Death of a Swinger

This is an excerpt from an obituary in yesterday’s New York Times:

“In the Tarzan film series, whose golden age spanned 1932 to 1948, Cheetah was said to have appeared in the films made between 1932 and 1934, as a comic and sympathetic animal sidekick whose intelligence sometimes seemed to rival that of his human co-stars, Johnny Weissmuller (who played the titular jungle lord) and Maureen O’Sullivan (who portrayed his civilized love interest, Jane).”

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, one of the New York television stations regularly aired old Tarzan movies on weekend afternoons—as well as Bowery Boys flicks and an array of Three Stooges shorts. Having spent many an hour utterly absorbed in this intellectual wasteland, my only quibble with the New York Times’ tribute to the chimpanzee who died of kidney failure last Saturday at a Florida primate sanctuary is its employment of the qualifier “sometimes.”

While I loved Weissmuller as Tarzan, it was clear to me even as a little kid that he’d been tapped for the role for his rugged good looks and athleticism—he’d won five Olympic gold medals in swimming in the 1920s—rather than his acting ability. When Weissmuller said things like “Tarzan hungry,” one suspected he merely was subbing his screen name into a declaration he might just as easily have made at the studio commissary. Tarzan of the Apes may have swung on vines across what then was Rhodesia, but that didn’t make the guy playing him a Rhodes scholar.

Maureen O’Sullivan was a beauty who convincingly employed many more syllables than did Weissmuller, but she wasn’t exactly the Dame Judi Dench of her day, either. She had this way of making life in the jungle sound like one big tea party, and seemed as likely to thrive in the wild as might such current-day survivalists as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

So let’s recap: Here I was, spending copious weekend hours watching B actors in various mid-century screen roles flee elephant stampedes, utter lines even Damon Runyon wouldn’t have touched and gouge out each other’s eyes. Cheetah the chimp, meanwhile, stood proud (if not tall) in the jungle, commanding the screen while making figurative monkeys out of every bloodthirsty crocodile, rapacious European and pissed-off tribesman he encountered. So, of course Cheetah riveted my attention. (So much so, in fact, that I never once asked myself why an ambling chimp went by the name of a speedy cat.)

Cheetah had presence. He always was the smartest primate in the forest, and not just given the scant competition. He was a leader and a problem solver who suffered fools gladly only in the sense that he showed many teeth while loudly mocking them and doing back-flips at their expense. Man, I loved that chimp. Of course, back then I didn’t think about the ethics or morality of people using animals for human entertainment. (This youthful lack of conscience also came in handy while I was delighting in the TV antics of Mr Ed and Arnold Ziffel.) All I knew was that Cheetah seemed to be a higher evolution of primate than were the schoolyard bullies who spent the 1960s calling me Captain Hook, or the adolescent girls who uniformly deemed me manifestly un-dreamy.

But until this week I’d assumed that Cheetah had shuffled—or perhaps swung—off this mortal coil decades ago. He’d starred in films made decades before I was born, after all, and I’m not exactly young myself. Why, even Tarzan—Weissmuller—had died way back in 1984, several months shy of the 80th birthday that Cheetah is thought to have reached before he finally passed away on Christmas Eve.

Eighty! I’m no primatologist, but that struck me at first reading as a stunningly long lifespan for a chimp. Indeed, what I’ve been reading in the past 24 hours is that chimpanzees typically live 35 to 45 years in captivity, where they’re protected from tropical diseases and predators if not the danger of being bored to death. I can’t claim to know what Cheetah’s life really was like or what he thought about it, but Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, where he’d lived since “around 1960,” made it sound like his long retirement had at least been as entertaining, active and sustaining as are those of his shuffleboard-playing, Early Bird Special-flocking human counterparts.

Cheetah enjoyed finger-painting and football, Cobb told the Times, leaving ambiguous whether he used a brush or his actual finger, or whether he liked to tackle opposing players on the gridiron or just watch the games on TV. I personally like to think Cheetah had kept himself mentally young by retaining some of the impish, chimp-ish aggression he’d shown on movie sets. My favorite anecdote comes from actress Mia Farrow, daughter of the late Maureen O’Sullivan. Farrow tweeted yesterday, according to the Times, that her mother invariable referred to Cheetah as “that bastard” because he “bit her at every opportunity.”

But perhaps Cheetah had mellowed in his decades away from the cutthroat movie business. Debbie Cobb characterized the senior chimp she knew as having been “very compassionate” and “in tune to human feelings.” She told the Times that he “always was trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day.” Supposedly Cheetah had been “soothed by Christian music,” so it could be that he absorbed those messages and even prayed for the souls of those who had pocketed his residuals and omitted his name from marquees while hyping a dimwitted ex-jock.

It’s all anthropomorphizing, of course. But “primate sanctuary” makes it sound like Cheetah at least got to spend quality time around his own species. Presumably he wasn’t caged and had room to ramble. Florida’s climate would seem to be to a chimp’s liking. His human caretakers’ hearts undoubtedly were in the right place. He might indeed have taken a shine to Cobb and others. He may genuinely have adopted finger-painting and football with the same zeal that you and I might have devoted to ass-scratching and feces-throwing had the tables been turned.

I'm reminded of that old saw about how a monkey, given a typewriter and enough time, might produce Shakespeare. Not likely. But chimps are apes, and as such they’re smarter than the average monkey. Cheetah was wily enough to parlay an impressive film career into a long and seemingly cushy retirement. I like to think he enjoyed his life. At any rate, I feel compelled to thank him for having enriched mine. If there’s an afterlife for any of us primates, I hope he’s finally received his SAG card and is grabbing a bite with his old pal Weissmuller. Either that or taking a bite out of Maureen O’Sullivan.

Hitchens, Havel, Holidays

Did you miss me? Hello?

Today, a grab-bag of thoughts as Chanukah continues, Christmas looms and the new year stands poised to make this one history.

Update. Remember how, back in January, I wrote about how I was going to read 20 books in 2011—and how, even though my retention stinks and I might not at this point be able to give you complete synopses of each book, I’d at least be able to list every title, because I’d be writing them all down?

Not even close. I read less than half of that number of books. And I can’t be more precise because I forgot to record most of the titles. Early in the year I read an interesting biography of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor. During the summer I read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, about what happens to the human body in zero gravity. (I’ll pass on space tourism.) I could swear I read a few other books, possibly even some fiction. But I can’t prove it.

I got to thinking about this earlier in the month, when Christopher Hitchens died. His obituary in the Washington Post was packed with great quotes that made me think I ought to buy everything he ever wrote. All of which would be new to me, because I’m not sure I’ve read so much as a single essay of his. I’ve long known of him by reputation, of course—as a dissolute but brilliant contrarian, and an atheist only too happy to publicly debate believers, including his own brother. I like how he called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, took the decidedly minority view that sainted Mother Teresa had been a “fanatic, fundamentalist and fraud,” and expressed gratitude that strangers would pray for his recovery from cancer, but also disgust at the notion that he might undergo a death-bed conversion.

In fact, this was the final paragraph of the Post article: “‘I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire,’ Mr Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in October 2010, ‘who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.’”

It probably goes without saying that I’ve never read a word of Voltaire, either. Or of the magazine output of Alexander Cockburn, a one-time colleague of Hitchens’ at The Nation who once trashed his former co-worker as “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic and cynical.” Somehow all of that attracts me to Hitchens even more. I’d like to think I’ll get around to reading him posthumously in 2012. History and the literal stacks of tantalizing but unread books already at home make the prospect unlikely, however.

Jane and me. I’ve made no secret of my love-hate relationship with technology—meaning that I love such old-school pleasures as electricity and indoor plumbing and hate pretty much all forms of social networking save that so-last-century “innovation” known as e-mail. I seem to have very few allies on this front who are younger than 80. You can imagine my excitement several weeks ago, then, when the celebrated, world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall, who’s merely 78, was quoted as saying this when asked if she “keeps up” with technology:

I definitely do e-mails. I take my laptop. I do my writing on it. I will not have a BlackBerry.

I have a cell phone, but I don’t know the number. I use it simply to call somebody if I need to. The cell phone is never on. The cell phone is not part of my life. Someone does a blog for me. I don’t tweet and Twitter. When people ask me to join their Facebook, I delete it.

Jane, my BFF! If I had a cell phone, it, too, would never be on! I don’t tweet or Twitter, either! (But if I might tweak you a bit, my chimp-loving gal pal, I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing.) I’ve got a laptop! When people ask me to “friend” me on Facebook,” I delete the requests, too! (Neither am I LinkedIn. You, Jane?) So, OK, I do write my own blog. But not with any frequency, Girlfriend! And my readership is miniscule!

Sure, Jane might argue that she’s too busy trying to save species and promote global environmentalism to spend time gabbing on the cell, sending gossipy texts or posting boozy photos on Facebook from her occasional pub crawls across Nairobi. But hey, my plate’s pretty full, too. I’ve got all these books to consider reading, for one thing.

Dead heads of state. I feel compelled to write something about the near-concurrent recent deaths of former Czech president Vaclav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Some essayist somewhere commented about how the two men’s leadership styles couldn’t have been more different. I’ll say! Havel was a dissident playwright and poet turned politician who was criticized for being too dreamy and impractical. Kim, meanwhile, claimed power as his birthright and wasn’t exactly known for his light touch. Yet if news footage is to be believed, whose death is it that’s really cranking up the waterworks among the local populace? But to Havel’s credit, he, unlike Kim, never starved and brainwashed his people into thinking he was All That.

This is going to shock you, but I’ve never read any of Havel’s plays or poetry. While I admire his creativity and courage as a thorn in the regime’s side in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its patron governments, I’ve always heard Havel’s writings referred to as “experimental” and “avant-garde.” I have enough trouble understanding stuff that’s relatively straightforward. It’s not lost on me that one of Havel’s best buddies was Frank Zappa, whose music and comedy carry the same descriptions as Havel’s oeuvre, and whose insightfulness and alleged brilliance always escaped me.

