Readers and writers blog

I gave the welcoming address at my 20-year high school reunion, the first one I had attended, and I was duly impressed with the momentousness of the occasion. My address was weighted with the American and world history we had passed through.

Now that the 50-year reunion is here, I no longer feel that weight.

Not that the importance of the span between 1958 and 1978 has diminished. Imagine if you will:

• Humans had walked on the moon. And not just the first two, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but eventually a dozen men, all Americans.

• The president who launched America’s space program, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated.

• There had been another war, Vietnam, and its inglorious conclusion had made World War II and even Korea seem like lost history.

• Two apostles of hope, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, had been gunned down at the height of the 1960s, a decade of social change that many of us thought had been too long in coming.

• But what seemed equally important to me — and to many others of the class of 1958 of Spaulding High School, Rochester, N.H. — was that we were now more than twice as old as we were when we graduated. At least, that’s what we talked about a lot, in one way or another, at that 20-year reunion.

Age now seems so far down on the list. And so, for that matter, do events in American and world history.

My classmates and I are now about twice as old as we were at that 20-year reunion, and yet I think age may be more important to those who have less of it and increasingly irrelevant to those who have more. I know I used to worry a lot more about death when I was in my late 20s and early 30s than I have since.

And now personal history seems more important to me than that of the nation and the world. Here’s why:

My 50 post-high school years started promisingly with college, the Army and then a marriage to a woman I had long dreamed about with love. But I was an unfocused collegian, an unwilling soldier and an unworthy husband. So 22 years out of high school, I was alone and, most of the time, drunk.

After another five years and a number of relationships, two of them ending in mercifully short marriages, I was living not in a house but in a small truck. You can read all about it in Adrift in America, a book found in the nonfiction category of our Works section.

Ironically, through all of this, my work as a reporter and eventually editor never suffered. And it was this work — I should say, work environment — that finally saved me.

In 1989, I visited a small daily newspaper in Kingston, N.Y., where I had worked in the 1970s, and I was captivated by a woman who now worked there. Actually, I was captivated first by her writing. In the paper that day was a story about a local Holstein farm that began with a description of black-and-white magnets on a farmhouse refrigerator.

I took a job again at the newspaper but didn’t stay long. I was still on the road and headed for more misadventures. But I never forgot that woman, and I got to know her better when I returned to work there in 1992, this time to stay.

Bonnie and I were married in 1997, and in the 11 years since, I have thought frequently about what a lucky bastard I have been — a bastard often in the past and now just plain lucky.

Bonnie and I will be traveling to New Hampshire on Friday for that 50-year reunion. It’ll be my third since the 20th. I didn’t give any speeches at the 35th and 40th. The 20th taught me that people just wanted to talk about themselves.

I think I will give a speech this time, but a personal one.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 30: Manitou Springs of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Melanie no longer believes anything Gerard says or does, so he leaves her and her daughter, Wendy, and goes to Colorado to be with Ginny again. But that doesn’t work, either.

• Chapter 18 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. For the first time in the months since their divorce, Tess is visited by her ex-husband, Jason, a meeting of tumultuous emotions for both of them. And now that there is no longer Jason-and-Tess, she feels it’s also just a matter of time before there’s no longer Brian-and-Tess.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve been watching the price of crude oil bob up and down like a bungee jumper, and I’m wondering how long it’s going to take us to cut the cord. Because continuing the way we are makes no sense.

What’s astonishing to me is how many people don’t see that it makes no sense.

I was talking the other day to a guy from our local electric utility, and he was trying to tell me why America isn’t trying to switch away from fossil fuels:

“It makes no sense,” he said.

What? Well, here’s how he saw it: Solar and wind technology are too expensive, and there’s really no shortage of oil, just a lack of initiative in finding it. As for global warming, he doesn’t believe it.

Granted, this guy isn’t a policy maker at the utility, just a field technician trying to determine whether we’re close enough to one of its natural gas lines to hook in for a tankless water heater.

It’s some of his beliefs that bother me — beliefs that a lot of Americans seem to hold.

For one thing, most of the science I read says we’re past the peak of the world’s oil supply. Most of the science I read also says our atmosphere is warming because our use of fossil fuels is pumping too much carbon dioxide into it.

And solar and wind are too expensive? Compared to what? Summers of 110 degrees and New York City under water?

