these things.  They cannot legally do them on their own, no matter how easy it might seem.  Our vet's license is on the line, even if we hand out a simple tube of ear cream without following certain protocols.

9.       Veterinary care can be expensive, so you might want to have a rainy-day fund in case of an emergency.  There are supplies, salaries, utilities, equipment, upkeep of the facility and numerous other things whose costs are out of our hands.  Our small business must pay for all that stuff before even a penny of profit is made.    We’d love to be able to provide our services for free, but it just isn’t realistic.  And don't get me started on people who stiff us on their bills!  After all, you wouldn't walk out of the supermarket saying "I've only got $10 on me to give you, but I'll bring the rest of the money for all this at the beginning of the month."  (At least I hope you wouldn't.)

10.   Every member of the veterinary staff is in this line of work because they really and truly love animals.  They love your animal, but they also must adhere to laws as well as medical and safety protocols in order to maintain everyone’s best interests, especially your pet’s.  Things are not always as obvious and simple as they may seem.

      ***One more thing...paperwork.  You hate it.  We hate it more.  Dogs like to chew it.  Cats like to shred it.  It is, however, absolutely necessary in any medical office, I'm afraid.  We know it seems cumbersome and repetitive at times, but it is one of those things that covers you, us, and your pet from something potentially bad happening.  Humor us.  Please, just fill it out.  And don't whine.

      Okay, so technically that's eleven.  Who's counting?  Hopefully by letting you in on a few of these things, it will make your pet's next visit to the vet go a bit more smoothly, wherever you take them.

Hooray, Sports!

Ahh…sports!  Baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball and hockey in the winter, competitive mosquito swatting in the spring.  Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that sports play a significant part in our culture.  (Well, you could, but I wouldn’t believe you.)

I consider myself a sports fan.  I don’t come from a particularly athletic family, and have no major athletic accomplishments to brag about, aside from five goals scored in one game of floor hockey back in sixth grade.  Nonetheless, I follow the sports world every day in one form or another.  I have ESPN’s Mike & Mike sports talk show on every morning as I am reading the other news of the day in the paper or online.  I also check sports websites for scores several times a day in-season and subscribe to two sports magazines.  In the evenings during the summer, I like to have a baseball game on as background noise.  There’s a kind of comfortable rhythm to it, even if I am only half-paying attention.

Baseball is my favorite sport, and the Boston Red Sox are my team.  It wasn’t always that way, and sometimes I wish it wasn’t like that now. 

As a very young kid, I was actually a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, oddly enough.  I think it was in part because Los Angeles seemed so far away and cool to a kid like me from rural Maine.  Surely their baseball team was populated with only the best players, I reasoned.  And back then, in the late 70s to very early 80s, the Dodgers were actually pretty good.  Steve Garvey, Fernando Valenzuela, Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, Steve Yeager…they were winning pennants most years and even took the World Series in 1981, when I was 11.  Trouble was, hardly anyone in my hometown knew anything about them, much less followed them.  Being a young Dodger fan in northern Maine was a lonely business.  The girls all thought the L.A. logo on my baseball cap (as pictured below) meant “love always”, since that was what it had been appropriated for in notebook doodles and so-called “love notes” by young girls at that time. 

While the media juggernaut that is the Boston Red Sox was not nearly then what it is now, they were still the “local” professional baseball team.  Their games were on the radio every night, their highlights were on the local sports reports, and their caps and t-shirts were in the stores.  In time, I gradually moved my loyalties over to the Red Sox.  In my mid-teens, part of my frequent responsibilities at the radio station where I worked was to play the commercials between innings of Red Sox game broadcasts.   I was there behind the operating board when Roger Clemens struck out 20 batters in a game.  I was also there when that ball went between Bill Buckner’s legs during the 1986 World Series.  Joe Castiglione is still calling games for the Sox.  His is one of the few voices still left in broadcasting that instantly take me back to my youth when I hear it.  Almost all the others are gone.

NOTE: I have to be careful when addressing the topic of the Red Sox right now, since they are in the midst of scandal and turmoil, and it would be very easy for this posting to degrade into an angry rant.  Let’s not go there.

