ELDER POETRY INTERLUDE: Forgetfulness

Now and then on Thursdays, particularly when I need some extra time, I will post a poem I like related to aging.

Today, it is from Billy Collins - Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

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And this is the poet himself, reading Forgetfulness:

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today - Joanne Zimmermann: Communications Way Back Then

Elders and Washington Politics (This Week)

UPDATE: In the time since I wrote this post on Tuesday, Congress has reached what is being called a "tentative" deal to extend not just the payroll tax holiday but unemployment benefits and make the "doc fix" which prevents a cut in reimbursements to physicians who accept Medicare. A vote tentatively set for Friday. Here's one news story about it.

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Two relatively big pieces of news out of Washington this week: President Barack Obama's budget and the Republican so-called “cave” on extension of the payroll tax cut. There are aspects of each that affect elders so let's take them one at a time.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S BUDGET
On one hand, there is hardly any point in parsing Obama's budget since it will be mangled by the Republicans in Congress. So why not wait until some of the dust has settled? Well, because it gives us a bit of a sense of his positions on important issues although they may be politically motivated.

Overall, within this new budget, the president is on the side of elders in regard to Social Security and Medicare. There are no cuts to the two programs but it does call for means testing and increasing Medicare premiums for higher income recipients.

This is a dangerous game because there is always downward income creep due to inflation so that lower and lower income levels are subject to the higher premiums and it's awfully hard to change such regulations once they are in place.

There are some other good and bad points for the two big elder programs in the proposed budget and I'll go over those in coming days. But considering that Republicans want massive cuts to both programs, the president has held fairly firm and I appreciate this statement on page 195 of his budget:

”The president realizes that Social Security is indispensable to workers, retirees, survivors, and people with disabiilities and that it is one of the most important and most successful programs ever established in the United States.

“Although current forecasts maintain the solvency of Social Security paying full benefits until 2036, the president is committed to making sure that Social Security is solvent and viable for the American people now and in the future.

“He is strongly opposed to privatizing Social Security and looks forward to working on a bipartisan basis to preserve it for future generations.”

Good statement of philosophy for an important program but he really needs to get over that bipartisan stuff with this Congress and find alternative means of reaching his goals.

EXTENSION OF PAYROLL TAX CUT
You will recall that when the two percent payroll tax cut was up for renewal just before the holidays, a last-minute agreement to a two-month extension got the Congress out of Washington for their extended break into the new year. But the extension expires at the end of this month and, if not renewed, will result in an average of $40/week increase in paycheck deductions.

Personally, I am opposed to this tax cut. Workers are not penalized and get full credit toward their future Social Security benefit and the lost revenue to the Social Security trust fund is replaced from the federal government's general revenue fund.

But, as we have discussed here in the past, that is a breach in the previously airtight lock on the trust fund door giving Congress, which holds the budget purse strings, the possibility to withhold the replacement funds. Scary.

Since hardly anyone else seems to care about that except me, let's get on with this week's issue. It was expected that Republicans in Congress would hold extension of the tax holiday hostage to budget cuts elsewhere. But here's a shocker: as noted in The New York Times yesterday, on Monday

”After months of partisan confrontation that left the tax break hanging in the balance, Republicans suddenly offered to extend the two-percentage-point cut while continuing to haggle over added unemployment benefits and a measure to prevent a drop in fees paid to doctors by Medicare.”

I'm sure you noticed the second part of that sentence. Unemployment benefits are due to expire at the end of this month too and what is called the “doc fix,” extending the current fee schedule paid to physicians by Medicare. The first is crucial to the feeble but possibly burgeoning economic recovery and the second would help keep doctors in the Medicare system.

Therefore, what some reporters referred to as a “Republican cave” on Monday wasn't a cave at all which caused the president to keep up the pressure yesterday:

“'They need to do it now — without drama and without delay,' he said. 'No ideological sideshows to gum up the works. No self-inflicted wounds. Just pass this middle class tax cut. Pass the extension of unemployment insurance. Do it before it’s too late.'”

Oy, my head hurts from so much of the same old, same old in Washington.

So – let's lighten our load today. There were so many other things to talk about last week that Crabby Old Lady didn't get a chance to speak her mind on the contraceptive/Catholic church controversy. As it happens, however, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show returned from a week-long hiatus in excellent form on this topic.

Stick with it to the end. It gets funnier and funnier.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: I Miss My Lips

Elder Effort for Medical Marijuana

The guy in the video looked to be near my age and he was talking to a group of other people as old or older than I am.

