ZIP!

I recently learned that an old friend – I’ll call him “Joe” - will be retiring.  Joe has spent his entire career at our company – 42 years.  That number astounds me (although, other, smaller numbers have astounded me in years past, only to find that they eventually seemed much smaller when I surpassed them.)
 
Joe was one of the very first people I met when I joined this company, fresh out of college.  He was the Assistant Manager of our department.  As a newbie insurance underwriter, I reported to a supervisor, who reported to Joe.  He was, and is, a great guy.

Joe knew his stuff.  We all respected him, and he, in turn, had our backs.  Although I may not have realized it, years later when I became a manager, Joe was among the early influencers who helped to shape my own style.  He stood up for his people, and we would have jumped in front of a bus for him.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Joe came from humble beginnings, a solid blue-collar family of first-generation Italian-Americans.  He speaks with a fairly thick Boston accent.  With no disrespect intended (quite the opposite,) he reminds me a bit of Boston mayor Tom Menino (known, affectionately or derisively, depending on who does the knowing, as “Mumbles” for his accented, occasionally slurred speaking style.)  Tom Menino has been, and continues to be wildly popular among his constituents, and for good reason – he knows how to get things done, knows every inch of his city, and does what he believes is best – always – for his people. 

Back in the day, Joe seemed to know everyone in our company – no small statement, considering that we worked at the headquarters of a Fortune 500 corporation.  If you needed to get something done – to cut through the red tape, go to the source, and just get it done – Joe always knew how, and could usually call in a favor if necessary to grease the skids. 
 
A friend and I went to Joe’s house, many years ago, to hash out an idea: we were going to lay plans to start a risk management consulting company.  By that point in our careers, we had amassed some industry credentials and relevant experience; and we were, after all, in the middle of the booming, Reagan-era 1980s.  Anything seemed possible. 

Our plan never got off the ground.  The usual reasons – inertia, fear of the unknown, lack of time to commit, the siren call of the “safe” corporate pay package – prevailed.   I don’t remember any of the details of our so-called plan, but what I do recall vividly about our visit to Joe’s house was his three young children.  They stood out to me as some of the most polite, well-mannered, respectful kids I’d ever encountered.  They came into the room, excused themselves, and offered us something to drink.  At that point in my life, I hadn’t had much experience with children, but even I knew that they were remarkably well raised.  They were special.  Joe, it turned out, had a pretty good life outside of work.

At work, as years went by, the story unfolded differently.  Joe’s career seemed to hit a plateau at a certain point.  I knew from our conversations that for him, the thrill was definitely gone.  Younger, less experienced, sharply dressed, fast-talking, MBA-wielding “suits” had taken the reins.  There had been a change of the guard at the top, and the corporate culture followed suit.  “Lean and mean” were valued.  Loyal and competent, not so much.  Joe, and many others like him, lost ground.  Some were shown the door.    

I had, by then, moved around a bit, and no longer worked at headquarters; so my own personal experience was, thankfully, somewhat distanced from the carnage.  But we felt the ripple effects in the hinterlands nonetheless.  The entire company was changing, evolving, shedding its skin and reinventing itself, repeatedly, like a snake.

Years passed, then decades.  Joe soldiered on.  I’m sure he had opportunities to move on to greener pastures, but for reasons that I think I understand – his family, including his elderly parents who had moved into the in-law apartment in the beautiful, new house that Joe and his wife had built along the way; the “golden handcuffs” of a pension plan, 401(K) and generous (though ever less so) benefits  – he stayed.

Now, after 42 years, Joe’s moment has come.  He has much to look forward to: spending time with his wife and children, now successful adults; and with the grandchildren he adores.  A Disney trip is in the offing.  I hope, for his sake, that there will be many more.

I spoke with Joe the other day.  I asked him about his retirement party, which I didn’t want to miss.  His answer saddened, but didn’t really surprise me.  He doesn’t want one; he just wants to fade away.  It turns out that his departure, though voluntary, has left a sour taste, for reasons I’m sure he would not want me to detail here.  This is not the way a 42 year relationship should end; but, equally true, it’s par for the course these days, in the parallel universe we call corporate America.

One could take away any of a number of lessons from Joe’s story.  I choose these: 

·         Family comes first.  Always.  By the yardstick that is his family, Joe is a rich and successful man, with every reason to reflect with great pride on the last four decades. 

