The Blizzard of ‘21

       “Wolf!  Wolf!

      It would be here on Wednesday evening, “they” said. 

     But Wednesday evening came, and nothing.

     Then “they” said it would be here on Thursday.  Thursday evening, nada.

     On Friday evening, it really did come, in the form of drizzle and mist.  “It” was to be two to four feet of snow.  As of Friday, I was still betting on two to four inches.

      In the story of Worthless William, the little boy who cried “Wolf!”  To break the boredom of keeping sheep on a hillside near a forest, WW decided to yell “wolf” just to get a little company, someone other than the sheep. 

     The first two cries caused the citizens of the village below to drop whatever they were doing, grab cudgels and stones (no second amendment in this story) and head up the hill to protect the sheep from a marauding wolf.  When they got there, they found nothing but Worthless and his sheep.

      Then one day, the wolf really did come.  “Wolf!  Wolf!  W-O-U-LF!”  This time, the villagers really did NOT come.  In some scarier versions of the story, the big bad wolf eschewed mutton and took Worthless William out for dinner.

       Saturday, the rain continued with a few fat flakes falling, hitting, melting.  By dark, some accumulation began to gather. 

     Sunday morning greeted us with more than my predicted four inches.  As I looked out the window, I said, “The wolf really did come.”

      The snowblower started all right.  It was no match for the heavy wet snow.  I went forty or fifty feet and might have kept battling for a while, except the clutch linkage, a bailing wire fix, gave up and so did I.  I used Vice Grips to put the machine in reverse and back it out of the way.

       The snow shovel wasn’t an answer either.  The stuff was heavy and wet.  And with the wind picking up, it was filling in as fast as I could shovel.

      We have snowbirds for neighbors.  Before departing for Florida, Ken bought a powerful two-stage blower and gave it to a neighbor with the understanding that the neighbor would keep Ken's walks clean all winter. 

     The neighbor was out and blew his way to my drive.  I told him not to bother with the drive.  Just get the sidewalk to the post boxes clean, which he did.  The walk would get cleaned two or three more times by Monday noon, once more by snowblower and again a time or two with shovels.

       I retired to the safety of indoors and read the Sunday paper on line.  No way would the newspaper carrier be able to navigate the streets.

 

  Trail to post boxes.  “Trees” are normally six feet or higher.

       On Monday, I repaired the clutch linkage on my blower and tried it again, but the wet snow plugged up the chute.  The helpful neighbor came by again and cleared a path to the front door and in front of the garage doors.  I told him to help the two ladies at the far end of the cul de sac, one of whom who was supposed to get to work.  She didn’t make it.  Nobody did.

      “Tis an ill wind that blows no good,” the saying is.  Everybody in the cul de sac was out shoveling, snowblowing, talking to each other, helping each other.  That’s the first time that has happened in the six years we have lived here.

 

     

     On Tuesday, I attacked the driveway again with the snowblower.  It worked pretty well while it was still below freezing.  The frozen snow was powdery enough to blow without plugging the chute.  When the temperature warmed up, I started plugging up.

      I wasn’t quite done, so I shoveled for a while.  But then, I grew weary, and I had to get to a quartet practice.  One of the guys agreed to pick me up which solved my problem and another one.  The guy who hosted our practice at his house only had room to park one car.

      Ted was able to turn around in the cul de sac with a few backs and forwards.  I waded out to his car and away we went.

      When we came back, he was able to pull into our driveway.  Someone had cleared a ten foot path from where I had quit at the end of my drive, out into the center of the cul de sac.  I could get out now.

 

     I made another discovery after Ted left me.  The door was locked.  I had no key and no garage door opener.  I was locked out.  No problem.

      I rang the doorbell.  Twice.  A third time.  No answer.  Looking in, I could see lights all off.  Had the Goodwife taken advantage of the newly-cleared pathway and gone shopping somewhere?

      No problem.  Call her cell phone.  No answer.  Call again.  No answer.  Ring the doorbell again.  No response.

      There is a key outside.  In the back yard.  I had to slug all along the house in the deep snow.  As I passed the garage, I peered in to see the car still parked there.  Uh oh.  I began to panic a bit.

