Passing the summer with a game of pitch and catch

Published sometime in July '06

From what I’ve observed about family traditions, I’m guessing that my early ancestors passed the time playing catch on the Mayflower.

And what with the Mayflower being a little overbooked, I imagine we beaned a pilgrim or two and lost a few overthrows into the Atlantic. Nevertheless, 300 years later, we’re still practicing.

That’s because nothing compares with a game of a catch. The only baggage it requires, whether you’re on a cruise or a walk to the park, is one mitt per player and one round ball—hard, soft or rubber. In my mind’s eye, I can see Mayflower passengers seasick from sailing, food rations diminishing, no new world in sight and someone from my family yelling, “Anybody wanna play catch?!!?”

My first real recollection of playing catch is with my father at his parents’ house in southern Indiana. My grandparents’ house had a large wraparound yard which invited games of catch in the front yard, sideyard and the backyard if you didn’t mind the occasional obstacle—the coal house, the smokehouse, the outhouse.

That’s where my pitch and catch memories begin. Back and forth. Pitch and then catch. Judge the distance of the throw. Then eye it all the way back, into the mitt, using two hands, of course. Back and forth. Now you’re Juan Marichal going into that “toe to the sky” windup. But now as the ball returns, you’re that cordless human vacuum, Brooks Robinson, making the play. Of course, if that’s who you remember, you’re now very old.

In that same yard, my grandmother would toss me balls while wearing her home team uniform—cotton flower dress, apron, nylons, black flats and catcher’s mitt.

Occasionally, we’d head out to my cousin’s spread, a large farm with barns and farm creatures that a young suburban boy couldn’t identify. After a game of catch, my cousin would get out the bats and we’d head to an empty corn field to hit a few. Six years my senior, my cousin could drive a baseball a mile deep and a mile high. I can still see myself circling unsteadily under a ball that had touched the clouds and was about to land two corn rows behind me. He once told me could throw a grape out of sight. “Uh-uh,” I said. So we ran to the grape vines along the summer kitchen, where he grabbed a handful and prepared to pitch a grape upward. He threw it straight up and, sure enough, it disappeared into the county cosmos and eventually landed nearby with a little squirt

I guess there are variations on the game of catch.

At another cousin’s, same county but on my mom’s side, we played a game of catch that we dubbed “Around The Horn,”—as in, “Hey, Brad, you want to come up and play ‘Around The Horn’ and trade me that Mickey Mantle card while you’re here?” Around the horn required an impressive knowledge of the infields of every major league team in the universe. (Of course, the universe of baseball was smaller back then.) In this game, each cousin portrayed the four members of a given infield team and attempted to field the four grounders without error. After several rounds, one team usually survived which was the perfect time to go get a soda and wait in front of Rose’s grocery for the cigarette truck that delivered new cartons of baseball cards.

One year my parents bought me a pitching net that that would return your throws as a grounder, line drive or fly. I guess it was designed so that a young kid in the 1960s could play catch even if fathers, grandmothers or cousins weren’t available. At first I couldn’t believe that the mind of man could conceive of such an invention. But after a few days, I realized it wasn’t the same as throwing with family and friends.

My son and I began playing catch as soon as we brought him home from labor and delivery. Twenty one years and a half years later, we’re still playing catch. It’s a good way to pass the summer, relive your boyhood days, enjoy the smack of a hard pitch into a soft mitt, elevate the heart rate and talk about things that matter.

Like what position your forefathers played on the upper deck of the Mayflower.

From work we loathe to work we love—in 48 days!

Published 7/4/06

If you have a job interview tomorrow afternoon, Dan Miller says you should cancel it.

The author and career “coach” quotes research that says 83 percent of executives are more likely to hire candidates in the morning and not after 11 a.m. And certainly not on busy Mondays or casual Fridays. If you get to schedule the appointment, says Miller, make it between 8 and 10 a.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays.

Insights on interviewing—and other vocational quest strategies—are all addressed in Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love. In the book’s Introduction, Miller identifies his reading audience: “lifebotchers,” “wasteoholics,” “insaniacs” and others who spend their lives doing work they loathe. Using his successes and failures as a therapist, psychology professor, business owner, counselor and author, Miller offers a step-by-step plan for tallying one’s God-given skills, abilities, personality traits, values, dreams and passions. He then coaches readers on how to position themselves for the job search, leading them in a 48-day quest from work they loathe to work they love. I’ll let you read the book to see how Miller, president of The Business Source, came up with the 48 days theme.

