I'm surprised that in Frankfurt, Wieners are regarded as a delicacy. When I was a kid, we had them all the time, and I liked them. I particularly liked "hot lunches" at school, which we rarely got, when we were served steamed hot dogs.
I still like the recollection of how those tasted.
Now days, I only eat hot dogs if I'm at a baseball game. That's about it. Otherwise, I never do. I probably had too many fried hot dogs as a kid.
Yes, my mother fried them. But she was an awful cook.
Anyhow, my grandfather was a meat packer and this article caused me to think of what we called these sausages. We called them "hot dogs" the American standard word, but my father would call them Wieners. His father was of 100% Westphalian extraction and had grown up speaking German. My father could speak it too, but sort of kept that to himself, like many other things in his very quiet personality. Anyhow, maybe that's why my father used that term for the little mild sausages.
The packing house did make them. Apparently they made a lot of them during World War Two, as the Army ordered them. When the war ended the contract for them was suddenly canceled and it turned out to be a big problem for the packing house, as the Army wouldn't order them with the added red dye that is what actually causes them to be that color. That was an unnecessary added expense, in the Army's view.
But not for civilians. The hot dogs turned out to be hard to sell to grocery stores as they weren't the expected pink. Without it, they're white.
I love sausages, FWIW. It's probably one of the things that will get me in the end, but then I don't have the American expectation of living perfectly fit until I'm 120 years old. But I'm not keen on Wieners. Brots, yes, other sausages, you bet. But these aren't my favorite.
There was of course headline news this day in 1924:
And the change in how Federal oil resources were administered was a huge one.
But it's the clothing ad that drew my attention:
"Best dressed men of all nations"?
Nobody would claim that now.
The Townsend Hotel, which was dilapidated by the time I was a kid, was opening. It was no doubt a great hotel at the time. Its café remained in use until it closed in the 1970s, just after the Petroleum Club moved. The café remained good until it closed, and was popular with men who worked downtown.
The Stratton's as realtors would carry on to the present day.
The Townsend remained abandoned from the 80s until it was refurbished as the current Natrona County Courthouse. It's now the Townsend Justice Center.
My mother was more of a music fan than my father. My father's record collection consisted a few albums he had bought after, I'm pretty sure, my parents bought a very large and heavy combination radio and stereo set. It's a massively substantial piece of furniture. The records he purchased were all of military marches. Nothing else.
My mother had a pretty extensive set of 45 rpm records, or singles as they were called, which weren't really singles but which had one song each on each side. I should commit more of them to digital. They included a lot of Elvis Pressley, and some jazz, and some odds and ends. She later bought some albums that were from the 60s, but they were people like Tom Jones.
Musically, FWIW, I can recall The Lawrence Welk Show being a weekly staple in the house. I can barely recall The Ed Sullivan Show playing from time to time, which must mean that my father watched it on rare occasion. It ran until 1971.
Carrying this forward, or over, or whatever it would be just a bit, my father's father died on October 9, 1949. He was 47. I'd been told by one of my aunts that it was on her birthday, but it was the day after her birthday when he died. Close enough to burn in an indelible mark, I'm sure.
That aunt was born in 1931, which would have made her 17 or 18 at the time of his death.
His youngest son, my father's brother, was born in 1936, which would have made him 12 or 13, which is a bit older than I recalled. It's still pretty young, however. My father was born in 1929, which would have made him 19 or 20, older than I recalled, but it makes sense in context. In both these instances, I think it's the younger age, 12 and 19, that would be correct. My father would have just completed junior college, as they called it at the time. His oldest sister, born in 1926 (the same year my mother was born) had been married three years and was living in Nebraska. She was the only married sibling, naturally enough, at the time.
My married aunt would come back to Casper when her husband graduated from dental school. He'd grown up at least partially in Nebraska, but had strong Casper family connections, but I'm not sure how that had come about.
My other aunt would go on to the University of Wyoming, something unusual for the time. She didn't graduate. I never thought much of that, but as the family story developed following her death the rest of us ultimately learned of a trauma that would have been about the time of her senior year there, so her failure to graduate, surprising for an extremely intelligent women, make sense.
My father's mother died in 1973, she was 71 at the time. That'd definitely older than I recalled (I had thought it was 65). Somewhat unusually, both she and my father's father were born in the same year, 1901, making them about a decade younger than my mother's parents. They married in 1923, when then both would have been 21 or 22. It's interesting that the oldest of their children wasn't born until 1926, which at that time was a little bit of a delay.