Pathway to the backyard.

       Fortunately, I left the snow shovel just outside the front door.  With the shovel, I dug enough to free the latched gate.  I managed to get the gate open wide enough for me to sneak through.  I slugged through the drifts to the shed where the key is hidden.

      Back I went as fast as I could.  I was just ready to insert the key into the door when the Goodwife appeared at the window.  She unlocked the door and I was in.

     “Thank God you’re alive!  Why the heck didn’t you answer the door?  Or your phone?”

      She was in the basement, couldn’t hear the doorbell, the phone in the bedroom, couldn’t hear it either.

       Enough excitement for Tuesday.  As we stood there by the door, a road grader and a frontend loader tractor came and shoved some snow out of the cul de sac.  The loader picked up the snow the grader bladed up and dumped it in a pile on the corners where the cul de sac borders the street.  The piles blocked the sidewalk a bit, and some of the grader’s windrow blocked the path someone (Neighbor Tom it turns out) had cleared from my drive to the center of the cul de sac.

       I finished my day out of doors by shoveling the windrow into two piles and my way was clear again.  We were back to some semblance of normal after the blizzard of ’21.  Icy streets will be around for a week or so.  Snow piles will last longer.  Some of them are huge.

       I am reminded of a snowy cold winter in Kansas, where for entertainment, a group of energetic citizens started a pool to see who could accurately predict how long the huge pile of snow in the center of the street in front of the courthouse would take to completely melt.

       You paid your dollar and entered a day, month, hour, and minute the pile would be gone.  For a while the judges selected to determine a complete melt down, met once a week, then once a day, and finally, they stood around on a warm sunny afternoon and determined when there was only water left.

       The contest wasn’t as close as one might expect, as the snow lasted quite a lot longer than most guesses.  It might be fun to do something like that this year, say in King Soopers’ parking lot.      

       Some people didn’t have enough to keep them busy in the storm's aftermath.  

 

 

         Like a decked, stunned prize fighter, the bushes struggle to rise up after the severe blow.   

                                     

                                                  

     Time will pass.  In years to come, will folks remember the one-two punch of a year of COVID followed by the blizzard of ’21?     

 

Abraham Was Black?

      “Abraham was the father of the white race.” 

     I wouldn’t know it for another 23 hours, but I had just made one of the most controversial statements of my career. 

     A day later, I would hear from one of my students, a girl who hardly ever said anything.  At the beginning of the class hour, she blurted out, “My mom says you are full of. . .”  She stopped appropriately for the classroom of those days, but everyone knew how to fill in the blank.

       I was amused.  I knew her mom rather well.  I had  had her in class.  Her grandmother was an accomplished pianist who accompanied lots and lots of singing groups, including some at school.  I wasn’t insulted.  After all, my comment was rather in jest, not a dogmatic statement.

       Without hesitancy, everyone in class chipped in.  “Yeah, my folks said they didn’t think you’re right.”  Similar comments came from every corner of the room.  It ended with the preacher’s kid.

      “My dad says that the Bible doesn’t actually say that.  Abraham was probably white.”

      “ Then Terah would be the father of the white race.  Abraham was black.  Isaac was the first white man,” I countered, still half jesting, as my original comments a day earlier had been.

       Objections followed and I laughed.  I admitted that none of those things I had said were my idea, but ideas that had been circulated for many years by some who knew a lot more about the Bible than I did.

       We moved on, but I don’t remember what we were working on.  I  just remember that the question a day earlier came out of the blue and had nothing whatsoever to do with what we doing in class.

      The amazing thing was that everyone was listening.  In day-to-day classroom work, the enemy is boredom, ennui, lack of participation, lack of involvement.  To think that they were not only listening, but actually took it home.

         “What did you do at school today?”

       “Oh, nothing.”  No.  Instead,  “The nutty teacher said Adam and Eve were black, that Abraham was the father of the white race.”  I had to laugh.  Delightedly.

        Ashton, we’ll call her, caused the whole thing.  She was a blond, fair, student who, I came to find out wasn’t disinterested.  Just quiet, maybe.  Her question came out of nowhere.  It was uttered seemingly without cause.