I like football too, but admit to not understanding a lot of it.  You see, here in northern Maine, we didn’t have football teams growing up.  For the most part, we still don’t.  The area is mainly agricultural, and when I was a kid, school let out for three weeks in the fall so students could work in the potato harvest.  Harvest break fell right in the middle of what would have been football season, and the students who were most likely to have played on a football team, the big, strapping guys, were working on the farms.  So the local schools and recreation departments never really established football teams.  Sure, there were football fans around, but for most of us, who didn’t play it or see it in person like we did baseball, basketball, and hockey, there was a bit of distance there.  Unless you really applied yourself, it just looked like big guys in tight pants lining up, falling into a pile, and then lining up and doing it again.

I understand a lot more about football now than I did as a kid.  It all started when someone explained it to me as “a game of acquiring territory”.  While I always knew this at a basic level, that explanation somehow opened my eyes and helped me open other doors.  I still do best during a football game if I have Google on standby for looking up oddball things like "fair-catch kick" or "Terry Bradshaw".

I am a passing fan of other sports too. 

In my radio days, I did color analysis for local high school basketball games on the radio.  I saw MUCH more of that brand of ball than professional basketball, though I did catch the occasional Celtics game.  However, professional basketball seems so slick and polished compared to the high school ball I was so exposed to growing up and the street games I took part in with my very limited skills.  I’ll tune in when the Celtics are on TV once in a while, but for my money, the amateurs are the best show in basketball.

And hockey is a terrific sport.  Fast paced, action-packed, physical.  It sucks on TV though.  I can’t see the puck.  Fox Sports tried to use a technical trick on a TV broadcast about ten years ago where they had a computerized “tail” that swept behind the puck on the screen, making it easier to see.  I loved it.  The rest of the world apparently did not, and that experiment was considered a failure.  If I am going to watch a hockey game, I want to be there in person.  At least then I can see the damn puck.  Looking back on local pond hockey, it’s a flipping miracle that my friends and I didn’t break more teeth, bones, etc., given the wild abandon with which we played and the complete lack of protective gear.  And absence of rules.  Pond hockey for my friends and I as kids was fast, brutal, totally exhilarating, and would probably have scared the bejeezes out of our moms.  It was great. 

I came to NASCAR most recently…around ten years ago.   I’ve figured out that the best way to watch a NASCAR race is to tune in during the last 10-20 laps.  That’s when things really get shaking.  Come to think of it, that rule applies pretty well to basketball and football games too.  Tune in for the last quarter, and you’ll see most of the best stuff live.  The other highlights will be shown ad nauseum on ESPN for the next 24 hours anyway.

And I LOVE the Olympics, summer or winter, but really could care less about most of those sports at any other time.   ABC’s Wide World of Sports was a very popular weekend afternoon program when I was young.  I remember watching it quite often, pretending to be interested in bowling and the like, since there was absolutely NOTHING else to do on a January Saturday afternoon where I lived.  My most enduring memory of that program has to be that poor sap on the skis who wipes out big-time in the “agony of defeat”.  

Other sports:  Tennis? Boring.  Golf? I've shed my blood for it, so I am done with it.  (A topic for another post) Curling?  Great after a few drinks.  Heck, what sport isn't?

At 41, I don’t play many sports these days.  I like to toss a baseball around once in a while or shoot a few hoops, but that’s about it.  However, I think sports play an important part in modern life, one that is sometimes overlooked.  


You see, they are one of the few things left in our culture that are not totally fragmented.  Back in the old days, there were only three or four radio stations to listen to, only three or four TV stations to watch, more people went to church and joined community organizations, and our worlds in general were a lot smaller.  Consequently, we had a lot more in common with the people we ran into every day.  Chances are, they DID watch the same show you did last night, or they DID hear what that announcer said on the radio this morning.  They were at the same church service as you last weekend or the same lodge meeting last night.  Those shared experiences are a lot fewer and farther between today.  Most things are fragmented.  Hundreds of television and music choices are out there, not to mention the vast array of “stuff” that is available on the Internet.   However, sports is still relatively compact.  There’s one major league in each of the five professional sports of baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and car racing, which is more compact than many other diversions in our world today.  


Anything that bring us together, that helps us share our passions and feelings in a positive way, that lets us see each other as pretty much being in the same boat...well, that's a good thing.

On Being A Geek

I’m kind of a geek.