·         Companies, Republican platform planks to the contrary notwithstanding, are not people.  Loyalty to a company may or may not be rewarded; the outcome is random, not unlike, say, that of loyalty to a sofa.

·         Loyalty to people, especially people who, for whatever reason, rely on you, is likely to be richly rewarding.  You may shape their lives in ways you will never know.  They just might jump in front of a bus for you.

Footnote:  The title of this post, “ZIP!” is meaningless to all but three people – Joe, me, and one other friend who may or may not remember its origin.  I hope that one day, Joe will come across my blog, and I want him to recognize himself. 

Advice to the G.O.P.

Here’s a link to Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal about, well, ostensibly about the many failures of the Republican Party, but, sadly in keeping with Ms. Noonan’s recent pattern of commentary, also about what she perceives as the inherent evil that is our President, Barack Obama.  The column does feature a worthwhile, if somewhat sardonic anecdote about golfer Phil Mickelson:

http://on.wsj.com/V5W5Pm

My take on this subject (lost among the hundreds of comments tagged to Ms. Noonan’s column at wsj.com):

The first half of Ms. Noonan’s column was the best she's written in some time. I was actually lulled into thinking the entire column would be free of her usual vitriolic, personal attacks on our President. Sadly, I was wrong. Nonetheless, she makes several excellent observations about the many points of failure within the current Republican party.

Listen up: if the Republicans truly want to become relevant again, they need to focus on the inherent truths in the first half of Peggy's column. They do look like "ants on a sugar cube." Here's how they can fix that:

Move away, far away from the DOA positions they embrace on "social issues." Safe, legal abortions are here to stay. The matter is settled. Deal with it and shut up about it. Americans are overwhelmingly fed up with the epidemic of gun violence that is unique to our sick, gun-worshipping culture. Stricter gun control laws WILL be enacted. Quit hiding behind the second amendment, which any thinking person understands has nothing to do with civilians owning AK-47's to hunt down Bambi in the woods. Grow a pair and be willing to stand up to the increasingly delusional NRA, and point out exactly where they are wrong. Get your nose out of people's bedrooms and accept the fact that Gay Marriage is, and should be, a simple fact of life. Move on.

Instead, Republicans, get back to the very basic "small government" principles that are supposed to constitute the essence of your party. Focus on fiscal issues, which really are your strength, and on which you will find widespread support from an overwhelming number of tired, spent, taxed-to-death hard-working Americans. Expose the long-term dangers of our ballooning national debt in terms that the average outside-the-beltway, apolicital non-wonk can actually understand and internalize. Put forth alternatives that will work (as opposed to your current, self-destructive, obstructionist and asinine ostrich act, in which "no tax increases under any circumstances" is the answer to every question.) Acknowledge that our current interventionist foreign policies are not only unwise, but unaffordable, and that the decade-old wars against ephemeral enemies have played a big part in arriving at this place of fiscal distress. Resolve to change course.

Do these things, Republicans, and you'll win the next election in a landslide - provided you float a candidate who understands the reality of real Americans enough to know better than to proffer a $10,000 bet during a debate.

The Typing Pool

Anyone who has watched Mad Men has seen a depiction of a corporate office that more closely resembles the environment in which I began my career than that of any current-day workplace.  This is perfectly logical, as the 1960’s were, in fact, chronologically closer to the 1980’s than the 1980’s were to the present day. 

Envision, if you will, the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  Subtract the in-office liquor cabinets and trysts, the pointy push-up bras and other 60’s fashion items, and the blatant racism/sexism/homophobia.  Keep the smoking, the rotary dial phones, the wide-open, cubicle-free “bullpen,” the occasionally drunken executives and employees (who imbibed at local watering holes, not infrequently involving three hour Friday “luncheons”) and the more subtle end of the sexism spectrum; et voila, you are picturing my first job.

In those heady days preceding adoption of the personal computer and e-mail in the workplace, “typing” (the term “keyboarding” hadn’t yet been coined) was a specialized skill, generally possessed only by female clerical (sorry, office support) personnel.  My work as a newly-minted professional involved a great deal of correspondence, which I wrote the old-fashioned way, putting pen to paper.  The most informal memos went out the door in that form – in envelopes, addressed in longhand cursive.  Everything else went to the Typing Pool.

Our Typing Pool consisted of five or six women who had worked for the company as typists, probably, on average, 20-30 years each.  During times when the workload wasn’t sufficient to keep them all busy, they would read magazines or knit at their desks. This was considered perfectly acceptable. They typed, and that was all.  Such was corporate life in pre-Lean-Six-Sigma days.

