Alarms

            In last week’s post I made light of the household maintenance and repairs that I accomplished. Well, since then the universe has gotten revenge for my disrespectfully smart-ass attitude.

 

            It started Tuesday night, sometime after midnight. Kim climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen, where she heard a loud whining noise coming from the basement. We checked the furnace room – nothing. After a bit of searching we found it, in a little closet next to my desk. When I opened the door, the noise was loud and a light on a gizmo plugged into the wall a blasted a bright red. The gizmo said, “Tank Alert,” and I recalled from my orientation years ago that this was where waste was pumped up to the septic tank. Fortunately, with the door closed we could manage a restless sleep in our bedroom upstairs. Kim was lucky that she could remove her hearing aids.

 

            The next morning, we called a guy whose number we had on our “Maintenance” list, and he was out to see us that morning. He said that we needed to replace the pump – that they all need replacing after about ten years. He happened to have one in his truck. It took him a couple of hours, doing stuff that my college education did not prepare me to do. I no longer take it for granted when I successfully flush a toilet.

 

            That night at about 2 a.m. we were again awakened, and by a very similar sound. We traced it to the furnace room, where a device about the size of a sandwich had noticed water on the floor and was letting us know. This was an easy fix: lift the device off the floor. The moisture was condensation from the cold-water pipes, which I had wrapped after a similar incident. I vowed to rewrap them and to move the little device. What’s next, I laughed – smoke alarms? 

 

            That night, as we were watching television, the smoke alarms went off all over the house, notifying much of the county that the house is on fire and we should evacuate. We opened a bunch of windows and looked for flames and smoke. Nothing. It was probably a battery issue, but we have eight smoke alarms, with two different kinds of batteries, and my liberal arts degree did not offer a solution, especially with me in near-panic mode, so we knocked on our neighbor’s door, and Rick and Sandy came over to help. Rick quickly learned, or he already knew, that in order to silence them, they all had to be disconnected. He set about doing that in a process involved some trial and error, but he figured it out. The silence was beautiful. My role in solving the problem was moving the ladder around. Sandy called her electrician and left a message, and I did the same using a number I had saved. My guy called me back at 7:30 in the morning, and by 8:15 he was here. He let me know that smoke alarms generally have to be replaced every eight to ten years (didn’t know that). He had six in his truck and promised to come back and install the remaining two the next morning, which he did. I vowed to be more conscientious about replacing the batteries every year – probably one failed battery set off all the alarms. I may be able to do it without help. I will stockpile the two types of batteries – AA and 9-volt – that I will need.

 

            So, today we had our annual furnace check-up, hopefully sidestepping another late-night alarm. And I asked myself, what other alarms could go off? We get soft chimes when the refrigerator door is left ajar – not laud enough to awaken us. Our seatbelts warn us when they are not fashioned, but the car has to be running, and besides, the garage is far enough from the house.

 

            Our toilet was plugged for a few days, and I used a low-tech plunger, plus some hot water and vinegar, and I got it unplugged in less than a week. The only alarm was in my frustrated voice. Can’t imagine what a plugged toilet alarm would sound like. Probably whatever I had deposited in the toilet was sympathetic after hearing all the alarms and decided, finally, to move on.

High Points

 

            Kim’s daughter and her family at dinner would sometimes exchange the “high point” and the “low point” of their day. Maybe they made this up, or maybe they copied it from a movie – I don’t know. I know that my family didn’t do it, for announcing a “high point” of my day or week at dinner would open the door to a barrage of sarcasm that I would just as soon avoid.

 

            But it’s an exercise worth pursuing. Kim and I don’t do it, but maybe it’s time we did. Anyway, here are a few examples of my high points for the last week or so.

 

Fixing the television. Kim and I were watching a movie on Amazon Prime when suddenly the image on the screen froze. I pushed a few of my favorite buttons on the remote – nothing. I tried Netflix – also nothing. Turned off everything and turned it on again – nothing. So, I telephoned our cable company and got a human being fairly quickly. She said she would turn off my internet connection and turn it on again, and in about five minutes everything should be working. She would send me a text when it was reconnected. She did. And we resumed watching our movie, thanks to my television repair efforts.

 

Finding the popcorn. Sometimes Kim and I snack when watching evening television, and we decided one night to make popcorn. We hadn’t done that for several months, and Kim told me that we had somehow run out of popcorn. Undeterred, I got down on my hands and knees in front of the Lazy Susan, and yes! – there it was! To understand why this was a high point, you have to be aware of my affliction with Male Pattern Blindness. Not only do I miss what’s right in front of my eyes (How often has Kim advised me, “Use your eyes!”), but I also seem to enjoy putting things away where neither of us can find them. But that night, I found something that Kim couldn’t see! And I could not resist telling her, “Use your eyes!” The problem, of course, was not with her eyes, but with her knees – she had trouble getting down to see the whole bottom shelf of the Lazy Susan, where I had hidden the popcorn months ago.