I was reminded the other day, via the Onion’s AV Club arts and entertainment Web site, that Kim’s death seems certain to influence future scripts of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock. When last season ended, Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks) the cable news-host wife of Alec Baldwin’s studio-exec character Jack Donaghy, had been kidnapped by Kim Jong Il. (This prompted dim diva Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski, to ask, “Kim Jong Il? Who’s she?”) So, what’s next? Will Avery be implicated in Kim’s death? Or, might the suddenly fatherless Kim Jong Un—the so-called “Great Successor”—seek solace in the arms of the shanghaied (wrong country, I know) American?

I love 30 Rock. I also recall that one bit had Kim Jong Il paired in a cop buddy movie with Tracy Jordan, the idiot man-child played by Tracy Morgan who’s famous for saying things like, “A book hasn’t given me this much trouble since Waldo went to that barber pole factory” and “I love this cornbread so much, I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.” The brilliance of the buddy-film gag is that the real Kim Jong Il by all accounts was a Hollywood movie nut who—who knows?—might have skipped the entire tyrant gig in Pyongyang for one shot at action-film stardom. It’s one of those “If only people had bought Hitler’s paintings” kinds of thing.

Makes you think, right? OK, not really. But still.

You are where you eat/shop. David Wasserman, the US House editor of the Cook Political Report, recently wrote: “In 2008, candidate Barack Obama carried 81 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and just 36 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel—a record 45-point gap. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won 58 percent of counties now containing a Whole Foods and 26 percent of those now boasting a Cracker Barrel, a 32-point difference. And in 1992, Gov Bill Clinton won 60 percent of Whole Foods counties and 40 percent of Cracker Barrel counties — a mere 20-point margin. This growing divide signals shifts in the electorate.”

The idea is that Cracker Barrel, the home-style restaurant chain that trades on comfort food and nostalgia, is synonymous with Republicans and conservatism, while Whole Foods, the high-end organic grocery stores, bespeak liberal Democrats who’ve got the money to spend on fancypants grub. There’s much to all that, but I personally am not crazy about either chain, even though politically I should be in the tank for Whole Foods.

What I most dislike about Cracker Barrel is its history of discrimination against gays. But also, the food’s not very good. And it’s the kind of place where people bring their noisy kids and then smack them in public. I’m sure concealed handguns are quietly welcomed there, too. Put it this way: I’d think twice before publicly backing “Obamacare” in that place.

But Whole Foods, too, gives me a pain in the ass. Everything’s expensive, and try finding a box of Lucky Charms or a selection of celebrity-gossip magazines. The place is always crowded, and every one of its theoretically carbon-neutral shoppers seems to have a huge, honking SUV parked in the frighteningly jammed parking lot. Everybody is glued a cell phone, and would rather run you down with their cart than pay any attention to where they’re going.

I don’t suppose I’m contributing to electoral analysis of the Cracker Barrel-Whole Foods divide by simply griping about both establishments. But I enjoyed that.

Christmas music. As I noted at around this time last year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas I listen to a ton of holiday music, on the radio and CDs. My car dial often is tuned to WASH-FM, which switches to an all-Christmas-music-all-the-time format during this period. Among my favorite CDs this season is one of country artists doing Christmas songs. It includes “The Christmas Guest,” a schmaltzy and wonderful recitation by the late great Johnny Cash about an elderly widower who fruitlessly awaits God’s promised visit on Christmas day while instead taking in three forlorn wayfarers who show up at his humble door. Spoiler alert: It turns out that God had disguised Himself as those wayfarers! So, he really did show up, and the old guy passed the hospitality test with flying colors. (Never mind that you’d think the Almighty might lighten up a little on the fealty thing on December 25. It’s a holiday, for His sake!)

Anyway, as often happens when I hear various versions of the same songs about 20,000 times in a compressed period, I’m stuck by certain peculiarities in the lyrics.

Perhaps no Christmas song is more peculiar than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” in which a child is privy to his mother’s seemingly adulterous cuckolding of his father with the fat bearded man in the red suit. If you listen to the words, mommy doesn’t just kiss Santa, she tickles him under his beard, too. And that’s just what the kid sees in a fleeting glance! Where else is mommy kissing him? And why is all this foreplay presented as innocent fun? The song’s last line is “What a laugh it would have been/If daddy had only seen/Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” A “laugh”? Do you think it’d really have been a laugh? This is America! If daddy sees that, I see him pulling out a handgun and wasting the bitch and the home-wrecking old elf, Christmas cheer be damned! You know what I see? Sing it with me: "I See Junior with PTSD."

Then there’s “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which begins by assuming everyone knows the names of eight members of Santa’s sleigh-pulling team, but, after naming them, asks, “Do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?” Isn’t that entirely ass-backwards? To the contrary, Rudolph's is the name everybody already knows—the acknowledged “most famous reindeer of all.” Wouldn’t it be more accurate to ask, “Do you recall how there are a bunch of other reindeer whose names escape us at the moment? One’s Donner, right—like the party?” But then, I suppose the song would lack something as “Rudolph’s Posse, the Eight Anonymous Reindeer.”

Finally, what are we to make of the notation, in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago”? Who the hell associates Christmas with scary ghost stories?! I mean, name one, other than A Christmas Carol. And even that tale isn’t particularly scary unless you’re Ebenezer Scrooge. Or maybe unless you, like me, felt a little spooked as a kid when that bony skeleton hand pointed at Mr Magoo’s grave in the old animated version.

So, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little pre-holiday potpourri. Happy holidays! Drive safely. Maybe bring a book on your travels. And don’t listen too closely to those Christmas song lyrics. They’ll drive you crazy.

Talking Turkey—About Zombies

Since Thanksgiving week is all about eating, naturally my thoughts turn to zombies.

I mean, they live to eat. Even though they don’t, technically speaking, well, live. And even though it makes no sense that they’re ravenous for human flesh, because why would a corpse have an appetite?

I was thinking about all this last Sunday night when I was watching The Walking Dead on TV. In case you don’t know, this is weekly series that’s broadcast on AMC. Which, extending the theme of counter-intuition, stands for American Movie Classics. The Walking Dead is neither a movie nor a classic. Rather, it’s an episodic television show, based on a series of graphic novels (hifalutin’ comic books) about a small band of survivors of an unexplained (in the show, at least) apocalypse that has killed most of the world’s population, littering the landscape with corpses. Many of whom (but not all, somehow) have reanimated—in the sense that they can move, see, hear and smell, if not breathe, enunciate beyond hisses and moans, or mitigate the stench of their steady decomposition. Furthermore, these “walkers,” when not eating survivors wholesale, lethally infect them with bites that turn them into zombies, too.

None of it frankly makes any sense, even within its own little suspension-of-disbelief universe. Which tends to makes the plots head-scratchingly stupid. Not only that, but the show’s writing, character development and acting are pedestrian at best (pun sort of intended). That’s why I write that, in addition to not being a movie, The Walking Dead isn’t a classic by any stretch. It’s in only its second season, so there’s time for it to become one, I suppose. If, that is, it somehow can fashion its own framework of absurdist logic and hire new writers and actors to implement it.

So, why do I watch this program? It’s stupid, yes, but it’s stupid fun. The makeup, prosthetics, etc, are excellent, and the zombies are genuinely frightening. (An aside: How did “zombie” come to be synonymous with the undead dead, when the term used to be applied to a living person reduced by voodoo to a trance-like state?) The show, thus, is suspenseful, and sometimes delightfully nerve-wracking.

Also, much as watching The Biggest Loser makes me feel good about my ability to exit my house and car without the aid of a crowbar or the fire department, watching The Walking Dead makes living in our real world of environmental, economic, political and civil collapse feel at least slightly more tolerable. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m as disgusted as you are that our congressional “supercommittee” promised steely resolve, then crumbled like tinfoil. And yes, it’s hard not to feel that all may be lost when Americans are so desperate for leadership that Newt Gingrich can rise to the top of the GOP presidential field simply because he has ideas—however wrongheaded and disproven and egocentric those ideas might be. Still, just as Tom Waits once famously sang that he’d rather have “a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” so, too, would I—speaking of brains—rather not have mine ripped from my cranium and gobbled up by ghouls. As depressing as real life can be, come The Walking Dead’s conclusion at 10 pm Sunday nights, I feel grateful that I’ll soon be sleeping in a comfortable bed, beside a spouse who may punch me to stop snoring but at least is unlikely to cannibalize me.

So, anyway, getting back to eating. Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead included a scene in which a woman standing in a hayloft emptied a sack of live chickens onto a barn floor, where a group of walkers were lurching and hissing and moaning, as the undead dead are wont to do. Please don’t ask why a bunch of zombies were being held captive, rather than having been dispatched by the standard methods—a bullet to the brain or beheading. Again, none of it makes any sense, even within its own crazy context. How is it that something that’s already dead can be killed, anyway? If I told you that these particular zombies are being protected by a flipped-out retired veterinarian who thinks they’re only “sick,” and that they shouldn’t be stigmatized simply because they’re rancid killing machines, would that help sort things out? I didn’t think so.

Moving on. The woman, a daughter of the nutty veterinarian, emptied her sack of chickens and the zombies below—who happened to include the Corpse Formerly Known as Mom—went into a feeding frenzy. Again, why do the dead need to eat at all? If they like chickens so much, shouldn’t survivors tote a supply of Rhode Island Reds at all times to buy themselves getaway time whenever the zombies get close? I read on a Web site somewhere—naturally, there now are more Web sites and chats devoted to The Walking Dead than those dedicated to sustainable agriculture and nuclear disarmament—that the walkers will eat only live animals. Now, why is that?! Is it because the show would be much less horrific if survivors could simply leave a freshly-baked pie on the window sill for a passing zombie to conveniently “steal,” leaving the humans alone? Are walkers ever satiated, anyway? Were they to feast on us at the Thanksgiving table tomorrow, might they later in the day go into a tryptophan coma and doze to the sound of football on TV? While that seems unlikely, it would make about as much sense as anything else in the zombie universe.