”We invented marijuana,” he said. “We're the Woodstock generation.”

Well, that got my attention and he's right, you know – sort of. Before us, weed - or pot, maryjane, ganga and the hundred other names for it - was mostly the province of jazz musicians – or so it was said.

The man in the video I saw is Robert Platshorn and he served more time in prison on a marijuana charge than anyone else in history - nearly 30 years. He was convicted of smuggling an extremely large quantity – half a million pounds over a six-month period - into the U.S. from Colombia. But still – 30 years?

Now that he's a free man again, Mr. Platshorn has turned cannabis activist. As the founder of The Silver Tour, he is working to enlist elders to pressure legislators to legalize marijuana or, at least, to provide safe, legal access to it for medical purposes. Take a look at this CNN story.

It is true that marijuana is well known to relieve symptoms of arthritis, glaucoma, cancer, nausea from chemotherapy and many other conditions when legal drugs do not or cannot.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration claims it has no medical use, and the federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug up there with heroin and LSD, and claims the right to supersede state law. According to Wikipedia:

”The United States Supreme Court has ruled in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Coop and Gonzales v. Raich that the federal government has a right to regulate and criminalize cannabis, even for medical purposes.

“A person can therefore be prosecuted for a cannabis-related crime even if it is medical cannabis that is legal according to the laws of this state.”

That claim causes some amount of jurisdictional difficulty when an agency in Washington decides from time to time to make a federal case of it in any of the 17 states and District of Columbia that have legalized medical marijuana. There's a story here of a federal raid of a legal (under state law) pot farm in Oregon last fall.

It's not funny for the people arrested and prosecuted, but all the fuss and bother and fear and misunderstanding about marijuana tend to make me laugh. I've been smoking pot off and on for 55 years – since I was introduced to it at age 15; it hasn't harmed me and it has sometimes helped me when nothing else could.

I still wonder, all these years later, if I would have healed from the breakup with my husband as well as I did without getting stoned every night after work; more evenings than not, I rolled a joint before I had my coat off.

It kept me from having to think about the mess I'd made of my life when I didn't want to, let me zone out to music or books or daydreams. I slept like a baby with no hangover in the morning which wouldn't have been the case with alcohol.

After about six months, I emerged from my cannabis cocoon ready to face the world and begin again. No harm, no foul and I returned to smoking now and then mostly with friends.

And now, we've got a president who used to smoke pot. Here's a mini-history lesson from Chris Matthews back in2006 about pot and politicians:

Yes, of course, that's the point. Getting high is fun, as the president – got that, the president - of the United States acknowledges.

Mr. Platshorn wants to see marijuana legalized for medical uses, and good on him for making the effort. God knows, not having found a way obtain pot since I moved to Oregon, I miss a night's deep sleep I can get after smoking a joint.

But it is a hypocrisy for me to say only that. I also miss getting high now and then, particularly for listening to music. Or not. Just enjoying the high, getting silly, giggling with some like-minded friends.

And it is stupid beyond all reason that alcohol is legal – you know, just for fun, for conviviality, for social occasions or even to get falling down drunk if that's your idea of fun – and marijuana is not.

The Silver Tour of Mr. Platshorn is a terrific idea - an elder crusade to legalize pot, at least medically. That would be a start. Read more about his effort here.)

I'll let Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC last November have the last word:

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Johna Ferguson: Schools in China

Carrying High School Prejudices into Old Age

Undoubtedly, you remember cliques in high school where students divided themselves into the jocks, brains, rich, preppies, druggies, etc. and the most privileged groups tended to be mean. If you were among the excluded, it could be painful.

It is expected that we outgrow these arbitrary divisions and certainly so by the time we reach our 60s and older. But last week in The New Old Age blog at The New York Times, this turned up:

”...last spring, managers declared the River Terrace and two other dining facilities at the community off limits to anyone but independent living residents. Assisted living residents were told to use their own small dining room; nursing residents were restricted to theirs.”

To get our terminology straight, River Terrace is a “gracious” dining room in a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) called Harbor’s Edge in downtown Norfolk, Virginia. It is, as is the definition of CCRCs, divided into the three sections mentioned in that quote. Residents move among independent, assisted and nursing care living through the years depending on the requirements of their health and needed care.