 

Fixing the coffee grinder. It had simply stopped grinding, so I ordered another one. When it arrived, I found in its instruction manual where it said how to clean it. I followed the instructions for my broken grinder, which involved partially disassembling the machine, and I put it back together. It worked! High point! I put the new one back in the box and stored it in the basement. The next day I pushed the button to grind some more, and the machine was again dead. Kim stopped me from trying to fix it again and told me to go get the new one. Sort of a high point, as my responsibility was lifted. So, the experience yields two high points: one when I fix the grinder, and one when I throw it away.

 

Fortunately, I have several repair and maintenance high-point opportunities ahead. Twice this week, in the middle of the night, alarms went off in the basement of our house.

 

Caregiver bonus. The role of caregiver has its own rewards, but this high point involved a bonus. Kim often has a very sore back, and sometimes I can rub or massage it to help ease the pain. It feels good to help. Sometimes, in addition, I find myself noticing my hands touching Kim’s skin, and if I maneuver properly, I can feel her hair caressing my hand or, if I’m agile enough, my cheek. This gives an erotic boost to my caregiver high point.

 

My ten-year-old car hit 130,000 miles. Why that counts as a high point is not clear, but it was and is.

 

            It occurs to me, as I read this over, that I have achieved, through my writing, a genre called “Unintended Self-Parody.” This is one of the few things I share with Donald Trump.

 

            Low points? Just follow the news.

Go, Granny!

          I found the piece below on a website called Quora. I wish I’d written it.

A 96-year-old woman wrote this letter to her bank, and it became so funny that the bank manager decided to share it in the New York Times.

To whom it may concern,

            I’m writing to thank you for bouncing my check when I tried to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, only a few nanoseconds passed between when he deposited the check and when the funds finally arrived in my account. I’m referring, of course, to the automatic monthly transfer from my savings account, which has been set up for the past 31 years.

            I want to give you credit for catching that short gap of time and also for charging me a $30 penalty for the trouble you caused.

            I’m actually thankful because this incident made me rethink my financial habits. I realized that while I always answer your phone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I’m stuck with your impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded messages that don’t help at all. So from now on, I’ll deal only with a real person.

            From now on, my mortgage and loan payments will no longer be automatic. Instead, I will send a check to an employee at your bank who you will have to choose. No one else is allowed to open that envelope—it’s against the Postal Act.

            I’m attaching an Application Contact Status form that your chosen employee will need to fill out. It’s a long one, but it’s necessary because I want to know as much about them as your bank knows about me. They’ll also need to provide proof of their financial situation and medical history, signed by a Notary Public.

            Once this is all set up, I’ll give your employee a special PIN number for dealing with me. It will be 28 digits long—just like the number of button presses I have to do to check my account balance using your phone service. I’m just copying you, and they say imitation is the highest form of flattery.

            I’ll also be updating my voicemail. Here’s the menu you’ll need to follow if you call me:

Press 1: To make an appointment with me. Press 2: To ask about a missing payment. Press 3: To reach me in my living room if I’m there. Press 4: To reach me in my bedroom if I’m sleeping. Press 5: To reach me in the bathroom if I’m in there. Press 6: To reach my mobile if I’m not home. Press 7: To leave a message on my computer (password needed). Press 8: To go back to the main menu.

            If you need to make a complaint, I’ll put you on hold, but don’t worry—some pleasant music will play while you wait.

            Oh, and just like you do, I’m adding a $50 setup fee for all of this. Please credit my account after each payment.

Sincerely,

Your Humble Client

(Just remember, this was written by a 96-year-old woman!)

 

 

Gardening

            I’m not much of a gardener. If you don’t believe me, ask Kim. Our Bark House is pretty much surrounded by gardens that Kim has designed, planted, and maintains. I help when and how I can, but most of the time Kim says, “That’s OK – I’ll take care of it.”

 

            I am slowly learning to tell the difference between a flower and a weed: If it looks healthy, it’s probably a weed, and if I’m standing on it, it’s probably a flower. And no, I don’t garden this way on purpose just to get out of the work. Kim says that my problem is that I just don’t want to learn to garden. She’s probably right: I’d like to know without having to learn.

 

            Nevertheless, I enjoy gardening. It gets me outdoors and away from all the crap that is going on in the world. My “gardening” usually involves a wheelbarrow. (Much like my “cooking” involves reaching things on high shelves, or opening a lid that Kim can’t.) We just spread a half-truckload of pine bark that we hauled, load by load, all around our property. It’s part of our non-lawn cottage look. I also haul rocks, as in our recent project building a river bed for the rainwater that our downspout delivers from our garage gutters.