As is typically the case with any team, some of the typists were, well, better than others.  We, as their captive clients, had no control over which typist handled our work.  It was the luck of the draw.

Kathy was the best. Her work was fast and accurate. Helen was… well, Helen had issues.  An older woman with a severe hearing impairment that made communication extraordinarily difficult, she had a few, shall we say, personal hygiene challenges (picture a lipstick-cheeked Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” who smelled bad) in addition to being a shitty typist. Manuscripts that went to Helen typically came back bearing globs of liquid “White Out,” clumsy attempts at masking the small subset of mistakes that she was actually able to identify on her own.  They may as well have gone into a black hole.

Alternatives to using the Typing Pool were few.  None were sanctioned.  On rare occasions, when I really, truly needed to get something typed up quickly and accurately without risking losing my work to the black hole, I had two options: ask a personal favor of our manager’s secretary (sorry, administrative assistant) who happened to be a crack typist; or, as a last resort, find an empty desk that was equipped with an IBM Selectric typewriter (the kind with the little round letter-ball; they were state-of-the-art machines, and there were a few around for various specialized purposes) and – slowly, clumsily, carefully – type it myself.

The foregoing is an historical account, to the best of my recollection. Only the names have been changed. The story that follows is fictional.  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The year was 2013.  At Sharon’s company, and across corporate America, constant evolutionary change had long been the norm.  This year was no exception.  The deck chairs had been rearranged yet again, this time fairly significantly, and Sharon hadn’t fared particularly well.  Her team had been disbanded, the scope of her authority curtailed.  Worse, it seemed to Sharon and her colleagues that the trigger had been pulled prematurely.  Projects were on the drawing boards, but were not yet shovel-ready.  It appeared that senior management hadn’t quite figured out what to do with these folks, and many others like them, in the interim. 

They considered taking up knitting.

Fortunately, or so it seemed, a short-term assignment came along.  The band of misfits would be busy for awhile.  It wasn’t exactly challenging or intrinsically satisfying work.  The main task was data entry – or, as it would have been called thirty years ago, “typing.”

For weeks, Sharon and her co-workers sat at their desks, copying information from printed spreadsheets into a truly god-awful, poorly designed application.  Working, as they did, in the software development industry, they recognized bad design in a heartbeat: to create a new record, they had to first create a fully-populated “shell” containing hundreds of subordinate records, then delete the ones that were not desired.

In English: imagine walking into a supermarket to buy a loaf of bread.  But the only way to accomplish that is to remove every loaf of bread from the store shelves, load up several grocery carts with all of the loaves, wheel each of the carts to the checkout line, one at a time, then, finally, select the particular loaf that you want from the cart in which it resides, and hand it to the cashier. Having done all that, you must then bring your newly purchased bread out to your car, put it in the trunk, turn around and go back into the store, and repeat the entire procedure to obtain a quart of milk.  The process was just about that inefficient, slow, and frustrating.

As a result, the short-term assignment that had originally been estimated to last a few days dragged on for weeks. The performance of the application was so poor that minutes would pass between transactions.  Sharon and the rest of the crew found themselves staring at the little “please wait” spinning-beach-ball icon, really, most of the time. Their minds wandered.  They exchanged instant messages to pass the time:  “Thank God for my iPod.”  “Shoot me now.  No, really.”  “I’ve lost the ability to blink.”

Eventually, the wheels of corporate bureaucracy began moving again.  Sharon was able to move forward with a project assignment that, while nowhere near as challenging or satisfying as her old job, at least provided her with an opportunity to think.  Her colleagues, similarly, landed on their feet in various roles, still cogs on the giant, impersonal corporate wheel, albeit positioned differently.  The Neo-Typing Pool was no more.

In 2013, virtually anyone with an ‘office job’ has access to technology and tools that would have made Don Draper’s head spin, even when sober.  Yet it has always been, and remains true that people are the ultimate determinants of the success or failure of an enterprise.  The socially acceptable, yet at times tremendously counterproductive and even harmful office behavior of the 1960s’ Mad Men; the unabashedly rife-with-waste and, by today’s standards, highly manual processes of my 1980s office job; and the demoralizing underutilization of our fictional friend Sharon in the supposedly enlightened, “lean,” highly competitive, hurry-up-and-wait world of 2013 – all share the basic fact that there is clearly, always, room for improvement.  The best of us will continue striving to bring that about, despite circumstances that may render our efforts difficult, thankless, and sometimes futile.