I suppose that, in a certain sense, zombies are eating my brain, because I spend a lot of time puzzling over supernatural inconsistencies and illogic that could be better expended on any number of other things. But at least I’m not the only one wasting brainpower in this way. Per my earlier mention of Web sites, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of people who labor over this nonsense at far greater length than do I. I recently picked up a copy of the Washington City Paper to find the syndicated “Straight Dope” column, which is written by Cecil Adams, the self-proclaimed “world’s most intelligent human.” The question posed by a reader was this: “Putting aside the brain-eating and all that, how dangerous is the combined smell of all those ambulatory corpses? I assume they’re giving off methane or ammonia or some other noxious gas. Would the aggregate stench of hundreds of walking dead make your mall sanctuary uninhabitable, even if you managed to keep from being bitten?”

OK, first, why “how dangerous is” the smell, as opposed to “how dangerous would it be”? Does this reader live in a town where creeping malodorousness suggests a looming ambulatory-corpse crisis? Second, while Cecil Adams at least is smart enough to get paid to answer zombie questions, is this really the smartest use of a stratospheric IQ that otherwise might be put to use identifying new energy sources, or perhaps a way to isolate and neutralize the gun-nut gene that daily makes me want to strangle my own country?

Adams’ answer, while circumstantially irrelevant, was based on science and made for fascinating reading. Did you know that “aptly named gasses cadaverine and putrescine are primarily responsible for dead-body smell”? Me, neither! (Actually, I probably did know it, when I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Life of Cadavers, but I’d since forgotten.) To make a long response short, Adams concluded, “While the stench of zombies probably won’t kill you”—again, why “won’t” as opposed to “wouldn’t?” does Adams know something?—“it may gross you out of existence. If you’re somewhere that makes you constantly want to throw up, that to me is a good working definition of an uninhabitable environment.”

See, that’s the thing. The world in which we actually live no doubt makes every one of us want to vomit from time to time. One can reasonably argue, too, that—given global warming and its predictably dire consequences—Earth is becoming less habitable with each passing year. For now, though, our immediate environments—climatic and personal—remain (at least for those of us with jobs) within the comfort zone.

Put another way, if we aren’t able to keep our food down tomorrow, it will be because we overstuffed our guts, not because a shuffling army of zombies are harshing our mellow and stinkin’ up the joint.

That being the case, allow me to wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving. And bon appétit.

Return of the Bird

News a couple of weeks ago that the Baltimore Orioles will feature the goofy, grinning cartoon-bird logo on team caps next season for the first time since 1988 made me grin just as goofily. It’s a feel-good image in and of itself, but more than that, it hearkens back to the days when the following the Orioles was fun.

The cartoon bird reminds me of the great teams of the 1970s, when future hall of famers Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Frank Robinson were being profanely pushed to the limits of their talent by Manager Earl Weaver, himself later enshrined in Cooperstown. It brings back images of Memorial Stadium rocking to cheers led by bearded, beer-gutted cab driver Wild Bill Hagy.

Which obviously is why the team brass has dusted off the cartoon bird, supplanting the “ornithologically correct” bird associated with the reality of 14 straight seasons of losing under the bungling yet defiant ownership of Peter Angelos. Team ownership won’t change in 2012, but perhaps the Orioles’ fortunes somehow will, the cartoon bird’s reappearance is meant to suggest. Anyway, how’s about turning that frown upside down and joining the impish bird in a break from all your worries? Why not simply crack open a cold one, sit back and enjoy the game, whether you’re watching at Oriole Park at Camden Yards or at home on your TV?

Presumably this was a marketing decision many months in the making. It probably had nothing to do with the suicide of Mike Flanagan this past August. But for me, there’s a connection that’s more sweet than bitter.

Flanagan was a mainstay of the Orioles pitching staff in late 1970s and early 1980s. He won the American League’s Cy Young Award as its most outstanding hurler in 1979, a year in which his team came within one victory of winning the World Series. In a 17-year major league career spent primarily with Baltimore, he won 167 games. He threw the last pitch by the home team at Memorial Stadium in fall 1991, then retired the following year.

Flanagan served as the Orioles’ pitching coach for two seasons in the 1990s, as the team’s executive vice president for baseball operations from 2006 to 2008, and as an Orioles broadcaster for many of the years in between. He broadcast games until late August of this year, in fact. When, on his property in the Baltimore suburbs, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thereby ending his long career with the team and his 59-year association with the planet.

Why did he do it? Reports conflicted. Money woes apparently were a factor. But some sources suggested he also was despondent about the franchise’s long slide from relevance, and perceptions in some quarters that he’d been part of the problem. It’s hard to imagine where Flanagan got that, since, for most Orioles fans, the blame begins and ends with Angelos. It’s difficult to imagine an unkind word having been uttered about Flanagan, an earnest, hard-working, wry New Englander who always stood out as an island of competence in a sea of miscalculation and outright haplessness.

The suicide shocked most everyone, even people who’d known him well. Not so much his wife, who vaguely alluded to demons of long standing. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man whose pain is so deep, whose perceptions are so warped, that he thinks self-negation is the only way out?

But let’s say money was part of it, and losing another part. And let’s assume that, like pretty much every other middle-aged man, Flanagan mourned, to at least some degree, the loss of youth. Let’s go out on a limb and speculate that he felt his best days were long past. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that, until the very moment his long-shrinking Happy Place vanished entirely, that portal in his mind opened out onto a long-gone ballfield located several miles from the Inner Harbor, where Flanagan was still a pitcher in his prime, in tip-top shape statistically, physically and on the balance sheet. Where his team won far more often than it lost. Where the hats were goofy but the baseball wasn’t.

Mike Flanagan won’t be back at Camden Yards next spring. But his talisman, his ornithologically incorrect little buddy, will be. And that somehow makes me smile. The cartoon bird won’t make a lick of difference in the standings, of course. If the team improves at all, real-life ballplayers will make that happen, not some animated mascot. But the bird’s reappearance will make a difference to me. It will feel much more like a tribute to Flanagan than did the memorial patches the players wore on their uniforms in September. It will feel like a breezy reminder of a happier time.

The Week That Was

It’s been quite an eventful past week in the news. So, for what it’s worth—and remember, when you read a blog that’s free, you get what you pay for—these are my quick takes on some of the major and not-so-major stories of the past several days.

Students riot in State College, Pennsylvania, in wake of Joe Paterno firing. Sure, it’s outrageous that anyone should defend Joe Pa’s complete lack of moral accountability in the child sex-abuse scandal surrounding his one-time aide, let alone that Paterno’s defenders should resort to violence and vandalism. On the other hand, though, the disgraced octogenerian probably can expect a commendation from The Vatican for his indifference, and complimentary membership in the American Man-Boy Love Society. (As I understand it, the latter includes monthly issues of society’s provocative periodical, Standing Behind Youth.)

Sexual harassment accusations mount against GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain. With his poll numbers slipping, as both credible victim accounts and inconsistencies in Cain’s own version of events mount, the embattled candidate might want to rethink his planned ace-in-the-hole defense: Inviting former DC mayor and current city councilman Marion Barry to share with the news media his belief that “the bitches set Herman up.” (Cain also, frankly, probably shouldn’t characterize anything, at this point, as being “in the hole.” I’m just sayin’.)

Race tightens for GOP presidential nod. Speaking of Herman Cain, in the latest nationwide poll of Republican primary voters, the embattled candidate nevertheless continued narrowly to lead the party’s presidential field—with a jaw-dropping 61% of respondents saying Cain’s alleged behavior toward women mattered not at all to them. In what may be a related development, left-for-dead blowhard Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the US House of Representatives sometime in the 19th century, now is tied for second place among GOP primary voters. Time was when Gingrich’s hypocrisy as a cheating-spouse Family Values candidate was held against him by the party faithful, but it seems that the power of Cain’s appeal to overwhelmingly white Republican voters as a conservative, unthreatening black man has opened the floodgates of GOP compassion for misogynists. Gingrich’s rise also appears to be the latest indication that Republican True Believers would rather concede the election to President Obama than hand the nomination to Mitt Romney. I might not even rule out a “Draft Paterno” movement.

Mississippi voters reject ballot measure to define a fertilized egg as a person. This one honestly shocked me—in a good way. Whenever I catch wind of an insane ballot item anywhere in the Bible Belt—whether its aim is to name Jesus Christ the official State Savior, or to mandate the bludgeoning of anyone with a Darwin symbol on his or her car, or to hereby resolve that “The War of Northern Aggression was never about slavery, but anyway, what exactly was so bad about an institution that boosted the economy and spawned some outstanding spirituals?”—I always assume the witless initiative is going to pass. But one news account I read suggested that the Mississippi measure was defeated because its language went too far—it also would have had “far-reaching impacts on birth control, in vitro fertilization, and a doctor’s ability to provide care for pregnant women.” Still, I fully expect proponents to tweak the language and give it another go at some point. Perhaps next time they’ll employ a non-threatening mascot to broaden the entreaty’s appeal. I just can picture it: The joyous, accordion-wielding Zygote Zydeco, back by his rockin’ Cajun band, the Moments of Conception.

Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus, dies at 89. While I’ve always found Keane’s single-panel God-and-family comic, now drawn by his son Jeff, to be saccharine and insipid, it has spawned some great parodies by other cartoonists. Which Keane, to his credit, always seemed to take in stride. I also was amused—in a way I never was by the cartoon itself—by this anecdote that turned up in Keane’s obituary Wednesday in the Washington Post:

In 1984, Mr. Keane told the Post about how he decided to add a new character to The Family Circus by introducing a baby into his cartoon family.

“My wife was outside the studio working in the garden,” he recalled. “I ran out of the studio and said, ‘Thel, what would you think of adding a new baby to the family?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s all right, but let me finish the weeding first.’ ”

Ha! That’s good stuff. Maybe Thelma should’ve written the comic.