I would have been ten when she died. I can definitely recall it, and having been up at the hospital while she was ill.
Best remembered for Brand New Key, she was, in some ways, a slightly earlier, and somewhat less known, version of the same sort of singer than Linda Ronstadt would become, even preforming some of the same songs.
She performed at Woodstock, still so young that her mother went with her.
What Have They Done to My Song Ma is one I recall from my childhood for some reason, dimly recalling that my mother liked it.
Still not ancient by current standards, but not 58 years of age, either.
That was, FWIW, the same year my parents married.
His wife, my grandmother, died at age 89, however, which is a little younger than I remembered. It was in 1979, which is later than I remember, which means that my recollection didn't make mathematical sense, either. I was in high school at the time, but I don't recall it that way.
That also means that she lived long enough to see one of her children die, which I knew, and two of them fall into severe illness accompanied by mental decline, which must have been hard in the extreme to endure.
That's correct. Just months shy of its 70th Anniversary, SI laid off everyone after failing to pay its licensing fees to the magazine's parent company.
Print magazines are rapidly becoming dinosaurs, as we all know. Many of the greats, such as The New Republic, Time or Newsweek, aren't what they once were. For that matter, many don't print at all. Newsweek, for instance, does not.
Sic transit glori mundi.
My father subscribed to it. It came to the house, along with Time, Newsweek, People, Life and Look (when there was a Look). After we perused them, they went down to his office. I loved Time and Newsweek (People is trash) and I recall pretty vividly observing South Vietnam's fall as I read them, at 12 years old.
I always looked through Sports Illustrated when I was young, although I think the infamous swimsuit issue, which is and was soft pornography, didn't seem to make an appearance at the house, or the office either.
It was, and is, a great magazine, covering every sport imaginable.
Wyoming teams appeared on the cover more than once.
As an adult, I lost interest in the magazine, although remained a great one when I occasionally viewed it. A college friend of mine took up giving me their swimsuit calendar every year for a while when I was a college student, with the great model of that era being Kathy Ireland, who had the Kate Upton role of her era. Interestingly, both Ireland and Upton are devout Christians (Upton has a cross tattoo on her hand), which given their swimsuit issue role is a bit of a surprise, but perhaps no more than the fact that I had those calendars on my walls during those years, and certainly wouldn't now.
As noted, save for its annual descent into cheesecake, it was a great magazine.
Happy Days, the legendary sitcom, appeared to mixed reviews.
1974 Happy Days cast.
Clearly riffing off of 1950s nostalgia, less than 20 years after the end of the decade, the show had more or less been laid a path to success by the recent film American Graffiti, which also featured Ron Howard portraying a major character. Even before that, however, nostalgia had seen the rise of the rise of the band Sha Na Na which appeared in 1969 in sufficient time in which to appear at Woodstock.
American Graffiti, as we've noted here before, actually takes place in 1962, not the 1950s, but its not recalled that way. Howard, for his part, had grown up on television as Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, which had run from 1960 to 1968, but which is also commonly thought as taking place in the 1950s, even though there's no effort whatsoever to suggest that in the show, and contemporary audiences would not have taken it that way.
As the name of Happy Days implied, the American public, troubled by the news of the ear, or perhaps of the entire 1960s, conceived of the 50s as "happy days", irrespective of what they had actually been. The series would run for a decade. During that time, it had a pretty substantial impact on the pop culture of the era. My family didn't regularly watch it, probably as they'd all lived through the 50s and weren't nostalgic about it, but I can recall the revival of 1950s rock and roll it caused. And at the junior high I was attending, there were dances called "sock hops", which was a revival of a term strongly associated with the 1950s.
College shock hop, 1948. Sock hops were called that as students took off their shoes to dance on gym floors.
I was too shy to attend them.
On the same day, a panel of experts testified that the 18.5 minute gap in the now infamous Nixon tape conversation with H. R. Halderman of June 20, 1972, was made by serial erasures.
In Indonesia, a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka turned into a riot featuring an attack, oddly, on Chinese Indonesians.
The disappointing Comet Kohoutek made its closest pass by Earth. I recall going outside to look for it and, like thousands of others, being disappointed by not really being able to see much in spite of predictions to the contrary.
John Wayne visited Harvard at the invitation of The Harvard Lampoon to debate students on his all but forgotten film, McQ. He traveled to Harvard Square in an armored personnel carrier from Ft. Devens. Native Americans interrupted his travels to protest events at Wounded Knee. Wayne ignored a question about supporting the Hollywood blacklist.