And one day, sooner or later, we will move on.  

So This Is Christmas

So this is Christmas, and what have you done?  ---John Lennon

This moment, right now, is the best part of Christmas Day.  My wife and I have had our coffee together, and she has retreated to the shower. The Christmas tree is lit, and has held onto its needles well enough to still look half decent.  Our “children,” who by virtue of age hardly qualify as such anymore, haven’t yet arisen from their beds to pierce the stillness with their bickering.    

Let me say up front that we are very, very fortunate, in many ways; and for that I am thankful.  Yet, 2012 has been a dog of a year, for so many reasons.  It seems we have entered a period of universal discontent.  It’s a bit of a paradox: by many external measures, at the national level, “things” are getting better: unemployment is ticking downward, and the economy is recovering, albeit painfully slowly.  So what explains the malaise that seems to afflict nearly everyone I know?

I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War, or more accurately, the tail end of it. It seemed then that our country was painfully divided.  We were hawks or doves.  In the 1972 election, we supported Nixon, unless we were from Massachusetts, in which case we supported McGovern {ahem… sorry, I couldn’t resist; disclosure: I was not, then, “from” Massachusetts, nor was I old enough to vote.}

I came of age in the 1970s, which by most traditional measures were terrible years.  There was the Watergate scandal, which forever changed the degree to which we were inclined to trust our government leaders. On the economic front, we had “stagflation” – persistently high inflation and unemployment, a terrible combination. There was the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, which led directly to the 1974 stock market crash.  The stock market went virtually nowhere for a decade. 

We faced gasoline rationing, with lines that snaked around city blocks. We groused, but waited in those lines for hours nonetheless, so that we could continue driving our behemoth Chevys and Fords, which in those early days of EPA-mandated catalytic converters, all smelled like rotten eggs.

There was disco.  There was cocaine.  There were Qiana shirts.  There was the Pina Colada Song.  There was no MTV.  There were no laptops, or iPods, or cellphones.  I believe I’ve made my point (OK, except for the cellphones, maybe) - the seventies sucked.

And yet, “misery index” notwithstanding, we did not turn against ourselves.  Despite our many differences, about which we were quite vocal at times, there was an unspoken camaraderie of sorts – we were all in it together.  We maintained, more or less, our national sense of humor.  We poked fun at ourselves with TV shows like Norman Lear’s All in the Family. 

Fast-forward to 2012.  What has become of us?  We have just witnessed one of the most divisive presidential elections in recent memory. We are a nation bitterly divided.  Battle lines have been drawn along countless dimensions.  Republicans vs. Democrats.  Red States vs. Blue States.  Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life.  Pro- vs. Anti- gun control.  Pro- vs. Anti-gay marriage.  Pro- vs. Anti-immigration reform.  Pro- vs. Anti-Keystone oil pipeline.   Belief vs. disbelief that global warming is real.  On, and on, and on, ad nauseum.

As I write this, we stand at the precipice of a so-called “fiscal cliff” that is likely more symbolic than it is consequential.  It displays, in sharp relief, the complete and utter breakdown of civil discourse in our politics.  The so-called “Super-Committee” failed miserably in its mission to resolve this economic quandary last year, and odds are good that we’ll soon see “Kick the Can 2.0” from our alleged leaders.

To quote an individual who, by virtue of his personal actions throughout most of his life, deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of history rather than immortalized by the likes of me, but for the fact that this is such a great line – I refer to the late Rodney King – “Can we all get along?”

Apparently not.

And so this is Christmas.  Where’s the Red Baron when you need him?  How do we move forward, now that the vitriol has become so very personal?  How do we get back to a place where, like Archie and Meathead, we manage to tolerate each other, recognizing that we have something, anything, in common?  And what would that thing, that common ground, look like?

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: we are all human.  We eat, breathe, struggle, love, die.  We nurture our beliefs, varied though they may be.  We make choices, good and bad.  We have dreams, of which some get shattered, some we abandon, some we can no longer recall, and some, perhaps, are realized.  We experience pain and sadness, illness and grief.  If we are lucky, in the sweetest of moments, we experience great joy.  We reflect and learn from all of this, or not.

I was awakened this Christmas morning by my wife, asking me to carry our beloved, elderly dog down the stairs.  Her hind legs are giving out, and on bad days she can’t do the stairs anymore.  I know, in my gut, that we will soon have a very painful choice to make. 

