Having let this field lay fallow for the last decade I've decided it's time for a reboot as a letter to my grandson, a time capsule for us to get acquanited in the future.
By the time I was born all my grandparents had died, so I never knew any of them. I remember, when I was about your age as I write this, my friend talking about his Nana. I had no idea who that could be and had to get a definition from him, or maybe my Mom. I never knew them, or really even knew of them when I was young, so I didn't really miss them. You can't really miss someone you never knew.
My Dad died when I was thirteen and my older brother was 15. I was very sad at the time because he was a loving father, had a great sense of humor, and he enjoyed music even more than I realized. But what I find I missed most, as time went on, was that I didn't get to know him as an adult. It's when we become adults that we get to know our elders on the level of peers. It's less parent teaching child to become a human being and more parent and grown child getting to know each other as friends and equals. That's what I would like to have had with my Dad and what I hope to do through what I write here with you.
I was just shy of 65 when you were born and I hope we'll get some time together to talk man to man about whatever comes up to talk about. The odds don't favor us having a lot of time for that so I hope to give us, a bit one sidedly, a chance to have something resembling those conversations.

The story is told that John Kruk, a major league baseball first baseman and outfielder of the 80s and 90s, was having dinner in a restaurant and afterwards, as one could in those days, he lit a cigarette. A woman patron of the restaurant had recognized Kruk and went over to him to lecture him about the bad example he was setting for the youth of America for them to see an athlete, in public, smoking. “Lady,” Kruk pointed out, “I ain’t an athlete, I’m a ball player.” Bottom of the 33rd, ain’t a work of art, which the cover might try to make you believe, but it is a very good baseball book. It is, ostensibly, the story of the longest professional baseball game, some 33 innings, played in Pawtucket, Rhode Island starting on Easter Eve in 1981. Because of a foul up in the instructions issued to umpires each year nobody knew they didn’t have to keep playing through the night until nearly dawn, 4:07am. The book is at its best when the author, Dan Barry, tells stories and there are a lot of them. About the orphaned ball club playing in the misbegotten park in a struggling city. Pawtucket is still the top Red Sox farm team in the International League, a “Triple A” league, one step on the baseball ladder and light years below Major League Baseball. The top of professional baseball. The Big Time, The Show. But what really makes it as good a book as it is, is that Barry tells us about the people and it’s quite a cast of characters. Two of them were on their way to having Hall of Fame careers, Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr. A few others would have careers worthy of note either because of the length or a specific accomplishment. Some were on their way up, others on their way down although they didn’t necessarily know it. Some were stuck, that close to the top, 90 miles from Boston’s Fenway Park and would never get the chance, or would get the chance and not play well enough to convince their club, the Orioles or the Red Sox, that they belonged. Sad tales like that of the Pawtucket pitcher who could go AWOL for days at a time whose major league career was 22 games and whose later life is in assisted living and Rochester shortstop whose budding career may have been sabotaged by a single ground ball that he didn’t catch. Or the star athlete, can’t miss prospect who returned home every winter to the increasing skepticism of the people he had known all his life who thought him a failure when he didn’t make the big leagues but whose real success came years after he left baseball when he finally joined A.A. There are also stories of the bat boys, the managers of the two clubs, even lineage of the Pawtucket team’s ownership makes a good story. But every once in a while there is an effort to link the game to Easter and to find significance in the fact that it extended till almost dawn on Easter morning. There is meaning in this. It means the game lasted, unresolved, for nearly eight and a half hours. Barry is a magnificent story teller but a lackluster theologian. You’ll enjoy the read though.

Thinking Outside the Tiger Cage

Truth be told I’m a little bit embarrassed that I didn’t think of this before. In fact, it’s so simple we all should be a little red faced that none of us came up with this before I did. It’s that obvious and it’s a multi-purpose concept! First a bit of review.

The health care reorganization has been at an impasse since, well since the beginning. As Percy Garris said to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “don’t you want to know why?” For one thing there is no way that a Republican would vote for this short of putting a gun to his or her head.