Frankly, I’m glad we’re running out of oil. Because if the utility guy were right and we were gushing in oil again, a lot of people would be right back in those Hummers and SUVs, driving the kids everywhere to and from their McMansions instead of making the little fatties walk somewhere.

Does that make sense?

You know, I still haven’t forgiven Al Gore for losing to George Bush in 2000. Gore as a candidate was so stiff that he reminded me of a big popsicle stick. But he said something Thursday that sums up our current energy situation:

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

It was his speech challenging the United States to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.*

A couple of other things Gore said:

(E)nough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.

And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of U.S. electricity demand.

Is it a daunting challenge? Yes, and so was John F. Kennedy’s program to put us on the moon in 10 years.

Gore’s challenge still would leave us using oil, but in far smaller quantities — for example, for aircraft and hybrid cars. But we would get rid of those nasty coal-fired plants that now generate more than half our electricity.

You know, there’s almost a religious fervor not to believe in global warming and the need for alternative energy sources. Well, apologies to my religious friends, but it’s actually safer not to believe in God than not to believe in global warming.

If you die and there’s no God, you haven’t wasted a lot of your life trying to believe. If there is a God, then he has to be the kind of deity who would find it perfectly reasonable not to believe in him. If he isn’t that kind of deity, then I’d just as soon go to hell.

But if you don’t believe in global warming and it turns out not to happen, you’ve still got the energy mess we’re in today. And if it does turn out to be true, then you’ve got hell right here on earth.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 17 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess spends a day talking with Brian’s troubled younger sister and is somewhat reassured that Rachel will survive her relationship with Tim, a drug dealer.

• Chapter 29: Burlingame of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and Melanie spend an evening with Ginny and Elliot, and it turns out as badly as Gerard had feared. Melanie punches Ginny, and all four get arrested. (Update: Whoa, to my chagrin, I am corrected by Gerard [see comments]. Only he and Melanie get arrested. Apologies, G.)

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Thanks to fellow blogger Ted Knerr at Art-spirit for sending us the speech, which you can see or read here. If you watch the video, push the ‘play’ slider over to 2:20 to get past the introductions.

Thhhaaaaah crush-ER.

It was a weekend of crushers for my wife and me, one that ranged from humorous to horrendous.

Bonnie, who works at the local daily newspaper where I retired four years ago, asked me Friday night for ideas for a story she’s doing on area people with unusual occupations. One of my suggestions was someone who runs a car crusher at a local scrapyard.

Little did I realize we’d be visiting not one but two crushers the next day.

Jesus, it was a nightmare. Like something from Apocalypse Now — remember that scene where Martin Sheen’s patrol boat, traveling upriver to find Marlon Brando, motors beneath the tail section of a crashed B-52 bomber towering high above the tiny boat?

So there we were Saturday, sitting in our rental truck on a narrow dirt road between mountains of crushed metal at a local scrapyard. Towering high above us on the left was a pile of crushed cars being made higher by a huge crawler excavator dropping a nasty looking four-tooth grapple into the engine of a wrecked car, then lifting it by its innards onto other dead vehicles. That last bite punctured what appeared to be an air conditioning reservoir, sending a stream of refrigerant onto our windshield. On our right, not quite as high, was a pile of old appliances and other scrap metal being chewed on by another excavator, this one equipped with an enormous shear that looked like the mouth of a tyrannosaurus rex. Behind us, more trucks waited to feed the monsters.

We hurriedly pushed our offerings off the back of our truck — an old washer and dryer set that had been in storage for years and that we wanted to recycle. Those once-elegant appliances had hardly crashed to the ground when we jumped back into the truck and lurched out of the scrapyard, not stopping to collect the few dollars our metal would have brought.

Meanwhile, this whole subject had revived the humor we shared from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon about a wrestling match. The villain of ‘Bunny Hugged’ (1951) is an overmuscled but not-too-bright wrestler named the Crusher. The funniest thing to me is not the action, which is funny, but the way the wrestler is introduced.

Like most cartoons from the golden days of Warner Bros., “Bunny Hugged” has its caricatures drawn from real life. Crusher’s opponent, before Bugs gets involved, is Ravishing Ronald, a takeoff on an old West Coast wrestler named Gorgeous George. And the ring announcer is the cartoon version of a longtime Madison Square Garden announcer whose name escapes me.