His research also found that…

■ Male suicides peak on Sunday nights, as many men sense the futility of their careers. Likewise, more people die at 9 a.m. on Monday than any other time of the week.
■ More than 70 percent of white collar workers are unhappy with their jobs.
■ The average length of a job stint in America is 3.2 years—meaning that people can expect to have 14 to 16 different jobs in a 45-year span.
■ Ten years after graduating from college, 80 percent of college graduates are working in a field totally unrelated to their college degrees.
■ I.Q. contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, while 80 percent is due to other forces.
■ Technical skill and knowledge accounts for about 15 percent of an individual’s success while 85 percent is due to personal skill—attitude, enthusiasm, self discipline, desire and ambition.
■ 97 percent of human beings do not have a plan of action.

Perhaps this is why on the 48th page of his 48 Days, Miller notes, “The difference between a dream and a goal is that a goal is a dream with a timeframe of action attached.”

Back to the facts…
■ In the last 10 years, small business has been responsible for 71 percent of the country’s new jobs. Likewise, small business now employs 54 percent of the American work-force. This growth trend will continue.
■ In the next four years, 50 percent of the work-force will consist of independent contractors and free-lance laborers.
■ 20 million Americans are now telecommuting, working in a location distant from their company’s headquarters.
■ Only 12 percent of job openings in the country appear in the newspaper, on the Internet or in another form of advertising.
■ One executive’s interview method was to ask candidates out to lunch and request that they drive. This interviewer believed that the organization of someone’s car was a clue to the organization of the rest of their life.
■ 50 million new jobs will open up in the next five years with a demand for new and creative roles involving people who are peacemakers, storytellers and healers. Seriously. (This from The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
■ The downsizing of corporate American and the accompanying insecurity have prompted the idea of a core career supplemented by 1 or 2 other streams of income.

Miller knows this subject well. He has seven areas of income, including coaching his clients on redirecting their careers, selling books and computerized profiles, writing for magazines and Web sites, and employing facilitators around the country to teach his 48 Days philosophy.

You can check out his Web site and even find some interactive career-related assistance at 48days.com.

And when you go interview for that work you love some morning, remember that, according to Miller, many human resource staffers say they make a decision within the first 10 seconds.

Oh.

How one man landed on the disabled wrist list

Published 6/27/06

When x-rays two weeks ago revealed that none of the 15 bones in my wrist were broken, I immediately began to treat my injury using the R.I.C.E. method.

As all orthopedic experts know, R.I.C.E. stands for Rest, Ice, Compression and Eat as much Chinese carryout as possible. Okay, the “E” actually stands for Elevate which any fool would know. But when you’re smarting from an acute physical infirmity, you need to eat as much comfort food as dietary laws allow.

Although I got all the medical attention I needed after my injury, what really hurt was that I didn’t get the media attention that a lot of other newsworthy wrists are getting these days. For example, two weeks ago this paper carried the headline “Oden to have wrist surgery Friday.” Unless your Internet connection is down, you probably know that this surgery patient was Greg Oden, the 7-foot high school Indianapolis basketball star who has attracted Sports Illustrated, USA Today, ESPN and other national news media to the big city south of here. This is a teenager who had his surgery appointment announced in newspapers coast to coast.

As most baseball fans know, the wrist pandemic has touched the carpal bones of Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield and both the Dereks, Jeter and Lee.

Like these players, but with a lot less fanfare and no calls from the press, I suffered a direct impact injury to my carpal ligaments and landed hard on the day-to-day list during a key stretch of the interdenominational fastpitch softball season. Now that there’s time and space to tell the story, I was attempting to score on a wild throw to third. I thought I could go in standing up when I realized that the catcher was waiting for me, ball in glove, and a little impatient with my progress toward the plate. As I faced down this catcher who had the advantage of full protective gear I knew my scoring would take a heroic exhibition of acrobatic athleticism. But as I assumed the athlete’s sliding posture, and fortunately memory fails me at this point, apparently, I caught a cleat in the ground and did a handspring that resulted in a hand sprain and an easy out.

For weeknight athletes, the sprained wrist is a fairly common injury. I know this to be true. I broke my wrist in a game of driveway basketball a few years ago. Craaack! And, as they say, the wrist was history.

