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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

Spring was blossoming all around us, it looked like the number of vaccinated people was reaching a local maximum, and Kathleen and I got the urge to go out and see something!, like the old days. We felt like those people in the City of Ember [ref] who had spent two hundred years underground to avoid a plague that ravaged the surface world: in a word, antsy.

The Washington Post said that the Smithsonian was reopening its buildings and facilities, and further said that dogs were welcome in most of their outdoor places, so we thought, Let’s take Louis to see the National Zoo!

Although the zoo was open, entry was controlled by access passes that you had to get online. They were free, but were quickly claimed up weeks in advance, when they were offered. If you wanted a parking pass to go with that, you were talking more than a month in the future. And if on top of that you wanted a “Panda Pass”, the wait was almost two months if you could get it at all. The pass requirement was a hassle, but at least when we got there, the crowds would be lighter than back when they let just anyone in.

I haven’t been following zoo goings-on this year, but I reasoned that if these Pandas needed their own passes to go see, they must be something really special. Maybe like Fiona the baby hippo at the the Cincinnati Zoo, who is so adorable that it makes us want to go visit that zoo also, despite the ten-hour drive to get there.

Flash forward a month or two, when the passes we had ordered finally became valid. Kathleen, Louis and I drove into DC (which was in itself an adventure—we hadn’t been into DC in well over a year. Had it changed much? What’s this new bridge going up over the Anacostia River? Am I even going to be able to find the zoo from memory?)

My first impression on arriving at the Connecticut Avenue National Zoo entrance was the hordes of people going in! Couples, families with all their survival supplies balanced precariously on strollers, school or other groups with matching t-shirts in various stages of dishevelment (and this was just as they were arriving at the zoo–I shudder to think what they’ll look like by the time they’re leaving!). The place seemed as crowded as I’d ever seen it before the plague year. That’s a good sign that things are returning to normal, I guess.

We parked (it’s lucky they required advance parking passes; at least we knew we’d find a spot), and strolled in.

Louis was an immediate hit! It makes sense since the zoo audience was animal lovers, and Louis is an undeniably photogenic labradoodle puppy. “Best looking animal here!” one bystander told us.

(This is no exaggeration. Every time we’re out walking anywhere, I estimate about 90% of the people we meet feel obliged to say, “Aw, what a cute puppy!”. They all use the same word, cute, and of the 10% of the population that don’t exclaim how cute he is, I bet 90% of them are thinking it. I sometimes forget when I’m up late with puppy diarrhea or cleaning up yet another TV remote that’s been chewed to bits, but Louis is undeniably one cute animal. He’s got a puppy bouncy enthusiasm, a winning personality, and long, soft chocolate dreadlocks. He’s like a little grizzly bear cub, only even cuter.)

Everyone at the zoo wanted to come admire Louis, and many, especially the kids (of which there were many), wanted to pet him. Louis was having a great time despite the heat, and he hardly noticed that he was surrounded by animals he had never before seen or smelled.

We found the “Asia Walk”, which led to the Panda House. A couple of young zoo interns were taking a break at the entrance, so I asked if dogs were allowed on this Walk. “Well, yes, if they’re service dogs. Otherwise they aren’t allowed in the zoo at all.”

Uh oh! I guess I should have done a little research on whether the zoo fell into the category of “most Smithsonian outdoor places” that allowed dogs!

Louis was in plain sight next to me, at the other end of the leash, but I calculated that these interns were too comfortable sitting in the shade drinking their big gulps to pose a threat to our day out. “Well, thank you, forget I asked,” I mumbled, and we hot-footed it away from the Asia Walk.

It may have been coincidence, or I may have underestimated the interns’ dedication to law and order, but soon after we ran into a uniformed zoo guard. Like everyone else there, he was instantly enraptured by Louis’s cuteness, and before talking to us he had to give him a good rubdown and tell him several times what a good boy he was. Then he spoke to us.

Kathleen was more prepared than I had been with the interns.

Great answer, Kathleen, not least because it was true—we do have him in training (leash walking, and coming), and we do hope he will provide us emotional support. How could he not, he’s so cute!

I was grateful that we had left on Louis’s seat belt halter, because it looked a little like a service dog harness. But we were starting to get nervous. We tried to stay on the less-frequented paths of the park, but there didn’t seem to be any. People were everywhere, and they all wanted to ooh and ahh at Louis!

We passed the elephant yard, and Louis finally noticed the animals. Several elephants were ambling lazily outside, and one big bull also saw us—and Louis! He didn’t make any obvious behavioral changes, he was too cool and had been around too long for that, but he kept his eye on the little brown pup at our side. Louis saw him too, and just stood and gawked as the bull elephant casually sauntered over to the hay tree, which just so happened to be near where we were standing.

The air was charged with mano-a-mano nonverbal messages zipping back and forth between Louis and the elephant, even across the stretch of barrier that divided us. That old bull kept his cool, and never batted a huge rheumy eye. But the conversation was too intense for Louis. His resolved snapped, and he dissolved into a spate of nervous barking.

Busted! We quickly turned up our collars to prevent us from being recognized, and skulked off. I was intently watching the animals, Kathleen was engaging with the interested people we met, and we both were trying to project the auras of two service trainers disguised as ordinary tourists taking our student for a field trip. I didn’t feel very convincing.

Louis, meantime, was happy just scouring the grounds for other dogs to sniff and people to pet him and tell him how cute he was. His search for other dogs was unsuccessful, because as I’m sure you already knew, dogs aren’t allowed in the National Zoo.

Finally the stress of living a lie got too much for us, and we lammed it for home. We had missed a lot, hadn’t made even one complete circuit of the campus, and didn’t see any indoor animals at all, but it was still a fun adventure.

The moral of this story is that when you are planning a trip, you’d be smart to do a little research on your destination, to make sure you’ll be welcome—unless you’re really, really cute, in which case you’re welcome anywhere.

Here’s a joke I stole from myself [here], adapted to this post.

A cop pulls over a car and notices that there is a grizzly bear cub riding in the back seat. "What a cute bear cub! But you know transporting grizzly bears this way is completely illegal. I'll tell you what, we're not far from the National Zoo, I won't arrest you if you immediately take him straight to the zoo with no stops on the way." The driver (in the original joke this was a Norwegian pig farmer, so let's keep that) promises to do so, and the two part company.

Several weeks later, the same cop pulls over the farmer again, and again there is a grizzly bear cub in the back seat. The cop tells the farmer, "You promised me you would take that bear to the zoo!" 

"I did!" she replies, "and he had such a good time that today I'm taking him to the Botanical Gardens!"

Thanks,
Dorn
7/20/2021