What the announcer does with the introduction never fails to crack me up. And the best imitation of that introduction I’ve ever heard is done by a talented writer and funny guy named Ron Rosner, sports editor at the newspaper where Bonnie works.

What the ring announcer does with the introduction is done by people who give the same speech over and over — tour guides, for example. They give a different inflection to words that are all too familiar to them. In this case, the Crusher has pulverized so many opponents, his name is all too familiar to the fans.

So it’s not the CRUSH-er. It’s thhhhaaaah crush-ER. Cracks me up. Every time.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 28: The Garden of Eden of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard encourages Melanie to have sex with other men so that she’ll eventually agree to move in with Ginny and their friend Elliot. When the four of them finally get together, as Gerard says, “that was when the shit hit the fan.”

• Chapter 16 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess meets Brian’s father, and it’s an encounter that ends in violence. Brian’s father wants to make amends for years of cheating on his wife and ignoring his children. When he mentions having visited Brian’s troubled sister, Rachel, Brian beats him bloody.

– Sid Leavitt

The Swellmobile is back. After 14 days and $1,323* to fix its transmission, I have been reunited with my car, which I have given an elegant nickname because it is one of the last few indulgences in my otherwise frugal life.

Oh, I’ve indulged myself before. Back in my salad days of the late 1970s, I bought myself a tuxedo. Tailor-made. Silk lapels, leg stripe, cummerbund and tie (not a clip-on, please). What I paid for it then would be about $1,000 today.

I reasoned that I needed the tuxedo — I’d been to a half dozen weddings where formal attire was required, and renting tuxedos already had cost me nearly half what buying one would — but it really was an indulgence.

What I didn’t realize, of course, was that weddings are about the only place a man needs a tuxedo, and even then, he’s often mistaken for a member of the wedding party, if not the groom. And try going to a restaurant in a tuxedo. People will ask you for a table. Or if it’s a party, they will expect you to be carrying a tray of hors d’ouevres.

And there were other indulgences. In the mid-1980s, when I was divorced, out of a job and living on the road in a small truck (again, see it here), I used some of the few dollars left over from the sale of our house to buy a portable VCR (they were expensive then). And, oh yes, six pieces of stemmed crystal glassware that hung under one of the cabinets in the truck’s living area, right across from the small closet where I kept the tuxedo, never to be worn again.

I came from a family of modest means (some might say poor), and the tuxedo, VCR and stemmed glasses were totems of a lifestyle I thought I wanted before I returned to frugality.

The last piece of stemware was broken years ago, but the VCR continued to function until two years ago, and I donated the tuxedo to a social-service thrift shop just last year. You know, I was a little annoyed when one of the thrift-shop volunteers put on the coat and laughed that she should wear it to a costume party. Hell, that tuxedo was still in perfect condition and might have helped some poor guy get a waiter’s job.

Ah well, I digress.

Being without my car for two weeks hasn’t been a great deprivation, but it has kept me away from Kingston, N.Y., about seven miles away, and the supermarket where I do my weekly shopping. (Yes, Kingston still has a supermarket right in town.)

My wife, Bonnie, and I split the shopping, but my part includes such bulk items as cat food and litter. (The cats have been eyeing me suspiciously of late, even though I know they can’t see into the closet where they’re down to less than one small bag of food.)

And in case you haven’t noticed from the photo above (or, like me, can’t tell one car from another), the Swellmobile is a 1994 Ford Taurus — yes, 14 years old. The reason it’s ’swell’ is that it has plush velour upholstery, a split-bench front seat, drop-down dual armrests and four power windows, three of which still work. It still has most of its paint — a rich burgundy — although my father-in-law, Glenn, has touched up a few rust spots with some orange paint he had lying around. I bought the car from him and my mother-in-law, Virginia, when they gave up their seasonal trailer in Texas and brought the spare car here.

It was certainly no extravagance — they gave me a good price — but the reason it’s an indulgence is that its six-cylinder engine barely averages 20 miles per gallon. Even though I drive it only about 20 miles a week, it’s wasteful.

You know, I would rather have an electric car or some kind of hybrid, but I can’t afford it. What’s sad is that there are some people who could — but wouldn’t.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 15 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess, who supports herself as a cleaning lady, meets a trophy wife in one of the new gentry’s homes, then runs afoul of one of Brian’s trophy ex-girlfriends in a local bar.

