June 22, 2016 Article

The Old Coot takes his medicine - water.

By Merlin Lessler

I’m sitting here on an expansive lawn behind Belhurst Castle in Geneva, NY looking down at Seneca Lake; I would guess it’s 30 or 40 feet below me. The sun is gleaming across the surface. It’s 8 am, Sunday morning, the day after our nephew, Jared Cady, married Jesseca Parsons in this same spot, followed by a reception in the ballroom that lasted well into the evening. Not a soul is here on this manicured landscape, except me. (I went to bed early)

To the north, two wind generators slowly revolve in a light breeze. Across the lake to the east, the sun is peeking through scattered clouds, shinning a spotlight on a hillside dairy farm. A string of cottages are scattered below it, hugging the lakeshore. I came fully equipped – a pen, a notebook and a container of coffee. The ultimate way for an old coot to start the day, especially with a scenic lake dotted with ripples at my feet.

That’s a long introduction to get to the subject at hand. Water! What is it that makes sitting on an overlook, gazing at a body of water, so calming, so therapeutic to ones soul? Today, it’s a lake, but any body of water will do. I get the same sedation from a river or a stream, a pond or a puddle and especially an ocean, which has the greatest soothing powers of all. Water even did its magic for me, two days after the Susquehanna River engulfed our village and I was paddling down Front Street in a kayak past my water soaked house. It reached in and placed a calming hand on my psyche.

Water is magical. Is it because millions, maybe billions, of years ago, the life form we’ve evolved from crawled out of the “soup” and some of those genetic materials lie deep within our DNA? Maybe. I guess it doesn’t really matter; we’re drawn to water. How else do you explain the premium price we willingly pay to be near it, to visit or to reside?

Anyhow, here I sit, yet again, gazing at a body of water, receiving a dose of curative, calming medicine; an old man, still trying to figure out what life is all about, and getting nowhere.

Comments. Complaints. – mlessler7@gmail.com

June 15, 2016 Article

The Old Coot is hip! (Sort of)

By Merlin Lessler

I’m hip! I have a smart phone. Know how to use it. Can cast movies from the Internet to my TV. Have a Facebook page. OK, so that’s not the definition of Hip. I overstated, yet again. Any 6 year-old can do those things. I don’t use Twitter or Snapchat, so I’m not that with it, but at least I’m not avoiding the technology that has rocketed through modern society  – altering social behavior and relationships. Most of it is good, like text messaging. Many of us old coots have adopted it and now use it instead of phone calls. Of course I scoffed at it at first, like most of my crowd.  We’re not exactly early adopters. But, I got there, and it made me realize just how intrusive a regular phone call is. Only the caller wants to converse at the moment the call is made. The receiver is interrupted in whatever he or she is doing.

Some people have cleverly adapted, by merging text messaging and direct, one-on-one, phone conversations. They do it with a simple text message, “Hey Bill, let’s talk; let me know a good time to give you a ring.” A great blend of two communication vehicles. Even better than the answering machine, that convenient device that went viral over thirty years ago and put an end to those terrible phone conversation intros: Are you busy? – Did I catch you at a bad time? And, the lies that were used in response: No, never too busy for you.- Yes I am; let me call you back. (And never do)

OK, OK, I’ll get to the point. I was just trying to prove I’m not a total skeptic of all things modern. But, (here it comes, the old grouch’s complaint) I do have a problem with some social media. Twitter in particular, but Facebook and You Tube as well. They start stampedes. Often with faulty facts. Next thing you know, a lynch mob is energized and then the “I can fix everything with a new law or regulation” politicians grab it and “fix” it. And, we lose a little more freedom.

Look how well they’ve done. They outlawed marijuana half a century or more ago. Now, nobody smokes that stuff? They outlawed a lot of controlled substances. Now, no one is hooked on drugs? They increased the drinking age. They are trying to raise the tobacco purchasing age. They’ve attacked obesity with a vengeance, mandating labeling on food products, vilifying MacDonald’s and other enemies of the state. They even regulated the size of a soda you could buy in New York City, until the law was overturned in court. Success, with any of these regulations? Of course not. You can’t regulate human nature? I just don’t know how many more “fixes” we can stand. It’s making me sound like an anarchist. I’m not, but I seem to be drifting in that direction. And the social media is driving the un-freedom train even faster. Be careful where you step; it may run you over.  

Comments. Complaints. Send to mlessler7@gmail.com

June 8, 2016 Article

The Old Coot didn’t call you. The cat did.

