The Civility of the Bicycle

A thousand miles down the coast from Hampton, New Hampshire, it's still the same ocean, but warmer. The birds are different. Very few seagulls of the ilk we see in New Hampshire but lots of majestic brown pelicans, who glide above the water, then suddenly drop out of the sky splashing below the surface only to pop up with a fish. 

These are charming birds, but they are not the reason to envy life on Cape Fear.

There are also live oak trees with hanging moss, which are dramatic, although no more bewitching than New Hampshire's birches.

No, what Cape Fear has over Hampton is the bicycle.  Not just any bicycle, the old fashioned Huffy, with pedal brakes, and stout frames and fat tires. You cannot hurdle along in a Lyra bicycle outfit looking like Lance Armstrong on one of these. They are the three toed sloths of bicycles, and they move and turn slowly, but they are good for baskets in which to haul things and you see the nicest people slowly sailing along the asphalt roads, waving to you as you lumber by on your own clumpy bike. You simply cannot hurry on these beasts.  They enforce a certain civility because you cannot just rush by people; you see them coming from a long way off and you have to tell yourself, "Okay, I'm going to be in contact with this person for a long moment and I'd better behave myself, be pleasant, because that moment can drag on and on."

Nothing moves fast in the South (except the traffic on the interstates, but that's because most of the people on those are not from the South.) When you are forced to slow down, it can be wrenching, but, after a while, it's sort of soothing.

Maybe we could designate a road, say High Street from Rte 1 to the beach as a Huffy Only road, for slow moving bicycles. If people had to get around on these turtles, they might have to stop and converse. It would be like trying to make your way down the aisle at Hannaford's, just can't do it in a blind rush. 

It might put the small town back in the small town.

August on Bald Head Island

My brother told me a story when he was in medical school. He said he was standing in the operating room suite, watching the charge nurse write on the board the operating room schedules for the month of August. He told the nurse Dr. Glenn was on vacation the last two weeks of August and she had written him in to do a gall bladder the last week, when he'd be gone. 
"Oh," she laughed. "He never lasts more than a week at that cabin in the Adirondacks. He'll be back with frozen trout for everybody. He'll be here."
My brother just shook his head. He had tried to tell her; if the patient arrived for surgery and no surgeon, well, he had tried. 
The nurse knew of what she spoke. Dr. Glenn turned up  in the operating room on the appointed day, just as she had said, and there was trout in the freezer in the break room.

When I was a college student, I could never imagine not being able to stay away from work. I was already brooding over the coming time when there would be no more summer vacations, when I'd be working July and August and that seemed like a very bleak prospect. 

Now I understand. After 30 years of never having more than nine days in a row off--two weekends and five day work week, I am facing 14 days off.  Actually, I had a similar 14 day holiday when I first moved to New Hampshire seven years ago and I did not last. After a week I just popped over to the office to clear away the paper work and charts I knew were building up. 



Two weeks is a long time.  It requires substantial preparation, arrangements for house sitters, lawn mowing, mail, newspaper delivery.  Friends tell me the first week is all decompression, and the second week is the actual vacation.

We usually fly down, but this year we're driving. We are bringing the dog and renting a house because the kids are joining us, this time with their wives.  One or another of my brother's sons may show up with family in tow.


This is supposed to be a trip back in time.  If it goes as planned it will be the first time in more than a decade when the whole family will reunite on the island where we vacationed when the kids were still in grade school.  Starting around high school, the kids had other commitments.  

In the days when the family was not separated for holidays, we would all gather at my brother's place on Cape Fear, now called "Bald Head Island" and memories were incubated. 

Some things became family touchstones. During a board game our younger son answered a Scattergories question to name a mountain animal with "walrus," and derision rained down heavily upon his head.  He never lived it down. Any time walruses came up he knew someone would mention that they lived in the mountains. A couple of years ago, there was a news item about a walrus or some similar mammal, having been found on the coastal Route1 in California; it was newsworthy because he had  apparently scaled the cliffs to get there and everyone was very surprised so large and ungainly a mammal could make it all the way up to Route 1. Of course, we all got the email from the boy with links to the story and a triumphal blast from the utterly vindicated son. "I TOLD you!"

