Category: Uncategorized

oyal readers of Third Age Thoughts will well remember, but new recruits (and disloyal old readers) might not know, or care, why I stopped putting out new blog posts in 2020. There were probably many reasons, but the proximate cause of my stopping was Louis. We had recently gotten him as a 12 week old adorable puppy, and what with walkies, poopies, feedies, and cleanuppies, I suddenly found myself deep in the red, creative-writing-time-and-energy-wise.

Baby Lu-lu

I’m not complaining. It was a good time, if exhausting. Louis, who is incredibly cute, was even cuter as a baby, as this picture shows. (The picture also shows that I was much balder back in 2020 than I allow myself to believe I am now. Fortunately, memories, especially memories of how much hair I don’t have, are mercifully short. I’m starting to forget already. But I digress.)

When Louis was a baby and had to pee every few hours, I would stay up late with him to take him for his midnight stroll. I would put on the TV something with a little slow movement and soft voices, to keep me from falling asleep too deeply while simultaneously not jarring me or Louis awake with sudden noises. This was December, and the Curling finals were on each night late, and they suited just fine. While I started airing them almost as a backg­round screen­saver, I soon found myself sucked in to that fascinating, if weird, sport. I thought it was like shuffleboard, but really the eye and skill demanded make it seem more like pool, like those trick pool shots that are always popping up unrequested on Facebook. Sorry, on “Meta”.

I picked up the lingo: Curling is one of the few professional sports in which the command “Whoa!” is part of the official patois. I learned that each inning is called an “end” no matter where it occurs in the game, and that the speed at which you slide a stone is called not its speed, but its “weight”. The curving trajectory that a player imparts by spinning the stone isn’t called “English” like in pool, it’s called “curl” (hence the name, Curling). I don’t know why they don’t call it English; maybe it’s because the term originated in English Canada and it’s the same reason they don’t call them French fries in France. (Third-agers will remember decades ago when Congress tried to change the name of French fries to “Freedom fries”, because they were miffed that France didn’t like that we invaded Iraq. Don’t you wish Congress was as states­man­like now as it was then?)

Kerri Einarson

I even picked a favorite team: Team Canada women’s curling team, hailing out of Manitoba and captained (or “skipped”) by Kerri Einarson. She identifies as Métis, which is an officially recognized Canadian indigenous group, interesting (to me) because of its mixed European (mainly French, I think) and native American ancestry, formed in the mid-18th century during the height of the North American fur trade.

ANYWAY, why am I waxing nostalgic for 2020 and puppy Louis? Because we have decided, against the advice of virtually everyone we’ve told, and our own better judgement, to get another new puppy. Or maybe I should just say we’re getting a new puppy, because Louis, cute and playful though he still is, isn’t really new, or a puppy, any more.

Our journey to second-puppyhood has been plagued with so many setbacks that it’s hard not to believe that the universe is sending us a message: Don’t do it! In December, Louis bolted while walking with Kathleen (there were extenuating circumstances; it wasn’t pure Louis evil), and Kathleen took a very bad fall and broke her pelvis. We were working with other ailments that were active at the time, maybe related to her auto­immune diseases, and the new injury and old diseases each made the other much harder to manage, and to live with. We’ve had a very hard time, one of the worst six months of our lives together (and we’ve been through some hard patches in our over forty years of matrimonial bliss).

We had picked out a puppy, a cute baby sister for Louis, and were only four days from bringing her home when Kathleen had her accident, and it forced us to scuttle the whole deal. She had a significant period of immobility and constant pain, and a much longer time of convalescence, ahead of her, and we just couldn’t have a puppy underfoot. It was hard enough with Louis, who spent a lot of time during the next few months in Doggie Day Care.

Kathleen

Six months later, Kathleen is still not fully healed, but she’s up and walking short distances. Our first choice puppy had long since gone to a different forever home, so we restarted our search despite the wailing of well-meaning friends and neighbors (these people said we were crazy to get another dog before Kathleen’s injury—you can imagine what they’re saying now).

Tom Hanks

The Day Care that Louis patronizes somehow found itself with a brown miniature poodle as a permanent guest. I think the circumstances were similar to those in that movie where Tom Hanks couldn’t get out of the airport and had to set up house there. We thought about this situation for about a week, then called: “We’d like to come up and take this doggie off your hands! We’ll be up in fifteen minutes!”. Less than five minutes later, they called back. “I’m sorry, while you and I were on the phone earlier, my coworker was finalizing a deal with another family to take the dog. He’s gone.”

That’s twice now that Fate had prevented us from adding a dog to our family at the last minute, but we kept trying. We saw another little schnauzie-looking thing at a small dog rescue site, but once again, by the time we were able to make it down there, he had been snatched up.