Later this week, we will drop our dogs off at a kennel, and drive a couple of hundred miles to visit family, including my 90 year old mother.  Though blessed with longevity, she, too, struggles against the limitations of a failing body.  Our visits are typically bittersweet, at once joyful and painful.  I’m acutely aware that any given visit may be our last.

The uncertainty is humbling.  We are reminded, daily, in a thousand small ways, of the fragility of life.  The media render this message unavoidable; our loved ones drive it home.

And so it is, I imagine, for everyone, in one way or another.  Each of us faces our own challenges, our own demons, our own motivators and calls to action.  Our biases and world-views take shape at a tender age, and are forged in the crucible of our life experiences.  None of this is new; it has always been thus. 

So what is it about this place and time that has rendered us all so rigid in our beliefs?  Why is 2012 so very different from, say, 1975?  I have theories, but this blog post has already grown way too long, so they’ll wait for another day.

I will instead offer this: We need to chill out.  All of us.  And what better time to start down a path of “Goodwill Toward Men (read: people)” than Christmas day?
 
Let’s take a moment, each of us, to think about our friend, our neighbor, our family member, our ‘frenemy’ – as a fellow human being, deserving of our respect and our kindness.  I’ll start.
 
Since starting this humble little ‘blog about nothing’ a few months ago, I’ve been gratified – and surprised – by the responses and kind comments I’ve received from readers.  I wish each of you well.  We may disagree, but that does not matter. Not to me, anyway.  More than anything, I wish for you and your loved ones: peace.

Jerry  

The Tipping Point

Another mass shooting, and once again tongues are wagging.  The massacre in Newtown is especially poignant because it involved the murder of innocent children.  There are tears, including from our president, as there should be.  It is a time to grieve.

But it is also a time to act.

Nuts With Guns have been holding this country hostage for far too long.  We have become inured to the idea of mass shootings, as though they are an unavoidable fact of life.  But they are avoidable.  Where is the outrage?

What is, unfortunately, an unavoidable fact of life is the tyranny of the minority, or more accurately, the tyranny of the very few, in which a tiny fraction of a given population ruins things for everyone else.

The world changed on 9/11.  As a society, we were shocked into action on many fronts. We were in reaction mode, collectively trying to figure out how to function in a world where our old assumptions no longer worked.  Today, the TSA certainly has its own issues; but for the most part people have come to accept that air travel involves what would have seemed an egregious invasion of privacy and personal space back in 2000.  We have, grudgingly or not, forfeited a fair number of what used to be our rights, and lowered our quality-of-life expectations just a bit, in order to harden the target. That the actions of a small number of terrorists have led us to this place is rather astounding; but this is our reality now.  Sad but true.

As 9/11 was to air travel, Newtown is to firearms.  If not, it should be.  Our old assumptions are no longer working.  We need to figure out how to function in this new reality.  We have reached, and passed, the tipping point.

The coming months will certainly see an animated debate about the merits of gun control laws.  The standard arguments on both sides of this issue (guns don’t kill people, people do; the second amendment refers to a militia, not to individuals; pry it from my cold, dead hands) are so familiar, so shopworn that I need not recount them here.  Everyone has heard them all. The battle lines have already formed.

I am a believer in the merits of small (read: non-intrusive) government.  I believe we have too many laws on the books already.  My gut reaction to any given proposal involving a freedom-restricting law is negative.  I believe we are an extensively over-regulated and over-policed society. So my evolving belief in the need for much stricter gun laws goes completely against my gut.  But it is my belief nonetheless.

I am a car enthusiast.  One might not guess that, based on the makeup of my current fleet, but trust me - I drive a Honda Civic because that is what I can afford.  In my mind’s eye it’s a 3-series.  I enjoy driving.  My friend, Jack, and I haven’t missed the annual New England Auto Show for as long as I can recall. 

I’ve held a driver’s license for 36 years. I commute 90 miles to and from work, every day.  I’ve probably owned a couple of dozen vehicles. In all that time, across all those miles, I have never been involved in an auto accident.  Not one.  Not even a fender-bender.  Yes, some of that is luck; but not all of it. I recognize my driving privilege for what it is, and I take it seriously. 