Don’t you want to know why? It was President Obama’s idea. If they vote for it, even one of them, and it passes who gets the credit? Obama, that’s who. Who else? The Democrats. Because it was their idea. Not that there’s much there that Republicans haven’t supported at one time or another since Theodore Roosevelt was rough riding through the White House. But the public, God bless us, has the collective memory of a brain damaged amoeba. We generally remember the last person who told us something as the originator of the thought.

If I came up to you and Glen Beck today and said, “John Boehner is apparently what happens when people marry within the same family.” You’d walk away with the idea that John Boehner is an inbred, spray-tanned buffoon. If Glen Beck said the same thing tomorrow two things would happen; 1- More people would hear it and, 2-they’d all remember that they heard it from Glen Beck and think he originated the idea.

So that’s why no Republican who isn’t willing to lose his job to a challenger who could come in from the right side of Attila the Hun is going to vote for health care reform. There’s nothing in it for them politically.

Not Scott Brown of Massachusetts. He ran to be the 41^st vote against it. Susan Cohen, Olympia Snow? Nope. Judd Gregg? You’re kidding, right? Joe Lieberman might or might not. We can’t really be sure till he’s wrung every second of face time out of it. Oh sure, they’d be doing the right thing for their constituents and for the country but that doesn’t carry much weight for someone whose ego is wrapped up in being addressed as “Senator” and having that nifty office on Capitol Hill. That and politicians generally have the figurative scrotal sac of a newborn male in ice water. Present in name only. Let’s be realistic. Ain’t gonna happen.

Okay, so here’s what we do. We water-board them all till they agree to vote for health care reform! It’s not really any big deal. Almost all of them have said all along that it’s not torture, no violation of the Geneva Conventions there, no sirree. So where’s the harm?

Best case scenario, we finally get a health care bill, maybe even one worthy of the name “health care system,” with – dare I dream it? – a public option.

Worst case scenario we’re down a few members of the Senate and the survivors finally admit that being nearly drowned isn’t just “enhanced interrogation” but when it happens to them it’s bona-fide, U.S. certified Grade-A torture. No harm there that I can see.

Looks like a win-win from my vantage point. That’s the multi-purpose part.

We like to think outside the Tiger Cage here and find new solutions for today’s problems, You’re welcome.

Reaching Back For Some Holiday Spirit

The Holidays are looming before us and I have a confession to make about one particular Holiday. I love Thanksgiving. No doubt this is in part attributable to the fact that we are always guests on Thanksgiving, never hosts. None of that all week cleaning, all day cooking, all night cleaning up for me. Nope, I’m like the 87^th Airborne; I parachute in, fulfill my mission (in this case eat) and then move out and on to the next challenge.

Turkey with all the fixings is a nice appetizer for what, in my mind has always been the main course, apple pie. Everything else is foreplay. It may be extremely pleasant but it’s still not the point of the exercise. Apple pie is it. The perfect ending to a perfect Holiday.

It turns out my family has a long history of Thanksgivings. We almost go back to the first one. Almost but not quite. The first Parmelee, whom we refer to as “Young John,” arrived in Charlestown, Massachusetts in late spring or early summer of 1635. Young John must have been a great letter writer because his father, we call him “Grandpa John,” arrived in New Haven, Connecticut four years later.

The early Parmelees were Puritans, a source of some irony and considerable amusement to me since this particular branch of the current generation is anything but Puritan. The timing of my ancestors arrival on these shores also helps to explain my attitude toward immigration. We should have closed the borders in 1640 and kept the rest of riff-raff out, but it’s too late to change all that now. Americans who can trace their ancestry back before the Pilgrims would probably pick an earlier date.

I’m guessing that Young John had a real good sales pitch because Grandpa John arrived in July of 1639. He was already 55 years old and had outlived four wives by that point. Grandpa John was also a rather prolific fellow, having fathered 13 children among those four wives although his record at keeping them alive past infancy is, at best, spotty. Although he took another wife in Connecticut when he was almost 70, his begetting days were behind him.

Not so with Young John. The boy was 22 when he arrived in Charlestown, eventually met up with his Dad in Connecticut and they both settled in Guilford, Connecticut. Young John did his best at begetting but he never did catch his father’s record. He did pretty well though, three wives, 10 children and 74 grandchildren. Imagine their Thanksgiving.