That’s why it’s important for the injury prone, who don’t have team doctors, to master the RICE approach to wrist treatment…

Rest: The first 24-48 hours following the injury are the most critical, according to wrist specialists, who caution you to avoid activities that cause pain. That’s why I immediately informed everyone that I would not be sweeping the carpets, dusting the furniture, ironing the underwear or taking out the trash until these activities became more enjoyable. (I did discover, however, that since it was my left wrist in need of rest, I could still play tennis almost every day.)

Ice: Ice packs on sprains during those 48 initial agonizing hours can take the form of frozen vegetables so the bag can be re-used, say the more creative practitioners. But I have found that cartons of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, wrapped around the wrist, are a tastier way of treating a sprain. Since it’s critical not to ice the site more than 20 minutes at a time, I suggest that you eat the gallon fast.

Compression: My doctor fitted me in an ugly wrist brace that looks like a hush puppy for the hand with holes for the toes, or in this case, fingers. He said to take notes if my fingers became blue or tingly. I’m glad I have my right hand fingers to take notes because the fingers on my left hand have been cobalt blue and immobile for about a week now.

Elevate: I’m writing this with my wrapped left hand in the air, upwards of my heart, as if I knew the answer and wanted to tell you.

But, hey, if I really knew the answer, I wouldn’t be handspringing into home at this decade of my life, nor would there be ice cream running down my wrist wrap, and I wouldn’t be writing notes to you about how to get off the Disabled List Wrist.

When it came to boats and travel, father knew best

Published 6/20/06

When I forward Jesse an online article about a domestic issue that I know he’ll appreciate and that I barely understand, and then sign it “Dad,” I always feel like I’ve committed identity theft. Even after 21 years of fathering, I just have not grown into the title. When I pick up the phone and the voice on the other end says, “Dad,” my first impulse is to reply, “Uh, hold on. I’ll see if one’s here.”

Maybe it’s the eternal adolescence syndrome suffered by a subculture of late bloomers within the subculture of baby boomers. At a fatherly age, I hate tinkering under the hood, my Craftsman ratchet set shines from lack of use and I still listen to Steppenwolf. Can I really be a father?

But the question may actually be, “Can I really be a father like my father?” My father took wild-game trips to Wyoming to hunt elk and deer. My father bought a fishing boat which he hitched to the family wagon for vacations. My father then traded up to a fiberglass birch bark canoe which we took to Canada to paddle in Ontario’s lakes while camping in its parks. My father took me to Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium to see the New York Yankees and their legendary pin-striped lineup of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Tom Tresh, Tony Kubek, and company. Frequently, my father took us kids to the zoo. Fortunately, he always brought us back.

As a father myself, I have tried to forward many of these experiences into the life of my own son, although keys are probably the only thing I’ve really ever hunted for. I’ve fished, too—for loose change. Yes, I guess I have deprived Jesse of the many manly values of hunting and fishing.

That may explain why at one point when my son was in junior high, at a time when we were having our generational differences, he looked at me and said in a tone of voice that suggested he was missing out on developmental tasks of early adolescence, “I want to lift weights, drive speedboats, ride motorcycles and see every major league ballpark in the country.” I knew the comment was a frontal assault on my obsession with dragging him into bookstores and used record shops while discussing my favorite existentialists.

Well, I could take a hint. In the next few years we took in an Indianapolis 500 auto race, took a boat—a pontoon speedboat, that is—out on Lake Monroe and became more aggressive about getting into the game. This summer we’re hitting the tennis courts, the softball diamond and the free weights when we can’t afford the pricey ones. We do this as a father and son who have only one year until the son’s wedding. (For the sake of his fiancée, we will not be racing motorbikes.)

My father’s work took me, by the age of 10, to the Southwest and the Northeast and—by proximity—to Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Knott’s Berry Farm, Washington, D.C., the deserts of Arizona and the hillsides of Pittsburgh.

Since Jesse didn’t have the advantage of travels by transfers and has lived his entire life in Madison County, we’ve compensated by sending him to Ireland, Mexico, Japan, Jamaica, Kenya, England and to D.C. for a semester. Okay, so we overcompensated a bit.

When my father would take us up to canoe Canada, we would stop overnight in these little towns where we’d hear echoes of French-accents. On mornings when I woke up in Wawa, Whitefish Falls or Thunder Bay, I thought I had died and gone to…Paris. The car trip culminated with several nights in a tent, where I now woke up and thought I had died and gone to...North Dakota. It’s not unusual for hot August nights in Ontario to become freezing August mornings.