     “Where did black people come from?” she asked.  The question had nothing to do with anything we were working on.

 

      Now in those days, there was a guru named Madeline Hunter.  She was beloved by many a principal and superintendent.  She provided a yardstick to actually gauge teacher effectiveness.  She made a principal’s dreaded job of evaluating his charges a little easier.

      She objectified an otherwise subjective job.  A principal could take a checklist of characteristics with him to observe a teacher at work.  He could fill it out and share it with the teacher in the required evaluation conference.  She could even make suggestions of how to improve.  Quite a difference from my evaluations in the early days of my career.

     A major problem with disciples of Madeline Hunter was that the administrator used that yardstick for purposes other than measuring, purposes that the schoolmaster of old may have used a yardstick for.  Like whapping his charges over the head with it.  Some principals were unable to practice what they preached.  They failed to dignify teacher’s actions when they fell short of the glory of Madeline.

      Madeline Hunter made a career of studying successful teachers.  She sought out those teachers who were successful, who were acclaimed by students, principals, and parents, whose students did well on SAT and ACT tests.  She visited their classrooms, sat in with their individual student conferences, observed their dealing with parents. 

     Then she drew up some characteristics that all these successful teachers demonstrated.  And less successful teachers failed to demonstrate.

 

     It came to pass that Madeline Hunter left her home in fertile California to sojourn in the heart of the Great American Desert for a night and a day, in Colby, Kansas.  And many of the pedagogues of Northwest Kansas gathered on an artificial hillside known as the basketball court of the Colby Community Building to listen to the great teacher of teachers.

     For six hours, three hours before lunch and three hours after lunch (I don’t remember what was for lunch, but it wasn’t fish and loaves) she dwelt on the subject of “Dignifying a Wrong Answer.”

     One of the things good teachers do is establish a personal relationship with their charges.  Jesus and Socrates come to mind. 

      Maintaining a good relationship prohibits embarrassing a student, especially in front of her peers.  So, when a wrong answer appears, you must handle it, without ignoring it, with a response that will allow the incorrect answerer to retain his dignity.

     It’s a form of “Jeopardy.”  When the wrong answer appears, you say something like, “Oh, you must be thinking of . . . .”  Then you supply a question for which the wrong answer is the RIGHT answer! 

      In the last section of her six hour presentation, Madeline answered written questions submitted by teachers, many who had felt the sting of the Madeline Hunter yardstick on their hides.  One question that appeared more than once dealt with the subject of “time-on-task.”  Madeline observed that good teachers spent a lot of their allotted class time engaged with students during the class “period.” 

       So some administrative disciples would actually set a stopwatch to see how long a teacher spent working with students during the class hour.  It meant a teacher needed to be still trying to engage students on a subject at the end of a long hour.  No time to just relax and visit with students.

      Well, Madeline set them straight.  When you’re done, you’re done, she said, in answer to a question she read from a small slip of paper.  No use whipping a dead horse.  She also said that some days, when the students can’t settle down and get to work, you might just as well pack it in and try again tomorrow.  I don’t think the ones who needed to listen to that actually listened to that.

       And now I must say that I was fortunate never to have to work under that kind of pressure or stress.  My principals were all good, as far as I was concerned.  But, we did have some in our system. . . .

       Anyway, we had had six hours of strategies to handle wrong answers from the great lady.  So when Ashton supplied not an incorrect answer, but a totally non sequitur question, my training kicked in.  Not for nothing did I spend six hours on the manufactured hillside attending the great pedagogical guru.

       “Where did black people come from?’

      “Adam and Eve were black.  Abraham was the father of the white race.”

      The question wasn’t where did black people come from.  The question was, where did the mutation known as Isaac come from!

      It wasn’t the first time I made controversial statements, even ridiculous ones, just to see if anyone was listening.  It wouldn’t be the last time either.

     It was the only time I got such a universal and unanimous reaction.

Faucets

     The house was cold when I walked in, 47 degrees.  It was 55 outside.

     I disarmed the security system and glanced around.  Everything seemed in order.  No need to go downstairs for the usual chores of turning on the water heater and turning off the cameras.  I wouldn’t be there long enough to worry about either.