Duggars announce they’re expecting—again. Speaking of babies, in an appearance on The Today Show, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the prolific procreators who birthed the TLC reality TV show originally named 17 Kids and Counting, announced that we can count on little Duggar number 20, currently in Michelle’s delivery system. My first thought was, “Man, the pressure really is on Octomom now!” No, my real first thought was that unless Jim Bob, a former Arkansas state legislator, is planning to reenter politics and cruise to victory on family votes alone, these people are insane. Also, were I Michelle’s uterus (don’t dwell on that image), I would sue for reckless endangerment. Why are people who go out of their way to deplete the Earth’s limited resources rewarded for their efforts with a TV show and constant publicity? Speaking of which, I’m wondering when Hotpoint will dangle a promotional deal for a series of “buns in the oven” ads.

Berlusconi exit makes it official: These are tough times for playboys. First, porn magnate and fossilized hedonist Hugh Hefner earlier this year was jilted on wedding’s eve by his nubile fiancée, in a triumph of revulsion over commerce. Then, actor George Clooney’s much-younger ex-girlfriend, Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis, told the media a month or two ago that she had considered him more of a father figure than a boyfriend. This suggests on its face an alarming family dynamic in the Canalis household. But it couldn’t have heartened Clooney’s ladies-man ego to have the world know that when his sultry ex used to cuddle up on his lap, she merely was angling for a bedtime story. Finally, yesterday, 75-year-old Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—he of reported palace orgies and a criminal investigation into his relationship with a 17-year-old girl—was forced from office by an economic mess that’s disastrous even by Italian standards. According to an account in this morning’s Washington Post, “Crowds of demonstrators erupted in a joyous yell and waved Italian flags as news spread of Berlusconi’s resignation. One group sang choruses of ‘Hallelujah’ to celebrate his departure.’” To a man who likely has paid legions of prostitutes to sing that exact same chorus at a certain key moment, it must have been a sadly humiliating scene.

Steamed

When I recently read the obituary of songwriter Paul Leka, it was accurate, in a sense, to say that I felt pretty steamed.

What, that name doesn’t ring a bell? It wouldn’t have for me, either, except that the full New York Times headline read “Paul Leka, a Songwriter of ‘Na Na Hey Hey,’ Dies at 68.”

If that song title isn’t familiar to you, chances are you haven’t been inside a sports stadium in a very long time.

The full name of the tune is “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” It was a number-one hit on the pop charts in 1969 despite—or probably because of—its repetitious banality. Fully half of its four-minute running time consists solely of the title words being chanted over and over, to an equally droning musical accompaniment. It’s sort of like the even-longer “na-na-na-na” ending of “Hey Jude,” except without those great Paul McCartney screams, the imprimatur of The Beatles, or—most importantly—the memorable lyrics preceding it. Whereas “Hey Jude” famously and inspirationally urges John Lennon’s then-young son Julian, and by extension all of us, to “take a sad song and make it better," “Na Na Hey Hey” in its initial two minutes is just a guy’s plea for the girl he likes to dump her boyfriend.

“Na Na Hey Hey” is a stupid song, but one that nevertheless appealed to my musical sensibilities when I was 11 years old. Not because of its boy-girl dynamics, as I wouldn’t yet date for another, oh, never mind how many years, but thanks to that oddly mesmerizing if seemingly endless chorus. I bought the single and pretty much wore it out over the course of the next few months.

But then I was done with it. And so was the rest of the world, until 1977, when—according to Leka’s obit—the organist for the Chicago White Sox employed the chorus as a taunt whenever the opposing team’s players struck out or when one of its pitchers was removed. Crowds who previously might have shouted “Sit down!” or “Sox rule!” at the departing opponent found it infinitely more satisfying to elongate their derision by singing “Na na na na/Na na na na/Hey hey hey/Goodbye!”

Somehow, some way, the chant went viral, in an age long before the Internet and social-networking tools existed to facilitate such contagion. As a result, over the course of the past three decades the ending chant of “Na Na Hey Hey” has become a staple at athletic venues around the world—because taunting the opposition knows no specific sport or nationality.

So, while presumably few people outside of his own family and a smattering of fellow songwriters and musicians of a certain age recognized Paul Leka’s name when it recently joined all the others on St Peter’s eternal registry, the song title “Na Na Hey Hey” resonated with many readers. As had been the case with me. But here’s the thing. I’m dead certain (no pun intended) that very few people reading Leka’s obit—even individuals like me who once had owned the 45 of “Na Na Hey Hey”—knew that the recording artist to which the single was credited was a group called Steam.

See, this is the kind of thing I tend to remember, while so many things that it would be infinitely more useful to recall—names of professional contacts, my online passwords, whether a dear friend is recovering from cancer or lost a kidney or what—are sacrificed. I no sooner had seen the headline associating the late Paul Leka with “Na Na Hey Hey” than I thought, “Ah, yes, the song that became a stadium phenomenon, performed by that one-hit wonder, Steam." But then, no more than a few seconds later, I asked myself, “Why the hell do I remember that?”

I mean, sure, I owned the single. But the name of the band was written in tiny type on the label, and it isn’t as if I’ve set eyes on that name in probably 40 years. It also isn’t as if I’d periodically been reminded, over the decades, that Steam was “the band behind the monster hit ‘Na Na Hey Hey’" when the combo swung through town for a widely promoted gig at the state fair or a nightclub devoted to revival acts. In fact, what I learned in Leka’s obituary was that there wasn’t, and never had been, a real band named Steam. Leka and his friend Gary DeCarlo, who co-wrote “Na Na Hey Hey,” recorded the song together and made up the name Steam on the spot, perhaps because their musical partnership was as ephemeral as the stuff arising from a still-hot cup of coffee. There would be no Steam follow-up hits, tours or merchandise. Steam would not live on at all, except as one more pebble of pointless trivia taking up precious space in the rock pile of my brain.

It’s confounding. It’s annoying. I take no pleasure in the motley conglomeration of discrete, rhyme-or-reason-less facts and figures that seems to add up to a disproportionate percentage of my collective memory.

It isn’t even as if I’m a kind of idiot savant who may forget the date of a key interview or the name of a close friend’s son, but who at least could kick ass in a sports trivia contest by rattling off the names of every player on the roster of the “Murderers Row” 1927 Yankees, or could impress film buffs by recalling who won all the major Oscars in 1987 or 2003. When I wrote the word “discrete” just now, I meant it. Even my accumulation of arguably or patently pointless knowledge is completely scattershot. I remember things like Steam, and the fact that President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and the pairing of character actors Herb Edelman and Bob “Gilligan” Denver in a short-lived sitcom called The Good Guys in the late 1960s. (I also remember that the show’s bouncy theme song began “We’re the good guys, who never let a friend down/Friends forever, ask anyone in this town.”)

But, can I even recite in order the names of all the American presidents of the last half of the 19th century, for whatever that may be worth? Is my familiarity with TV theme songs anywhere near encyclopedic enough to get me into the final rounds of some obscure competition on the Game Show Network?

No, and no.

Much has been written, I realize, about the neuroscience of how and why the human brain remembers what it does, forgets what it forgets, and might go about retrieving what it can retrieve. As much as I’d like to be glib and tell you I just keep forgetting to check out that array of potentially insightful resources, the fact is, last year I bought myself one of those works.

It’s called Moonwalking with Einstein, is subtitled “The Art and Science of Remembering Anything,” and was a bestseller in 2010 for author Joshua Foer. You might have seen him on talk shows, discussing how a year of “memory training” transformed him from being a guy of average retention to winner of the US Memory Championship. I’m looking at the book flap right now, and it says that Foer “draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human remembering.” If that sounds potentially dry, the back cover features a glowing endorsement by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, the hilariously accessible science author Mary Roach.

Of course, I have not, to date, read Moonwalking with Einstein. In fact, I had to fish it out of a box in our basement when my chagrin over this Steam business brought it to my mind. I have no trouble, however, remembering why I bought it and then didn’t read it. Per the book flap, “Foer’s experience shows that the memory championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.” It was the “perseverance” thing that had pushed the book to the back of my reading list. I’d ultimately decided that, while I’d love to have a better memory and all that, I didn’t much want to work at it. I might rather read books that didn’t give me homework assignments.

In the wake of this Steam Incident, however, I’ve changed my mind about reading Moonwalking with Einstein. I figure maybe I can at least pick up a few tips—minimally effortful ways to train my unruly and un-sharp mind just a little better, with the effect of maybe remembering a few more substantive things than I might otherwise retain. And perhaps not even at the expense of my Steams and other pieces of useless minutiae, because author and National Public Radio commentator Stephan Fatsis writes in his back-jacket endorsement that “Joshua Foer proves what few of us are willing to get our heads around: there’s more room in our brains than we ever imagined.”

What Fatsis means, I gather, is not that our brains are partially empty (although I sometimes feel the jury’s out in my case), but that there’s always space for more to be retained. I’ve long despaired over my poor hold on new information, so the possibility of losing less of it intrigues me greatly. On the other hand, though, my reading retention is abysmal, which poses a huge catch-22 in trying to draw lasting lessons from Foer’s research and narrative.

What I’ve decided is, Moonwalking with Einstein is going to be the next book I’ll read. Maybe it’ll hook me and convince me to make a real effort to improve my memory. But then, I imagine it’s the kind of thing where even minimal exercise is better than none at all, and presumably I can coax the self-discipline to do the equivalent of a few sit-ups or toe-touchers. At worst, the book stands to be a painless read. I mean, my girl Mary Roach—author of the fantastic Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers—touts Foer’s book as filled with “humanity, humor and originality.” How much of a slog can it be?

So, I’ll start Moonwalking with Einstein soon. I mean it. I owe this to myself and to all the people in my life for whom my lapses of memory have adverse consequences, be they small or substantial. And frankly, I don’t want to feel quite so annoyed the next time, in a single 24-hour period, I miss an office meeting whose date I forgot and find myself singing the entire "Ballad of Jed Clampett"—including the part that accompanied The Beverly Hillbillies’ closing credits.

Steve and Me

When Steve Jobs died of cancer a couple of weeks ago at 56, he was eulogized worldwide as something of a secular God—the electronic genius whose inventions and vision did much to shape the world in which we live today.