Treks to Canada, led by my father, were one way of seeing the world—the world outside our neighborhood—and understanding the differences in geography, culture, custom, language—or at least accent—and pronouncing them good. If my son has experienced any of that with his old man, he can thank his grandfather—my father—just as I did this Father’s Day weekend.

One school of thought on the commencement flap

Published 5/23/06

It’s college commencement season, that time of year when campus officials bring to the stage speakers who cause graduating seniors to either yawn or express moral outrage in general.

For example, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to speak Monday night at Boston College’s commencement ceremony. The “New York Times” reported that demonstrators planned to show their disapproval by wearing protest accessories and handing out anti-war literature. Others said they would turn their backs on Rice when she received her honorary law degree.

Protesting professors and students cited a conflict between BC’s Catholic and Jesuit traditions and the administration’s policy on foreign affairs.

Generally speaking, I see nothing wrong with this form of democratic dissent. On the other hand, I don’t know that I would stand and show my backside to the Secretary of State. In most elementary schools, teachers wouldn’t permit students to stand and make faces during the presentation of a classroom guest.

My main concern, assuming I was a college administrator, would be what happened last Friday when Senator John McCain addressed New School, a university located in Greenwich Village, at Madison Square Garden. The Times reported that, in addition to giving McCain the back-side treatment, students booed, heckled and laughed at the Arizona senator as he gave them their year-end sendoff. And apparently the degree recipients were doing so in their “outside” voices.

Perhaps it all depends on where one’s diploma is pursued. I did my undergraduate work at a minor Midwestern liberal arts college. And maybe “work” is not the right word. But at my school it was absolutely inconceivable that we would have a member of the president’s staff speak at commencement. If such a public figure had appeared on our graduation day, we would have been ignorant oafs to heckle a guest who had accomplished more than most of could ever imagine. In spite of our outrage over the speaker’s political allegiances.

“Outrage” was what the kids expressed at Boston College and New School, concerning their respective commencement speakers.

The Times reported that at the New School ceremony, students yelled, “We’re graduating, not voting!” and “This is all about you. We don’t care!” None of these lines demonstrated the spontaneous creativity of the senior who, following McCain’s quoting of Yeats, blurted, “More poetry!” The fact remains: one person yelling bumper sticker-sized thoughts at another in a public forum is downright childish and is one insult from resembling a Fox News interview.

To add to this year’s commencement fray, one adjunct writing professor resigned his job over Monday night’s appearance of Secretary of State Rice by way of an open letter to Boston College President Father Leahy which appeared in the May 12 edition of the Washington Post.
One has to appreciate such a “statement.” But as an adjunct writing instructor myself, I know that Boston College, despite its great loss, will probably survive this devastation to its English department.

Of course, there’s another angle to this story, and it’s one that college officials, politicians and those of us classified as adults frequently miss. Young people, graduating seniors, that is, can sense a “disconnect” a mile away.

For example, the commencement address that Senator McCain gave at New School in New York was the same one that he gave at Liberty University. Liberty University? Isn’t that the school founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell? Isn’t Jerry Falwell the person McCain called an agent of intolerance within the Republican Party?

And Bob Kerry, president of the New School, has been dismissive of McCain in the national press, questioning the way he “buddies” up to President Bush.

For students informed by a sometimes unreal digital world, such political maneuvering must seem unreal to students. I’m guessing that at their age and as they enter the real world, they want something real—including their commencement speakers.

Given McCain and Falwell’s recent relationship, the senator’s appearance at Liberty seems a little un-real. Some pundits observed that McCain, routinely available to reporters and audience members, left the Liberty ceremony immediately after his speech and before Falwell’s greeting to graduates. According to aides, he had a plane to catch for a speech later that day.

And I’d love to finish this column but I’m already late for a bodybuilding competition this evening...

Local man recalls meeting “mother of television”

Published 5/16/06

When Elma Farnsworth passed away a couple weeks ago, most people—including millions of viewers of TV’s “American Idol”—probably didn’t blink.

But for Anderson’s David Baird, professor of journalism at Anderson University and student of media history, Farnsworth’s death deserved a moment or two of pause and reflection.

Only media students and scholars know that Elma, nicknamed “Pem,” was intimately involved in the invention of the electronic television in the 1920s with husband and visionary Philo Farnsworth. David met and interviewed Pem at her home in Ft. Wayne while he was enrolled in a doctoral course, “History of American Broadcasting,” at Purdue.