     Next step, check the water.  Nothing at the kitchen faucet.  I was a little surprised.  It was only a week or so since I last checked in.  Probably a dripping faucet or something.

      I grabbed the keys and unlocked the shop.  Then I turned on the pressure pump.  On my way back to the house, I stepped in the shop to turn on the well pump.  I walked back to the house.  I didn’t run.  I probably should have. 

      When I opened the porch door, there was water on the floor in front of me.  There was the ominous hiss coming from the corner beside the washing machine.  (A hiss must be a universal danger signal that puts us mammals into fight or flight mode.) 

      It wasn’t just a broken hose I saw.  There was an open pipe, no shutoff, nothing.  The only way to stop it was to go downstairs and shut off the main valve.  Through the kitchen door, across the kitchen, through the cellar door, down the stairs, around the stairway and to the southeast corner I went as fast as I safely could.

     With the main valve shut off, I grabbed a mop and went back to the porch.  Well, it wasn’t exactly an open pipe that I saw.  There was a piece of brass still attached to the galvanized iron pipe.  I could see threads where the rest of the shutoff valve should have been.

      But where was the rest of the valve?  And how on earth did it get unthreaded from the adapter still fastened to the galvanized pipe?

     The rest of the valved was still attached to the washing machine hose.  It didn’t take long to answer that question.  How did it come loose?  It took a while to answer that one.

     A couple of trips to the garage and then my pickup got the right tools.  I removed the brass fitting from the pipe.  I took the valve off the washing machine hose.  I began the process of putting the two parts of the valve together.

      Then I saw it.  There was a big crack in the bottom of the valve body, the piece attached to the washing machine hose.  It must have frozen.  The ice split the valve body.  When it got warm enough to thaw out, the water pressure must have blown the valve body apart.

     That brought on a few more questions.  I had been there since the great freeze.  It was a warm day when I was there.  It wasn’t leaking then.  I had used the water and even run the pressure pump up to its maximum of fifty-some pounds.  Why had it had a delayed reaction?  The pump was off as usual when no one is there.

      Oh well.  Ours is not to reason why.  I set about repairing the damage.  A half inch plug would stop the leak so I could turn on the water again.  I thought about making a run to town for a new valve.  Then I realized that there were three valves in the cluster that supplied water to the washing machine, a spare one in case someone need to attach a garden hose. 

       I took off the spare and put it where the damaged one had been.  I put the plug where the spare valve had been.  As common sense began to take over after the panic, I realized I would not have had to make the change of valve and plug.  I could have simply put the washing machine hose on the valve where it was.  Oh well.  I had already done the work.  No need to redo it. 

      I turned on the water and checked for leaks.  All was well.  Now the process of bleeding pipes.  Loss of water pressure usually means a lot of flushing to get the air out of the pipes, and then a lot of faucet screen cleaning because the old iron pipes have a certain degree of rust and even some sand in them. 

     When a faucet is turned on, the air escapes not with a whimper, but with bang.  The bang jars stuff loose inside the pipes. 

       I started the process in the upstairs bathroom.  Air likes to go up, I think.  When I opened the lavatory cold water faucet, I got the usual boom and pop, some rust, and some sand.  But then it wouldn’t shut off entirely.  There was a prodigious drip I could not stop.

       Of course, there are no stops under the lavatory counter.  Back down two flights of stairs to shut off the main valve again.  I thought the problem with the lavatory faucet was the friction between stem and stem body made it difficult to turn all the way off.  I had been having some problems with it last fall.

      As I was in the process of greasing the valve stem, I noticed the screw holding the faucet washer to the stem was loose, so loose it wouldn’t let the seat washer close on the seat.  The screw head hit the seat and stopped the washer from going all the way down.

     That problem was easily solved with a screw driver, which was handy since I had to have it to take the  handle off the valve stem.  I reassembled the faucet and took the two flights of stairs down to turn on the water.  Then back up the stairs to check for leaks.

     Aha!  There were none.  The faucet now shut off and held, no drips. 