By Merlin Lessler

When cell phones first came into popularity, a new term was coined –the Butt-call. You’d shove the phone in your pocket, sit down, and it would call someone on your contact list. That was back in the days when the phones were mechanical; you had to physically move a button to get it to perform a task. Butt calls are rarer now, partially due to smart phones replacing dumb phones, but mostly due to the fact that people seldom put their phone down. They are tied to it more firmly than they were once tied to their umbilical chord.

Even so, some of us still make a proverbial butt call, but a more accurate term for this, when an old coot like me does it, is a finger-slip call. Old guys do this a lot. We’re working with a double handicap; we’re touch-screen challenged and we’re not hip to many of the capabilities of our smart phones. We’ll be editing our contact list or scrolling through a menu and our finger slips. Then someone’s phone starts to ring.  

It wouldn’t be so bad if the receiver of the call didn’t find out who called and hung up, but that’s not the case. Our society’s phone-o-phobia makes people uneasy when they notice a missed call.  And, with the caller’s number right there in front of them, tempting them to check it out, the phone phobics do just that. “You called?" One will ask. “What did you want?” We give the Butt-call excuse, not willing to admit to our ineptness.

That’s OK with some of the people we butt call, but not the people who are monitoring our descent into old age. It sets off an alarm for them. Wow! The Old Coot is really slipping. That’s the third time this month he called me and hung up. I bet he forgot why he was calling and that’s why he hung up. It’s like a giant report card, broadcasting our latest shortcoming via cell phone towers. It’s bad enough to have people evaluate our slide into senility when they see us in person, but with our shaky fingers hovering above a cell phone, our deterioration goes viral. 

Even my doctor is in on the conspiracy. The last time I saw mine, he asked me to count backwards form one hundred by sevens. I got the first one right. - One hundred! And, without using my fingers, the second one, ninety-three. Then, like a knight riding in on a white horse to save a damsel in distress, my phone started to ring. It was a butt-call from some other old coot, but I pretended it was a real call and told the doctor I had an emergency at home and had to leave. What a lie! But, I got away. And, a good thing too. I’d never have come up with 95 or 96 or whatever the number seven down from 93 is. And, I knew he was also going to ask me to spell my full name backwards, skipping every other letter. I dodged a bullet that time.

Which is a perfect example of why old coots tell lies, especially if we sense that someone is raising an eyebrow, doing a senility evaluation. So, if you get a missed call from me and call back for an explanation I’ll tell you right now, you’re gunna get a lie, Oh sorry. My phone was on the counter and the cat was playing with it. 

Comments (except about the improper use of “rarer” in my first paragraph). Send to mlessler7@gmail.com

June 1, 2016 Article

The Old Coot - Cardboard ain’t what it used to be!

By Merlin Lessler

What’s with today’s cardboard? Even an old coot like me can tear a box to shreds for the recycle bin in a few seconds. The cardboard is just plain wimpy. When boxes were made with “real” cardboard they were so strong I had to hire a contractor to come to the house to tear up the boxes for the trash. Not anymore.

When I was a kid (Here I go, back down memory lane to the good old days. What do you expect? I’m an old coot.) cardboard was essential to our toy armory. It was so strong, so durable, you could make a fort out of a box that a washing machine or a refrigerator came packed in, cut out doors and windows, paint a picket fence with daisies peeking through the slats around the outside and it would last for months and months. Easily stored under the bed when other toys or games moved to center stage.

We used it to slide down hills in winter. It held up through several snowstorms. And, if the snow was especially sticky, a cardboard box could beat a toboggan to the bottom of a hill. It got a real workout at Halloween. The neighborhood was filled with kids in cardboard box costumes, disguised as: a pack of cigarettes on two legs, a radio or TV, the torso of Frankenstein, a lion in a cage. The options were limited only by a kid’s imagination.

Even adults prized these “real” cardboard discards. You would find them covering the garage floor to soak up oil from a dripping oil pan, in the attic storing mementos and family heirlooms. Fathers often used them to make the body on a soapbox racer for a young, future Indy driver. (Back when “box” in soapbox racer meant what its name implied.) An older teen in our neighborhood crafted a canoe out of a refrigerator box and proved it was sea worthy in the swamp at the bottom of the hill.  

It was that old cardboard, what I call real cardboard, that flapped against our spokes to make our bicycles sound like a motorcycle. Sometimes it came from a cut up box, sometimes from a baseball card. I often had Mickey Mantle flapping against my spokes. If I’d only known how much those cards would be worth one day. They were cheap back then – 3 cards and a flat piece of bubble gum for 5 cents. No, they sure don’t make cardboard like they used to.

Comments?  to mlessler7@gmail.com, Complaints to donotcare@cootmail.com.