At my age, however, it is much easier to admit it.  I never would have said that when I was, say, 23 years old, even though it was true then as well.  Actually, anyone at this point in time can admit to being a geek and not have a whole lot of self-esteem issues.  Over the past twenty years, as science and technology has reached ever more deeply into almost every aspect of our lives, it has become more socially acceptable to be labeled as one of the geeky.  Even the thickest skulls can see that the things once stereotypically associated with being a geek (computers, electronic gizmos, science-fiction, robots, etc.) have made life immeasurably easier and much cooler.

Of course, not all geeks are science and technology geeks.  Take me for example.  I can find my way around a computer to some extent.  I can install software and empty my recycle bin.  But if you asked me to reformat a hard drive or do anything that requires taking the plastic casing off the machine, I would likely break into a cold sweat and have to go lie down. So “computer geek” is not really what I am.

Nor am I a “gadget geek”.  I have a cell phone.  I hate it.  I rarely have it on my actual person (it lives in my chariot), and it has not been off “vibrate” in months.  My current phone has been with me for three years now, and I have racked up a grand total of (are you ready for this?), 47 minutes.  The only reason I even have it is for emergencies.  Living in a rural area as I do, breaking down on the road can be a major problem.  It’s possible to not be within walking distance of any civilization.  Really.  And there’s no Triple A around here.  If you break down, you have to get hold of someone you know, and a cell phone is usually the only way to do so.  Otherwise, you could be eaten by a yeti.  Or so I’m told.  Also, I have several older relatives for whom I do a lot, and I want them to be able to reach me if there is a pressing need.  Trouble with that is, they don’t believe in cell phones, much like most of us don’t believe in the tooth fairy, and would not even think to call me on mine, even if they were starving to death and I was the only person able to bring them oyster crackers and sugar-free chocolate crème pie.

Ok, I DO have an iPod Touch.  I haven’t had it for very long, and it kind of scares me.  I can do so many things with it, and I know I am only scratching the surface.  I can convert  millimeters to bushels (or whatever), I can find the cheapest gas (usually 140 miles away), and have recently learned how fling upset avians at green porkers (that’s the game “Angry Birds” for those of you who have been vacationing in the Himalayas for the past two years).  Beyond that, the only use I have for it is my music.  (More on that coming up.)  I am afraid that if I am not careful, I might inadvertently launch a nuclear missile on a small foreign country with it, and starting an international incident can seriously throw off one’s day.  Can’t be too careful, you know.

I wouldn’t really consider myself a “sci-fi geek” either.  Sure, I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies, and had lots of the action figures (NOT dolls!) when I was a kid.  However, my interest in Star Wars as an adult doesn’t really go beyond having enjoyed the movies.  And I have never “gotten” Star Trek.  I’ve never been a fan.  It probably stems from childhood.   Back when Saturday morning programming was a HUGE deal to kids, Star Trek was the last show before the boring grown up stuff came on and the day grew exponentially less exciting.  It meant it was time to actually get dressed and go entertain ourselves.  Often outdoors.  Can you imagine?  So Star Trek, which was also the only non-cartoon on the Saturday morning slate (if you don’t include H.R. Puffinstuff, which I don’t), was the signal that the fun was over.  I developed kind of an aversion to it that remains to this day.

I am definitely not a “comic book” geek.  I associate comic books with waiting my turn at the barber shops to which I was taken as a child.  Believe you me, I had some damn unfortunate haircuts back then.  Plus, I’ve always been a fast reader, so a comic book to me would be like eating one jelly bean.

So, what kind of geek am I?  I am a music geek.  Big time.  Ever since I got hooked on rock music by the Eagles in the late 70s, I’ve loved music.  My first record, the big vinyl kind, was Freeze Frame by the J. Geils Band.  Since then, I’ve accumulated literally hundreds of albums in progressing formats: records, cassettes, CDs, and now MP3s.  I even had a few 8 track tapes.  At this point, my MP3s alone add up to more than ten days’ worth of listening without a repeat.  In my teens and twenties, I was lucky enough to have worked in broadcast radio, which was a dream job for a music geek like me.  To this day, radio is the road not taken in my life…the great “what if”.

If I am playing a trivia game with friends, they all steer way from the music questions, because I dominate.  If someone at work wants to know the name of a song based on a few lyrics, I am the go to guy.  If “Name That Tune” was still on the air, I’d clean up.