Sean Connery

Now that’s three times, and you know what they say: “Once is happen­stance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” (And by “they”, I mean Ian Fleming in the James Bond masterpiece Goldfinger.)

But we would not be deterred from our quest, despite all reason, and a clear message from the universe! The heart wants what the heart wants, and in this house, what the heart wants is PUPPIES!

So we reached out to where we got Louis, a farm where they not only breed dogs, but also train them (some of them) to be service dogs. We picked out a little Cavapoo who they promise will never grow beyond half of Louis’s current size, and we arranged that she would stay there to get obedience and self-discipline training for about three months before we pick her up. We named her “Phoebe”.

Phoebe

We’ll be getting her after she has mastered the fields of heeling and sitting, with a minor in not knocking Kathleen over and breaking her pelvis. Meantime, we’re having long awkward talks with Louis so he won’t be surprised or jealous to have a new baby in the house, and understands the importance of being a Good Big Brother. I’m sure that’ll go just fine, but I’ll keep you posted.

Toodles,
Dorn
5/29/2024

athleen has been watching shows about Swedish Death Cleaning, or as they say in Sweden, Din mamma är norsk grisuppfödare. For those of you for whom this blog post is your first foray into the internet in several years, Swedish Death Cleaning is the new house­keeping meme, taking over from Marie Kondo’s The Unbearable Magic of Tidying Up, or whatever it’s called. It’s a uniquely Third-Age-and-up concept that starts with the premise that by your age you have filled your house to the brim with useless stuff.

When you pass away (that’s the “death” in Death Cleaning), your kids have to get rid of it all. They have no use for it, and are not bound to it as you were by habit or sentimental attachments. So if you really loved your kids (the premise continues), you would do them a favor and relieve them of this unpleasant bit of posthumous housekeeping. Throw it out now, and everyone wins!

We’re not zealots, but we have been cleaning out stuff that we’ve kept for so long it’s hard to imagine life without it, especially as it will never break or wear out, because we never actually use it. A case in point is the large collection of photographs we’ve accumulated over the years, documenting weddings, births, graduations. And vacations, oh so many vacation photos.

Our most recent pictures are online, stored somewhere in the cloud. It wasn’t that long ago (in Third-Age time) that we were storing all our pictures on CD. Remember those heady days when digital photography first replaced film, and your camera could suddenly take thousands of images at a time instead of just 20 or 30? You could take hundreds of shots of that mountain goat, or sunset, or halloween costume, secure in the knowledge that when you got home you would discard 99% of them and just keep the one or two perfect gems. Yeah, right.

For sheer cubic footage, our photo archive is dominated by film-based, printed-on-paper pictures, and the most treasured of these were always carefully mounted in a Family Album. Kathleen’s been saying for years that we should get a good quality scanner and, if we can’t bring ourselves to just throw away most of these pictures, then at least digitize them so they don’t take up any physical space, and throw away the redundant paper copies. I finally gave in, and found that she was right (as usual).

So I have been scanning in our photos, one Family Album at a time. I say one at a time, but actually I’m still scanning the very first Family Album. It’s our oldest, containing pictures of Kathleen’s childhood and long-departed relatives. Back in those days, every photograph was the culmination of someone’s hard work and planning, so I’m expecting many fewer “should-never-have-bothered-keeping” photos than I’ll find in our later Family Albums.

Here are some highlights I’ve come across to far. This is Kathleen’s mother Rose, somewhere around 1920. Kathleen tells me she heard that back in the early 20th century, itinerant photographers with ponies would prowl the streets of Brooklyn looking for children to pester their tired parents for a picture on horse­back. It was the in-person, on-foot equivalent of what we Third-Agers will remember from the commercials-disguised-as-cartoons that hypnotized us every Saturday morning, or the Tik-Tok clickbait that today’s kids must navigate. Will the children never be safe?

This is Rose’s lifelong friend Rosemarie Carbone in 1930. She’s noted for two things: first, years after this picture she became god­mother to Kathleen’s brother Joseph. Second, she’s related some­how to the Carbone spaghetti sauce empire that’s still going strong today. There’s a whole saga in there I’m sure, but I don’t know any of it.

Nanny

Kathleen sometimes recounts stories that her maternal grandmother “Nanny” used to tell her when she was very young and they would do chores together. Mostly they were about people that Nanny knew. She told the story of their neighbor Maria, who worried that she would never get married. Every night Maria would pray to St. Catherine (Nanny would pronounce it “Kat-a-RINE”), the patron saint of old maids.