All of which shows why people were nostalgic about the 1950s.
Mira qué bonita era by Julio Romero de Torres, 1895. Depiction of a wake in Spain.
I didn't have him as a teacher in high school, but I certainly knew of him.1 Somehow or another, I also knew that a student that was in school with us, and who my cousins knew, was not only his daughter, but also one of his students. Apparently that was awkward.
I don't do a good job of keeping track of former teachers. I probably couldn't tell you where a single one of them was, even the ones I really liked, let alone those I only sort of knew by association. In his case, there was our classmate, whom I also didn't know (she was a couple of years ahead of me), but he was also known to our parents. Without knowing for sure, in looking at it, I think that must have been because he was from a Catholic family here in town.
My classmate died the year before last. She was 62.
I read his obituary as he was so well known locally. And then I recalled there were bits and pieces of his story I'd picked up over the years.
His wife was also a teacher.
Sometime after I left high school, the couple apparently civilly divorced.2 He remarried, and apparently to an apparently significantly younger women whom I take was also a teacher. According to the obit, they had a child after he retired, who would now be about 31. He would have been about 56 when she was born. I can dimly recall my parents and my father's siblings talking about this as well, mostly in a somewhat bemused manner, given the difficulties of raising an infant, in their view, when you are that old.
When my classmate died, her mother was mentioned in the obituary. Indeed, her obituary characterizes both of her parents as loving, and contains praise of them.
His obituary mentioned both of his daughters by his first marriage, and then goes on about his second. His wife, the mother of my classmate, isn't mentioned at all. The obituary is profuse on his latter "marriage", calling that individual, named in the obituary, the "love of his life" amongst other things.
Of course, the dead don't write their obituaries. If they did, who knows how they'd read? We might all fear how they'd be penned. I've read plenty where a "first" and "second" spouse are mentioned. This one is profuse on his love of one woman that he had children by and which the civil law would regard as his wife, but totally silent as to his wife who was the mother of my classmate. My classmate's obituary mentions her, and kindly, using the Americanism "step" to describe her as her "stepmother", which is polite, but the second "wife" of a divorced person isn't anything, relationship wise, to a child of the "first" marriage at all.3 Children, of a later marriage of any kind are, of course, as they're related by blood, i.e., genetically. Of course, children born out of wedlock to an illicit partner, to which I am in no way comparing this situation other than to note it, are "half" siblings as well.4
It must be a later child of the second union that wrote the obituary, as it concluded with the funeral details, those being an apparently civil funeral, followed by an "Irish wake", the latter something not really understood by Americans. A real wake comes before, not after, the ceremony, and the body of the deceased is present. Indeed, the body is key to the wake, and the dead's family and friends do not allow the body to be left alone. Prayer for the dead is a feature of it, but there is also food and drink and even courting, which in part has to do with the fact that life goes on, but in part because in more natural societies people live much closer to death than they do in our false one.
Everywhere, real wakes have much diminished.5
But then, so has our understanding of, and appreciation of the metaphysical and the existential, and as most people do not dwell deeply on those topics, and the culture has drifted many of those who drift with it bear no fault for having done so.
There's no Irish wakes without prayer, the deceased, and a sense of the next world having stepped into this one. In our age, however, we expect this world and how we define it to step into the next one.
1. In no small part because he was a well put together athletic man who drew hall monitor duty, but didn't seem to care for it much. Indeed, if you went by him in the hall, when he had it, he didn't bother to ask you where you were going.
2. I'll admit that this entry disregards the topic of Catholic annulment. Did they obtain one? No idea.
To add to that, do I know anything whatsoever about the circumstances of their "divorce" and what brought it about, including who brought it about. No I don't.
3. The etymology of the prefix "step" goes back to the 8th Century and denoted an orphan. It was later extended in Old English to connote a remarriage of a widow.
Some "step" parents, it might be noted, particularly in the case of an early death of an actual parent, or an abandonment by one of them, really step up to the plate and become effectively de facto parents.
The Pogues song Body of an American gives a good description of Irish wakes and how they can be. The movie Road To Perdition, however, gives a very good depiction of a traditional wake, complete with the body iced.
4. Again, as the fraud of civil divorce is so widely recognized as real in the Western World, I am in no way comparing the children of illicit affairs to the children of later contracted civil marriages.
5. I've been to a real wake once, for a deceased second cousin, and it was horrific. My father, who was 1/2 Irish, and 1/2 Westphalian by descent, but whose family did not retain any Irish customs, detested them.
6. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,
and let light perpetual shine upon them.
Thou art worthy to praised, O God, in Zion,
and to thee shall prayer be offered in Jerusalem.
Hear my prayer,
for to thee shall all flesh come.
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,
and let light perpetual shine upon them.
Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
When I put this up on January 1, I also posted this calendar image on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub. Somebody came by and remarked on how tiny the glass the young woman is holding was.
And indeed it was.
Coca-Cola for years came in a 6.5 oz bottle, not 12. It's interesting to reflect on as it really says something about proportions.
Coke's iconic bottle was a 6.5 oz bottle until 1955.
Its competitor Pepsi started using 12 oz bottles in 1934. In fact, that as one of its marketing devices, as it came in a 12 oz bottle, having a jingle that went
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot
Twelve full ounces, that's a lot!
Twice as much for a nickel, too
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
It says something about the quality of Coke, or at least the original recipe of it, that people would in fact pay the same amount for half of what they'd get if they'd bought Pepsi instead. It also says something about soda in general that it's so cheap to make, the added 6 oz of product really doesn't do anything to the economic bottom line.
In 1955, Coke switched to 10 oz bottles and 12 oz bottles and offered a "Family" sized bottle of 26 oz. The move was not without internal company controversy, however. One company executive stated that “bringing out another bottle was like being unfaithful to your wife.”
But that 55 10 or 12 oz bottle isn't gigantic.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, when you went to a fast food restaurant and got a soda, large was a 12 oz serving with ice. Starting in the 80s, somehow, that doubled, with stores, particularly convenience stores, advertising what was essentially double that.
24 oz of Coke is a lot.
And it went on from there.
McDonald's, when it was first getting up and running, served Coke in 7 oz cups. After Coke switched, it started serving it in 16 oz cups. In 1980, 7-11 introduced the "Big Gulp" which weighed in at an absurd 32 oz. In 86, 7-11 introduced the 44 oz Super Big Gulp, and everyone went down that road thereafter.
Indeed, now, getting a small or medium soda draught is really what a person should do, and on the rare occasions when I get fast food, I try to get that. But most people don't. Even little kids get the 55 gallon size soda drink.
At least by some measures, New Years are supposed to be periods of introspection. If so, the annual arrival of New Year’s this year certainly has been for me.
2023, by which I really mean the period from October 2022 to the present, has been the worst year of my life, and that’s saying something.
Probably only people who know me really well would know that I’ve had, at least by western world standards, a rough life to some degree. My teenage years and early (20s) adulthood was overshadowed by the physical and accompanying mental decline of my mother, something that still hangs over me like a dark cloud in a lot of ways. It certainly sprung me from being a child at age 12 to an adult at age 13 virtually overnight, and not in ways that were good really, but in ways you can’t ever get back. My relationship with my mother really didn’t recover in some ways until she was near death, and it never recovered in some ways. I’m still working on that, trying to understand that what happened to her wasn’t her fault, or anyone else’s.
Added to that, the death of my father at age 62 was an irreparable loss to me that I’ve also never recovered from and won’t be able to. As I noted here the other day, being an only child meant that I didn’t have a sibling to help endure this loss with, and when he died the person then closest to me in the world died, leaving me with an obligation to my mother that was a very heavy burden under the circumstances.
In short, things haven’t been always a treat.
But then, are they for anyone?
It may in fact be the case that everyone’s life is rough, to at least varying extents. Maybe its best if you don’t even recognize that fact.
Anyhow, in October, 2022, as I’ve noted here before, I had colon surgery, following a colonoscopy that revealed a polyp too big to be removed in that process. I really waited well beyond the age at which you should have your first colonoscopy, which was inexcusable on my part. Had I gone in earlier (a lesson for everyone who might read this), the surgery would never have been necessary. Ultimately the polyp proved to be precancerous, and was “as close to cancer as it can be without being cancer”.
I was 59 years old when I went in for that and that’s the very first instance of surgery, other than I suppose oral surgery to have a broken molar and the nearby wisdom tooth, taken out. What I didn’t really grasp, but should have even due to the oral surgery, is that I wasn’t going to bounce back right away. I expected to. I didn’t even really expect to be out of work for more than a couple of days, in spite of everything that everyone told me.
Well, I’ve never fully recovered from the surgery and I’m not going to, that’s clear by now. I notice it mostly in the mornings. I just can’t eat. Things make me sick, no matter what they are, as a rule. The onset of late in life lactose intolerance has made that even worse. For decades what I ate for breakfast was cereal with milk. I can’t really eat that anymore.