For me, the best way to unwind is to strap on my iPod, hit shuffle, and then lie back and vegetate for about an hour.  Nothing clears my head nearly as well. While a rock guy at heart, by collection is all over the road.  I’ve got rock, pop, metal, some folk, some blues, and even a little country, not to mention a smattering of new age, classical, hip-hop, and jazz.  These days I average about one new album a week.  (When I use the term album, I mean a collection of songs released by the artist together, not a vinyl LP.)  My latest is Nine Tonight, a live album by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.  Bob's stuff has only recently been released in the MP3 format, so I've got some catching up to do with him.

There was one other person I knew growing up who was a comparable “music geek”.  I won’t mention his name without his permission, but he took it to a whole new level.  We lost touch after high school, but I recently reconnected with him to discover that he taught himself to play the guitar (something that I am only middling at, at best), and then drove himself to follow his dream.  He’s now a big-time heavy metal guitarist in New York City with a number of albums under his belt.  He’s still the same guy though.  I am friends with him on Facebook, and every once in a while I see the notice that “Insert Name Here now likes Bananarama” or some such thing.  He may be “metal”, but his musical taste is all over the road, just like a true music geek’s should be. 

Like a true geek, I could go on and on about this topic, which is probably of only marginal interest to most of you, but I need to end it here.  I just noticed that I can download a rare Bay City Rollers double album at half price.

Scapegoats Are People Too

Ours is a society that loves to beat the snot out of someone.  We have become Scapegoat Nation, mainly because we have more to worry about, and thus more of a need to blame things on someone.

When you think about it, the amount of information that we in western culture have literally at our fingertips is monumentally massive compared to that of similar people living just thirty years ago.  Information that would have taken years to gather back then can be pulled up in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.  Who won the first Cricket World Cup? The West Indies.  You think I knew that 30 seconds ago?  Nope.  Now think about what I would have had to go through to find that tidbit out in, say 1984.  It would have required a trip downtown to the library at the very least.

I think back to when I was a kid, spending vacations with my grandparents in the country.  My grandmother spent years and years researching basic family history for her family and that of my grandfather, using what she knew personally as a starting point.  She wrote letters.  She made phone calls.  She dug around old records in courthouses and libraries. I yawned a lot and asked when we would go get ice cream.  By the time I was a teenager, after years of work, she had fleshed out her family tree and my grandfather’s to the point from when their great-grandparents came over from Ireland.  She wrote most of it down in a notebook, but kept a lot more of it in her head.  She died in 1995.  The notebook has been lost and what was in her head remains with her.  I am kicking myself that I didn’t take more of an interest and do something to save that information.  I’ve been able to reconstruct some of it, but a great deal of knowledge was lost forever when she died.

Nowadays, I could do some of the research that took my grandmother many years in a fraction of the time.  Though I doubt I could ever do it with the dedication and love that she had.

But I digress.

My point is, we just know more stuff now.  The quality of that stuff varies a whole lot, mind you.  One of the upsides of the pre-Information Age was that a lot of crap was filtered out before it got before the masses.  If you don’t believe me, just think back to what was on prime-time TV in the mid-70s and then look at it today.

There have always been pretty, brainless heiresses like Paris Hilton.  We just haven’t been able to know as much about them as we do now.  There have always been idiot politicians acting more in their own interest than ours.  We just didn’t get as much of the lowdown.  There have always been horrific accidents and terrible crimes, probably more so then than now, but the only ones we heard about were those in our general vicinity.  Some psycho shooting up a daycare center in Asia would not have likely made headlines back in the 1950s, for example.  Today, it would be global news.

You can discuss amongst yourselves whether this is good or bad.  I personally don’t think it is one or the other, but a mix of both.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the stuff.  Murders, rapes, gangs, dog attacks, corruption…it seems like it’s everywhere.  Our world is falling apart.  What happened to the good old days?  Right?

Wrong.

The same things were happening back in the good old days, only we didn’t hear about them as often.  They probably occurred even more frequently, since the degree of public scrutiny was much less, so getting away with them was easier.