• Chapter 27: Sutro Heights of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Things begin to fall apart between Gerard and Melanie when she realizes he still loves Ginny and wants the two of them to move in with Ginny and her current paramour Elliot.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*No complaint about the repair cost. It was on the low end of what my Google research showed was a national average of $1,300 to $1,900 for repairing a 1990-95 Ford Taurus transmission. It also was on the low end of the estimate of $1,300 to $1,500 given me by the local repair shop. So thank you, Paramount Garage & Transmission of Kingston, N.Y., a shop run by Anthony and Frank Naccarato — two guys who keep their word. (See? There are guys like that in New York.)

The sultry air of a July evening envelops me, caresses me, sedates me into an indolence where I do not seek but merely play host to questions that visit me:

• Why am I refreshed after four hours of sleep but still sleepy after eight? I slept today from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and now, as the sun slips into the orange horizon, I want to curl up again and doze.

I went to sleep last night at 10 p.m. and awoke at 2 a.m., my usual four hours, and I was wide awake. I balanced the family accounts, read our blogroll, walked on the treadmill, watched the stock market futures, even though I don’t own any stocks, then had a bowl of Wheaties with watered-down soymilk. Drifted off at 8 a.m. I should have been awake again before noon.

After three or four hours in bed, pain sets into my back, hips and other joints, some of them damaged by football in my youth and others just generally arthritic.

My doctor says it’s normal for someone in their late 60s to sleep in three- or four-hour segments. Mine usually are in the early morning and early afternoon, usually adding up to six hours or so. She says that’s fine, and all things considered, that I seem pretty healthy.

• Dreams? I had one last night where I was having trouble walking because, of all things, my shoulders hurt. Then I turned around and saw my mother standing there. I asked if I could lean on her to relieve the pain. She said yes, I did, and the pain went away.

I frequently have dreams where I am walking, jogging, sometimes bicycling long distances over routes that I remember only from other dreams. When I lived on the road for seven years back in the 1980s and ’90s, I walked four to six miles a day along local routes — but none of them that I travel in my dreams.

My mother died two years ago. She was 85, but it still was a shock and a terrible loss to me. I was always close to her, but especially so in the late 1940s after my father died. Maybe I’m still saying goodbye to her.

• Why does our dog Emily’s grave in our backyard seem so comforting to me? It’s in a shady corner, marked only by a wide hardwood stake to which her food dish, her leash and some plastic flowers have been attached. After Emily died of lymphoma last summer, my wife Bonnie and I buried her in a deep hole we had dug. Emily was wrapped in a quilt she had burrowed into so many times before settling down to a nap that it was in tatters.

Grass now grows on top of Emily and her tattered quilt. And even though I can still see them as I last saw them at the bottom of that hole, it’s . . . comforting. Maybe because I know that someday, perhaps not too long from now, I’ll be in a similar situation. And we’ll both be contributing ourselves back to the earth that gave us life.

It’s raining lightly outside now, and cool air is coming in the window behind me.

Today’s new offerings in our Works section

• Chapter 26: Cole Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard meets Melanie, a voluptuous 19-year-old who is nothing like Ginny, and they move in together with Melanie’s 4-year-old daughter. Gerard thinks he is getting over Ginny — until he hears that she and friend Elliot are now living together.

• Chapter 14 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. A July 4th family gathering at Tess’ apartment reignites her painful relationship with her mother, who makes it clear that she not only resents but dislikes her daughter. Brian comes to Tess’ defense, soothing the hurt and reinforcing her aspirations as an artist.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

Bobby boyd is a contributor to the website Category Five, a blog from the National Weather Service in Old Hickory, Tenn.

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Today in Works: a new chapter
of Disconnected. See below.

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I was reading a blog entry the other day about chickens, Kentucky Fried Chicken and PETA. The consensus among the author and most of the commenters was that chickens are stupid and/or soulless, that KFC is being unfairly criticized for its choice of chicken slaughterers and that PETA is “crazy.”

Now I come from a family of farmers, and I hold no brief for chickens. I had a pet chicken once, and he was stupid, not to mention the most unaffectionate pet I ever had.¹ And I certainly hold no brief for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which I think could use much of its time more wisely and effectively.