 

            But there is more to gardening, as Voltaire clarified for us in his 1759 book, Candide. The book describes a world of stupidity, wars, greed, cruelty and injustice, all written as a comical refutation of the philosopher Pangloss’s hollow claim, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” Candide’s conclusion, after witnessing and surviving these horrors: “We must cultivate our garden.”

 

            What does this concluding message mean? When I taught Candide, my students were generally confused by this ending, which seemed small in comparison with the horrors that Candide witnessed and experienced. But no. Maybe part of the solution – and I’m thinking of our own world’s horrors – is to look after your own garden. This is not necessarily a garden. It can be whatever small part of your world that you can tend to and improve.

 

            In Kim’s case, it actually is a garden. She has created a beautiful half-acre of flowers and greens, while preserving another half-acre of woods. But think about other ways we can cultivate our gardens by tending to an area of our lives that we can grace with beauty, or kindness, or perhaps a small insight. Kim also “cultivates her garden” in the way she has designed our world within the Bark House and the way she presents a meal on a plate. Maybe you can play some music, tell a good story, or kindly give directions to someone who is lost, or share a bit of food you created. I like to think that my weekly blog posting is my way of cultivating my garden – creating, in a small way, a contribution in the face of all the cruelty and madness in the world. (Note how I turned gardening into a metaphor so I can be included.)

 

            I know, I know: It’s not enough. We still need to sign petitions, send some money to support justice and sanity, maybe take to the streets. Certainly: vote for the right people. We need to fight the cruelty and madness, frustrating as that fight might be. A college friend sent a good sum of money to our local land conservancy in order to plant a three-acre butterfly meadow – one that Kim and I explored last week. All the way from California he cultivated our garden here in Northern Michigan. Cultivating our gardens, however we find a way to do it, can be a huge step toward creating a kind and beautiful world, countering the horrors with beauty and kindness. Make, at least, a small difference . . .. Think of the billions of deeds that individuals do, and can do, to cultivate our earthly garden. (I just deleted a poor paragraph – my most recent act of gardening.)

 

Half-Fast

            Kim and I decided to go on a one day fast. I’m not exactly sure why we wanted to do this, except Kim has been having some digestive problems, and we knew from friends who know these things that fasting is good for your health. These friends probably have in mind a longer stretch than a single day, but what the heck. We’d done it before, together, and it was not difficult. No hunger if we stayed away from food. And the fact that coffee was allowed, in addition to water and a few pills, made the whole enterprise appear tolerable. One of my vices was permitted.

 

            We started off fine with a big glass of water and my two cups of black coffee. We had a number of errands, medical and otherwise, in Traverse City, and when I told myself to stop thinking about where we should stop for lunch, all was well.

 

            Except: On the drive home we had to stop at King Orchards to pick up some cherries for the pie Kim was going to make for her son’s birthday. No problem. Next to the pint and quart containers of cherries were two boxes of samples of sweet and tart cherries. I paused. Would that be cheating? It’s only one! This was my Eve-with-the apple moment. I glanced at Kim – no help there, as she was just examining the pints. So, I thought, What the heck – What the Hell was probably more appropriate – and I took a delicious bite. I tried to be mindful as I was tasting the cherry, as I connected mindfulness with fasting – though I don’t see the connection now. I waited – nothing. Kim told me to check out the day-old baked goods on sale, so I did, and I was strong – until I saw the warm just-baked doughnuts. I put a couple in a bag “for later,” paid up, and headed for home.

 

            The problem was that “later” was not that much later. Coffee was beckoning, and the doughnuts were radiating warmth through the bag. So, we sat down and enjoyed our coffee and doughnuts.

 

            I felt like a bit of a failure, but not entirely. We had skipped breakfast. And since it was about 2 p.m., we had technically skipped lunch as well. We did not resume our fast for dinner, but we did reduce our intake by grazing leftovers from the refrigerator rather than sitting down for one of Kim’s usual home-cooked dinners. And I passed up on the potato chips when I had a small evening drink.

 

            No, it was not really a fast. Some might say that my efforts were half-fast.

 

O.K.

            Kim and I occasionally watch foreign language films that are subtitled but not dubbed into English. I noticed English words that occasionally pop up. The most frequent word, which I heard several times in a Danish series we watched, is “OK.” Not surprising. (“O.K.,” or any word borrowed from another language, is what is called a “loanword.”) With a little digging, I learned that “O.K.,” and it’s O.K. to spell it “okay,” is the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet – loaned out around the world. (It makes me wonder what word is in second place.) If you don’t think so, start listening for this wonderful word. I did, and I hear it everywhere.