(Interesting side note: Catherine was a 4^th century saint who was sentenced to die for her faith by being placed on a revolving torture machine. She was saved from this fate when the torture wheel miraculously broke. So they just beheaded her. I don’t know exactly what the torture wheel did, but I can imagine it was pretty grisly, given that they named the “Catherine Wheel” firework in its honor.)

Maria (Nanny’s story goes) had a St. Catherine statue, before which she prayed dutifully, but to no avail. Finally, in frustration one day, she said the good italian girl’s equivalent of “screw it!”, and threw the statue out the window. Soon she was summoned to the door by an angry knocking. A young man was there, red with fury, carrying in his hands the pieces of the broken St. Catherine statue. “You nearly killed me with this! It just narrowly missed my head!” Apologies were made, tempers were cooled, and eventually, Maria married this young man. “And” (Nanny would beam), “he owned an entire apartment building!”

This story is too good to be true!, you may think, but no, it’s real, and here’s the proof: Maria’s wedding photo. That’s her, third from the left.

Below is another shot from the Family Album. Young Kathleen is with her parents (in the top row), her Aunt Josie, and her paternal grandparents Giuseppe and Vincenza. Kathleen was almost named Vincenza, she says, but happily avoided this fate when her mother fixed on Kathleen instead, to prevent fighting over naming rights among relatives (not the grandmothers themselves, they were too genteel for that).

Giuseppe was by all accounts an awful man, but he did provide some of the genetic building blocks for Kathleen and our kids, so I’m grateful for that. He also had the foresight never to bother getting naturalized when he immigrated from Italy, right around the turn of the last century. By Italian law, this means that his descendants, even though born in the United States, are eligible for Italian citizenship, and need only demonstrate their relationship to Giuseppe to be recognized by the Italian government as citizens.

I’ve been working (very slowly) on getting Kathleen’s italian citizenship recognized. This is for purely selfish reasons, you understand: by another Italian law, anyone married to an Italian citizen can themselves apply for Italian citizenship! I can see myself in my sun-baked villa in Sienna, with grape vines and chickens running around, enjoying my breakfast of espresso and a cornetto in my coffee-stained white t-shirt, ready to sit around the piazza with the other old men watching the world go by. Crazy, you say? Yes, crazy come una volpe!

I would write more on my quest for a new foreign identity, but I suspect I could stretch it into a blog post all its own some day, especially if I actually make any progress. So I’ll end my exploration of our Family Album here with a little puzzle. I’m sure you’ve realized that the title of this post, “Flamy Malibu”, has nothing to with what I actually wrote about. That’s because that isn’t really the title. It is in fact an anagram of the title. Can you possibly guess what the true title is?

Thanks,
Dorn
5/2/2025

Author's note
Before getting into our regularly scheduled blog, I really have to share with you something I read last night in the April 20 Washington Post. I like to try to keep abreast of the evolutionary turns the language is taking, but I gasped out loud with delighted surprise when I read this sentence (not even the full sentence, really) that Chris Richards had written in his review of Taylor Swift's latest album:

"...Swift’s new ballads are sour theater, fixated on memories of being wronged and stranded, sodden with lyrics that feel clunky, convoluted, samey, purple and hacky."

"Samey"! What a wonderful word, immediately obvious in meaning, but less than half the letters of its predecessor, "repetitious", just the thing for tired young thumbs. How'd I miss that? I'm'a have to look into this more, and maybe post about it.

Now back to "Schrödinger's Hair". 

I take Louis on a good long walk every day that I can, and it does us both good. We walk on local roads, Bayside boardwalks, park trails and forest hiking paths. If I’m not mistaken, it seems like there is less litter along the pathways than I remember in times past, which is very heartening. But there’s still some. There is one item in particular that I seem to find more often than any other, by far. Care to guess what it is? I won’t reveal the answer until the next paragraph.

Paragraph separator and pause-forcer

It’s not candy wrappers or empty cans of Red Bull. It’s those little elastic black cloth-covered rubber bands used to hold ponytails together. They’re sometimes known, I believe, as scrunchies. It seems like I see these on fully half the walks I take, and I have no idea why.

Is there some sort of fundamental flaw in its structure that causes it to work its way loose while the wearer is walking, then drop off without being noticed? Does its drab black color and unadorned design give off some “worthless” vibe that makes it prone to being thoughtlessly discarded, the way smokers used to carpet the ground with used filters and butts?  I just don’t know.

I probably first noticed these scrunchies on the ground because I use one for my own ponytail. I confess my first thought when I realized how abundant they were was “Neat! Instead of buying them at Walmart, I can just pick one up whenever I need one! Live off the land!.” Fortunately, my second thought was “eww. Cooties”

I have a ponytail because stopped cutting my hair in the Covid year, when Kathleen and I were strict quarantine observers. After the quarantine lifted, I noticed that my quality of life had not been impacted in any way by my lack of hair cutting, so I thought screw it! I just won’t bother cutting my hair any more since the act is not doing me any good.