So be it, but what really surprised me was the onset of really deep fatigue. I was simply worn out from the surgery and it lingered for months. I was tired like I never had been before in my life.
To compound it, when the diagnostic films were done for the colon surgery, a MRI was done all the way up to my neck which revealed I had a sizable polyp on my thyroid. The same surgeon recommended that the thyroid come out and seemed to look at the question as to what to do as almost absurd. I was so surprised, and so beat up from the first surgery, that I went to my regular doctor for a second opinion. He referred me to an endocrinologist. That doctor had no qualms at all about what needed to be done. It needed out, the risk of cancer was so high, I was informed, that it was almost certainly cancer.
Great.
I ended up having a partial thyroidectomy in Denver. I was extremely hesitant about the whole thing.
Well, the polyp turned out to be benign, which overjoyed the medicos but made me feel like I'd done something I could have avoided. After surgery, I hoped to avoid medication (I've never had daily medications), but wasn't lucky there either.
Since the thyroid surgery, and particularly at first, on a lot of days I've just been in a fog and tired all the time. It’s a difficult thing to describe, as it’s a feeling that’s internal. I don’t think anyone else noticed it at all, but plowing through my days, and that’s what it felt like, I just didn't feel right. I complained a lot about it to my wife, but in retrospect now I realize that if you complain a lot about certain topics, it become routine and won’t be paid too much attention to, particularly if there are no external manifestations that are obvious.
There were in fact external manifestations, but they weren’t obvious to anyone but me. Normally, I look forward to the weekends and feel disappointed if I have to work on Saturdays, which I often must do. I was so tired and dragged down, however, that I actually started to look forward to having to be in my office on Saturday. I’d drag myself out, a little, to go fishing and hunting, but my feet felt leaden and I just wasn’t having the fun I normally did, the exception being when my kids were here.
I just went in for a follow-up and upon examination just recently. At that time the doctor asked me how I was doing and I reported what I was feeling and experiencing. He gave me a physical examination. I didn’t have bloodwork yet, as doing this on December 26 meant that I didn’t have the chance to get it done. Based on the physical examination, they determined they needed to up my meds. “Everything will be fine”, I was told.
The bloodwork came back and showed everything to be just what it should be. They immediately cancelled the doubling of the meds.
Long story short, what’s going on is post-surgery depression, a thing I didn't know even existed.
This is, apparently, particularly associated with thyroid surgeries, although most people don’t experience it. To just sort of note what’s out there, here’s a medical journal report on it:
Thyroid surgery is usually recommended for thyroid cancer and can be to remove one lobe of the thyroid (partial thyroidectomy) or to remove the entire thyroid (total thyroidectomy). Thyroidectomy may also be recommended for certain non-cancerous disorders including hyperthyroidism and large goiters. The results of a total thyroidectomy is hypothyroidism which requires lifelong treatment with a thyroid hormone pill. Several recent reports have highlighted a decrease in the quality of life and an increase in depression in some patients with hypothyroidism due to thyroid surgery. Therefore, the authors have examined if there is an association between thyroid surgery and a new onset of depression.
Great.
Apparently post-surgery depression is a thing with older adults anyhow, and I’m 60. But to make it even niftier, depression is even more associated with colon surgery. Another medical journal notes
The prevalence of anxiety, depression and PTSD appears to be high in patients who have undergone colorectal surgery. Younger patients and women are particularly at risk.
I don’t know the cause of all of this, and there could be a bunch of them that occur to me, some of which actually wouldn’t explain it in my case. But being honest with myself, one of the things has to do with a family history and my early life.
Anxiety of a type is a condition which occurs on my mother’s side of my family. Not everyone has it by any means, but some do and at least in one case, my maternal grandfather, it was really noticeable. He was by all accounts an extremely intelligent man, but as a young man he suffered enormously from anxiety which kept him from building a career at an age, in that era in particular, a person normally did, and which in turn kept him from marrying at an age when people normally did. My grandmother was his fiancé forever, and its actually a bit surprising that she waited for him, but then she had her own background haunting her, that being that she was highly educated and intelligent, but her own mother was not particularly fond of her, and was open about it.