“Knowing that she was in the lab where TV was invented, and an eyewitness to such an important invention, it was my ‘brush with history,’ ” says David of the April 1999 interview. “It was like meeting Gutenberg.”

Unfortunately, the Farnsworth name never had the recognition of inventors such as Gutenberg, Edison or Bell. Pem had dedicated her life to telling the story of her husband’s pioneering work, which began when he was just a young boy on an Idaho farm.

As the story goes, Philo Farnsworth first imagined electronic TV while plowing the family’s potato field row by row at age 14.

According to Dave, Pem told him that the challenge for her husband was scanning an image onto a picture tube row by row using an image dissector tube.

In 1927, Farnsworth applied for a patent for a complete electronic television system, including the tube, the same year that he transmitted an image into a receiver in the next room. Elma, who kept logbooks and spot welded tube elements for her husband, earned recognition as “the first woman on TV” when Philo first transmitted human images in 1929.

An unfortunate chapter was introduced into the Farnsworth story when RCA unveiled its own TV, three years after an RCA engineer’s visit to the Farnsworth lab, and challenged several Farnsworth patents. Although the courts ruled in Farnsworth’s favor in the late 1930s, his invention didn’t become part of American living rooms until after his patents expired in 1947.

During his 1999 interview, Dave asked Pem if she and her husband had speculated how TV might affect the world. The interview transcript shows that the Farnsworths thought the advent of television could usher in an era of hope. Pem told Dave that they both believed that peaceful solutions to international conflicts would be possible once rival nations could see images of how differing cultures lived.

But as TV became commercially available, the Farnsworths banished from their home their own invention. “Phil felt there was too much junk on it,” Pem told Dave in the interview. “One time he said, you know, I’m sorry I had anything to do with it.”

However, when the world watched Apollo 11 crew members step off the lunar module and touch the surface of the moon, as Pem remembers it, “He turned to me and said, ‘Pem, this makes it all worthwhile.’ ”

According to Pem, her husband took a few “sidetrips” from his work with TV to invent the incubator and the electron microscope. He held more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents when he died in 1971.

Noting that Farnsworth was self taught, suffered from bad health, lost a home in a fire, fought depression and faced years of legal hassles from a corporate giant, Dave says that the life of Pem’s husband is a lesson to students.

“It’s important for students to see that these technologies are developed by real people who battle enormous odds,” he said.

Dave and Purdue communication professor, Robert Ogles, who also made the trip to meet Pem, recently sent a transcript of the interview to the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland.

On the day of final exams last month, Dave told students about Pem’s death and recalled his brush with history. “I’ll always treasure having that meeting, and it’s a story I will tell until I retire,” he says.

When Dave hits that age and wonders if the meeting ever really happened, he’ll have a tangible reminder. It’s a copy of Pem’s 1990 book “Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier.”

Inscribed just inside are the words: “Best wishes to David. Remember the sky is the limit. The impossible just takes longer. Pem Farnsworth.”

How JCS handles motorists who violate stop arms

Published 5/9/06

After reading this paper’s story about dangers posed by local motorists when they disregard school bus stop-arms (“A passing danger,” April 30), I entertained some thoughts about what I might do if were a bus driver.

As you may recall, THB reporter Lynelle Miller quoted one bus driver who said a day hardly passes that she doesn’t have a vehicle sail through her warning zone. Other bus drivers, as well as parents of bus riders, commented on motorists who honk or make obscene gestures when they have to wait for students to board the big yellow.

G-r-r-r-r-r. I have no patience for impatient drivers—particularly those who endanger the welfare of children on the path to a high school education.

Perhaps that will explain this mental mischief. Here’s how it is in JCS—Jack’s Community Schools--where the motto is “No Child is Left Behind On Account of Motorists Who Are Morons”…

First of all, forget the flimsy little flop arms that apparently some drivers use as an invitation from the game “Red Rover.” Jack’s fleet of Classic Yellow Commando Buses have a patented Door of Swinging Steel® which pivots out from the driver’s side—similar to the flimsy flop arm—and essentially clears the streets of unwanted traffic and secures the area while children enter or exit the bus. The Door of Swinging Steel® can stop drivers dead in their tracks. A poised bus driver on the balls of his feet can return a speeding car like it was a lob over the net. And the faster they come, the faster they leave. To protect children from commuters shooting around from behind the bus, an alert bus driver who keeps one eye on the mirror can shift the door in reverse and basically back hand a reckless motorist.