     I cleaned up and put away the tools.  The rest of my trip was routine.  Check this, check that.  Everything seemed ok. 

      Home again, I thought about being able to solve the plumbing problems in an hour or less.  Actually, I was a bit proud of myself for the day’s work.  Then I drew some water from the kitchen sink at home.  Dang!  It takes special attention to get it to shut off and not drip.

      That wasn’t a new discovery, either.  It has been that way since Christmas.  I just never get around to doing anything about it.  Well, ok.  I did have a hip replacement and carpal tunnel surgery.  I gave myself a little break.

      But the aggravation didn’t go away.  This kitchen faucet has only been in a little over two years, and this will be the second time I have had to operate on it. 

      I had a Franke faucet there, one where the main head is on a hose that comes out of the faucet spout and can be used either as spray or stream.  It leaked where the handheld part connected to the hose.  The water dripped down underneath the sink and made a mess. 

     Try as I might, I could find no repair part for a Franke faucet.  I checked with Lowes who sell the Franke brand.  Nothing.  I went to Ace Hardware.  The helpful Ace guy referred me to a local plumbing shop.  I could buy hose, spout and all for $150 or something ridiculous.

     So I bought a Delta faucet, thinking I would be able to buy parts.  Which I can, but I thought I might get a little more than a year or two out of it before I had to buy parts.

      I'll get to the kitchen faucet one of these days.

      And so it goes. 

                 

     

H20

      He was a crochety old man.  He lived catacorner from the school playground and across the street from the sports field.

     We were supposed to be watching the football or baseball game, but of course it was much more fun to be playing our own game in the parking lot directly across the street from old John.  Don’t let the ball cross the street into his yard.  It was a lost ball if it got into John’s yard.

     He was somebody’s grandpa, so we watched what we said about him.  What we said was never good.  That’s all I ever knew about him.  Until many years later.  Long after he was dead.

 

      Recently, a group of local citizens started a club whose goal is to keep Lake Loveland filled with water all year around.  In the spring, the lake fills and remains full most of the summer.  As fall approaches, the inflow stops and the lake’s water level drops even as farmer demand downstream declines.  The decline in water level exposes vast stretches of “beach.”  Winter winds kick up dust and sand storms that the lake’s neighbors don’t care for too much.

     Additionally, the lake serves as a tourist attraction and a picturesque background for lots of activities.  The club members see it as a bit of false advertisement to use pictures of the full lake for tourist brochures since the lake spends about half of the year being a not-so-attractive mudhole.

    The group approached the city council, asking that the council take matters into their hands to do what they can to get some control of the water level in the lake during the winter months.  The lake is not owned by the city.  It is owned by the Loveland Greeley Irrigation Company.  Its main purpose is to provide water for Weld County farmers.

     In an op-ed in the local paper, a city councilman pointed out the difficulties of doing anything about the water level in Lake Loveland.  He says there are nine separate boards and commissions that have a say in how much water goes into and out of the lake and when those inputs and outflows can occur.  There goes the simple solution.

      Water has long been a point of contention west of the Missouri.  Many an old western book or movie has at its core the conflict over water rights.  For whoever knows what reason, the story and op-ed in the paper stimulated memories of another “range war.”

       

            Looking for something to do on a weekend many years ago, the Goodwife and I, before kids, went to the museum in Oberlin, Kansas.  There my eye fell on a story that actually occurred 40 or 50 miles west in Cheyenne County near the border with Rawlins County where we lived.

     Why wasn’t that story in the Rawlins County Museum? I wondered.  I think because sons of one of the participants were still in their prime and may not have wanted to see that story about their father in an institution partially supported by their tax money.

    The story is referred to as the Dewey-Berry feud.  I read it with some interest.  That interest spiked when I came across the phrase “John Berry of Genoa, Colorado.”

     Apparently, he had made an unlucky choice to visit relatives in Western Kansas one fateful day.  Three of the Berrys were killed on that day.  According to the article in the museum, John was called as a witness when the case went to court.   

      The fight was over a stock watering tank, not exactly a fight over water.  At what must have been a sheriff’s sale, the Deweys bought the tank and had come to the Berry place to take possession of it. 