Ultimately my grandfather found a career in real estate in Montreal, and did well until the Great Depression. When the Great Depression hit, and funds trailed off, he turned to drink, something that plagued him for years. Remarkably, probably in the late 40s or early 50s, a Catholic Priest apparently told him to stop drinking and he did then and there, cold turkey. Even more remarkably, my Grandmother suffered a miscarriage with what would have been her eighth child and went to a Priest, maybe the same one, and asked if she could stop performing the Marital Debt. He said she could. That means that my grandfather, for the last ten or more years of his life, didn’t drink anymore, which is where he had taken refuge from stress, and also lived in a sexless marriage, which must have added enormously to his stress. Amazingly, he seems to have actually pulled his act together, and lived out the balance of his life as a happy guy before dying at age 58. His siblings, however, never got to where they trusted him and that ended up being taken out, after his death, on his widow and surviving children.
That’s an extreme example, of course, but there are a couple of others. Something afflicted my mother, but nobody has a clue as to what it was. She recovered from a condition pronounced to be terminal, and therefore the early diagnosis was either wrong, or her recovery was miraculous (which is what I think it was). Her recovery, while real, was never complete, however. As another example, one of my cousins on this side of the family, named after my mother, and one year older than me, was so conscious of anxiety being a factor in her makeup, she purposely chose a scientific lab career in order to avoid it. In her early 60s, the impacts of this have not hit her, but she’s dying of cancer presently.
I know now that anxiety has impacted me my entire adult live, although largely unacknowledged by me. I don’t recall it being a factor at all until I was an adult, but the trauma of what I went through as a teen probably didn't help, long term. The first time I really experienced it was when I worried about going to basic training, but I got over it quickly when I was there. After that, it became clear to me that I experienced travel anxiety, which is a condition that is something that uniquely occurs in some people. It’s hard to explain. Ironically, I've traveled in my adult life a huge amount, and generally like where I'm going, once I'm there.
It’s when I became a litigator that I really became conscious of anxiety, however.
Litigation is an extremely stressful career as it is. Anxiety runs rampant in the field. According to the ABA, for lawyers in general, a study revealed:
•64 percent of lawyers report having anxiety.
•28 percent lawyers suffered from depression
•19 percent of lawyers had severe anxiety
•11.4 percent of lawyers had suicidal thoughts in the previous year
And that’s just regular lawyers.
There have been study after study on this topic, and they all come about the same, with some coming out much worse. I’ve seen one article that has dissed these findings, but just one. My guess is that probably double these figures (except for the self reporting anxiety, which would amount to a statistical impossibility) would be the case for litigators.
Indeed, I’ve long noted that most litigators actually won’t try a case. I have tried a lot of cases, and one of the reasons why is that I’ve always been conscious of the duty not to allow a person’s anxiety to keep them from dutifully fulfilling their duty to their client. I”ve sometimes worried, in fact, that I might possibly try more cases than others in order to counter the fact that anxiety might be infusing my views, but I don't think that's the case. Anyhow, anxiety in litigation is so bad, as noted, that a majority of litigators actually won’t try a case. I've always just been aware that it was there, can impact how you think, and set it aside.
In other contexts, I’ve long seen the impact of anxiety working itself out in destructive ways in the legal field. I’ve known lawyers who were drug addicts or alcoholics, or who engaged in other destructive life choices. I’ve known two who quit practicing due to anxiety, one self-declaring that and the other just not being able to overcome an addiction to alcohol otherwise. One really well respected plaintiff’s lawyer actually disappeared from his household and family for a couple of weeks until he was found in a hotel in another state where he’d gone on a profound days long bender. Three I’ve been aware of just disappeared, two resurfacing in a seminary and one in the People’s Republic of China.
This all being the case, while I’ve been a successful lawyer, law probably wasn’t a field that I should have gone into. One lawyer friend of mine from Germany, whom I remarked to on this, dismissed this, saying “you are an intellectual, your choice was to become a lawyer or a priest”, which is an interesting way of looking at it, but had I been smarter, I’d probably have chosen the path of my scientific cousin in order to avoid the stress.
It doesn't matter now. Like the Hyman Roth character in Godfather II, "This is the business we've chosen". And by and large, it worked out well. Being honest with myself, I've been able to do a lot of interesting things, and have constantly learned new fields and topics, all the time. If you are an autodidatic polymath, it's hard to imagine a field that would actually offer so much as the law. And if you do like visiting obscure places, at least prior to COVID, it really allowed you to.
In saying all of this, what I’m saying now is that looking back on the past horrible year, I can look back decades and see the points at which the stress rose up and made me act in ways I never would have, although never in a professional sense. Each time, really, was a cry for help, but cries for help don’t really come through that way if they’re not posed that way. And sometimes, there is no existential help, you just need to pick up your pack and carry on.