I felt some sadness that he’d died so young, but otherwise was a complete bystander to the global canonization. While you can’t spell either my first or last name without an “i,” there are no “i” products in our house—nary an iMac, iPhone, iPod or iPhone to be found. Not because I favor competing labels, but because I’m pretty much a Luddite. Yes, I know the ship of change has long since sailed, and that I must come to grips with the inevitable death of everything from newspapers and radio to mystery and intrigue (since every question now can be instantaneously answered by a Google search and any entrancingly mystical figure from one’s past can be made mundane and contemporary on Facebook). I know those things, but I don’t have to like them. And I don’t. (Except when I do. Like when I use a search engine to decipher in an instant some long-vexing song lyric, or to find out who that guy was in that movie. I don’t claim to be consistent.)

So, anyway, let’s just say there’s a lot about the world Steve Jobs helped create that I don’t like. For that reason, while others mourned his passing with much the same passion that I imagine earlier generations felt at the deaths of such historical game-changers as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, I regarded it with the shrug one might direct at Pandora’s box long after all the chaos within it had escaped.

I suppose the one thing Jobs’ disciples and I always had in common was seeing him much more as a symbol than a man. To the faithful, he represented the happy interconnectedness of today and the possibility of a future in which no gratification whatsoever will be delayed. To me, he embodied the end of the heretofore familiar and the certainty of ever-escalating levels of noise.

But then, in this morning’s print Washington Post (ironically enough), I read an article about Steve Jobs, the newly published biography that the very private i-con of the Internet Age had authorized, and for which he’d granted author Walter Isaacson more than 40 interviews. According to the book, Jobs had handpicked Isaacson, whose biographical subjects have included Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, because he wanted his children to know why he “wasn’t always there for them” and “to know why, and to understand what, I did.” (Jobs is survived by four children. And yes, I Googled that.)

Today’s article brimmed with facts I hadn’t known about Jobs—not that I’d known much of anything. It humanized him and made him relatable to me. I discovered, for instance, that folk singer Joan Baez had been among his pre-marriage lovers, and that a college friend of Jobs thinks the major draw was her previous relationship with Bob Dylan, who Jobs revered. I found out that Jobs had been adopted, that he'd both praised and treated shabbily his adoptive parents, and that angst over his birth origins had fueled a vague but lifelong spiritual quest that had manifested itself in a pilgrimage to India, extreme diets and even primal-scream therapy.

The book, according to the article, on balance lauds Jobs, who nevertheless had no editorial control. But Isaacson also concedes that his subject often was a bully and a jerk. He “largely abandoned” his first child for the first 10 years of her life. He cheated Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak during one of their first business ventures. He had a mean streak even close friends couldn’t understand or reconcile.

The secular deity also spent years studying Zen Buddhism, and is quoted by Isaacson in the book as having said, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.”

It’s not like I felt, after reading all that, that Steve Jobs and I were soul mates who never met. I still neither know nor care much about his life’s work, and I probably won’t buy the biography because the i-stuff figures to loom large in the narrative. Spoiler alert: I never bedded Joan Baez. I never had kids with whom to have problematic relationships. I never had to wrestle with my own adoption. (Although every time I compare my parents’ beliefs and worldviews with my own, I wonder how we possibly can be blood.)

Still, I like knowing these things about Steve Jobs. It isn’t as if I ever thought he was an automaton, or that he didn’t put is pants on one leg at a time just like me (unless he’d perhaps programmed a robot to perform that task). But neither had I imagined that he and I had such big and small things in common as theological skepticism, struggles with civility and a soft spot for 1960s folk singers. If I’d ever taken the time to give Steve Jobs’ personal life and beliefs a single thought before reading that article—and I hadn’t—I guess I’d have assumed he’d died a never-married or divorced childless atheist, who’d found only his work sustaining and only the promise of perpetual technological advancement spiritually satisfying. If he’d listened to music at all, I’d have assumed he was into electronica created not by musicians in a studio but by some masterful melder of computer-generated sound. (A subsequent Web search revealed that Jobs in fact had been a huge fan of the Beatles. You think maybe "Apple" should’ve been my clue?)

Which isn’t to say that Jobs’ work wasn't the driving force in his life. But, like everyone else on the planet, he was much more complex and multifaceted than his CV would indicate. Well, duh! Except that, until today, I hadn’t really internalized what was an intellectual given.

There's this, too: Nothing humanizes any giant like death—whether that outsized figure is a visionary like Steve Jobs, or the late madman megalomanic Moammar Gaddafi, or King of Pop/Peter Pan/space alien Michael Jackson. The Big Sleep truly is the great equalizer. We're all ashes and dust, destined to return to same.

So, where is Steve Jobs now? If he lives on in any sense other than our collective memories, given what he told Walter Isaacson, he’s half-surprised to find himself there. Wherever “there” is. He may or may not still be wearing that black turtleneck with the black jeans, or sporting those ubiquitous wire-rim glasses. Maybe he’s been reincarnated as another person, or a dog or a horse. Perhaps he’s part of an energy field currently zipping across the universe. Who the hell knows? He didn’t. I don’t.

That, and all the other things that made him human, have changed how I look at Steve Jobs. Now I need to similarly reassess my attitude toward the fruits of his work and his societal legacy. Because I know I must, sooner or later, come to terms with that world. It’s not going anywhere. And it won’t be the death of me.

Something will be the death of me. Perhaps it’ll be the Big C, in which case my man Steve and I will have shared something pretty major. But whatever ends up snuffing me, it almost surely won’t be the i-Anything. And I do objectively know that all those devices he created have their uses. I understand, for instance, that you can download pretty much the entire Bob Dylan and Joan Baez catalogs on one of Jobs' portable music-player gadgets.

Gut Reaction

The following paragraphs are excerpted from a front page story of the Washington Post’s Web page this afternoon:

The jerky cell phone videos that surfaced Friday showed Gaddafi, his face and shoulder drenched in blood, being pushed and shoved by revolutionaries.

“Get him out of the pipe!” yelled one, apparently referring to the drainage culvert where he was discovered Thursday. “God is greatest!” several revolutionaries yelled, firing their rifles.

Another video shows a dazed Gaddafi pulled roughly onto the hood of a truck and being punched and slapped. A third showed him begging revolutionaries, “Have pity, don’t hit me!” The videos were shown on the Arabic television channel al-Arabiya.

I hardly know where to start. But these are my visceral thoughts:

I’ve never felt firmer in my stance against an-eye-for-an-eye Old Testament justice. Which, however you want to dress it up, is the core of the death penalty in this country.

While I know intellectually that religion can be a force for good, once again I find myself thinking the key to world peace would be universal adoption of the Golden Rule and abandonment of all other faith-based nonsense.

I’ll readily cop to being a technophobe who’s in many ways the 21st-century equivalent of The Kinks’ 1960s Village Green Preservation Society, but, is it really progress that anybody, anywhere, now can and do take pictures of anything—including lynch mobs virtually whistling while they work?

Sure, you can argue that compassion comes easy to someone like me—a middle-class American who’s never known a Libyan, let alone one who was brutalized by Moammar Gaddafi, that country’s deposed and now quite dead dictator. But I have to say, I feel more than a little sympathy for that battered corpse.

I‘ll not belabor any of this, because I always feel more comfortable—inside and outside this blog—making light of myself, rather than suggesting I have anything profound to say, or that I’m an expert on anything.

Who am I to argue, for instance, that the death penalty is any less defensible than are its sad alternatives within our criminal “justice” system?

Where do I get off condemning religious faith, which propels people of all creeds toward good works, and not merely toward rivalries, hatreds and wars?

How can I credibly argue that the digital revolution is, in wide balance, perhaps less empowering than it is impoverishing?

Why waste sympathy on a sorry excuse for a human being who hardly lavished it upon his own people?

I don’t frankly know how to answer any of that.

All I know is that I've a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach—as once again, as routine as sun and rain, violent retribution is celebrated and shared.

Ride of a Lifetime

Last Wednesday was my mom’s 80th birthday, so this past weekend Lynn and I drove down to Greensboro from Bethesda, and my brother Ken and sister-in-law Cindy traveled from Roanoke for a family celebration. This featured dinner at a nice restaurant, desserts from a fabulous local bakery, a champagne toast, and gifts that included a stay at the stately Hotel Roanoke and a handsomely packaged reproduction of the entire New York Times of October 5, 1931, the date of my mother’s birth in that city.

It was clear, however, that my mom’s favorite gift was one she’d received the day before her birthday: a ride in a red sports car. She’d mentioned every now and then for years that this was something she’d someday like to do. Not to put the pedal to the metal herself, or even to get behind the wheel at all, but simply to be in the passenger seat of a sleek crimson convertible as it sped on down the road. For a woman whose life has been the absolute antithesis, in daredevil terms, of that guy I recently saw on 60 Minutes who scales sheer cliffs barehanded and sans safety equipment, this seemed the ultimate adrenaline rush.

To make a long story short, I made it happen. Given the name of a foreign-car dealership in Greensboro by a friend who lives there, I lucked into contacting a salesman who’d graduated from my high school a year after I did, with whom I’d probably even shared a school bus. That bond, plus the fact that he’d thrilled his own elderly mother with a ride on his Harley-Davidson just years before her death, meant he was only too happy to help make my mom’s dream come true. My dad delivered her to the dealership at a pre-arranged time, and the salesman took her for an exhilarating spin in a turbo-charged Porsche that had carried a $174,000 price tag when it was new three years ago. It had been owned by some Raleigh millionaire who’d traded it in for a new Ferrari.

Everything about this gift—for which I wasn’t charged a dime—worked out perfectly. My dad cannily planned the event for the day before my mom’s birthday so she could have the pleasure of telling the story to everyone she saw on her big day. Which she did, by his account and her own, and which she still was doing when we saw her over the weekend. No friend or even casual acquaintance was spared the story of how she had zipped along on NC 68 at speeds of up to 70 mph on a 45-mph road, of how an impressed trucker had looked down from his lofty rig at the spectacle of the Old Lady and the Porsche and given his horn a hearty toot, or of how she’d left her hairnet in her purse and simply let the wind blow through her tresses. (Given my mother’s impenetrable perm, this amounted to something considerably less than letting her freak flag fly, as it were, But trust me, for her to have gone hairnet-less was, in its own context, as much a statement of abandon as is that free climber’s distain for ropes and harnesses.)