      There had been bad blood between the two families, as the Deweys were ranchers and the Berrys were squatters in the Deweys’ opinion.  The Berrys accused the Deweys of letting their cattle run over Berry crops.  So, when two sides came together in the Berry farmyard, the frustration on both sides boiled over and a gun battle ensued.

       Both sides claimed the other side fired the first shot.  After the shooting, three of the Berry men lay dead.  The only Dewey casualty was a dead horse.

     As word of the goings-on spread, an army of vigilantes composed of other settlers who had also felt themselves victimized by the Deweys gathered at the Berry place and were considering heading to the Dewey Ranch to even up the score.  Somehow, lawmen prevented that from happening. 

      Dewey and his cowboys holed up at the ranch until the sheriff’s pleas to Topeka brought National Guard troops to the rescue.  The Guard troops were more for the protection of the Dewey Crew who feared the mob that was rumored to be looking for them than for help in arresting them. 

      Dewey and company were arrested and taken first to Colby, then St. Francis, eventually to Topeka where they were released on bond.  The trial took place in Norton, Kansas.  The Deweys were acquitted in the criminal trial, but were later sued for wrongful death by the Berrys.  A jury awarded the Berrys $15,000.

      As I read all about the feud, I had to look in my memory bank and take another look at the crochety old man who lived on the corner.  The feud occurred on June 3, 1903.  John could not have been very old then and still be around in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

       Forty or fifty years later, I had another “run-in” with John Berry.  This time with my now-deceased neighbor.  One of the guns Neighborly showed me in his gun collection was one he bought from John Berry.  It was a civil war rifle that had been stored for years covered in grease and wrapped in a gunny sack.    

      The gun belonged to John’s father (or was it his uncle—I don’t remember for sure) and had been used in the civil war.  John was reluctant to give up the gun but eventually succumbed to Neighborly’s  persuasive powers.  The gun lives on.  As I studied the gun, once again I had to recalculate my thoughts about John Berry.  And what a small world it is, maybe.

      Will the water wars of the west once again break out in armed conflict?  Doubtful.  But who knows?  The right combination of swelling population, unprecedented drought, and disgruntled water-rights holders mustn’t be dismissed out of hand.

       Conflict is certain.  This time, it will be over water, rivers and reservoirs,  not a stock tank. 

    

Take a Walk

     You never truly appreciate something until you lose it.

   I haven’t been able to “take our walk” for about a year, now, due to hip problems.  Some days I could do it, but other days we would set out and I would find it necessary to turn back.    

     I was able to make the full circle for the first time since November on  Saturday, January 23.  That is a milestone since my new hip was installed on November 16.

     The first steps:      

 

East down the street:

 

And on to the walking (and biking, skateboarding, scootering) path:

 

Stop to take a look at the hills across the lake:

  

Back to the path:

 

There are many forks in the road.  We follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”:

Some of the second half of our path is good old fashioned dirt:

After a stop to check out the birds on the lake from the little pier, back to the concrete way:

We have to cross some bridges when we come to them, for there are four lakes on our walk:

And we are back to the first fork we took and are headed home:

 

     As Mark Twain  observed in Life on the Mississippi, having completed the trip up the river, you now have to go back down, and it is an entirely different river than the one you went up.  So it is, the path looks different on the road back.

     In our case, that’s not a bad thing.  It makes life more interesting.

     It is good to get back home and put our feet up for a while.  In all, we have walked a little over 2 ¾ miles, according to the Fitbit.

      Not often in life do you get a second chance at a missed opportunity.  Having been unable to make the complete circuit for some time, I now appreciate our walk more.

      My apologies for boring you with a bunch of pictures.  Nothing is completely worthless, though.  You can turn to this page to help cure your insomnia.     

Sunday Puzzle

      Habit?  Or Addiction?

      Are they the same?  Is it possible to have a “good” addiction as it is possible to have a good habit?   Is someone who reads the Bible daily “addicted”?  Or do they  just have a good habit?

