A Close Shave

Over the years, I've observed that men are on a perpetual search for perfect sex, a perfect cup of coffee, and a perfect shave, and we'll settle for one out of three.

So let me make some observations about one of the other two - namely, a perfect shave.

As a teenager, I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror looking for something, anything, that resembled a beard. When it finally appeared, I learned about shaving from my father. Pretty simple in those days - shaving soap, a shaving brush, and a Gillette "Safety Razor." (The idea of using a straight edge just scared the hell out of me, so the double edged blade was the only choice. Lathering up from the hard shaving soap in the wooden bowl was easy, even fun, but It took a lot longer than I thought it should to learn to navigate the razor around my face. So I also learned about little pieces of toilet paper stuck on a cheek to stop the bleeding and the sticks (called styptic pencils) in the medicine cabinet to accomplish the same thing.

After I absorbed the basic vocabulary, I began the search for improvement. The first was the arrival of the Wilkinson razor blade, and then a parade of different razors followed - single blade, razors with vibrating motors, double blades, triple blades, electric razors (totally unsatisfactory for me), and once I settled on inexpensive razors from my local Target store, I began to review the "soap option." After decades with the brush and hard soap swirled into lather, I tried a succession of "brushless soaps."

Not the same, although I did conclude that some of them - the ones in a tube - were appropriate for use during travel when one wishes to reduce the impedimenta to a minimum. In my sixth decade of shaving, with ageing and dry skin, I finally left behind the hard soap in a bowl for soft soap in a bowl, but with the shaving brush.

If you haven't shaved with a brush, you've missed one of the great pleasures of life. Generally English, typically made with badger hair, the shaving brush transports and foams the soap on the face. It feels good, very good in truth, and when properly applied makes shaving a literal breeze.

When the shaving is done, getting the soap off your face with hot water and running your hands over the skin reminds you that you are now ready for the day, knowing that on some days, shaving might well be the high point.

A couple of days ago, while shaving, I realized that the shaving brush I was using was the same one my father used for many years. Made by Kent, a fine English brush manufacturer, its brown handle has had a few knocks, and the brush hairs are shorter and less "spread" than they once were. But it still works fine.

Each morning, when I shave, I am reminded that although my father has been gone for over two decades, there remains a complex web of connections between us. Most of them lie in memory or in objects which he enjoyed and which I inherited.

The brush is a different kind of link with its physical connection to my father, and it brings me more pleasure than I might ever have guessed. I like that in a very small way, I'm carrying on what I learned from him about something as elementary as the morning shave.

I have become an "e patient!"

On a very rainy Monday couple of weeks ago, I woke up and felt that I had a problem in my right lower eyelid. The choice was to get in the car and drive through the pelting rain to a distant suburb and see my ophthalmologist or to find a more sensible strategy.

After a period of quiet contemplation in the smallest room in my house, I searched out my cell phone and using the bathroom mirror to allow me to see the image I was about to take, I snapped an image of my right eye. Then I e-mailed it to my doctor with a note saying words to the effect of do I need to see you for this or can you tell me what it is and what to do about it so that I can stay home and keep dry?

Within a half-hour, I had his response - what I had was not a particularly big deal, and I could take care of it at home without ointments or other medication just the application of hot water on a regular basis to the affected eye lid.

I had a couple of follow-up questions, so I rang the doctor, and we had a very pleasant chat, during which he observed that he had already filed electronically a "low-level" claim with Medicare. Well, that surprised me -- that is, that Medicare was sufficiently up-to-date that they could handle something like this. The doctor said that with my image and e-mail long with his e-mail response, he had enough to file a claim. Fine with me.

In finishing up the conversation he said with some apparent delight that I was his first e-patient and that I was beginning to catch a glimpse of part of our medical future... remote diagnosis and treatment done electronically.

Now obviously one cannot do this sort of thing with a doctor when you've fallen down on the floor and broken a leg, but when some of the niggling problems either aren't worth driving to the doctor's office or can possibly be dealt with over the telephone, even with the technology as simple as a cell phone image, well then maybe this brave new electronic world isn't going to be so awful after all.

At this stage of the game, I've given up updating my resume, but I do think it would be fun to have listed among my few accomplishments that of my newly found status as an e-patient.