In response to this, however, I feel like we have become a scapegoat society.  We want someone to pay the price for the bad things that happen out there. The origin of “scapegoat” goes back to biblical times, when a goat, symbolically laden with the sins of the people, was left to wander in barren lands (presumably to starve or be eaten by predators).   Often now, it is one person that is symbolic of the problem of whom we want the figurative blood.  Sarcasm alert!: Music stinks these days?  Blame Lady Gaga, because I don’t like her.  Professional athletes are lazy and overpaid?  Blame Alex Rodriguez, because he seems kind of arrogant anyhow.  People do stupid things?  Blame the local school superintendent.  He's supposed to be able to fix stupid, isn't he? End sarcasm.

There are countless examples I could give, but I’ll use the one that is most accessible to the majority of us is the presidency.  No matter WHO is in the Oval Office, whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, that person carries the weight for all of the ups and downs of our country.  (Who in their right mind would want that job?)  I can’t remember a single president in our lifetime who was not treated with disdain over things that he simply does not control.  After all, our leader is a president, not a dictator.  He (or someday she) cannot simply decree that there be good jobs or less crime.  The constitution lays out certain powers, and he has to stick to them.  But, because he is a single individual, with his own personality and opinions, the president becomes a lightning rod, rightly or wrongly.  Our current economic woes are not the fault of Barack Obama.  Nor are they the fault of George W. Bush.  They are the result of a myriad of factors, not the action or inaction of any one person.

And it runs in reverse as well, where a single person’s plight results in arguably inordinate action.  One pretty blonde teenage girl from an upper middle-class family (whose pictures look good on news reports) is kidnapped and killed, which is a true and genuine tragedy, and a law in her name gets passed to help prevent such a thing from happening again.  Maybe that law was indeed needed, but I can’t help but wonder about the families of the many others who may have met the same fate.  Why wasn’t a law passed when their loved ones were taken from them?  Weren’t they just as important as the more photogenic person who came from the “right side” of the tracks?

Most things today are complicated, shades-of-gray kinds of things.  They always have been.  There is nothing new here at all.  But we are faced with more knowledge of bad things, and it’s just easier to wrap our minds around things that are black and white.  It’s simpler to blame a person (or a group, like religious zealots, opposing political parties, or Justin Beiber fans), instead of trying to address the array of things that led to the problem in the first place.

I have to admit, this post was not inspired by some great philosophical problem of our times, but by the dismissal of the manager of my favorite baseball team due in large part to the apathy of his players, in spite of his best efforts.  What can I say?  I am deep as a paper plate at times.

I am not going to change a whole society’s way of thinking with a single blog post.  (It may take at least two.)  But hopefully, at least a few of us can start to look a little more carefully at all sides of a situation before we hang someone out to dry.

On Handwriting (or: Mrs. Crazy Old Bird and The Mutant Claw)

I like to write.  Always have.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say, I have always liked to create with words.  When I was in third grade, I wrote a series of "horror" stories in an old notebook I found around the house and received accolades from my parents, grandparents and teachers for my creative efforts.  They were fairly tame accounts, as I recall.  One was about a large Loch Ness-type sea monster who lived in a local lake and frightened people out of swimming, fishing, or boating there.  No blood, no death.  Nothing like that at all.  Very Scooby-Doo-ish actually, which should be no surprise as I was addicted to that show at the time.  While far from contenders for the Pulitzer for short story writing, the stories were fun to write, and people seemed to like them.  I was hooked.

The trouble was, while I liked the creative aspect of writing, I hated the physical act of doing it.  For that matter, I still do.  If I can't type it, I don't want to do it.

You see, I developed this mutant way of holding a pen or pencil that no amount of correction by the nuns and other teachers at my parochial school could remedy.  (Corporal punishment was de facto banned there by the seventies.)  So, I essentially hold my writing utensils backwards, not unlike how some left-handers do, even though I am a righty.  Also, I hold it very tightly.  While I can hold my pen or pencil in the traditional way, my default is the "mutant claw" hold.  It's true to this day.  My handwriting is legible, but no thing of beauty, for sure.

THE MUTANT CLAW GRIP

My fourth grade teacher, a non-nun in her seventies whose picture is in the dictionary beside the definition of "old school", waged constant war with me about my handwriting grip.  We'll call her "Mrs. Crazy Old Bird" for now.  She was constantly coming to my desk and rearranging my fingers around the writing utensil, using a tone usually reserved for addressing mentally-challenged baboons.  Needless to say, I found this rather humiliating, especially since it was always done in full view of all my friends in class.  (This was just one of many conflicts I had with this lady, which could fill an entire book.  Maybe they will someday.  It was an epic battle of wills between she and I all year long, on a number of levels.)