      I have an addiction, or maybe habit.  I make an effort to listen to the Sunday puzzle on “N-P-Ah” as the Car Guys use to call it.  I loved to listen to Tom and Ray, too, in their day.  They have been off the air for a few years, now, and one of the ”Tappet Brothers, “Click and Clack,” never sure which was which, died.

     The Car Guys had “the puzzler,” too.  The younger brother would pose a question to be answered by the listeners.  The lucky listener who answered the question correctly and had his/her name drawn out of a hat got a gift certificate to the “Shameless Commerce Division” of their show.

     A week after posing the puzzle, the older brother got a chance to solve the puzzle before the correct answer and the winner was announced.  The older brother always had to be reminded of the question, which of course was a ruse to remind the listeners who didn’t bother to enter the contest what the puzzle of the week was.

     When the brothers retired from their weekly show, the younger brother revealed that the older brother was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and could no longer carry on with the show.  Always good for a joke, the younger brother commented that the older brother really couldn’t remember last week’s puzzle.  It wasn’t just a ruse after all.

      The Car Guys are sadly missed in this age of COVID and violent politics.  They could be counted on for a little humor mixed in with sometimes-legitimate efforts to help callers with their car problems. 

     One of the favorite segments of the program was “Stump the Chumps” where the brothers contacted a previous caller to see if their advice was good or “B-O-O-O-GUS”.  If their advice had been followed and proved successful,  there was an orchestral “Ta-Da!”  If, on the other hand, their advice had proved to be ineffective or wrong, there was the “r-r-r-r-“ of a car’s starter dragging down and stopping as in the case of a nearly-dead battery.

      While the Car Guys are a thing of the past on NPR, the Sunday puzzle motors on.  You can hear it on a Sunday morning at 6:40 or 8:40 a.m. on most stations.  In these days of computers and smart phones, you can find the puzzle on the internet if you miss it on Sunday morning.

     I have listened to it for years, even sending in a postcard or two back in the day before email and the like.  You now enter via email.  The lucky puzzle solver gets to play a puzzle on the air with puzzle master Will Shortz.  The reward for maybe making a fool of yourself in front of millions of listeners is a lapel pin and some other games like Scrabble and a book of crossword puzzles.

     More often than not, I am unable to solve the puzzle.  I write down the details and then forget about it until Sunday morning rolls around again.  When I have been successful at solving it, it’s usually an easy one, and I join two or three thousand others who have solved it.  Well, things changed two or three weeks ago. 

      The hostess nearly always asks the lucky listener how they solved the puzzle.  The solver two or three weeks ago said he works on the puzzle as he is going to sleep.  The seed sprouted and took shape in my mind.

       I don’t need any help going to sleep the first thing at night.  Reading usually does a good job of putting me to sleep.  The usual sign that it’s time to put away the book and turn off the bed lamp is when the book, or tablet nowadays, falls from my hand onto my face.

      However, sometimes I have trouble going back to sleep if awakened in the night.  It  happens frequently now.  I have to arise to answer the call of nature, so to speak.  Then I have trouble getting back to sleep.

       Worries, usually something beyond my control, beset my mind and get it to working when it should be concentrating on sending me a soothing dream of some kind.  I have to find something soothing, even boring, to think about and help me get back to sleep, something like the boring stories enjoyed by Sesame Street’s Bert.     

      What better thing to do than to try to solve the puzzle to help put me back to sleep?  I have been trying that the last couple of weeks, and it works.  I have to get the details of the puzzle in my head so I can work on it in the middle of the night when I can’t check out my written notes.  It does take my mind off of foolish worries and puts me to sleep.

      Amazingly, there is another result.  I actually solve the puzzle.  At least I have been successful the past two weeks.  I entered, too, but I have not been the lucky solver.

     That’s okay.  I would be like a dog chasing a passing car.  If he caught it, what would he do?  But it is fun and serves a useful purpose.

      As I contemplate this new pastime, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that in this time of isolation, puzzles have become a bigger part of my life.  If the Goodwife doesn’t complete the crossword in the newspaper, I finish it for her. 

     I have also challenged myself with the sudoku in the daily paper.  After a month or so of trying, I have actually managed to solve two or three sudokus without cheating.