But I cannot disagree with its purposes. All animals, humans included, deserve to be treated as kindly as possible, and I said so in my comment. You know, I’ve previously corresponded quite cordially with some of the people whose thoughts were in that blog entry, and I have great respect for them. So I want them to understand why I feel as I do — and have for some years.

I wrote about it nearly two decades ago:²

Charleston, South Carolina. January 22, 1989.

North of Charleston, where Route 17 expands to four lanes again, the highway is divided by a greenbelt that rolls wide and gentle like a golf course fairway. Except that here, the divots are caused by empty cans, bottles and any other detritus that was smaller than an open car window. One of the things I have learned from walking the highways of America is that roadside trash has become not only a permanent part of our landscape but apparently a permanent part of our consciousness. As motorists, we have become so accustomed to litter along our highways that we notice it only when it is not there. In fact, it’s not so much a matter of noticing it as it is a vague feeling that there is something different about a clean roadside. What’s different is that there is so damned little of it. That’s especially apparent when you walk rather than drive along our nation’s highways. There is no movement to blur the roadside into the landscape. Every piece of trash is there, fixed clearly in your vision.

This section of Route 17 skims between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Francis Marion National Forest, two of the most beautiful assets of South Carolina. Yet here, on their fringe, the trash spreads away from the highway and invades their wilderness, a wilderness that in the past three years has become part of my yard.

These bastards are trashing my yard. Just who the hell do they think is going to pick up their shit?

A final indignity: On the way back to the truck, in a narrow clearing at the edge of the Francis Marion National Forest, I find the mangled remains of a deer squashed into a garbage bag. It was apparently a small animal, and most of it seems to be here, but I can’t tell its gender. There are no antlers, although they may have been cut off, and the internal organs seem to have been gutted. A roadway accident victim? Maybe. But there’s also the other possibility.

I’m so tired of arguing with hunters. Sorry, boys, there just isn’t any sport in killing an animal at the height of its vitality and freedom. The hunters, of course, always counter with the argument that I eat meat that also has to be killed. Yes, I do, and too much of it at that.

Maybe we should reinstitute mealtime prayers by saying thanks not to some deity but to the animals we are eating. And to the fish we take from the sea and the plants we take from the earth.

Expressing gratitude and respect to the living things we put to death would force us to examine our reasons for killing them. Maybe we would eat less meat. And maybe we would raise the animals we do eat on farms that would treat them not like livestock but like demigods, ending their lives mercifully, sacrificially. Maybe we would stop poisoning our crops with chemicals. You don’t think this could happen? It could if we made farms rather than churches tax-exempt.

We could say thanks to the trees that give us air. And to the earth that gives us trees and crops and fish and animals.

Saying thanks seems so little, but as I look at the rotting deer and see the beauty that still shows through its gnarled corpse, I am grateful it has lived. And I realize that after I’m dead, the best I can hope for is that someone will thank me, in spirit if not by name, for having lived.

I pull the garbage bag away from the shoulder of the road until I find a hollow in the grass. I empty the deer’s remains into the hollow and cover them with pine boughs. The dripping, foul-smelling bag I drag away with me.

Within sight of the truck, I find a cluster of empty beer bottles and pick up one. With the beer bottle in one hand and the bag in the other, I return to where I have been parked since last night and deposit my totems in a nearby garbage can.

In the years ahead, I will rarely go for a daily walk without returning with a piece of litter in each hand. And I will never find a two-mile stretch of roadside America where there aren’t at least two pieces of trash. In fact, I will find many stretches where there is so much trash that hundreds of walkers like me couldn’t make a dent in it.

I suppose it’s like a religious ceremony. I know it’s virtually meaningless, but it makes me feel better.

And I do feel better. I guess I have decided there isn’t much difference between a person who throws trash out of a car and a person who stands on the roadside bitching about it.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Four of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected. Rachel joins family members for a Thanksgiving dinner that reopens old wounds and brings back the tensions and grievances that have alienated her from them.

• Chapter 13 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. As their weeks of living together progress, Tess and Brian begin bumping elbows and working out the more mundane aspects of their romance. But it is still there, its flames transforming into a glow.

• Chapter 25: Kentfield of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and his friend Elliot move in together in mid-1968, and Ginny spends most of her time with them. But her old demons find her before Christmas, and they all go their separate ways, Ginny eventually into a hospital.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. You know, old Cluckity was just doing the best he could, surrounded as he was by humans who eventually ate him. I’d had chicken dinners before, and I’ve had them since, but that one was different.