The sports car ride actually was the perfect gift for my dad, too, in that he’d never before planted his ass in the seat of a vehicle worth more than twice what he’d paid for his current home in 1972. The words “one hundred and seventy-four thousand” were something of a mantra the entire weekend for my tightfisted father—in much the same way, I imagine, he might have chanted the words “filet mignon” during his Depression-era childhood had he ever lucked into such a meal.

Of course, I came out of Operation Red Sports Car smelling like something of a genetically engineered Super Rose—the devoted son who had taken a mother’s passing wish and turned it into a dream gloriously realized. In baseball terms, if my mom hadn’t dared hope for more than a clean single, I’d nevertheless drawn a bead on the ball and socked it completely out of the park.

So it was that I got back home yesterday feeling pretty smug. Delighted for my mom, to be sure, but more than a bit taken with my own success in taking an open-ended desire and transforming it into something my mother surely will remember for the rest of her life. Last night, when we picked up our dog Bean at the home of our friends Joanne and Eric Scott, Lynn prompted me to recount the story. I modestly filled them in on the details. They beamed at the image of my octogenarian mom basking in the pleasures of the open road, and in the knowledge that her youngest son had turned out so outstandingly.

I continued riding that high all the way into this morning, when Lynn suddenly jogged my perhaps willfully spotty memory about What Really Happened.

Didn’t I remember that conversation back in August, Lynn queried, when she’d asked my visiting mother what she wanted for her 80th birthday? Didn’t I recall how my mom had jokingly referenced that oft-mentioned sports car ride, clearly not thinking it ever would come to pass? Didn’t I recollect how she (Lynn) subsequently said we needed to make that happen?

Lynn no sooner had completed the questions than I sensed my Super Rose wilting and its divine fragrance dissipating. Just two minutes earlier, my mental sequence of the events leading up to The Car Ride had begun with my having brilliantly brainstormed to Lynn that our friend Kenneth in Greensboro, a well-connected local attorney, might be able to recommend a car dealership to target. But now, in an instant, I realized that the impetus for my decision to e-mail Kenneth in the first place had been Lynn’s identification of the Perfect 80th Birthday Gift.

“It’s fine,” Lynn assured me. “I don’t need credit. But it was my idea.”

Every piece of that, I immediately understood, was absolutely true.

It honestly is fine for a mother to think that her son came up, completely on his own, with a wonderfully thoughtful way to make her 80th birthday extra special.

Lynn doesn’t require credit. If she did, she could’ve demanded and received it any number of times over course the weekend, on each occasion a new person heard instead the tale of The Car Ride and the Amazing Son.

The ride was her idea, as Lynn reminded me. In the code of marital scorekeeping, she had deemed it important to keep me honest. I totally get that, as I tend to do the same thing.

So, yes, it was Lynn’s conception. I executed it, with an assist from Kenneth in suggesting the dealership, and with monstrously huge thanks to one Reade Fulton, now my favorite car salesman in the world, who soon will be receiving a generous gift card from me.

My mom literally enjoyed the ride of a lifetime. My dad savored her excitement and his own brush with affluence. I loved playing a key role in making my mom so happy. And Lynn got the satisfaction of being quietly virtuous throughout. As returns on investment go, this one was turbo-charged.

162 and Out

October has started off cold and rainy. That feels about right.

Back on April 8, in a post titled “The Boys of Bummer,” I’d chronicled the annual torture of being a rabid (as in “sick” even more than “devoted”) fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Toward the end of that piece, I’d noted, “I am not fooled by their record at this writing of 4 wins versus 3 losses. There is every reason to believe the club again will reach season’s end with far more losses than wins.” Of course, I needn’t have been Nostradamus to have made that prediction. I needed only a grasp of history, given the fact that the Bucs’ previous winning season concluded the same autumn Bill Clinton first was elected president of the United States.

The 2011 season of the Pittsburgh Pirates ended this past Wednesday night with a 7-3 loss in Milwaukee to the playoffs-bound Milwaukee Brewers. The Pirates closed out the campaign with 72 wins and 90 losses. The positive spin is that it represented a 15-win improvement on the club’s abysmal (even by its own sad standards) 2010 record, and was good for fourth place in the six-team National League Central Division rather than their standard spot in the cellar. But that spin overlooks the fact that the team was enthrallingly and improbably competitive for more than half the season, and stood proudly at 53-47 in late July, before wresting the word “freefallin’” away from Tom Petty and making it their own.

Did I write “improbably” competitive? Given that the club entered the 2011 season with more or less the same personnel who’d lost 105 games the previous year, I hadn’t exactly been hopeful at the outset that the string of losing seasons at last would end. But—and I won’t bore non-baseball fans with a lot of details here—the pitching far exceeded expectations for days, weeks, then months, while the hitting and defense proved sufficient to vault the Pirates above the .500 break-even mark and even keep them there for a while. Neither I nor most other Pirate partisans took it seriously when the team claimed first place for a day or two in July for the first time in forever. But we, or I at least, foolishly began to hope that a winning record over the course of the entire 162 games might be attainable.

But then the pitching collapsed, the hitting got even worse, and the defense turned offensive. It’s not easy, frankly, to be six games over .500 with only 62 games left to play and still finish 18 under. But damn if my boys didn’t do it. Management’s post-mortem for the past few days has been that the early success proved that the basic talent is there, while the buzz-killing plummet largely was due to inexperience. Sure, the team maybe could use a few more good players in 2012, this bill of goods reads, but now that our young pitchers have thrown those extra innings once, and now that our young hitters know better how to pace themselves physically and mentally over the course of a six-month season, look out for us next year!

The problem with such cheerleading is that the team has no credibility when it comes either to forking over dough or evaluating talent. Pirates fans have heard all this stuff from the Front Office many times before. Yes, the Jekyll-Hyde splits of so many players’ first- and second-half statistics this year does suggest there is much good to be found amongst the evil, as it were. But then, the club’s record on maximizing its players’ potential is far from stellar. This is evidenced by the fact that the major leagues are littered with good-to-great ex-Pirates who stumbled and floundered until they prospered under the mentoring and nurturing of other organizations.

Getting back to what I’d written in April, I’d expressed hope that, come what may, I might this year lighten up considerably about the Pirates—not let their fortunes so profoundly affect my moods, or so lessen my enjoyment of live baseball at Nationals Park, or on so many nights bedevil Lynn with my OCD stratagems for influencing athletic contests taking place hundreds or thousands of miles away. I made a little bit of progress on those fronts, although of course it was easier when the wins still flowed. Even during the dark months of August and September, though, my attempts to be philosophical were fitfully successful. I obsessed a little less and shrugged a little more. I saw several games through to their completion at Nationals Park even after the out-of-town scoreboard recorded a Pirates loss. I was better at enjoying the successes of my hometown team in DC, which by many measures had an outstanding year, and whose future is bright.

If the Pirates’ future looks less luminous—and it does—there’s still some good news. They’ve now experienced some real success on which to build. Their headier moments in 2011 brought fans to the ballpark and captured the city’s imagination, which might encourage management to spend more money to make more money. A few of the current players look like the real deal, and laws of probability suggest that one or two of the team’s recent high draft picks (fruits of their ineptitude) just might pan out.

None of which makes today—a day on which, once again, playoff baseball will be played by other, better teams—any less cold and rainy. But it, and my incremental emotional progress this year, stand to make next April’s inevitable renewal of optimism feel a little less naïve, and a little more maturely measured.

Three Cheers for the Zombies

I had a pretty good idea what to expect when I hopped in the car last Friday night to catch what was being billed as “The Zombies 50th Anniversary Tour” at Montgomery College’s small performing arts center in Silver Spring. It had all the makings of a mega-Bucket List item for an aging baby boomer like me: See the once-big 1960s rock band one time before you die, but, of more immediate concern, before they die.

Though I felt drawn to the event, I frankly expected the evening to be more depressing than enjoyable. I couldn’t help contextualizing the names of the group’s hits—observing, for example, that if this is the “Time of the Season,” in the Zombies’ case it’s late winter.

“She’s Not There”? Well, maybe she is, blokes, but you can’t see her because your vision is failing. Or perhaps you’re just trying to avoid that conversation where she gently suggests it’s time for adult diapers and you defiantly “Tell Her No,” even though you have to admit the leakage is getting embarrassing.

Throw in the venue size and host—a couple-hundred seats and a community college—and the presumed “crowd” of creaky old suburbanites sporting sad ponytails and resurrected tie-dye T-shirts, and I felt only slightly closer to “pumped” than I might have if I’d been thrown onto a charter bus by the Gray Panthers and forced to see a show at the Andy Williams Theater in Branson, Missouri.

Affirmation of my saddest assumptions began when I pulled into the venue’s small and only half-filled parking lot and continued as I entered a lobby dotted by clusters of the creaky old suburbanites my mind’s eye had described. The only people under 40 were a couple of attractive young women—Montgomery College students, perhaps—who were bartending beer and wine with all the kind solicitousness of high schoolers earning public service credit at an assisted living facility.

A souvenir table offered T-shirts, CDs and posters for depressingly low, low prices. You could buy a poster signed by Zombies headliners Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone for $20, for example. It made me wonder if I could’ve skipped the show and talked the band into performing a house concert in my sunroom and still gotten change back from my hundred.

It turned out that my seat, which I’d purchased online just a few days before, nevertheless was in the second row, stage left. As show time neared, I looked across the orchestra section and up at the balcony and was heartened to see the place starting to fill up. It would be more or less a full house by the time the opening act departed and the Zombies assumed the stage.

A few words about that opening act. Billed as “The Acoustic Strawbs,” they were an unplugged iteration of a band whose name sounded familiar, but who I couldn’t quite place. According to the concert program, they’d “come out of the early days of the British folk movement” and once had counted as a member Sandy Denny—a folk singer of greater fame who later joined the better-known Fairport Convention. Anyway, the trio of white-haired Englishmen walked slowly onto the stage, instruments in hand, and sat themselves down on folding chairs to which they would remain rooted for their entire hour-long set.