Every time I hear yet another report of an elderly driver crashing through a plate glass window, I cringe; because I know what’s coming.  There has been a burgeoning epidemic of car crashes involving elderly drivers, fueled by the giant, aging baby-boomer demographic, of which I am a part.  The calls have begun for stricter licensing requirements for older drivers.  The chorus is just getting started; the crescendo is coming. 

The AARP is fighting this notion, on the basis that it constitutes age discrimination.  In the long run, the AARP and the oldies will lose.  By the time I’m 70 years old, I will probably be required to demonstrate my agility on a freakin’ balance beam once a month in order to hold onto my license.  And odds are, at 70, I will still be a safer driver than most, of any age.  It’s not fair.  The idea of it galls me.  But it’s coming.  It’s inevitable, and I know it.

My friends who are gun enthusiasts need to develop a similar understanding.  They may be “responsible gun owners” to a person, but the tyranny of the few is wrecking it for them.  They may have the second amendment (or their particular interpretation of it) on their side, and the NRA may have their back, but the tide of public opinion is turning, and in the long run, they will lose.

It’s not fair.  I get it.  I empathize, to a degree.  But we cannot continue down this path of carnage.  Better the gun lobby should accept the inevitable now, and allow countless innocent lives to be spared by not dragging the fight out over many years. 

This is your Christmas/Holiday Card

Dear friends, relatives, acquaintances, loved ones, total strangers, and people I used to know:

It’s that time of year again, and I’m [thinking of you, wondering how you’ve been, trying to remember who you are, wondering who will show up and read this.]  We’ve had a [trying, amazing, expensive, humbling, brilliant, near-suicidally boring] year.  It’s amazing how time flies.

Each year at this time, we engage in familiar holiday traditions [/rituals /obsessions /mind-numbing tasks.]  It all begins with our traditional Thanksgiving dinner, at which every detail is an exact replica of Thanksgiving dinners past, from our last-minute inability to find the matching crystal salt and pepper shakers [and our discovery anew that the latter is broken, upon which we return it to the cabinet shelf and pull out the little rectangular metal McCormick’s pepper can for placement on the holiday table] to the dinner table conversation.

And by “dinner table conversation,” I don’t mean that we generally tend to discuss similar topics from year to year; I mean that we have the exact same conversation, word for word, syllable by syllable, as last year [and the year before that, and the year before that…]  An elderly family member kicks it all off upon entering our front door, with the words “What time are we going home?”  Yes, the Gould family Thanksgiving dinner is a scene from “Groundhog Day.”

And that’s just the beginning.

When we moved to this semi-rural town many years ago, our children were very young.  We thought it was a cool idea to go to one of the several Christmas Tree Farms in town, and “cut our own.”  There’s a ritual associated with this.  One does not just arrive at the farm wielding a chainsaw, and go for it.  It’s much more civilized than that.  Rather, while still digesting that wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, we'd visit the Tree Farm to select the family tree, and “tag” it, essentially reserving it.  A couple of weeks later, closer to Christmas, we'd return to the farm to claim our tagged tree, and the fine gentleman who runs the place would drive his rusting Dodge pickup truck, with fuzzy reindeer antlers affixed to the side-view mirrors, through the muck (it’s always raining on tree pick-up day – that’s part of the tradition) to the tree site, fell it with his buzz-saw, plop it into the truck and bring it to the front “office” [a tiny outbuilding resembling a sugar shack, complete with pot-bellied stove ablaze] where we'd pay and go happily on our way.  The kids and dogs always came along, and seemed to enjoy it. How wonderful to live in such bucolic surroundings, where such a quaint New England tradition still lives on.

But… as years have passed, the experience has become less and less enjoyable.  For one thing, tree-tagging has evolved into a blood sport.  The day after Thanksgiving?  Fuhgeddaboutit…  all the “good” trees have been claimed by then.  Not only claimed, but decorated on-site, so ornately as to appear to have been visited by Martha Stewart herself (which I understand would have been physically impossible, given that she had taken up residence in the Pokey during much of the time period in question.)  And there were we, showing up a month late and a dollar short, with nothing more than our empty plastic gallon milk container, a Sharpie, and a roll of duct tape to make “our” tree easily identifiable within the forest. 