I was perhaps channeling my inner child a bit when I decided this. Fellow Third-Agers will remember that back in the Age of Aquarius, hair was the medium of choice for expressing one’s defiance of one’s parents and society in general. I was a bit young in the 1960s for full-out rebellion, but I did make my dad crazy by refusing to wear my hair short. Ah, fun times.

In an attempt at compromise, my dad suggested had I could keep it long on the top if I cut it short on the bottom. Or maybe the suggestion was to cut it short on the top and keep it long on the bottom, I don’t remember.  At any rate I do remember being absolutely horrified to my bones at the thought of his suggestion. Funny about what horrifies you when you’re young. 

Now that I’m old, I’ve developed prejudices of my own. I particularly don’t like how the young people these days sport huge bushy beards they look like they are trying to mimic civil war heroes except with shaved heads. Kids!

I have this one hair style prejudice that is so specific that it feels like it came to me in a vision. When I was younger (I can’t remember if this happened when I was 5 or 50 or somewhere in between), I developed an abhorrence at the prospect that some day I would simultaneously have both a ponytail and bald spot.

This of course is exactly the look I’m sporting now, at least from the back. One of my neighbors pointed it out, and my forgotten vision came flooding back to me. Oh well, I’m old now, I don’t have to be horrified by anyone’s fashion choices, including my own.

From some angles, it’s not at all obvious that I’m nearly bald on top. Growing up watching the inexorable deforestation of my dad’s head, I was pretty confident of what was in store for me, but I feel like my hair has gotten something of a stay of execution. I’m not sure I’m any less bald than my dad or my baby brother, but I inherited from my mom (who probably got it from her Irish ancestors) the tendency to go white early, and my white hair captures more light, and gives a better illusion of fullness, than my brother’s or my dad’s darker tresses.

The discussion might be enhanced at this point by a picture of me. Because this post is all self-report (as opposed to, say, facts), it would be more informative if I provided a picture of how I see myself, rather than a photograph of how I objectively look. I assure you, though, the differences between the two are practically negligible.

It’s now been five years since the Covid hit, and almost five years since I stopped cutting my hair, and I’ve noticed something remarkable: I’m pretty sure that the overall amount of the hair on my head hasn’t changed in that time. Yes, my ponytail has grown longer, slowly. But at the same time the number of hairs making up that ponytail, and the average thickness of each individual hair strand, have reduced by an amount that seems to exactly counterbalance the length increase.

Amount of hair =
(length of hair) * (no. of hairs) * (thickness of hair)
= constant

Were I to graph the length of my ponytail length against the number and thickness of the hairs that comprise it, I predict it would extend asymptotically to an infinitely long ponytail composed of an infinitely small number of infinitely fine hairs.

I can already anticipate your objection to my prediction: both the number of hairs on my head, and my hair’s thickness (measured in, say, atoms), are positive whole numbers that can’t keep getting smaller forever. Sooner or later, one or both of these quantities must go from one to zero, and the asymptote ends.

Or does it?

I believe the hair on my head is getting so fine that it can no longer accurately be described using Newtonian concepts of particles and mass. As my hair gets finer and finer, its properties are becoming less particle-like more wave-like, and quantum effects must be considered. In other words, my hair is getting wavy. (Ha ha ha, “wavy”, see what I did there?)

Anyway, I have developed a theory that the material that inhabits the top of my head is approaching the point where it is best described as a probability cloud, and I’d like to figure out a way to test my quantum-hair theory.

If I cause my hair-cloud to interact with a macroscopic object, for example by dragging a comb over it, I find the hairs have collapsed back into their fully particle-like form and are stuck in the teeth. I believe this is called “quantum entanglement”. But there is a simpler explanation—that the comb simply yanked out some weakly-anchored normal Newtonian hairs from my dome—and Occam’s Razor requires that I select the simplest explanation. (Speaking of which, I gave up shaving years before I gave up cutting my hair, and that process has a physics all its own. For example, did you know that, like the poles of planet Earth, the human head has two cowlicks?)

I wish I could come up with experiments that could prove or disprove the existence of my hair probability cloud, but so far I haven’t thought of any. If any readers have suggestions of how I can further explore the quantum physics of hair loss, I would love to hear them. But I won’t shoot electrons at my head, or sit in a box with a cyanide pellet that will kill me if I am observed to be bald, so don’t bother suggesting anything along those lines.

Thanks for reading,
Dorn
4-23-2024