This past year, however, with the fog of post-surgery depression setting in, I was really unaware of it.
I should have been, as I didn’t mentally feel right. I did keep mentioning that “I feel slow”, but that means you feel slow. The real warning was when I absolutely exploded on two partners who have been keeping a long running irritating argument going for years, permanently ending it. It needed to end, but blowing up on them was the wrong thing to do, and in retrospect I’m amazed that I wasn’t told to take a hike.
In Catholic theology there’s something called “the problem of evil”, which boils down to “why does God allow bad things to happen”. There are various answers to that question, but a universal partial response is that God doesn’t allow something to occur if he cannot bring good out of it. In our temporary lives that can be awfully hard to accept, but I believe it to be true. In this instance, I can now in fact see this at work. In a way, this allows me to go back, but clear minded, to the beginning of my career as I now approach its end, but to be a kinder, more thoughtful person, and a more grateful one. I do believe that people can and do change if they wish to, and while it’s not as if I’m now going to become an Iron Man competitor, or something, I am in a way following a bit of the same path taken by a friend who was very bitter about his legal career, and openly so, but in the last few years has become very grateful for it. I have a lot to be thankful for.
I also have the chance now to beat anxiety that was lurking there, rather than to sort of give into PTSD, which is basically what I have had in a way. That condition, known as combat fatigue originally, or shell shock, has been determined to be much wider than originally thought, and the frequent comparisons of litigation to combat are pretty accurate. But knowing what’s what is frankly more than half the battle.
Part of that also I think is following a bit of what Alcoholics Anonymous and other addition programs have in their “twelve steps”. I’m not saying I need to join AA or NA, or something but rather the page AA took from the advice of a Catholic Priest, which is similar to what Jews do on Yom Kippur, is to apologize to people you’ve hurt. I’ve done that with four people already, which is probably the set I needed to. But beyond that, part of it is being more tolerant to the people and conditions we routinely encounter, something that is difficult in a judgmental profession like the law.
So, in the end, I’m grateful to have an outside professional let me know what was going on, and that its connection to surgery, twice will remediate, and indeed already are. But beyond that, I’m grateful for the door it opened and which I’m walking through to be more aware.
Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn into that office. Only three votes were cast against his appointment.
The Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act was signed into law in order to allocate petroleum distribution and control prices. This came about, of course, due to the Arab Oil Embargo.
The effort at price control and allocation would prove to be a failure, as generally such measures prove to be.
The House of Representatives passed a bill to put the US on Daylight Savings Time year around. A similar bill recently passed the Senate, and then went nowhere.
This act passed and went into effect in 1974, and very rapidly it went from being popular to unpopular. I can remember the reason why. As a kid, we now went to school in darkness.
It escapes me why these bills always choose Daylight Savings Time over natural time.
"The Battle of the Sexes" took place in the Houston Astrodome between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King won three straight sets.
King and Riggs prior to the match.
This event was a big deal at the time, and I can recall my parents watching the television coverage of it. It's always seemed odd to me as Riggs, who had been a tennis great in his youth, was well past his prime, while King was in hers. Riggs, however, was quite the promoter and much of the attention can be attributed to that.
It was, up until that point, the most watched tennis match of all time.
Jim Croce, age 30, was killed along with five others when a chartered Beechcraft E18S hit a tree during takeoff from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Louisiana.
Croce was a well known pop singer at the time. When in grade school, one year we had to learn his Time In A Bottle song for a performance of some sort. Perhaps it's for that reason, but I've never liked that song since then, and I didn't like it then. Or maybe its just the song. I have always liked his Leroy Brown song.
The Arming and Departure of the Knights (of the Round Table), a tapestry. I feared Uncle Mike was going into the Kennedy at Camelot point of view of things, but he didn't. This tapestry, as idealized as it is, might serve as a pretty good reflection of the 60s and of the Arthurian legend, which features adultery, armed conflict, and defeat. Not cheery.
I really like Uncle Mike's blog. It's one of two I have up here by New Yorkers (the other being City Father), and on a website like this you're going to get some nostalgia, like it or not, but it can serve to really reflect how our recollections of the past are pretty messed up in some instances.
Uncle Mike's essay starts off:
The Summer of 1963 was a beginning for some, and an ending for many more. America would never quite be so young again as it was that year.
The essay goes on from there to note a bunch of stuff that happened in 1963, and does a really nice job of it. I was prepared to condemn it, but I can't upon reading it. The part I'd still object to is the opening line. "Never quite be so young again"?