Bald Head vacations were the last time my brother's sons and my own sons spent significant time together. The older cousins used my sons as "chick magnets" to meet girls on the island, apparently quite effectively, so many bonds were formed, but now the cousins have families of their own and rarely make it back to Bald Head.

Bald Head is hot in August. The ocean is warm, and the beaches, while not empty, are very spacious.  

Days on the island have their own routine:  They start with a roller blade excursion, from one end of the island to the other, which is a great way to start the day. It takes almost two hours and I'm exhausted when I finally get back.  The roads are paved but  there are no cars, only golf carts, and you wind up looking out from a cliff over  Frying Pan Shoals, where the cross currents churn the surf white, where pirate ships went down in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, Confederate blockade runners got chased down by Union war ships and sunk.  The island had a Confederate outpost, and from South Beach you can see ocean tankers headed up the Cape Fear River toward Wilmington. The battle for Wilmington had been epic and desperate and was the final nail in the coffin for secession. Wilmington was the last port through which war supplies could reach the Confederacy. 

 I roller blade past these relics and once home, remove my skates and go plunge into the ocean.  There have been lots of sharks this year, and 9 attacks, so I'll make that a brief plunge this season.

Then I go out on the under porch, in the shade, for the time I really look forward to. My brother sits in one rocking chair and I in another and we talk without a clock ticking. We call each other every weekend, but this is face time. He is retired now, but he ran an academic department in the medical school for thirty years and his take on the evolution of medical care in this country comes from another perspective, but it is entirely consonant with my own.

Work can be stripped down to it's essential tasks. You read X rays, issue reports and that is the work. You sit in the room with the patient and write prescriptions and arrange for tests and follow up, and that is the work. Each task nowadays has a number code for billing. 

But that part of the job of medicine is not why you went into medicine and not why you stay in it, at least not for us.  

For many doctors now, the job is just a job, a means to an income.  Doctors are no longer working until they die. They get out as soon as they can afford to retire, and many of those are opting out in their  early fifties, even sooner if they can afford it. These people did their jobs, billed, got compensated with money, but they never really got into the job. 

The fun part, the part that keeps you juiced,  is the patients, or your coworkers, or just getting a system running well so it serves everyone's needs and problems get solved.  I'm not saying you need to be every patient's new best friend, but, ultimately, no matter how frustrated you might be with your electronic medical record or with the hospital admissions office or anything else, patients are looking to you for help and being able to provide that, being able to solve the problem, is what keeps you coming back. 

The man limps in with back pain radiating down to his heel and leaves the hospital walking pain free.  The patient who was driving her family crazy because her hyperthyroidism made her so irritable, returns with her husband, who draws you aside and says, "Thanks for giving me my wife back. She's herself again."  The woman comes in in booming labor and goes out with a new baby. The man in the emergency room frothing over in pulmonary edema is breathing comfortably within the hour. 

There's no high in the world better than what medicine has to offer. 

And we talk about all that on the porch and look out at the Atlantic. Our father used to join us down there.  Our mother never lived to see it. But, much as I have reservations about the Confederacy, the heat, the torpor, the sharks, Bald Head has history for our family--in one sense, it's home. 

The Intimacy of the City

A New York Look

Walking around New York City today I was struck by how differently we experience other people on the sidewalks of a city than we do in the towns of New Hampshire. 

To a significant extent I know my neighbors by their cars. One neighbor drives a big Jeep and a Ford F150 pickup truck, and that is the way I experience him mostly, seeing him drive by in those big machines. I was surprised, standing, talking to him at a neighborhood party, how small the man is. On the sidewalks of New York, you see people unattached to machines or other accouterments.  A woman walked by in flip flops and shorts so brief you saw the under lips of her buttocks. People are exposed. My grandmother would have been scandalized: she described a woman who was wearing shorts which ended above her knees as "practically naked."

My mother grew up in New York City in the 1920's and 1930's. She wore gloves and a hat when she walked out of her apartment.

Not A Second Glance

New Yorkers in the hot summer now wear so little and outfits arresting enough to make me stare and wonder if I'm getting to be as fussy as my grandmother. On the other hand, a glimpse at the blog, "Shoppers of Walmart" suggests others may see  exposed body parts  and find them as jarring as I do.