2. The excerpt is from Chapter 65 of Adrift in America, a book found in the nonfiction section of Works. The truck I lived in was camouflaged to look like a sanitation vehicle.

I love working for Uncle.

As with a lot of government jobs, I don’t do too much (well, I do support my local economy) and he pays me once a month, just like clockwork.

You might say I’m secure . . . socially secure.

True, my Social Security income, even though it’s near the maximum benefit, is only about half what my job was paying before I retired. On the other hand, I don’t have to drive to work every day, buy a lunch somewhere, drink overpriced beverages from vending machines, buy coworkers overpriced drinks when the pressure of the day is over — or wear clothes more expensive than the cheap sweatsuits I lounge around in while writing this deathless prose (you know the joke — deathless because it never lived).

The only money withheld from Social Security is for Medicare (no, it’s not free if you sign up for Part B for outpatient care, and you’d be an idiot not to), and that’s a lot less than I was paying for company insurance that wasn’t as good. Also, I no longer pay union dues. Also — and this is a big one — Social Security benefits aren’t taxed as high as private-sector income.

So, I watch my nickels, dimes and dollars (pennies aren’t worth watching any more) and live a fairly comfortable life that, while it may have no frills, is pretty much the no-frills life I lived before I retired.

Now listen, you Gen Xers, Yers and Zers, I don’t want to hear you complain about having to pay into Social Security so that I can live my modest life. I paid into that system for 40 years, so don’t whine at me until you’re in your 60s and have done the same.

Besides, I just found out I’m going to have to pay 2,000 bucks to fix the transmission in my 14-year-old car while you’re driving around in models from the 21st century.

And don’t listen to those who say you won’t have any benefits by the time you retire. Social Security will be just fine, and those who predict its demise are capitalist fat cats who want to get your contributions into the stock market so they can steal them legally. We could have fixed Social Security a hundred times in the past eight years with the money our current government has wasted just on its war, one that’s enriching all its friends.

We have a government that doesn’t believe in government. I do. But it has to be good government — in other words, one that isn’t run by them.

I’m grateful for my current life of relative comfort. And I’m grateful to the relative — a red, white and blue Uncle symbolizing generations of believers in good government — who made it possible.

An update

I wrote last week about losing the link to Mike’s Circular File, but I have now reconnected. It turns out that if you use our blogroll page to link to its listings, you never lost the connection. The reason I did is that I keep a separate blogroll listing to avoid opening our website more than I have to. Mike’s address on this separate listing was an old link to Comcast that he has now dropped.

Glad to be back with you, Mike. Unfortunately, the other link I wrote about — Robert Lashley’s The literary thug — is still missing. I hope Robert is well.

Today in our Works section

• Chapter 24: Speedway Meadows of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard wanders into a rock concert where he runs into Ginny, who then gets into another drunken incident with the police. Her father’s lawyer gets her out of jail and cleared of an assault charge.

• Chapter 12 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess learns from a phone call in the middle of the night that her former mother-in-law has died — a woman who introduced her to the beauty of art, a woman she loved. But Tess cannot go to the funeral because there she would face a man she loved, her ex-husband.

– Sid Leavitt

It’s too bad global warming couldn’t be just in the Northeast just in the winter.

I don’t know about you guys, but at our house, we’re spending the warm-weather days wondering just how high the guaranteed price of heating oil is going to be for this winter under our prepay plan.

Meanwhile, we’re not just wondering. We’re taking whatever steps we can to reduce our use of oil, including an alternative for heating our water and a small construction project to close off even more of our house for the winter.

The letter outlining the new prepay plan hasn’t come yet from our heating oil dealer, but it’s going to be ugly. We know this for a reason that is beyond the current skyrocketing price of crude oil — namely, that the letter hasn’t come yet.

By this time last year, we already had signed up for 850 gallons of No. 2 heating oil at a guaranteed price of $2.50 a gallon. Even with a 5-cent-a-gallon discount for prepaying, the whole thing still came up to $2,124. Now we’re people of moderate means, and that was a hard amount to come up with. That’s why we wear sweaters and keep our thermostat under 65 degrees in the winter.