     I think puzzles offer a challenge where you can feel good about yourself if you succeed.  And if you don’t succeed, no use to tell anyone.  Keep it to yourself.

      Now I have to get over the Puritanical notion that solving puzzles is a waste of time and that I should be doing something more productive.  Or, that working puzzles is a bad habit, an addiction, even.

     Working puzzles must be better than watching television.  Now that really is a waste of time.  Most of the time.   

    

       

 

The Trash Can

      “A disposable cuff?

     I was somewhat incredulous.  I checked in to the hospital before 9 a.m.  My first instructions said 9:30 for a 11:30 “procedure”.  A subsequent phone call informed me I should be there two-and-a-half hours before my appointed hour.

     After the usual height-weight routine, Rebecca led me to my prep cubicle.  There on the bed lay the ubiquitous backless gown.  It had company, a pair of yellowish-greenish tube socks covered with non-slip strips.

      Four plastic packages about the size of a Hershey candy bar, only longer, topped the gown.  Rebecca explained that the contents of the packages should be used to bathe as much of my body as possible.  Even though my “procedure” was a slit about an inch-and-a-half along the wrist and slightly into the palm of my left hand.   

     “Trying to keep the OR sterile,” Rebecca explained.  “Four packages, one for each leg, one for the arms, one for the front of your body, and one for as much of your back as you can get,” she continued.                                                              

     As I finished using the oversized Wet Ones, which had been warmed, I dumped each one, into the trash can. 

     No wonder the trash can was huge.

     Having donned my backless gown, I stepped, in my non slip socks, the only time they would hit the floor, over to the curtain, drew it to signal to Rebecca that I was ready, and lay down on the bed.  Rebecca proceeded to insert two IV needles, one near my right elbow joint, one in the back of my left wrist near the joint between arm and hand.

     A pile of plastic wrappers covered my lap when she was done.  Into the trash can.

     Rebecca hooked up a series of monitors and started the juice flowing through my elbow IV.  The wrist one was to inject numbing agents to stave off pain, she explained.  Then she unwrapped the blood pressure cuff.  I noticed it wasn’t the usual black lined material.  It looked more like the cardboard, soft, flexible that we used to use to pad and separate eggs in a wooden crate. 

      The cuff was soft and flexible.  And disposable.

     “It will stay with you the whole time you are here,”  Rebecca assured me.  And then?

     Into the trash can.

     I can only guess how much trash was generated in the operating room.  I took a nap. 

     I am sure that all the instruments used were no doubt sealed carefully in sterile plastic packaging.  Which went into the trash.

     In the recovery room, I got a carton of cranberry juice.  The carton could be recycled, but I doubt it did get recycled. 

     Various dressings and two or three pairs of gloves used by the recovery room lady as she got me ready to depart went into the trash.  The socks came off as she dressed me.  Did I want the socks?  Heavens no.  They weren’t very comfortable and they were ugly.  Into the trash can.

      Finally, off came the blood pressure cuff.  The nurse didn’t offer to send it home with me. 

      Into the trash can.

     Fully dressed, I rode the wheel chair to the exit door.  The Goodwife pulled the car up to the door.  The young lady helped me get into the car.  Away we went.

      I left a pile of trash in my wake.

     I should not complain.  My surgery went smoothly.  The big clock in the OR, big enough for me to see without my glasses, said 11:30 as they wheeled me in. 

      I was awakened briefly to look at the slit in my wrist.  Back to sleep I went.  It wasn’t quite 12:30 as they wheeled me out of the OR.  It was 1:30 when I left the recovery room.

      So far so good.  I have less pain in my wrist now than I sometimes experienced before surgery.  So far, no sign of infection.  I am grateful for the strides made in medicine.  (Think of the amputations in field hospitals during the Civil War.  How did anyone survive that?)

      But I can’t help reflecting on the mountain of trash hospitals and medical facilities generate daily, hourly.  When we run out of places to dump trash, we may need to take a look at how the medical industry does business.

     Really?  A disposable blood pressure cuff?

Addenda:  What did I do after a day at home?  Bought gloves that would go over the bandage on my hand and wrist, so I could wash my other hand.   Disposable plastic gloves.  Shame on me.