Another of Mrs. Crazy Old Bird's favorite tricks was to literally sneak up behind me and pull the pen or pencil out of my hand while I was using it.  She maintained that if she couldn't grab it out of my hand, then I was holding to too tightly.  I became more than a little high-strung in her class, never knowing when this loon was going to swoop in and steal my pencil as I was about to make a great point in an essay about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff or something equally mesmerizing.  Back then, there was no room in the curriculum for writing anything even remotely of the student's own choosing.  Sometimes she would cause me to jump, she became so stealthy at it.  I think I developed a nervous twitch for a while.

I often would shake cramps out of my hand or stop to rest in the middle of an assignment because it hurt me so badly.  Mrs. Crazy Old Bird would smirk at me from behind her desk, as if to say "It's your own stupid fault, kid.  Just do as I say, and no more pain."  I loathed her at the time.

Much of school did not challenge me, and I often resorted to wisecracks and other distractions to keep myself sane throughout my school career.  It really reached a peak that year in fourth grade.  Heaven knows, Mrs. Crazy Old Bird had plenty of other things to complain about to my parents, but that grip always topped the list at every conference.  It was like her white whale.  Given the list of behaviors Mrs. Crazy Old Bird presented to them each time, my parents were mystified that it was my handwriting that vexed her most.  It was legible, if not letter-perfect, and I had taken to cursive that year as well as any other student.  Her tirades about how I held my writing utensils actually worked in my favor with my parents, since it made her seem a little kooky.  They must have thought that the other things on her laundry list about me were out of proportion as well.  For my part, I kept my grades top-notch in spite of it all though (except for penmanship, of course), and knew where to draw the line between being a wiseguy and being rude in the classroom, so my parents didn't get too worried about it all.

I believe that it was in fourth grade that my love of creative writing went into dormancy.  It didn't die, thankfully.  I was fortunate enough to have the same language arts teacher for the next four years.  She was a gifted young nun named Sister Mona whose instructional methods, I know now, were ahead of their time.  While she was not able to include much creative writing in the curriculum due to the restrictions placed on her, she was pretty understanding about my mutant claw pencil grip.  She also saw flashes of talent in the writing that I did do for her over those four years, and was gently encouraging.  I can't say that she caused me to take off as a writer, but she managed to keep the ember glowing inside of me.

In time, word processors became more prevalent, I learned to type quite well, and my writing ember sparked into a fire again.  I don't do it nearly as often as I'd like, but it's always there for me as an escape and a creative outlet.  This blog is one example of it.

POSTSCRIPT: The story of me and Mrs. Crazy Old Bird had kind of an interesting ending.  It turns out that my fourth grade year was her last before she retired.  She was genuinely elderly at the time, so I do not think it was me who pushed her over the edge to retiring.  Her husband died shortly after I started fifth grade, and she moved into a small apartment by herself within walking distance from our school.  One of the nuns would visit her at least once a week, and liked to bring along some of Mrs. Crazy Old Bird's former students to visit as well.  I was asked to go on several occasions.

It was during one of these visits that  Mrs. Crazy Old Bird, whose real name was Mrs. Upton, told me how much potential she saw in me, how strongly she felt about my abilities, and how she was hard on me because she genuinely wanted to see me succeed in the future.  I hadn't seen it that way before, but for some reason it made perfect sense to me now.  I could tell she meant what she was saying.  The ice melted between us, and we became friends.  I went along on the visits to see her a number of times in the first year or two after fourth grade, and saw her in an entirely new light.  She liked soap operas and her snaggle-toothed old cat, and loved being a teacher.  Her former students, even me, meant the world to her.  The frequency declined over the next couple of years, and she died shortly after I started high school.  To this day, whenever I am at the local cemetery, I stop by her grave and say a quick prayer.  We misunderstood each other, but she was looking out for what she saw as my best interests, and for that I am grateful.

Everybody Talks About The Weather...

As I type this, Hurricane Irene is churning its way in my general directions.  I find it difficult to get too intimidated by an entity that shares a name with my grandmother's sister.  The woman used to knit caps for her cats, for pete's sake.  Of course, the fact that I am 100 miles inland and nowhere near a major body of water also increases my hubris.