Pin ball? Kind of.

My warning doors don’t carry the word “Stop” because apparently violating drivers are extremely illiterate anyway. What it does have is a picture of a door—we’ve used the door theme for consistency and understandability—with a number 1 on it with the symbols $$$. (Everyone understands that.) When a second door swings from the passenger side of the bus, not only does it help balance the bus but it provides a picture of a door labeled 2, showing a gent duded up in jail attire. It’s a shorthand way of saying, “Mr. Violator, cross this line and you’ll get whatever’s behind door number 1 or door number 2.” This shorthand is not misunderstood by those who already know the system.

As a bus chauffeur for JCS, I sometimes have to administer the personal touch to wayward drivers. When these antsy drivers hit the horn while innocent children are dawdling to or from the bus, I activate the Door of Swinging Steel ®, seal off the intersection, dismount from the driver’s seat and do my own bit of dawdling over to the window of the honking driver who’s spitting venom by now. Then I’ll say something like, “Hey, pal. You late for a House vote?”

I can’t print the responses of my drivers. Of course, by now there’s a long convoy of cars honking their hoods off as well as a few miles of road rage raging behind my bus.

Since many of the offenders are teenagers with cellphones, my school bus is outfitted with the kind of technology that allows me to cut through all of the electromagnetic radio waves and interrupt conversations of drivers who are about to interrupt my children’s safety zone. You’d be amazed at how drivers slam on their brakes when I make their private call a conference call and say in a deep divine voice, “Excuse me, excuse me. This is God. Put it in park now!!!”

Frequently I write up tickets for their crimes to education. The ticket is actually a free pass to a driver’s temper training seminar which explains that violating a school bus stop-arm law is a criminal offense. The session also provides massage therapy for those fuming with redlight rage. Because in my dreams I’m a busy, busy bus driver, these seminars are handled by my assistant, Misty Meanor.

That’s how it is in JCS.

Pssst. How many e-mail messages are in your inbox?

Published 5/2/06

Like crumpled news clippings stuffed in a file, like John Denver albums in the attic, like a closet full of out-of-fashion pants with pleats, like stale glazed donuts in the bread box, I just can’t seem to throw away yesterday’s e-mail messages. Or last month’s messages, for that matter.

My inbox of e-mail messages provide me with an unofficial “to do” list—things that people want me to do, like “Jack, please rewrite the column about your outsized inbox and do something dog related.” It’s also a cyber library of sorts, containing e-mail newsletters, online editions of newspapers, documents for free-lance writing projects and answered requests for forgotten password numbers. I also save messages from my friends—okay, my friend—so I can simply reply and hit…“Reply.”

Then there are those things you just can’t throw away. On December 1, 2005, I received a “high priority” message with an attached 19-second RealPlayer video entitled, “What your dog really does when you let him out.” In this clip, a white and grey mix of a mutt sits behind his dog house while his master calls from her back door, “Bennett! Time for dinner!” Out of view of the owner, “Bennett” takes a drag on a cigarette and then emits a short human-sounding hack. Many of you would know the name of the Andersonian who sent me this high priority message but I’ll spare him the embarrassment he so richly deserves. The video is quite amusing, for anyone easily amused. That would be my friend. That would be me, too, the one who still has it five months later. (I’d be happy to forward it to you.)

At black tie dinner parties, I tend to corner people and ask questions like, “How many e-mail messages do you keep in your inbox?” It’s a personal question and one that I say in a near whisper, the same tone of voice I would use to say, “How’s the investigation going these days?” It’s just that I’m always curious as to where I stand on the curve compared to the habits of other humans.

So after a couple looks of disbelief at dinner parties and because frankly my inbox had become a litter box, I decided to confront an e-mail stockpile that had accumulated to nearly 300 electronic missives. Give or take 10 or 30.

As I might have done on a daily and orderly basis, I then spent a full hour—or was it a full day?—organizing the messages into various folders, printing them out or just closing my eyes and hitting the “delete” button. I guess my amassing of e-mail is a kind of phobia. A fear that—like my old RCA 33 1/3 “Rocky Mountain High”—I’ll need it at some point and for good reason.