(I have been learning a new computer-based dictation program, and this blog entry is the first to use that software. I have made a number of mistakes as I've gone along but all in all, I'm really amazed at how relatively easy dictating this rather than typing it has been. My thumbs, overworked after 50 some years of typing almost every day, welcome the respite.... If future entries seem to have been created by someone else, you can blame the software. That's what I plan on doing.)

Seventy...? You Can't Be Serious

Getting old sucks. Plain and simple. Relief at reading the obituaries of other and younger people is tempered by the realization that there's no way to stop the process of being edged out to the end of your limb on the tree of life, and the time will come will a large hand will descend from a passing cloud and take you off to another place.

Frankly, I'd prefer to be in Scotland, but the hand probably won't reveal one's destination. I would like the hand to know that I like moderate climates with a healthy amount of rain and that I find locations in the warmer climes completely unsuitable. OK, so I'm lobbying, but just a little.

A couple of weeks ago I left the world of the 6s and entered the world of the 7s, and as I look around me, I find that most of my friends are retired, enjoy leisurely lunches, trips to various places on the planet, and try to persuade each other that their array of golf or tennis games, board meetings of worthy organizations, and concerts at 11 o'clock in the morning are their preferred bill of fare.

Me...I'd rather go to the office and put in a few hours on the modest enterprise which has entertained me for the last several decades. I don't abhor the "r" word (retirement for you youthful readers), but it doesn't seem to suit me particularly well, so I like to say that I am changing gears, downshifting, you get the idea.

Such available time as there is will be devoted to some projects, ranging from traffic management on the road which runs by my house to the history of the Christmas Eve service at King's College, Cambridge, family genealogy, and to learn some of the lore about the highland place in Scotland where I've spent a week each May for the last few years. Nothing too serious, except for trying to catch up on the reading I fell behind on in fourth grade - a hill the summit of which will always be unreachable, I'm afraid. No harm in trying, as long as the eyes can manage.

Between that and dealing with Islay, the scottish terrier (the Empress Of My Universe) and trying to keep ahead of the weeds at home, I expect I'll be pretty busy.

By doing so, perhaps the hand will focus on others whose stillness may attract it more than a man who cannot quite accept the image facing him in the bathroom mirror every day. Excelsior, and let the race continue!

Retirement or Shifting Gears....

My little business has been running me for almost the last quarter century, and about a year ago, I began to plan for its future.

Retirement is a word I've never liked because it suggests that one is leaving life's competition in order to contemplate the meaning of this and that before one drops off the perch. So when I'm asked whether I'm "retired," I prefer to say that I'm not, but I am "changing gears," probably because that description conveys a sense of action, of moving forward, of not departing the field of play...yet.

About a year ago, I started to think about what might be best for me and my business, and the first decision I reached was that I would not close it down so that I could go to some island off the west coast of Scotland and hike paths both old and new. No, I decided that I would re-design the business so that I could carry on those parts of it which are unique and run it from my office, my living room, or from some island on the west coast of Scotland.

When we stopped printing catalogues and focussed on selling on-line, I began learning a whole lot about contemporary technology, and that stream of new stuff banging around in my brain has been enormously helpful in keeping me both alert and growing. I don't want that to stop.

Nor am I ready to give up contacts with customers. Even though our contacts are by email and phone, I feel that we've been helpful to them in small ways beyond providing a product. I remember the guy in London who couldn't find the baton he wanted in London, so he called us, and we were able to get him what he wanted in time for his event....the son in Alberta whose father was a noted musician who wanted custom printed instruction cards for his dad's memorial service, so that the congregation could play together...the band members who found us for that special gift baton for their teacher upon his or her retirement...the speech therapists who taught us that nose flutes are not only fun but also helpful in working with youngsters with speech difficiulties.

So, in the next three months, there will be changes in the enterprise, the most notable of which will be the elimination of music gifts from our offerings so that we can focus on conducting batons from plain to fancy. We'll be selling some items through Amazon, and they'll handle shipping those orders for us. The volume imprinted batons and custom work will be handled by George, our baton maker.

George is a remarkable man. I've worked with him for over two decades, and in that time, he has provided a quality product at a fair price, first-rate customer service, and in spite of the pain he lives with after surviving a serious automobile crash, he does not hesitate to go the extra mile both for us and for our customers. We are grateful to him and his colleagues at the workshop every week. I don't want to give up that relationship either - the jokes and stories are too good to walk away from.