The media have been hyping this storm for nearly a week now, and I have to say, it's hard for me to take them seriously about it.  I do believe in my heart of hearts that they do genuinely want their viewers to be safe, but as a former media guy myself, I know the major part ratings play in everything they do.  With so many possible choices for information these days, media outlets are constantly trying to draw attention to themselves by whatever means possible.

I worked in radio news in the late 80s and early 90s.  Broadcast radio in those pre-internet days was still a pretty active player in the media game.  Among my responsibilities was to assemble stories from the various wire sources to which we subscribed into a five minute newscast.  There was no shortage of material from which to choose, but I learned early on that there was an unwritten rule to putting it all together: "There ought to be blood at least once in every newscast, and death if you can get it."  The reasoning behind it was that these stories grabbed the attention of listeners more and therefore made them more likely to become repeat listeners.

As a result, a car accident on the other side of the state with no local connection at all was more likely to make the newscast than an actual local story with a less "sexy" angle.  This rule wasn't hard and fast, mind you.  Sometimes there was no blood or death to be had, and once in a while there were enough impossible to ignore local stories to keep the gore at bay.  At the time, viewing it as a young adult on the inside and ground-floor of the business, it all seemed  perfectly appropriate.

Now fast-forward 20+ years.  Competition among media outlets has increased exponentially.  There are more elbows than ever being thrown in an effort to attract the attention of viewers.  And these media outlets are willing to stoop lower and lower to find things that will jack up ratings.

The other day, I had one of the cable news channels on, and this big voice came on stating in the most serious tone, "This is (Insert Name Here) Breaking News!".  This was of course accompanied by tense music and expensive-looking graphics.  Well, it got my attention.  I remember Reagan getting shot, the space shuttles going down, 9/11, and the rest of it, so I figured it was some pretty big deal.  The "breaking news"?  President Obama was about to give a speech on the economy.  Isn't it his JOB to give speeches and whatnot?  Doesn't he do it all the time?  How is THAT breaking news?  Nonetheless, it did get my attention.  And I was pissed off that it did.

So when the media outlets are urging us to take precautions because a storm is coming, I just can't help but wonder if they are crying "Wolf!"  When they present everything as being so urgent in order to grab attention, how can you tell when something really IS urgent?  I don't want to be like that character in every disaster movie who ignores the warnings he is given and then is washed out to sea in his split-level ranch.  At the same time, I don't want to be one who panics every time attention-hungry media types want to stir things up whether for real reasons or for ratings.

It does work though.  I have to admit, I've watched more of The Weather Channel this past week than in all the rest of the year put together.

There is another side to this as well.  When some Kardashian's wedding, for example, gets space in a newscast, that means something else, something less ratings-friendly but likely more important to everyday people, like people starving to death in east Africa, gets kicked to the curb.  Media bias, so frequently hollered about these days, is not just in the stories they choose to emphasize, but even more so in the ones they do not.

My point in all this, and I do have one, is that we all need to be savvy media consumers, now more than ever.  And, we need to be sure that our children are taught to be as well. It is vital that they can distinguish between real news, "fluff", parody, and infomercials, all of which blur together at times.

I'd type more, but my neighbor's Volvo just landed on my back deck, so I had better go to Costco and stock up on canned goods and candles in case the powe

Weenie War

I am a picky eater.  Very picky.  There are lots of foods I will not even try, and never have.  Most of them are meats or meat products.  Ham, deli meats, most sausages...they are just a few items on my no-no list.  But one food stands far above the rest.  It is my great adversary.  The Professor Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes.  The Robert E. Lee to my U.S. Grant.  The Wile E. Coyote to my Roadrunner. That great enemy of mine is: the hot dog.

People often do not believe me when I say that I have never eaten a hot dog in my life, but it is true. Not even once has a frankfurter touched my lips.  I haven't even been tempted to try one.  I don't know if it is the eerie similarity in shape and size to a certain part of the male anatomy, or the rumors that they are made of sheep intestines and stuffed with eyeballs, hooves, and various other rejected parts from the meat packing plant.  I would rather go hungry than eat a hot dog, and on occasion actually have.