By the end of last week, I had down-sized my inbox to 50-some messages and was ready to conquer the world. “Conquer” being a relative term and because some e-mail induces unnecessary guilt, I’m now unsubscribing to mailers like the Mini Marathon News.

Of course, it’s a constant battle. My son is half way home from college, meaning sometimes he lives here, sometimes there. A few days ago I got three messages from him about softball equipment for our team, and he’s just two doors down the hall. If he had known the fierce battle that his old man was waging with e-mail apoplexy, he might have had the decency to walk down the hall or just yell prices of the chest protectors from his room.

So if you have an issue with one of my pieces, go ahead and compose for me an e-mail message. But instead of hitting “send,” print it out and use conventional U.S. postal procedures. That also saves me the paper and ink from printing it, which I always do before filing readers’ opinions in manila folders marked “Loves Me” or “Loves Me Not.”

Of course, I still have all those e-mails in my Deleted Items Box, which now contains 3364 messages and where they are deleted but not really. Like “An Evening with John Denver,” you never know when you might need one.

Confessions of a Strawberry Frosted donut addict

Published 4/25/06

I was just a schoolboy bookworm when I read a story—one I will never ever forget—about a donut machine. Honestly, I do forget the title of the story, its plot, its characters, its setting, its impact on the American breakfast.

What I do remember about the book is that from the time I read it, I wanted to work for the donut industry. Whether in donut research, donut development, donut supervision or donut middle management, I knew I wanted to labor within reach of those tasty rings of cooked dough.

Of course, everybody loves donuts. But I…I…idolize, if not deify, donuts. I like to look at them through the bakery cases and push my nose up to the glass. I enjoy window shopping for donuts and experiencing them voyeuristically. I dote on donuts. I am devoured by donuts. I…I…it’s a problem.

And if I can’t blame it on that book, I can point a finger at my beloved grandmother. With her own version of a storybook donut machine, she spoiled me with home-made, deep fried right before your eyes donuts. After which she would place them in a brown sack filled with powder or sugar. She let me do the shaking. I shook for a long time just thinking about the crumbs to come. I still shake from time to time.

To make matters worse, when I arrived at college, now some two or three wars ago, I discovered the pearly gates of a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet just a block from campus. Over the next four years I spent a lot of semester hours at the donut bar, studying the varieties…Apple Crumb, Bavarian Crème, Sugar Raised, Jelly Filled, Blueberry Crumb, Chocolate Frosted, Apple N’ Spice, Chocolate Coconut Cake, Cinnamon, Boston Kreme and, of course, my favorite, Strawberry Frosted.

And then, because there is justice in the world, one of my hallmates began seeing a classmate who worked at Dunkin’. Now I’m not saying there was calculation in his choice of sweethearts. But I knew the guy to have a passion not only for women, but for the Maple Frosted as well. Anyway, when he learned that leftover donuts went to the dumpster on Saturday around midnight, to make room for fresh product, well, he had a weekly date. A few of us always went along to secure the leftovers in garbage bags and to make sure the bags were properly topped off and sealed with a twisty tie. When we returned to our dorm, entrepreneurs that we were, we invited the rest of the hall for a midnight donut sale, charging a quarter for the cake varieties and just a dime for the yeast-based, those being mostly air anyway.

But you know how it is with anything, the first dozen or two are delightful. After that, you think you’ll never eat another donut till…tomorrow. So with one bag of leftovers remaining, we would pitch donuts down the hall in a variation of dodge ball. In Donut Dodge Ball, points were scored when the thrower hit an opponent with a donut or when said opponent caught a donut in his mouth. So you can see why sorting through the practice bag to find the right donut and then rearing back to fire Boston Kreme filled fastballs made for a much more interesting game. And I know what you’re thinking. A jelly filled donut is a terrible thing to waste.

So when I finally graduated into the work world, I could immediately consult with my supervisor on how he could get more bang for his Dunkin’ buck on Friday morning corporate casual and pastry days.

Of course, where there’s justice, there’s injustice waiting in the wings. “Injustice” is what I cried when I was diagnosed with diabetes and had to confront my donut dysfunction. But, now that I’m wearing an insulin pump, it’s simply a matter of counting the carbs per donut, multiplying by 12 and pumping to my blood sugar’s content. True, my insulin pump is now the size of an oxygen tank, but as someone once said, there is no adversity that compares to a life without an Apple Crumb.

And no, I never found my way into donut manufacturing or donut distribution. But that doesn’t keep me from being an end user.