As you can imagine, many residents object to the new dining policy not only because it is discriminatory in general but for a lot of other good reasons:

”...longtime friends — and several married couples — who lived in separate parts of the facility could no longer share meals in the main dining room. Those in assisted living or nursing care also were also barred from community events like the Fourth of July celebration...

"The Hodgeses had been eating together nightly, though he lived in the nursing unit and she was in independent living. Lindsay Bilisoly sometimes escorted his 90-year-old father, Frank, to dinner with his wife, Indie, 85, who remained in the independent living unit they’d originally moved into together.”

Other residents support the segregation:

“Martha Haycox, 80, past president of the Resident Advisory Council...took pains to point out that three independent living residents with health problems are also excluded from the dining room, while many who do use it require wheelchairs or walkers.

“'It happened to me twice in one week that somebody at the next table threw up,' requiring hasty clean-up by the maintenance staff, she said. Another time, she said, someone’s wheelchair got tangled in a tablecloth at Sunday brunch and nearly pulled all the food off the buffet table...

“'It’s a very upscale community,' said Mr. Volder. 'When someone comes in wearing a coat and tie, with guests, they want an ambience of fine dining.'”

In other words, we don't want no crips sullying our lovely upscale meals.

Vomiting at the dinner table is hardly pleasant, but hey – shit happens and more than most places, it should be expected sometimes in a retirement community. It's hardly a big deal – you clean up and move on. I seem to recall such an event with a president of the United States at a state dinner in Japan.

Let us not forget too that, healthy or sick, residents at Harbor's Edge pay dearly to live there. The grown son of one resident:

“'Ninety-five percent of the time he’s perfectly capable of eating dinner,' Mr. Bilisoly said. 'I can take him to any restaurant in Norfolk or in the state of Virginia, except the one in the building he paid $600,000 to move into.'”

In high school, students who considered themselves better than everyone else prevented lesser beings from eating lunch at certain cafeteria tables. Fifty and 60 years later, nothing has changed.

Sometimes I am deeply embarrassed by my contemporaries. The full Times story is here and it's worth reading some of the comments.

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today: I.S. Kipp: Trinkets and Treasures

ELDER MUSIC: Elvis – Part 1

This Sunday Elder Music column was launched in December of 2008. By May of the following year, one commenter, Peter Tibbles, had added so much knowledge and value to my poor attempts at musical presentations that I asked him to take over the column. He's been here each week ever since delighting us with his astonishing grasp of just about everything musical, his humor and sense of fun. You can read Peter's bio here and find links to all his columns here.

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When I started writing these columns, I said to myself that I wouldn't do any on the big four of 20th century music – Elvis, Frank, The Beatles and Bob. The big five really, Louis as well. This was because they are so well known, what could I come up with that was new?

So much for that as I've already done The Beatles and Frank and sort-of Bob, thus that idea is well and truly gone by the board.

Recently, when there was nothing on TV - something that occurs quite regularly - I put on some music, as is my wont. This time it was Elvis. There was quite a bit of his music as I have a five-CD changer.

That got Norma, the Assistant Musicologist, and me thinking about which tracks we'd select for an Elvis column. We took up pencils and papers and each wrote a column's worth of tracks we'd include.

To my surprise, there was only one song that was common to both our lists. Okay, Elvis has a lot of songs to his name, but the A.M. and I have roughly similar tastes in music so that was a bit of a surprise. I guess our tastes are probably more roughly than similar.

However, it means there are two columns for Elvis. It also means I have to come up with twice as much interesting stuff about him. I know that there's a lot of information out there but most of it is pretty well known, so I'll have to go to the books, particularly those by Peter Guralnick and Elaine Dundy.

Both of these books, or more than one book in the case of Guralnick, have hundreds of pages so I probably won’t bother. I’ll just say something about the songs.

These are my selections. I’ll start this off by turning the record over. The flip side of the single of the A.M.'s first choice was my first choice. I know that because my sister bought the record, she’d play one side (the A.M.’s side, but you'll have to wait till next week to find out which one it is unless you bought that record as well back then) and I'd play the other, the one that wasn't a hit.

That song is I Was The One.

♫ Elvis Presley - I Was The One

When I was a whippersnapper, not too long after the previous record, we had the EP (remember EPs?) of Jailhouse Rock. I say we because I can’t remember whether this belonged to my sister or me. We both would have claimed it no doubt, but as she is older it was probably hers as I wasn’t buying much at that stage.