My loathing of hot dogs somehow became a well-known quirk of mine when I was a kid.  When hot dogs were served, as they often are to groups of kids, I would turn up my nose.  Forget about trying one; I would not even touch one.  A child who would not eat a hot dog was thought an oddity by many adults, and for some  reason it became a notable characteristic of mine.  "The kid who won't eat hot dogs" they called me.  I didn't promote it, but apparently it was viewed as being so odd, and the strength of my resistance to even try one was so great, that people noticed.  The mothers of my friends were flabbergasted when they threw a birthday party and they had this one little creep who just would not eat what all the other guests were so happily scarfing down.  A friend's father once offered me $10 (a princely sum to a little kid), just to take one bite of a hot dog.  No way.  It didn't take long for word to get around that, if hot dogs were on the menu at a party to which I was invited, it was a good idea to have a PBJ on hand as a backup.

I remember one time in parochial school when I was about 7, I ordered school lunch instead of bringing my own as I usually did.  The menu said pizza for that day, and I was all about that.  Now our school did not have a kitchen or cafeteria.  The lunches were prepared by cooks at the public schools, placed in Styrofoam trays, and were delivered to us.  It was some kind of contract deal, I guess.

Anyhow, this particular day, I was especially hungry and looking forward to some pizza, which the school lunch people made especially well.  I went down the hall with my class and got my white tray, full of anticipation.  Walking back to my seat in the classroom where we always ate lunch, I noticed my friend Frenchie out of the corner of my eye at his desk.  On his Styrofoam tray was sitting a rather soggy hot dog and about a half dozen even soggier french fries, along with some shredded carrot & raisin mixture.  My heart sank.  I slid into my seat and opened the tray with dread.  Sure enough: hot dog.  The worst-case scenario had occurred.  Not only was it not pizza, it was something that I absolutely despised. My disappointment knew no bounds.

Now going without lunch when I was hungry was bad enough, but bear in mind, this was parochial school.  Wasting food while there were poor children starving in Africa was just not acceptable. The nuns required that we eat at least half of our lunches or else.  For them, only requiring that we eat half was considered lenient. And no, trading was not allowed.  They kept their eyes peeled for finicky kids like me who might try to break these rules.

There was no way I was going to even take one bite of this thing.  I was willing to go to the principal's office.  I was willing to serve detention.  I was willing to have my parents called.  Heck, they could have dragged me before the pope.  Eating this thing was just not going to happen.  Of course, if there was a way to avoid all of this drama, I was going to do it.

It required stealth.  Just ditching the whole weenie at once would arouse suspicion with Sister Ursula, who surveyed us with watchful eyes.  As much as it pained me to do so, I held my breath, thought of clear blue skies over a flowery meadow, and pulled a bite-sized portion of hot dog off when Sister Ursula was not looking, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it down the inkwell of my desk.  (The days of using ink in schools had long since passed, but we still had the old desks with the inkwell.)  I tried to time my tear-offs with the bites Frenchie was taking so as to add to the believability factor for the formidable nun watching over us.  The trouble was, I hated hot dogs so much that even handling them made me a bit queasy.

Maybe it was warm in the room that day.  Maybe I had a mild stomach bug of some sort.  Or maybe it was hot dog cooties.  Whatever it was, by the time I had clandestinely dispatched of the entire hot dog down the inkwell and into my desk, I was feeling pretty green around the gills.  Fortunately, my desk was within reach of the classroom wastebasket, because I felt that uncomfortable surge from down in my gut, and whatever was down there came back up.

Needless to say, this ruined lunch for many of my classmates that day.  For me, however, it meant a) I got to go home for the afternoon, even though I felt fine after vomiting, and b) I didn't have to eat that damn hot dog.  I did have to clean the hidden pieces out of my desk the next morning, but I was ready for it and did so quickly before class started, holding my breath and keeping my eyes closed.  No throwing up involved.  So, final score: Me = 1, Weenies = 0.

Some of the adults who knew me back then, as well as some of the kids who sat beside me wolfing down weenies all those years ago, are amused to no end to find out that at age 41, I still will not eat a hot dog. I don't get nauseous when I touch them now, but I still will not try them.  I will not eat them in a box.  I will not eat them with a fox.  I will not...well, you get the gist.  That stubborn kid who dug his heels in so deeply against eating hot dogs way back then is still digging in his heels many years later.  Better have a PBJ on hand if you are inviting me over for lunch.