Over the years, a number of people have worked with me to keep things going. Anne, Susan, and Cynthia have been major contributors over the years, and Tom and Vicki provided important support at critical times. I am grateful to them all for their hard work.

After June 30th, it will be Islay the scottish terrier and me in the office. Islay has worked for me since she arrived in my home from the Humane Society and will ontinue to greet visitors and remind me about treats, walks, and lunch, among other things.

Beyond work, I have some projects I want to work on and finish up and some places to visit. It will be an interesting next step in my journey, and I hope you'll stick around and watch what happens....

Noise

When I was in college, back just before the end of the dark ages, I attended Boston Bruin hockey games in the old Boston Garden. On a typical night, the haze of tobacco smoke overwhelmed the building, and aside from announcements for goals and penalties, the only other sound, outside of the very occasional cheers for the local lads (always in last place in the NHL in those days) there wasn't much in the way of sound. I never thought much about it, because the pauses in the action provided the group of us who went an opportunity to talk.

Nowadays, I've given up professional hockey (way too expensive) and attend college hockey games at the University of Minnesota (both men's and women's versions, by the way). The hockey is quite good, but the artificial noise produced is almost unbearable, and sometimes it is unbearable.

The purpose seems to be to whip the customers into some sort of seated frenzy, to convince them that they are being entertained, and to prevent any meaningful discussion between seatmates throughout the event. If it's not a goal or penalty announcement, then it's the band. If it's not a pathetic in between period competition involving a racing game or the singing of a lyric of a rock song, then it's a commercial blasting from the scoreboard and all the speakers in the building.

But sometimes you find your fingers in your ears to keep the blast of sound out, because if you don't, you will feel real pain. So I have become convinced that the by-product of all this noisy "fun" is a significantly higher probability that all of us in attendance will become deaf much earlier in our lives.

As a geezer, I understand that my high frequency hearing is somewhat impaired because of my years on the planet, but as I watch young parents bringing their infants and young children into the arena, I wonder what's happening to the kiddoes' hearing. No, actually I don't wonder; I know. If the arena sound doesn't make hurt their hearing, attending rock concerts and listening through ear buds to audio players cranked up so those of us across the room can hate the music being played will finish them off.

Because I go to a number of athletic events menaged by members of the same tribe of acoustical neanderthals (no insult intended to neanderthals, as I am sure they were really good neanderthals for their day), I decided to get a pair of fitted noise protectors. I am hopeful that they will allow me to enjoy the important part of the event - the competition and to ignore the rest of the codswallop and frou-frou which both cloud our minds and wreck our hearing.

You have been warned.

Postscript:  My noise protectors arrived, and they fit very well and knock 15 decibels off the sound without eliminating its quality and range.  What's more, I can hear the conversations around me and can chat with my neighbors without difficulty.

Good for me...still not good for all the others whose hearing is battered routinely at these events.  I think I should try to help them, but how?  I'll get back to you on that.

Slouching Towards....What, Exactly?

The long transition between election and the assumption of power is now over, but there is no time for even a single sigh of relief, what with the shredded remnants of our economy strewn all around us.

Recently, a friend from England asked me what I thought the feelings of Americans were about all this.  Scared, I answered.  He wondered aloud whether perhaps "apprehensive" might be a more appropriate term.

Nope, scared was it as far as I was concerned.  Scared and paralyzed, because nobody seems to know exactly what to do about it, and this is one of those rare times when you want all those who can think outside the box to do just that.

So far our elected representatives seem to be repeating the same old mantra about tax cuts and increased subsidies, but I wonder where is the light at the end of that tunnel?  The New York Times published an exploration of what Sweden did not all that many years ago when it faced a similar situation:  they nationalized the banks, and the taxpayers gained while the banks' investors lost everything.

You can't legislate greed out of capitalism, but you can find ways to trim sails so as to keep the boat upright, but apparently the mantra of "free market" attracted the cynical and manipulative and hypnotized those whose job it was to pay attention to what was going on.

At this late stage of my life, I wonder whether it's time, as K thinks it is to get a couple of large bags of beans and rice and hunker down under a lot of blankets and pray.  I prefer to believe that the new occupant of the White House has enough intellectual capacity and curiosity to gather the best and the brightest and the most experienced around him and find strategies which will  succeed and will be equitable.

Well, enough.  Time for me to get down on my knees and pray both for the righting of the economic ship and for being able to get up off my knees when I'm done.