This one had five songs on it, the five best from the film. Come to think of it, there were only five songs in the film anyway. This was the best film Elvis made, but that really doesn’t say much. Naturally the title song has to be here.

♫ Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock

Although the quality of his songs, but not his singing, fell off somewhat after he returned from his stint in the army, there are still a number of them I like from that early sixties period.

The reduction in quality had a lot to do with the “Colonel” refusing to use any more songs from Leiber and Stoller after they chatted to Elvis without first clearing it with him. I won’t say any more about this complete waste of space of a person.

Here is one of the songs from that period I really like, She's Not You.

♫ Elvis Presley - She's Not You

King Creole was probably the last of the (rather few) decent Elvis films. He stopped trying after this one.

It started life as a book by Harold Robbins, A Stone For Danny Fisher. James Dean had already signed a contract to play the main character, however, due to circumstances, he was unavailable.

The film produced a couple of good songs, and I’ll start with the title track. However, I’m not playing the hit version, it’s an alternate take with the Jordonaires’ ooh and ahhing way in background instead of the prominence they had in the released version - a bit more stripped back, the way I like it.

It also has some fine guitar playing that’s closer to jazz than rock & roll.

♫ Elvis Presley - King Creole

Another song from that film tries to marry rock & roll and traditional jazz. Rock & roll won in this case, and the track is one of his hardest rocking numbers ever, Hard Headed Woman.

♫ Elvis Presley - Hard Headed Woman

Back to the beginning, to the “Sun Sessions.” These are the songs he recorded with Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis that started him on his way to becoming the most famous person on the planet.

Elvis turned the old Wynonie Harris R&B classic into a rock & roll classic, Good Rockin' Tonight.

♫ Elvis Presley - Good Rockin' Tonight

Don't was another Leiber and Stoller song that came out in 1958, backed with I Beg of You. Most of Elvis’s singles in the fifties were double sided hits.

♫ Elvis Presley - Don't

I mentioned Jailhouse Rock up above. Here’s another song from that film, You're So Square.

♫ Elvis Presley - (You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care

Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello was yet another Leiber and Stoller tune recorded in 1962. Without their song writing, Elvis’s music would have been the poorer as was shown later on when, as I mentioned, his manager kept them away.

I may be going over the top here, but this is one of his forgotten masterpieces. Okay, that’s a bit excessive, but it’s really good and it’s seldom mentioned whenever top Elvis songs are discussed. If only they could have dropped that annoying bell or whatever it is.

♫ Elvis Presley - Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello

To finish, and in case you're curious about which song made both lists, here it is, His Latest Flame.

♫ Elvis Presley - His Latest Flame

Recently, I heard on the radio almost certainly the worst song Elvis ever recorded. This is Yoga is as Yoga Does. If you’re unfamiliar with that one, and I admit I was until I heard it, it’s from almost certainly his worst film (and that’s saying something), Easy Come Easy Go.

That’s the general consensus. I haven’t actually seen it that I can recall. Fortunately for you all, I don’t have that song in my collection. Joe Bob sez check it out. Not.

INTERESTING STUFF: 11 February 2012

SONG FOR ANDREE GEULEN
My neighbor Bill Pederson, who spends winters in Arizona, sends along this video made in celebration of a remarkable woman's 90th birthday.

During World War II, Andree Geulen joined an underground group in Belgium to rescue Jews from the Gestapo. For more than two years she took in Jewish children and hid them in Christian homes and monasteries under assumed identities.

Throughout the war, she kept track of the children, keeping a secret record of their original names and other details about them in a diary. At the end of the war, she returned as many as she could to their surviving relatives. Some say she saved 3,000 children. Here is the song and more of the story.

In 1989, Andrée Geulen was recognized at the Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, as a Righteous Among the Nations. There, at a special ceremony in 2007, she was awarded honorary citizenship of the State of Israel. You can read more about Ms. Geulen's work and life at the Yad Vashem website.

PLAY ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS AGAINST A COMPUTER
It says at The New York Times, that “computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages.” So the paper created an interactive game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to play online.

It comes in two modes - novice, and veteran in which the computer uses its database of 200,000 previous games. I tried novice and still lost nine out of ten games. You can try it here.

SENSATIONAL PORTRAITS OF OUR PRIMATE COUSINS

Can you stand it? So human and so not human all at once. A hat tip to Carol Wasteneys for sending the link to this page at the Daily Mail with a more gorgeous primate portraits from the Frankfurt Zoo by German photographer, Volker Gutgesell.