 

            So – what does “O.K.” stand for? I won’t go into all the shades of meaning for this word – they are abundant, and you probably know most of them. What I’m more interested in right now is how that word got into the language in the first place. I imagined a simple abbreviation, like our current plague of acronyms, but language often does not move that simply – especially English.

 

            We have to go back to the summer of 1838, when the expression first appeared in print. At the time, we are told, there was a fad in the United States that involved the use of what one author calls “comical misspellings,” along with forming abbreviations and acronyms based on colloquial speech patterns. From one source:

 

The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 ... and used expressions like OFM, "our first men," NG, "no go," GT, "gone to Texas," and SP, "small potatoes." Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, "oll wright." 

 

The general fad is speculated to have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK's original presentation as "all correct" was later varied with spellings such as "Oll Korrect" or even "Ole Kurreck."

 

Combine these supposedly comical misspellings with abbreviations, and we get OK. So, this most common word owes its existence to a weird sense of humor that somehow caught on. How? The exaggerated misspellings I suppose made one feel superior to the poor spellers, and then the abbreviations made some folks feel superior to those who don’t know the code.

 

            What’s striking to me is how weird our sense of humor can sometimes be. I get the part about using abbreviations as acronyms – we do far too much of that today, in my not altogether humble opinion. But “exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day”? I suppose that can be amusing, and then the misspellings become reduced to abbreviations. O.K., I learned, is an amusing abbreviation of “Oll Korrect.” Really funny, right?

 

            Before I was enlightened I thought that such an omnipresent word as “O.K.” would have a more dignified origin – you know, maybe from Greek or Sanskrit or Old High German. Nope. It goes back to a clown named Ole Kurreck.

 

            Here’s another theory on the origin of OK, quoted from Wikipedia: “In ‘All Mixed Up’, the folk singer Pete Seeger sang that OK was of Choctaw origin, as the dictionaries of the time tended to agree. Three major American reference works (Webster's, New Century, Funk & Wagnalls) cited this etymology as the probable origin until as late as 1961.

 

            Perhaps . . . but I prefer “Oll Korrect,” mainly because it’s so stupid.

 

            Tempting to conclude this post with something that includes the word, but I’ll resist.

 

 

 

 

  

Hearing Aids

            Last week Kim went in to order new hearing aids. Her old ones weren’t working well, and the help she got at the place where she got them was less than satisfactory. What sealed the separation was that the packaging on the replacement batteries made it impossible to open them.

 

            But I don’t want to discuss hearing aids. Kim’s new hearing doc, Jesse, after explaining all the benefits of the new ones he was selling Kim, confided three keys to hearing that he and his wife had discovered – keys that have nothing to do with hearing aids. I think it has a lot to do with the brain’s role in hearing, especially as we age.

 

            First, conversation works better if you are face-to-face with your partner. This suggests that some lip-reading is involved, and there is nothing wrong with that if it helps the communication. Also, if you are speaking and listening face-to-face, you are probably in the same room. One of the problems Kim and I sometimes have is shouting from another room. And though Jesse didn’t mention it, face-to-face conversation will help you keep in mind the person you are speaking with – not just the spoken message.

 

            Second, it may take us a moment to shift into listening mode, so it might help to give a brief lead-in before you start a conversation. Something innocent, such as, “I read something interesting today,” or “I was just thinking . . ..” I appreciate it when Kim leads with “I have an idea!” To me, this means, “Brace yourself – our lives are about to change!”

 

            I imagine a brief rewiring taking place in the brain, and it’s a courtesy to let, or make, that happen. This is especially the case if your conversation is with an old person. You probably know that you can’t multi-task the way you could when you were young. Well, you may need to help your conversation partner get through a mini-multi-task as he shifts his attention from the movie he is watching to whatever you have to say. Throat-clearing might be a way to do this.

 

            I can’t remember Jesse’s third key to listening. I must have been thinking about the second one when he was talking.

 

            Jesse’s three suggestions reinforced, for me, the distinction between hearing and listening. I have great hearing. I can hear distant sounds – a car passing the house, an unexpected thump from our back yard or roof, a loon’s faint call from across the lake. No, my problem isn’t hearing – it’s listening. Apparently, I spend too much time inside my head – thinking about my to-do list, or maybe my next blog entry. Or sometimes I’m just not paying attention. Kim suggests this happens most often when she is speaking, though sometimes it’s women in general. It may be that men just have trouble listening to what women have to say. We are more tuned into important guy stuff – you know, sports and politics – not what women tend to talk about, though for some reason I don’t know what that is.

 

            So, Kim gets her new hearing aids next week. I’m looking forward to it, partially because I can ask Jesse about his third of his keys to hearing – which are more about listening than hearing. I’m not sure when my listening aids arrive.