Since then we’ve carried on down through the generations, I think I’m about 9^th or 10^th generation, and there are about as many spellings of Parmelee as there were Parmelees after the first few generations. This gives those of us who have trouble spelling a tendency toward hubris on the spelling issue since we can say, “maybe I can’t spell ‘cat’ if you spot me the ‘c’ and the ‘t’ but at least I can spell my own name and my great, great, great grandfather couldn’t even do that!”

I discovered all this when I stumbled on a website devoted to the Parmelee lineage when I was trying to find out a little about my grandfather whom I never knew. Turns out a guy in Los Angeles, a former news editor and copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, has spent 30 years compiling all this information. I sent him what little information I had and he tied me into the rest of the clan. As it happens there are a couple of United States Presidents in the family, albeit two of the worst.

But I don’t have to worry about seeing them at Thanksgiving which is the other thing I like about the Holidays in general and Thanksgiving in particular, I like all the people I get to see this time of year. To tell the truth I like them a lot. And as much as I enjoy playing Scrooge before the ghosts come to visit most of the year, comes the Holidays and I’m a little like Old Fezziwig. I delight in the spirit of the thing. Just don’t get between me and that apple pie.

The Union Forever!

Okay Maine you surprised me. You went to the polls and overrode your own legislature to take the right of marriage away from same sex couples. I thought you were so much more sensible than that. I thought you would see things the way I do; if you’re opposed to same sex marriage, don’t marry a person of the same sex. That’s simple. It’s easy to remember. You may not have entirely made up your mind about what you hope for in a spouse but you rule out anyone who has certain body parts that look pretty much like yours.

I get that there are a lot of people who feel threatened by gay marriage, but I’ve never figured out why. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything resembling a logical explanation either. There are those who point to the bible and say it’s prohibited there but the bible also tells us to lay off the pork chops and I don’t see any of these people trying to fire the minister who allowed the ham and bean supper in the church hall.

There are people who take the old “we’ve never done it that way here before” approach. That’s a great piece of logic that would still have us riding horses to work. You know when automobiles came along they were seen, in part, as a solution to the pollution caused by horses. Imagine the Maine Turnpike public works crews spending the whole day cleaning up road apples.

There are a lot of negative consequences from the proliferation automobiles - remember nothing causes problems like solutions. But about the only downside that I can think of as a result of the change away from the horse is we put the guys who made boot scrapers out of business.

Since my spouse is of the opposite sex and I don’t live in Maine it probably shouldn’t bother me at all but for some reason it does. So at the risk of sounding like one of those dogmatic atheists who is so strenuous in their insistence that there is no God that it becomes pretty obvious that non-belief is their religion, I’m going to make a suggestion to get all 50 states on the same page and let us worry about other things. You know, little things like two wars, a tanked economy and a health care system that isn’t a system and only works for those who are healthy.

It is time for the states, all 50 of them, to get out of the marriage business entirely.

All 50 of the 50 states are civil institutions and should recognize civil unions. Let the state of Holy Matrimony be, as it should be, the domain of religious institutions. You cover the law with a civil union you go to a religious institution to get things straightened out with the Deity. It’s a “render unto Caesar” approach that makes perfect sense to me.

This would not invalidate any existing marriage, all would automatically be recognized as Civil Unions by the states that make a distinction between Civil Union and Marriage. Whether your religious institution would recognize it is your problem, not mine. If you were married in a church I would assume you’re already covered. If not, and you wanted the sanction of religion for your union, that’s entirely between you and your clergy in the faith of your choice.

Is this idea reasonable? Definitely. Plausible? Entirely. Original? Well I can’t claim to be the only person or the first person to think of it I’m sure but it makes sense doesn’t it? Which is why I’m sure it has practically no chance. I’m sure the people who overrode the legislature would think this was somehow cheapening their marriage. And of course legislators with sense enough to do the right thing more than occasionally are in extremely short supply. But I offer it in the marketplace of ideas and you can either buy it or keep walking.