At the end of the heating season in April, we had run 12 gallons over our guaranteed amount, and that extra 12 gallons was billed at $3.70 a gallon.

What’s next — $4.50 a gallon?

I don’t know, but I called our heating oil dealer a week ago and was told they were “still working on” the capped price program.

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Update: We just got the letter from our heating oil dealer. The base guaranteed price will be not $4.50 but $4.70 a gallon — for us, a total of about $4,000, payable up front.

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Is it any wonder our friends are talking about putting in wood stoves? Not me. I grew up with wood stoves and later wood furnaces. They’re a lot of work and, no matter how airtight, a lot of smoke.

My stepfather, a logger, always brought home slabs and other leftovers from the sawmill, but even he wasn’t keen about burning wood. We were cutting up wood one day in the early 1960s — heating oil then was about 25 cents a gallon, I think — when he turned to me and said, “I keep praying for oil to go back down to 19 cents.”

It never did.

We’re hoping to knock off 250 gallons of our oil use by installing a tankless water heater that will keep the furnace from coming on just to heat its water tank. Sure, the new heater will use either more electricity or perhaps LP gas, but it won’t waste energy heating a water tank. The new heater will cost around $2,500, but at the current price of oil, that’s what we would waste in about two years of furnace-supplied hot water.

You know, Jimmy Carter warned us about this problem almost 30 years ago, just after the OPEC embargo caused our first big petroleum crisis, and he was ridiculed for his “malaise” speech:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

Carter called for a massive program toward energy conservation and independence. Then along came Ronald Reagan, told us nothing was wrong and dismantled the energy program. Twenty years later, having learned nothing, we put two oilmen in the White House. We know how that has turned out.

Meanwhile, the auto makers are still advertising SUVs, the neighborhood adolescents are still roaring around on ATVs, and the Nascar types are still going around in circles.

I hope the bastards all freeze this winter.

Today in our Works section:

• Chapter 11 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess and Brian awaken together in bed where they are interrupted by the arrival of his sister, Rachel. She seems to accept Tess in her brother’s life but resists his attempts to curb a growing drug problem in her own.

• Chapter 23: Golden Gate Park of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard meanders into the park, thinking he has to find some way of getting away from Ginny, when he witnesses a confrontation between a graying hippie and two young Marines. The hippie has a machete.

– Sid Leavitt

I was looking for two of my blogroll buddies the other day when the Internet threw me a couple of curveballs. Mike’s Circular File told me I wasn’t authorized to view it, and The literary thug looked like it had been mugged by Amazon book hawkers.

It was enough to make me say, “What th’. . .?”

Well, actually, what I said was what the Internet, in a usage that seems to me snickeringly adolescent, has acronymized as WTF. No, it doesn’t stand for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It’s shorthand for ‘What the f—,’ and I see it everywhere.

I prefer not to use the f-word or its derivative, WTF, in written discourse such as this on R&W Blog. Not that I have anything against the word ‘fuck.’ It’s just that emphatic words lose their power when they’re overused.

By the way, the best expletives of all time are found not in classic literature like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or on HBO’s “The Sopranos” but in, of all places, the old Popeye cartoons. You know, the ones where the squint-eyed sailor’s foil was not the latter-day Brutus but the mumbling, grumbling Bluto.

In their confrontations, both Bluto and Popeye threaten each other with phrases like “Why, I oughta . . .” and “Well, I’ll show you . . .” so far under their breath that the words are barely understandable — and never fail to make me laugh.

What’s so funny to me is that all the phrases are innocent but they’re all delivered in such an arch, roguish style.

Want a sample. Take a look at the 1937 cartoon Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves. It’s a long one — nearly 17 minutes — so you can shortcut it by moving the ‘play’ slider to the 8:00-minute mark where the mumbling-grumbling expletives begin. At the 9:40 mark, by the way, even the band of thieves starts mumbling and continues to 10:20.

Anyway, I’ve emailed Mike Pontillo to ask how I can get into his weblog again. I had a similar problem last fall when Mike’s Circular File originally was posted on our blogroll. It had something to do with a redirect function on Pontillo’s Internet service provider.

And poor Robert Lashley, a fine young poet and thinker at The literary thug. His site is now a billboard of Amazon books — ranging from conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s expose on Liberal Fascism to liberal pundit Cliff Schechter’s expose of The Real McCain — followed by blocks of words strung out in gibberish.