You Don't See This on Park Avenue

New York women now wear workout leggings which amount to little more than a second layer of skin as they walk along Lexington Avenue.  In the summer heat, I can only assume the material is breathable or those women would be broiling from the waist down. Above the waist, there is precious little to trap the heat in sheer T shirts. The level of restraint American men show on the sidewalks is remarkable, as few heads turn or eyes follow these quasi naked women walking around in the Naked City. You can see the Talibund and ISIS would be mobilizing the morals police quickly, if they ever took control of the Big Apple.

On the other hand, maybe it's all about context. On Christopher Street, in the Village, you are not fazed by eccentricity. In Wallmart, there may be a different expectation. You bring your kids to Wallmart.  

At the Beach, no problem; At Walmart, problem

Whatever the expectation, it is clearly different in New York City than in Exeter, New Hampshire.  People walk around sidewalks in Exeter and Portsmouth but their numbers are small, the scale is small and they are generally headed back to the protection and insulation of their cars.  You see people along Rte 1A in Hampton, walking in nothing but bikini's, but you can smell the salt in the air and hear the waves crash, so that's different. 
Three miles up Rte 27, around the Old Salt,  and everyone is fully clothed, and, of course, they are getting in and out of their metal conveyances, walled off. When they are out of their cars, they are like astronauts doing space walks--you know they are tethered and will be sucked back into the protective confines of their machines.  

It's that connection to the automobile that presents a wall to the sort of automatic intimacy people experience just walking down the avenues in the city. New Yorkers are said to be abrasive, unfriendly, anti social. Actually, quite the opposite is true. New Yorkers are the ultimate in "social." They live in such close proximity to one another they are like people in the elevator, they keep their distance and they look up at the ceiling or at the numbers on the panel, but they tacitly acknowledge each other in a very functional way.

Driving License Written Exams: Your Tax Dollars at Work

When I was 16, my mother drove me out to the Montgomery County, Maryland driver's test in our 1955 Oldsmobile, which had the size and agility somewhere between  that of a Ford Expedition or a small cabin cruiser.  I flunked the test twice, unable to maneuver it into the parking space they made you use which was meant for a much smaller car. Finally, my brother taught  me how to drive a stick shift and I passed the test in our VW bug. 

The absurdity of having to park a large car in a small space because that's the only space the government would allow and why parking a car was considered so critical never made any sense to me.

A neighbor's kid recently suffered the same indignity, but this time on the written exam for a New Hampshire's driver's license. Looking at a sampling of questions, I realized there is no way I could pass this exam, having driven for decades:

1/ When entering a highway from an entrance ramp, you should generally:

Enter slowly to avoid other vehicles
Accelerate to the speed of traffic
Stop first, then slowly enter traffic
Enter above the speed of traffic to get ahead

I would say when entering a road you might, depending on the road, do any of 
the first three: stop first (if there's a car coming); 
enter slowly if you have obstructed vision 
as you do on the ramp at the Hampton tolls getting onto 95, 
where cars are coming from behind you, 
or enter and try to get up to speed. 
So I miss this question.
Actually, there are no really good strategies for getting on to I-95 
other than prayer.

2/ To reduce the effects of headlight glare at night, you should look:

Over your shoulder.
To the right edge of the road.
Straight ahead.
At the center of the road

To avoid headlight glare, I have tried all of the above 
(except looking over 
my shoulder, and I may yet try that one) 
but I can tell you,none of these work, 
especially if the headlights are from a BMW 
with those bright, white halogen lights which go right through you
 so anyone sitting behind you can see your skeleton

3/ When approaching a railroad crossing you should:

be ready to stop
slow down
all of the above
look for a train

When approaching a rail road track you should clearly slow down 
and be
ready to stop, so these are "all of the above"
 But also true is you would 
probably be wise to look for the train, 
which is not "above," because it is,
in fact,  below. 

4/ What does an orange-colored sign mean?

construction ahead
start of a no-passing zone
railroad ahead
school zone ahead

I have seen many orange construction signs 
but also other orange signs,
and frankly, I can't remember
 if I've seen any of the others in orange,
but orange is the new black, so anything's possible. 
As a last resort you might want to try 
reading what is on the sign.