While two-thirds of the Strawbs look as though they might be capable of sustained verticality, such could not be said for the ample-gutted lead singer, whose voice mostly held through a series of ballads and protest songs that often seemed perilously close to claiming his last remaining breath. The trio did a creditable job, and I’m always appreciative of any degree of musical talent and singing ability given that I have none of either. But watching the Strawbs soldier through, looking like nothing so much as old friends of the deceased sharing bittersweet memories at an Irish wake, did nothing to dispel my prevalent melancholy. It didn’t help when the lead singer self-effacingly yet pleadingly suggested we all might like to purchase a Strawbs CD, available in the lobby, for placement in our granny’s Christmas stocking.

There was a break between acts, which I will vouch is appreciated by middle-aged concert-goers with bladder-relief issues. I met that need, then milled around in the lobby for a few minutes, eavesdropping on several conversations about past Zombies shows, including one last year in Rockville that had been unknown to me. It seems that even bands whose first teenaged jam sessions occurred when John F. Kennedy was president have groupies. Which nevertheless reminded me of how, pre-show, one guy in the audience had loudly and kiddingly asked his female companion whether she planned to throw her underwear on stage, and how I’d so hoped the gag hadn’t given anyone any ideas.

I reclaimed my seat and was glancing at my program when I became aware of somebody standing nearby, ticket in hand. I looked up and saw what I first took to be a particularly unattractive older woman in a bad wig and comically oversized eyeglasses who was wearing, for some reason, a cheerleaders outfit. But then I quickly realized that she was a he. As was reinforced when the be-skirted man asked me, in a decidedly unfeminine voice, whether he was at the right row.

He gave me his seat information and I confirmed that he was. With that, he picked up the canvas grocery bag he’d temporarily set down, in which I could see a hint of silver pom pom, and made his way to the far end of my aisle. As much as my mind was shouting “WTF?”, I was determined not to outwardly register anything that could be construed as disapproval, bewilderment or surprise. Part of that is because I try to be a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but I also was struck then, as I would be through the remainder of the evening, by the utter lack of attention or interest he drew from anyone in the audience.

In fact, the next day I would Web-search a variety of word combinations—“guy in cheerleader outfit Silver Spring,” “dressed in drag cheerleader Montgomery County,” etc.—to confirm my suspicion that he was some local character whose act by now was so familiar as to be passé. But I found nothing. Had he perhaps come from a rehearsal of a dinner-theater farce? Had he plans later in the evening to wow the boys during Varsity Night at a local gay bar? I guess I’ll never know.

At any rate, it seemed that he, too, was a Zombies groupie. I overheard him exchanging past-show stories with another guy on my row, and speculating on tonight’s play list. Although I was careful not to stare, I could see with additional side glances that he likely was my age or a little older, although there was no gray in his manifestly unflattering brunette rug, which gratuitously included pigtails. He was short and of medium build, and obviously hadn’t received the fashion memo about how a gal never should show five o’clock shadow after Labor Day.

Soon the lights dimmed. Out came the Zombies, who currently consist of founding members Argent and Blunstone (vocals/keyboards and lead vocals, respectively), longtime Kinks bassist Jim Rodford, Rodford’s son Steve on drums, and British session guitarist Tom Toomey.

Argent looked weathered but lean in his jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket. Blunstone was of more indeterminate shape in a dark suit, and looked facially as if he’s had some work done. Both original Zombies retain impressive amounts of hair, although Blunstone’s in particular is suspiciously dark. Rodford looked like Popeye’s dad Pappy in the old cartoons—a wisp of a man, nearly bald, with a jutting chin. His son, obscured by the drum set, had the happy look of a garage-bander enjoying a paying gig. Toomey clearly was the baby of the bunch, looking to be 40-ish.

They started out playing some of the band’s early songs—bluesy numbers with echoes of Motown, recognizable in sound if not specifics to anyone familiar with early ’60s, pre-Beatles rock ’n’ roll. The ensemble was tight from the opening notes. Argent showed great energy and enthusiasm behind the keyboards. Blunstone was considerably less mobile, slightly swaying at the microphone, but in fine voice. And when he spoke between numbers, it was with a poet’s cadence—gentle, unhurried, slightly lisping in the way one might imagine Keats or Shelley would have sounded.

Before long the band started weaving in songs from a new studio album Blunstone announced has been well-reviewed in Britain and is beginning to gain critical notice in the United States. If the new music was hardly groundbreaking, it conversely was far from vanity-lap stuff. The songs were crisp, well written, tuneful, interesting. Anything but lame.

Next came the numbers we all had come to hear—the hits, and other songs from the Zombies’ masterwork album, Odessey (sic) and Oracle. The poignant “A Rose for Emily.” The quirkily buoyant “Care of Cell 44,” about a pending reunion with a jailbird girlfriend. The moody and evocative “Beechwood Park.” “This Will Be Our Year,” which Argent proudly noted the Foo Fighters recently covered on a CD of that band’s favorite songs. Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, Argent further noted, has cited the Zombies as a huge early influence.

By mid-set, I wasn’t thinking about how old these guys were, or I was, or the audience was. Because the Zombies were genuinely rocking, and because they so clearly and happily were engaged in what, for them, was the timeless pursuit of creating and performing music. Yes, they were honoring their past and our memories of it, but they were perhaps even more proud of their new material. And they reveled in their continuing relevance. Blunstone and Argent noted that Odessey and Oracle, a one-time commercial dud released after the band’s breakup, has gained sales and cache in the decades since, and was named the 80th most important album in rock history by Rolling Stone.

I’d arrived expecting a dog-and-pony show of sorts but had gotten a rousing, full-bodied rock concert in an amazingly intimate setting. How rousing? Rousing enough that Cheerleader Guy on numerous occasions pulled his pom poms out of the bag and shook them high and long, to the appreciative nods of the band, who several times acknowledged his enthusiasm.

One of the final songs the Zombies played was not in fact a Zombies number, although it had been written by original member Chris White and became a huge post-Zombies hit for Argent’s eponymous early ’70s band. The place erupted with the opening thumps of the arena rocker “Hold Your Head Up,” reverberated through Argent’s extended organ solo, shook through the audience-participation chorus and reached a crescendo with the final repetition of the defiant title sentiment.

A little while later, that scene and feeling still were playing in my head as I climbed into my car. Driving home, I thought about how, although aging is a bitch, there’s no law saying any of us has to give in and give up. Yes, life is terminal. We fear the reaper. But take a look around. There’s music to nourish you. A cheer somewhere to lead. Minimal expectations to be proven wrong.

Life will slump your posture. The Zombies’ advice? Try to look past it all. Hold your head up. Hold your head high.

Blast in the Past

The Web site of the Maryland Renaissance Festival describes the 25-acre site near Annapolis as “a recreation of a 16th-century English village.” The trappings certainly reflect that, what with the Tudor facades, Globe Theater replica, jousting arena and whatnot. Technically there’s indoor plumbing, but the Port-o-Lets lined up behind the wood screens more closely approximate ye old privy than what we think of when we say “bathroom.”

I read recently that personal computer sales are down, as newer, faster, more portable modes of communication and media access become ever more popular and dominant. As I sit here typing at my PC’s keyboard, this news strikes me as just the latest of countless blows in what I not so jokingly describe to friends as the 21st century’s gleeful obsession with obliterating every vestige of life as I’ve known it.

Therein lies the key, I think, to why every year I make at least one trip to the Renaissance Festival, which runs from late August to late October. In terms of shtick, the event is all about Henry VIII, Elizabethan speech, elaborate costumes, period entertainments and throwback libations and grub. But when I pay my American dollars at the ticket counter (oddly, bartering is forbidden) and am welcomed into the village of Revel Grove by a jaunty lord or gracious lady, I feel as if I'm entering not so much an imagined 16th century as a gone and lamented 20th.

It starts in the parking area, which is a huge open field. I exit my car and immediately feel as if I’ve merged into the line to get into a midnight movie sometime in the 1970s. A lot of the people who are emerging from their vehicles and trudging slowly toward the entrance are dressed in costume—the guys tucking in their puffy shirts, the women assuring that their tightly corseted dresses display ample teat, and the kids adjusting tricorn hats that their parents have deemed, historically speaking, to be Close Enough. (I would have been appalled were my mom ever to have shown any teat. But then again, my parents never would have paid the 1960s equivalent of $18 to get in.)

At the ticket booths there’s no such thing as paying by smartphone pointed at an electronic reader. There only are old-school cash boxes and credit card swipers.

Enter the “village” and there’s live entertainment on multiple stages. There are microphones, sure, but no video screens, overhead Tweets or other falderol. You’ll see a juggler over there, a magician and his bungling assistant over here. Troupes ham their way through lampoon versions of Shakespeare. Knife-throwers and their targets wink at audiences and exchange banter that’s Sherwood Forest by way of 1930s vaudeville—corny, harmlessly risqué, as sunny and light in spirit as 2011 so typically feels dark and ominous.

Just as you wouldn’t have watched a Zeppelin concert back in the day without a flask or a joint, you aren’t about to traverse this alternate universe without being in a slightly altered state. To that end, there’s plenty of mead for sale. And ale, of course, otherwise known as beer. Put a tip in the jar on the counter and the bartender will ring a bell, as if to tell all the king’s subjects you’ve just single-handedly defeated a band of knaves and deserve to be celebrated.

Food booths are huge money makers, of course, and the choices are as blithely, delightfully inauthentic as was anything offered at history-tinged tourist sites in 1955, 1975 or 1995. Behind cheesy names like Ben Jonson’s Banana Split are dishes as unlikely to have been found at any Renaissance table as genuine colonial fare was to have been served at the Fort Ticonderoga cafeteria during a family vacation in 1962.