A DAY MADE OF GLASS - 2ND GENERATION
Most of the glass on smart phones and tablets is specialized to do amazing things. This video shows what this glass - or new generations of it - will do for us in the future. It is astronishing, but most of us reading this blog are unlikely to live long enough to see it in real life.

Not to mention that I question some of its usefulness. Nevertheless, it is a wonder to watch.

There is another version of this video, longer at 11:30 minutes, explaining it all.

REPUBLICANS STILL BELIEVE OBAMA IS NOT AMERICAN BORN
Now you would think that when President Barack Obama called Donald Trump's bluff and released his long-form birth certificate, that would be the end of the birther phenomenon. Not so.

Last year, a survey of Republicans asked if Obama was born in the United States. After the release of the birth certificate, the number of those agreeing jumped from 30 percent to 47 percent – still shameful but an increase.

In January this year, the question was asked again of Republicans. This time 27 percent agreed. Huh?

The chart is too small to reproduce for this post. You can see it and read more here.

MEET A BLACK PERSON
This is an old prank from 2006, but I had not seen it and it's pretty funny. The prank collective, ImprovEverywhere, put comedian Colton Dunn in an empty hot chocolate kiosk at the foot of a mountain in Aspen to greet people as they came down from the slopes. Take a look. (Hat tip to Nikki)

WAYS TO RE-USE OLD BOOKS
Carol from CO alerted me to these photos of ways people have found to use old books they aren't going to read anymore. I think the library counters are perfect (originally from here).

And this one (originally from here) sure does save on cleaning up pine or fir needles after the season.

The Two Butterflies blog has collected a whole lot more images of new/odd/interesting uses for old books.

NIGEL FOTHERINGTON CYBORG
That's what a British company, CNFX Workshop, named this little bundle of electronic joy and it is so real - or will be when it gets its skin - that it creeps me out. See what you think:

The Gajitz website, where I found this video, says the animatronic baby

”...will allegedly be used for some sort of television show...

“...according to the creators of this terror, the clients it was built for were completely fooled once the creepy thing got its skin: they thought little Nigel was a real, human baby until they were told differently.”

KITTY/KID WRESTLING MATCH
After that animatronic baby, I think a real, live, human one is in order. According to the date on this video, it's 11 years old but age has not diminished the fun at all.

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Interesting Stuff is a weekly listing of short takes and links to web items that have caught my attention; some related to aging and some not, some useful and others just for fun.

You are all encouraged to submit items for inclusion. Just click “Contact” in the upper left corner of any Time Goes By page to send them. I'm sorry that I probably won't have time to acknowledge receipt and there is no guarantee of publication. But when I do include them, you will be credited and I will link to your blog if you have one.

Beer Delivery from the Post Office

That's just one of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' ideas to “save” the post office from draconian cuts that would, probably, destroy it.

Well, it would not need saving except that six years ago during the Bush administration, Republicans in Congress forced the U.S. Postal Service into unnecessary pre-funding of its' retiree health benefits that some say was deliberately done by Republicans so that the post office could be privatized.

I could detail all this to you, but I'm trying to take a day off from blogging and on Thursday evening on MSNBC, Ed Schultz did a pretty good job of it. So take a look at this video – Ed's explanation of the post office crisis and his guest, Bernie Sanders:

Here are some documents with further information that I would usually digest for you but don't have the time today:

Information on the Senate Bill from The Hill

Sanders' Explanation of Unnecessarily High Pension Reserves

American Postal Workers Union Statement to Members

U.S.P.S. Inspector General's Analysis of Proposal [pdf]

The Post Office is Not Broke from The Nation

As to those beer deliveries, Sanders said at a press conference on Monday that he wants a blue ribbon commission to give the Postal Service ideas about how it can substantially increase revenue by offering far more services than today.

"Let's be clear: these short-term accounting efforts will not solve the long-term financial problems facing the U.S. Postal Service,” said Sander. “In order to do that, the Postal Service needs to adopt an entirely new business model which makes it much more entrepreneurial, pro-business, and pro-consumer compared to where it is today.”

If the postal service cuts go through, many small and rural communities will lose their post offices altogether taking a terrible toll on small and home businesses.

This is a good thing to call your Congressional representatives about because many Republicans represent those rural communities so appear to be willing to join Sanders in stemming the cuts. As always, you can contact them via Open Congress and many other online locations.

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Dani Ferguson Phillips: Bare Bottomed Betty