5/ If another car is in danger of hitting you, you should:

Wave your arms
Flash your headlights
Sound your horn
Use your emergency lights

I have personally tried all of the above without much success,
 so I'm looking for "none of the above" but that is not a choice.
I'm not sure my car has emergency lights, 
but they sound like they
might be useful.  
Really have no clue on this one.
Why is this not an essay test?

6/ The minimum drinking age in this state is ____ years.

18
21
2/9
20 My main thought about this one is: Who cares?   What is this doing on a driver's license test?  Here's a proposed alternative:  If you are about to get behind the wheel,  you should first:  A/ Get drunk   B/ Get your girlfriend drunk  C/ Offer to be the designated driver for your girlfriend's   sorority  so you have your pick of who you want to drive home.   Full credit for either B or C. .

West Wing, Elitism and Knowing of What You Speak

Okay, you know I love "West Wing." I love the snappy back and forth among intelligent women and men and the rapid fire wisecracks.

But there are some things which have recurred and like a burr under the saddle and they do catch up with you; they fester and progress from a sore to an abscess.

One is the unabashed elitism, which, as far as I can remember, is very true of Washington and I presume is an accurate depiction of White House culture.  (Peggy Noonan and Dee Dee Myers consulted) In every scene in anyone's office, there are framed diplomas on the wal, as if having gone to Berkeley or Harvard is a qualificatin for working in the White House.  CJ the press secretary has them on her wall and when Amy goes to work for the President's wife, Abby, the first thing she does is to hang up her diplomas from Brown and Yale, and she mentions she went to those places when she makes her case to Abby for why Abby should trust her.  The Republican attorney who joins the White House staff rattles through her academic pedigree: Harvard undergrad, Yale Law. We are told repeatedly Sam went to Princeton and on and on.  

And President Bartlet tells Sam, "You are one of the great minds of your generation," when we have seen little evidence of that, beyond the fact he has gone to Princeton. So, I suppose, we must conclude that fact he went to Princeton makes him one of the great minds of his generation. 

In fact, Josh (Harvard undergrad, Yale Law) constantly loads his remarks with lots of statistics which sound impressive and they flow rapidly by, leaving the impression he knows what he's talking about, but if you know anything about those numbers, you know they are bogus--how they were derived, what they really prove are questionable. It's all so facile.

Listen to Toby explain why the U.S. government should not sign on to the treaty banning land mines:

It's Korea. Tabitha. There are 900,000 North Korean soldiers in the DMZ,

and the only

thing stopping them from walking into South Korea are 37,000 US troops,

and about a

million land mines along the border. We have said over and over that we

would be thrilled

to sign this treaty if we could have an exemption for South Korea and we

have been rebuffed.

Rebuffed... I say.

I don't know much about land mines or Korea, but I'm willing to bet those land mines are not the only thing stopping those 900,000 North Korean soldiers from crossing the DMZ.  

This sort of thing happens repeatedly as these people marshal their arguments based on data which they really have never stopped to critically examine.  

They all quote polls as if the were handed down from Heaven on stone tablets:

Here's Leo:

Not quite. Our report card for our first two weeks in office. The President's

approval has

gone from 61% during the transition-- when, I suppose, there's nothing to

approve-- to 49%

once there was. 47% see him as a strong leader-- a result of bungling the

Rooker nomination--

and African-American support, which basically elected him, has gone from 92

to 78. Finally,

if the election were held today, the President would be Chairman of the

Economics Department

at Phillips Andover Academy. Can anyone report anything good?

To be fair, there are some discussions about polls and how they can be manipulated, mostly by the deaf actress who plays a political pollster/operative. (There is some irony in the fact a deaf person is best at listening to the electorate.)  If you phrase the question just slightly differently, you can get an entirely different answer.

Of course, my problem with "West Wing" is not so much with "West Wing" as with the culture it so accurately depicts: People who have been told they are the best minds of their generation because they got into Harvard, who work very hard learning large quantities of data they do not know how to critically examine, use these lodes to intimidate others into thinking they know more than their opponents. 