I don’t have an email address for Lashley, and I could kick myself for not copying it when his site was accessible.

I hope both he and Pontillo get back on cyberspace soon.

Today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 22: Haight Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. By March of 1967, Gerard has become a hippie, consorting with a variety of free-floating women, but he knows the hippie movement is already over: “The music, long hair, beads, dope, bare feet, brown rice, free love . . . all that was nothing but advertising by people who’d already taken acid to get other people to take acid, and by then, the advertising was getting mistaken for the only thing that really went on. A few minds got blown on acid. That was it.”

• Chapter 10 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. After months of cautious waiting, Tess Dyer and Brian LaChance finally consummate their mutual attraction.

– Sid Leavitt

My wife and I are getting together with some of our friends July 4th to read and discuss Henry IV, a Shakespeare play that is more often talked about than read, mostly because everyone’s heard of two of its characters — the lively young Prince Hal and his ne’er-do-well sidekick John Falstaff.

I’ll be the beard.

Well, I may be corrupting an expression that I associate only with New York, although it dates back to Chaucer: ‘To beard’ or ‘to be a beard’ is to act as a romantic cover for someone else, as in the movie ‘Broadway Danny Rose’ when Woody Allen takes Mia Farrow to a nightclub so that the nightclub crooner can pick her up later without his wife finding out. (”I’m only the beahd,” Woody says in his Brooklyn accent to a couple of gangsters who have taken him for Mia’s boyfriend.)

In my case, I’ll be just covering for my own romantic interest — my wife, Bonnie — who hasn’t read the play, hasn’t been feeling well and has been so busy with work and with family matters (not the least of which was our recent trip to Indiana) that she won’t have time to read it and wondered one recent day if I had.

“That way, you can sit there and talk about it, and I can just sit there,” she said.

“Hell, I do that even if I haven’t read the book,” I said.

Bonnie, ever the honest but considerate one, just smiled back, not wanting to agree that I would be such a pompous ass to do such a thing but not wanting to lie and say, “No, that’s not true.”

Over the years, I’ve read a number of Shakespeare’s plays, but I couldn’t remember whether Henry IV was among them. When I looked it up, I quickly realized it wasn’t. It’s a two-part play, and I would have remembered that.

Now before you get the wrong idea about my literary background, it’s a basic 1950s plumber’s model that included Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, King Lear in college and a handful of other Shakespeares when I was in the Army and didn’t have either the finances or the energy to be a young Falstaff myself.

And don’t get the wrong idea about our reading friends. Although I have referred to them as the Woodstock Reading Group, a lofty appellation entirely of my own invention, it’s just a loose-knit group started by a couple of friends who run a publishing company in nearby Woodstock.

People show up as they will, whether or not they’ve read the book that we all agreed would be the subject of the gathering. And we may or may not get around to the subject. Basically, the book is just an excuse to get together to eat a little food, drink a little wine and talk about stuff — maybe the book, maybe the world, maybe just ourselves.

The books aren’t all hoary classics, either. Selections have included Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective novel from 1939, The Big Sleep, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk from his 1956-57 Cairo Trilogy.

Among the selections have been two of my recommendations — The Redheaded Outfield, a less-read Zane Grey book about minor league baseball, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America — and the group basically hated them. (I have to admit the Zane Grey book was a favorite from my adolescence, which is how those who read it saw the book. I recommended de Tocqueville because everybody talks about his book but nobody ever reads it. For good reason. Much of this huge work from the 1830s reads like an annual report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But some parts — the young French aristocrat’s prescience about what would happen in the young America in the decades and centuries to come — I just loved.)

And now, if the group members read this blog, they’ll know about my beard on the bard. Ah well.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Nine of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess uses paint and canvas to put new life into a dying orchard outside the apartment where she has taken refuge in a small Maine town, and she finds new life growing in herself toward her neighbor Brian.

• Chapter 21: Foghorn Fish-and-Chips of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. One of Gerard and Ginny’s occasional roommates, a one-eyed hippie named Thulin, marries a high school girl named Wanda but later abandons her and their unborn son. Wanda gets the last word: She names the boy Popeye.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*The photo at top is from the Royal Shakespeare Company showing Ian Holm as Prince Hal and Hugh Griffin as Falstaff.