Twenty years ago, that approach was de rigueur…  but, as with everything else in our little slice of exurban paradise, the stakes have been continually raised.  To wit, our friendly proprietor, Dodge pickup-guy, has gradually increased the price of a freshly-cut tree at a steady pace – roughly equivalent to the pace at which houses out here seem to sprout additional rooms and wings and such.  Last year, my wife and I - our children having long since lost all interest in participating - found ourselves trudging through the mud with our elderly dogs, minds still addled and bellies still swollen from our turkey-day festivities, in search of a tree – ANY tree that had more stage presence than the object of Linus’ affection in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”  We completed the ritual, but I think we both sensed a turning point.  This whole thing was just not worth it anymore.  

This year, we’ve made the bold decision to switch things up.  Change does not come easily in this household, in case you haven’t inferred the obvious quite yet.  Yesterday, we went to a familiar big-box store and purchased a cheap, already-cut Christmas tree.  I’m aware that this thing was most likely severed from its life source back in July, trucked down from some forlorn, deforested corner of Nova Scotia on a flatbed tandem trailer with about 5,000 of its brethren, and that it will likely spill its remaining needles by Wednesday.  I don’t care.  It was cheap, and it smells good.  I’m actually quite proud that we’ve deferred the ultimate concession to practicality – buying an artificial tree – a bit longer.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the greeting card writer in this household.  Each year during the holiday season, I sit amidst several boxes of cards, list at hand, trying to come up with something unique and appropriate for each person or family with whom we exchange cards.  For the past several years, I’ve experienced an increasing sense of [futility, redundancy, silliness] as I’ve gone through the motions of printing address labels, scribbling vapid content, and affixing stamps to snail-mail greetings meant for people with whom I interact much more frequently through social media and/or e-mail.  Not that any of this has ever been insincere; it has just grown to seem so… pointless.  So, I set about exploring alternatives.  There are “e-card” sites these days, at which one can find, well, e-cards; most of these seem to involve some sort of multimedia presentation of holiday cheer – music, blinking lights, dancing reindeer; I developed a headache after viewing the first three or four.  Nah.  Not for me.  I have decided, dear reader, to go commando.  And so:

If you are still reading this, you are among the faithful.  I hope you will understand why we’ve decided to go electronic with our conveyance of holiday cheer.  We’re making exceptions, of course, for the elderly [or ultra-sensitive or long-lost-and-possibly-dead] relatives for whom we have no e-mail address or other electronic means of contact.  We could point out how “green” we’re being, but that would be a tad hypocritical for people who just, once again, murdered a Douglas Fir to display in our family room (though technically, I think we may get more 'green cred' this year than in the past, seeing as how the tree was already on the flatbed long before our decision to purchase… but I digress.)

So, from our home to yours, we wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas [/Happy Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Holiday / Weekend] and all the best in the coming year.

With love,

The Gould Family

The Fever

“You’ve got to be in it to win it!”
 

I was leaving the office for the day.  That was my colleague’s parting shot.  On the table was a potential $500 million (and growing) Powerball payout.  “Get your ticket, man!”  This, from someone whose judgment I trust, most of the time.  I actually paused and thought about it.  Score one for peer pressure.  And, I suppose {ahem} for greed.

By the time I got to my car, the thought had vanished.  I wasn’t going to be “in it.”  I was going to hold onto my two bucks.

One in 176 million.  Those were the odds.  I heard some statistics wonk on the radio equate that to the likelihood of having twenty-two grandchildren who are all female.  According to CNN, the odds of dying from a lightning strike are one in three million.  Odds of being struck by lightning in the course of an 80 year lifetime, one in 10,000.
 
I’m a risk-averse guy.  I brush and floss.  I brush WITH floss.  I wear my seatbelt at all times.  I’m wearing it right now, sitting at my desk.  Because you never know.

Powerball?  Not so much.

So I drove home, with that familiar, warm feeling of mild superiority enveloping my spirit.  I was wise.  I was thrifty.  I was prudent.  I used my turn signals.

Over dinner, my wife told me that she’d entered her workplace Powerball pool.  Once again, that tiny greed-voice whispered: maybe I was “in it” after all!  There was a nanosecond of something that felt a little like relief.  Then my True Self reappeared, with its litany of questions: how many others were in the pool (as though splitting 500 million dollars with a handful of elementary school teachers was really going to create a hardship?)  Who collected the money, and can we trust that person?  Interesting side note there, the individual who actually did collect the money was the brother of a notorious murderer {true story…  curiously, this is the only detail of this blog post that is not tongue-in-cheek; go figure.} 
 
In the end, none of it mattered.  The next day, we didn’t get to tell anyone to shove anything, anywhere.  Probably just as well; just imagine the taxes.