It all reminds me of a remark my father once made at dinner. He was talking about a man who had testified at some Congressional hearing.  My father had lunch with him and discovered he was actually a physician although he had been testifying as a government employee of the Department of Labor.  Why,my father had asked him, did he stop being a physician to do the job he was doing as a physician? Why work in the administration of government programs to help employ older workers?  
"Well, I like to think I'm making a difference," the physician said, a very common reply from a federal employee. 
 "But you know medicine. You actually know something. Why would you want to spend you day debating with people when neither side of the debate knows anything, really?"

What my father  was saying is that economics, sociology, political science are not sciences. People have theories but there are no prospective, double blind, controlled studies. Everyone digs around for some studies, some data, which support whatever position they like.  But they don't really know anything.

It's not like the best minds of the generation are in the government, even at the White House. The best minds are in engineering, science, maybe commerce, where you can measure outcomes and test theories. The kid who goes to China, or Japan, who immerses himself in the culture, learns the language, he knows something. He's my pick for a "best mind" of his generation.

As much as I've come to love the characters on "West Wing," I'm constantly reminded, they have conviction, elegance of phrasing, passion, great wit and charm, but they are all using smoke and mirrors. The best thing about President Bartlet is he is the one who always reminds them of this.

Serial

Like "brilliant" the word "riveting" has been so overused as to be rendered into cliche. But that is the only way I can describe the Podcast "Serial" about a Baltimore murder, or, as its narrator, Sarah Koenig, says, this story is about "love, death, truth and justice."

When I go biking, or walking my dog, my iPod scrolls through music and I did not think it possible that a narrative about the murder of a teenager in Baltimore could possibly tear me away from all those endorphins which start flowing whenever Bob Dylan, Eva Cassidy and the Doobie Brothers get going.

But I was wrong. 

I'm only 2 episodes in, but I'm in for the duration now.  It is astonishing on so many levels:  The work which so obviously went into it--each point is examined and nothing is simple; every event is seen from multiple viewpoints, often diametrically opposed. 

It won't be too much of a spoiler to outline some basics: At a Baltimore high school, a "magnet" program for talented students is a melange of ethnicities and the teenagers, many of whom have known each other since elementary school, flow in and out of each others lives.  Hae Min Lee, the daughter of Chinese immigrants is asked to the Junior prom by Adnan Syed, the son of Pakistani immigrants. He is forbidden to date girls because in his Muslim family you are either married or you are not married and if you are not married you do not spend time in company of women. He, of course, ignores this, and has the girl drop him off a block away so his parents will not see. 

Starship Enterprise

At the prom, Adnan's mother shows up and berates him for consorting with girls and upbraids Hae, asking her why she is doing such harm to Adnan's family.  This is recorded in Hae's diary, as is a narrative of her falling in love with Adnan:  "It's amazing. I think I'm the happiest I've ever been, and then I just get happier." 

But the confrontation with the mother at the prom shakes her and she rethinks Adnan's remark, "Oh, well, of course, you are the devil, leading me away from my religion." She had thought he was speaking ironically and he was laughing as he said it, but now it takes on a different meaning. As Koenig says, in every spin there is a tendril of truth.

Just Seventeen

Among the many astonishing things depicted is the nature of love, not just young love, but all love, as revealed through Hae's diary, her friends, who are remarkably articulate, insightful and expressive.  She falls in love with Adnan because he is so sweet.  As the prom prince, he is suppose to have the first dance with the prom princess, but he breaks the rule to dance with her and she rewards him with a kiss on the lips and writes in her diary, "How can you not fall in love with someone so sweet?"

Just Another High School Couple

They have sex everywhere, in locker rooms, friend's houses, motels.  How does a 17 year old couple get a motel room? Think about that.  And they have so much free time. When I went to high school, your day was strictly regulated by the tick of the clock, bells rang and you raced the length of the school to make it into your next classroom on time. After school, there were team practices, for which you had to be on time. After that, you had to be home on time and do homework until you dropped. These kids have so much free  time between classes, they go to malls or to motel rooms. 

But then Hae meets a twenty something at work, a blonde, blue eyed swain, and she falls in love with him at first sight.  Again, her diary registers rapture. So there is love. 

The Next Guy

And all through it is truth, the many sides of truth, and justice, which I have always suspected is a delusion.  Justice, now there's a concept for you. What, exactly, is justice?