Maine in the Driver's Seat

Nobody remembers Percy Garris. He’s the guy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” who hires Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s title characters to be payroll guards in Bolivia. On the way to get the payroll money Percy finds his two guards are overlooking one important point.
“Morons,” says Percy Garris, “ I've got morons on my team. Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain. When we have got the money, on the way back, then you can sweat.”
Percy gets shot going back up the mountain.
We tend to forget this as we go through or daily life. When we get health insurance we tend to think we’re all set, we’re covered, we have our payroll guards. And as long as we don’t need insurance, the insurer is vigilant as to our health and well being, like Butch and Sundance going down the mountain. They remind us to get out blood pressure checked, to eat right, exercise, get plenty of rest…
They’re kind of like a Mom with her first child. You can’t be too careful with your first born. Make a claim and they become kind of like Dad with the second child, “haven’t we been through this before? What were you doing there anyway?” Get really sick, and they’re like a friend who owes you money.
Well, come to think of it, they’re more like Otter in National Lampoon’s Animal House, “you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up - you trusted us!”
The thing to remember is an insurance company doesn’t make any money by paying your medical expenses. They make money on the premium. Oh, there are actuarial tables, probabilities and all that, but what it comes down to is the premium. Everything else is an expense. It’s the same way with the health professionals by the way. Nobody gets paid for making you better. They get paid for treating you.
This means the insurance company wants you to stay healthy or if you become ill to either get better or die quickly. I don’t know that they have a preference for anything other than celerity. There’s no profit in anything else.
The doctor gets paid for treating you, not for curing you. I think the ultimate exercise of this option is psychiatry where people undergo “treatment” for decades. I’m not saying it’s not necessary, I wouldn’t pretend to know such a thing. I just wonder about something that is so open ended, but I digress.
What brought me back to all this, and has me darting about the verbal landscape like a squirrel on meth was Maine Senator Olympia Snow. Right now she’s got the White House and the Congress in the palm of her hand.
When Senator Snowe became the only Republican thus far to break away from the lock-step orthodoxy that the only good health care reform is no health care reform she made sure to let everyone know that she isn’t committed to staying out of step. That makes her the most powerful person in the congress – house or senate – on the health care issue. Do you want to bet that she isn’t the envy of every member of both houses and every governor in all the 50 states?
That, my friend, is the definition of power. To be the one swing vote on an issue. Does Maine need a hospital, a highway, a bridge, an airport? Now’s the time to ask. Right now Maine’s swing vote is the prettiest girl at the dance and she can probably get just about anything for one turn around the floor.
So what do you want, Maine? The time to worry about pork barrels is when some other state’s member of congress has the swing vote. Right now you could probably get congress to pay for an even up swap of Mount Katahdin for Mount Rushmore, you might as well go for it!

When Merely Rude Is An Improvement

When I learned it was Representative Joe Wilson, (R- S.C.) who screamed, “you lie!”, during President Obama’s speech on healthcare reform Wednesday night (9/9/09), I thought it was an example of the enlightened voters of the state of South Carolina having elected a guy with Tourette's Syndrome. I gather my assumption was incorrect, but this is still a vast improvement in the behavior of South Carolinians from the House.

It was Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina who beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of the Senate. So, in terms of the behavior of South Carolina Congressmen, it is a nice upgrade to have one who is merely ignorant and rude.

Maybe South Carolina politicians are less violent these days but its politicians are still as nutty as ever. Remember the Palmetto State is led by Governor Mark Sanford whose dalliance with an Argentinean journalist brightened an otherwise imprurient summer. As I write this, Governor Sanford is still in office. The allegation that he used state funds in one way or another to further his relationship hasn’t cost this avowed “Christian” his job yet, although his wife and children have moved out.

It should also be remembered also that it was South Carolina Attorney General James L. Petigru who observed on the state’s vote for secession, “South Carolina is too small to be a Republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

If Lincoln made a mistake, aside from going to Ford’s Theatre, it may be that he didn’t just let South Carolina walk away.

In another 150 years South Carolina politicians may behave well enough to be allowed out in public...but I'm not counting on it and if Congressman Wilson comes to work with a cane or crutches I hope someone will have the foresight to keep a close eye on him.