Then there are the shopping options. The prices aren’t 20th century, but the offerings are. Don’t come to the Renaissance Festival looking for the latest electronic gadgets and apps. You’ll find hippie clothes, albeit billed as the stuff Chris Marlowe or the court’s ladies might have worn. You’ll see jewelry, pottery, crafts. You need no IT expertise to make, model or use this stuff.

Or, you can spend your money on old-style soothsaying and other happy wastes of shilling. Palm reading, tarot cards, phrenology. Want to know where you’re going? Leave your GPS and Google Maps behind. Rather, ask some chick hovering over a crystal ball. She’ll tell you for $40.

A couple of my favorite activities at the Renaissance Festival are the dunking booth and the music. The former is the perfect antidote to insular, endlessly strategizing video games—it’s just me, three bean bags, and a saucy wench who questions my ability to drench her, and who’s been right all but one time to date. As for the latter, just as rocking to the Who, or to Elvis Costello in his punk days, was an incredible trip for the teen and 20-something me, so, too, is kicking it now to amplified Celtic music performed by men in kilts while I’m in the throes of a moderate mead buzz.

Really, it’s all good. It’s great, in fact. Four or five hours at the Renaissance Festival—where I’m headed tomorrow, on what promises to be a brilliant, fall-like Saturday—and I always feel as if I’ve been to high school reunion that brought back only the good memories, and to which none of the bullies, pricks and other jerks showed up.

Yes, soon enough I’ll be back on the Beltway, where I’ll have to honk phone-distracted people out of my lane and will hear radio reports of the latest economic meltdowns, environmental disasters and political stalemates. For the moment, though, as I exit Revel Grove, all I’m thinking of is the joy of a visiting a lost century—the most recent one.

Bright Sunshine-y Day

So. Following up on my previous post, from two weeks ago today, we actually never—surprisingly, amazingly—lost power when Hurricane Irene, or what was left of her, blew through the D.C. area. I’m guessing that’s because Pepco was stung by my certainty of an outage, unnerved by the vastness of my readership and determined to prevent trees from falling on local power lines even if it meant making their line crews sign kamikaze suicide pacts to prevent it.

Ha! No, what I’m really thinking is, maybe it was like how carrying an umbrella around sometimes seems to have the effect of preventing promised rain. Perhaps my bemoaning the inevitability of power failure was exactly the thing that prevented it.

Anyway, we’d spent days monitoring the forecasts and assuming that when Saturday night’s deluge ended and the sun reemerged the following day, what was being billed as a pending blessing would feel like a curse, as temperatures rose in our sunlit but un-air conditioned home. To our happy shock, however, Lynn and I found ourselves sitting in cool comfort as the post-storm sun blazed outside on that sultry late-August afternoon.

But then this past week came the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. Although nothing about that weather event had sounded particularly threatening—“tropical storm” suggesting nothing an afternoon indoors with a fruity cocktail couldn’t mitigate, and “Lee” sounding rather like Marie Osmond’s idea of a bad boy—that storm in fact kicked far more heinie around here than had the considerably more heralded hurricane.

From Monday through Thursday, rain fell more or less continuously, often in sheets. Creeks became rivers, roadsides became creeks, lawns became pools. Fortunately, the precipitation seldom was wind-driven, however, and the saturation somehow failed to uproot a single tree hovering over our power lines.

Still, I experienced Lee in a way that I had not experienced Irene. And the Bean was the reason.

I haven’t written much, if anything, about our three-legged hound mix since I introduced him, in a blog post early December, as “essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues.” A little more than eight months later, he’s still big and spazzy. He’s better socialized and suffers less separation anxiety now, although he hasn’t made as much progress on either front as we’d like. He’s as handsome and lovable as he was the day we brought him home, but as he has become more comfortable he’s also become more destructive. Time was when he’d feel too freaked out when left alone to indulge in such time–honored canine behaviors as shoe-chewing and paper-shredding, but that’s no longer the case.

In short, Bean has turned out to be exactly as advertised in that old post. He’s very much a Dog’s Dog, in the same way that our late greyhound Ellie, Bean’s predecessor, was a Cat’s Dog. Ellie was aloof and meek. Bean is engaged and rambunctious. Which is great in many ways. But not so much, I have to say,when Noah’s flood is raging, and I’m the one being swept away in it, tethered to the dog by a leash.

See, as I’ve noted before, Lynn is the dog advocate in our house. I loved Ellie and I love Bean, but I have no innate need for canine companionship and would be fine with our never having another one. I much prefer cats, who are less work, less needy, less gross, equally beautiful/handsome and, in my experience and contrary to stereotype, as affectionate, if not more so, than dogs. (I know canines have that “unconditional love” reputation, but the closest to that Lynn and I ever have experienced with either of our pooches is, “You are my best friend as long as you have in your possession, and may give to me, food that I want.”)

So, we rescued Ellie, and then Bean, with the understanding that Lynn would be their real-life, hands-on mom, and I their sitcom dad—amiable and well-meaning, but minimally involved in their raising, and more cheerleader than mentor. In practical terms, this means that, while I’m always there to rub Bean’s belly as I pass him in the house, and to shower him with affectionate nicknames (“Beanie Buddy,” “Beaner Budder,” “Crazy Pupper,” “Handsome Head,” etc.), when I’m getting ready for work in the morning and wearing my PJs at night, it’s Lynn who’s trudging out the door to walk him.

In a real sense, I’m like a member of the cushiest Army Reserves unit, who needn’t ever muster on weekends, let alone ship off to Afghanistan. I merely need occasionally to serve a single soldier his grub, or to lead that same soldier through a short hike on those infrequent occasions when his commanding officer is unavailable.

That soldier, of course, is Bean. Except without an iota of the discipline that should make the job easy.

Perhaps because Irene had proven to be such a non-event as inconveniences go, or maybe because Lynn’s body in recent years consistently has conspired against her, last Sunday Lynn tore a muscle in her left calf while running across a street with Bean. Being the doting husband and enormously compassionate human being I am, I commiserated and fretted over my wife’s not inconsiderable pain for as many as 10 minutes before turning my full attention to how this misfortune promised to adversely affect me. With crystal clarity, sometime during that 11th post-injury minute, I realized the upshot was that I would be Bean’s primary walker for at least the next several weeks.

I also knew that a lot of rain was forecast, starting the following day. Unfortunate timing, but I knew what I had to do: prepare myself mentally and practically. Be a Man and suck it up. Be selfless. Be dutiful. Be the husband and Doggie Dad I must be at a time of familial adversity.

Which is to say, the bitching and whining began pretty much immediately. Followed by the grudging, petulant and absolutely minimal fulfillment of my obligation. And all of this while wearing inappropriate and inadequate apparel that promptly got soaked, because donning proper raingear would’ve taken even more precious minutes away from “All Things Considered” in the mornings and baseball on TV at night.

At 9:30 those first couple of evenings I chirped, “Time to take the doggie out,” hoping to ape Lynn’s usual neutral-to-cheery tone in voicing those words, but knowing I sounded more like Dick Cheney in his heyday, being dragged into an obligatory meeting with America-hating members of the “Democrat Party.”

I had on shorts, a T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball hat—that last being my only concession to the rain. Bean, being the un-Ellie, and thus as oblivious to getting wet as she had loathed it, immediately busied himself doing all the things he does on walks under all weather conditions—stopping to eat grass, employing his hound nose to sniff up every morsel of delicious squirrel and rabbit waste to be found on each lawn and stretch of road, lunging at wildlife, often pausing to stare into space at who knows what.

Meanwhile, victimhood saturated my thoughts, much as the rain was saturating my clothing. “Why me?” “Damn dog.” “[I love you honey, but,] Stupid crippled wife.” Etc. Flashlight in my mouth to illuminate the proceedings, I clamped the plastic implement I call the Jaws of Poop around Bean’s glistening turds, as a waterfall cascaded off the bill of my cap.

After toweling Bean off on the front porch, I sloshed my way inside, careful to say little to the missus beyond the necessarily informative “He pooped,” lest words escape my mouth that I’d best not utter. I then trudged downstairs, shed my wet clothes, toweled myself off, changed for bed, brushed my teeth, took a few deep breaths and tried to leave as much of my bad attitude as possible in the basement.

As the week went on, though, I found that things got better. I like to think I Manned Up, gained maturity, all that positive-spin stuff. I do believe that was part of it—that I started heeding that “angel of my better nature,” per Abe Lincoln. But also, most things get easier with repetition (commuting in D.C. traffic and, in my case, rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates each baseball season, notwithstanding).

A huge game-changer for me was when I stopped bone-headedly repeating my sartorial mistakes and began taking the time to dress for the biblically ridiculous conditions outside. Clad now in a sweat-inducing-but-waterproof raincoat (with its peripheral vision-restricting but protective hood tugged over my ball cap), with jeans having replacing my shorts (although rain pants would have been better yet), and with water-resistant boots covering my feet and lower legs, I came to feel nearly as indifferent to the rain (if not as enthusiastic to be outside the house at 6:15 am and 9:45 pm) as was Bean.

In fact, I daresay it even felt ever-so-slightly fun at times to be largely impervious to the elements that everyone else was hiding from—as if the city was exploding, or radioactive, but those citizens wearing superhero suits like me needn’t be concerned. In fact, even on Friday afternoon—with the monsoons finally ended and the sun back in the sky, but the landscape still as squishy as a Nerf ball—I delighted in wearing my rain boots along with my shorts and T-shirt, the better to follow my crazily zigzagging dog wherever he might lead me without having to worry about soggy shoes.

It’s Saturday afternoon now—the second day of dry, and my sixth full day of primary dog stewardship. Soon I’ll take Bean out for the third of his four daily walks. He’ll be his usual endearing and infuriating self—thrilled to be outside, sniffing everything in sight and nearly everything that isn’t, eating all manner of gross stuff, forcing me into conversation with people I don’t know, or with fellow dog-owners who assume (incorrectly) that I love talking about dogs, and getting mouth slobber all over my hand when I slip him treats he’s done nothing to deserve.

But you know, I honestly won’t mind it that much. OK, as much. I’m in this thing for the long haul.

Maybe, in a sense, I can see clearly now. The rain has gone.