Well, maybe, but in part because 1963 was on the cusp of the real 1960s. 1963, quite frankly, was in the late 1950s, era was. The 1960s, as I've written here before, actually started in 1964 or 1965. I guess that means I'm placing myself as being born in the cultural 50s, but I'd also note that the real 1950s featured the Korean War, the Cold War, conscription, and a host of other bad stuff.
A lot of which were going on in the early part of the calendar 60s, some of which Uncle Mike notes.
Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023
Eh?
The view of the world that seemingly many people have about the past. Even as this great Rockwell was being painted, the greatest war the world has ever fought was raging, which was part of Rockwell's "why we fight" point. We'd win, but bring it to an end by using an atomic bomb, something that stained our morality in the cause and which has been a burden on the world every since. And at the time that this was painted, there was no freedom to sit where you wanted, if you were black, in much of the US. The "innocence" of our past is never as innocent as we might suppose.
I remember growing up that we were losing the Vietnam War and inflation was destroying my parent's savings.
I don't like a lot of the way things are headed now, but we weren't living in a Normal Rockwell painting at any point in the past.
Nikki Haley was born in 1972, which means that she's a decade younger than me (thank goodness the GOP has some candidates that aren't 120 years old). That means that she grew up in the 70s and 80s.
I don't know if I have a more accurate recollection of being young than other people seemingly do, or if I lack a gene which causes us to romanticize the period of our youth. Either way, the 1970s weren't exactly all skittles and beer, or whatever the proper analogy was. Inflation was rampant, we lost the Vietnam War, Iran took our embassy staff hostage. . . you recall all that, Nikki?
Life wasn't actually all that simple if your parents were constantly worried about the price of absolutely everything. The cost of gasoline was a weekly topic. Watergate's investigations were on the news.
Do I remember how simple life was?
Yes, because I was a kid. For most kids, life is a joy because you are a kid. Same with being a teenager, really.
I was in my late teens and early 20s in the early 80s. For part of that time I lived at home, and I hunted and fished as I would. Sure, life was simple, because I had no financial worries, being a single guy with no responsibilities whatsoever.
Even at that stage, however, your DNA will come in and pull the brakes and levers. Pretty soon you are worrying, or should be, about your future, including your economic future. And you'll start to look for what modern boneheaded lexiconites call "a partner", meaning a spouse. It's the way of the world.
None of that is simple.
So was that time about faith, family, and country? Maybe where Nikki lived, but where I lived, probably less so. Everyone, pretty much, where I lived at the time, and where I still do, was a cultural Christian, and the mainline Protestant churches were still strong. This was before the onset of Southern Populism brought about by that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan. I'm Catholic, of course, but the shift was notable. To people just a little older than me there was disruption in the Catholic Church as reformers came in and took out the altar rails, etc., but I didn't hear much about that at home really, probably as I was a kid. Now that I'm far past being a kid, I don't really appreciate a lot that was done to the Church in that period, by which I do not mean Vatican II.
Anyhow, people were at least culturally Christian here, and this is the least religious state in the United States. People who weren't Christians were likely Mormons. So I suppose she has a point there.
On family, I suppose, at that time, most families were intact. Roe v. Wade and Hugh Hefner had started the march to Obergefell, so there were things occurring that were destructive going all the way back to the 1950s, if not before. The 70s was the real heyday of the Sexual Revolution, and it permitted the entire atmosphere of the culture. Playboy was sold at the grocery stores in the checkout lines, with the rack designed to camouflage most of the girl on the cover. Moral decay hadn't set in, in the really perverse ways that would take off in the 1990s, but it had started.
What about "country".
Well, amongst the young, in the 70s, not so much, and yes. I was in the National Guard for most of the 1980s, but frankly we didn't wear our uniforms off duty if we could avoid it, and we didn't bring it up in casual conversation. Part of that was to avoid getting a lecture from somebody our own age, a lingering aspect of the Vietnam War. The military recovered under Reagan, but social attitudes weren't what they became later, where everyone was thanking you for your service. More likely, somebody was going to ask "why?" if you were in the service, or maybe even give you a lecture.
None of which is to say that we don't have a moral dumpster fire going on in our society right now. But what led us to that was long in coming and will take real work to address. It isn't as if Joe Biden came in, and it was like electing Caligula. Our prior President, after all, has a history of behavior that the late Hugh Hefner would have approved of.
The point?
Well, Haley brings up some valid things about the current reprehensible state of affairs. But it would require a lot more work than voting Joe Biden out. It's a pretty deep cultural operation, really.
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