September 21, 2015 Article

The Old Coot repeats himself.

By Merlin Lessler

I watched a young guy empty a have-a-heart trap in a wooded area across the river from the village along Route 434 the other day. A bushy tailed squirrel scampered out and ran into a thicket. I don’t know for sure, but I surmise that he trapped it at his house and was getting rid of it in a squirrel friendly way. I can appreciate that; I’ve been in a decades long war with squirrels. Coming up with ingenious ways to keep them out of our bird feeders. Winning for a short period and then marveling at their cleverness as yet another brilliant scheme of mine has gone down in flames. The guy freeing the squirrel didn’t know that he was fighting a losing battle. The squirrel would return. It’s a lesson I learned in 2004, when I was a younger old coot and published the following article.

A squirrel teaches an old coot a lesson. - September 24, 2004

I didn't know squirrels could swim. I hadn't given it much thought, but had anyone asked, I would have said, “No.” Now I know better. I was out on the river with four friends in our kayaks. You can always spot me when I'm with other people on the river; I'm the slowpoke in the back. I say I’m taking my time so I can observe the wildlife along the riverbank, but it’s because I'm an old coot and no matter how hard I paddle, I can’t keep up with the group, any group, even the AARP crowd.

Jean was in the lead kayak. She pointed to a lump in the middle of the river and shouted, "What's that?" Being the elder, and self-proclaimed wildlife expert, I took a look and chuckled, “It’s just a log.” She didn't buy it. "No, she replied. It's furry!"

"Well,” I countered, “Then it must be a muskrat.” (They're all over the place, but not usually in the middle of the river). I started paddling; I was sure it was a log and wanted to be first to reach it. It wasn't a log; it wasn't a muskrat. It was a squirrel, doing the doggy paddle and making good time. I reported the news and began to follow it, to see where it was going. It headed straight for shore, taking ten minutes to get there from the middle of the river. When it hit the riverbank it jumped out of the water and scampered up a tree.

I was stunned; we all were. None of us had any idea that squirrels could swim. We discussed why it was in the middle of the river. Did it fall out of a tree along the bank and swim in the wrong direction? Was it a teenage squirrel running away from home? Was it an old coot squirrel, banished by the clan for endlessly talking about the good old days?

I didn’t expect to learn why the squirrel was in the river, but through a quirk of fate, I stumbled on the answer. The mystery was solved at a meeting of the Riverwalk advisory committee. A husband and wife from Owego sat next to me. They live on the river and do a lot of kayaking. I asked if they had been out lately. "No, we haven’t. How about you?" I told them about my squirrel experience. "In fact, I concluded, the squirrel hopped ashore right near your house."

They both began to laugh. I didn't think they'd be able to stop. It was like when you start laughing in church; they couldn’t get it under control. Finally, they calmed down and the husband, wiping tears from his eyes, told me what was so funny. He'd been trapping squirrels and transporting them across the river. He caught nine so far this summer, but the squirrel population in his yard never changed. He’d wondered if they were coming back via the Court Street Bridge. It never crossed his mind that they might be swimming back. "The whole thing makes sense now," he exclaimed. I learned a good lesson. Just when you think you know everything, something happens to show you how little you really do know.

Postscript - Just a few days ago I gained some additional squirrel knowledge. Because of our hot dry summer, the “pack of four,” as I call them, started stealing my wife’s tomatoes, taking a bite to get the juice and leaving the evidence behind. I trapped them and took them to a new home, 2 miles away. Three days later they were back. That’s when I did the research I should have done before moving them. Google informed me that squirrels should be moved ten miles or more if you want to keep them from returning. Proving to me, yet again, you’re never too old to learn.

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September 14, 2016 Article

The Old Coot packs for a trip

By Merlin Lessler

I’m getting ready to go on a short vacation. To Virginia. For Larissa Dobransky’s wedding. I still think of her as the little kid who lived next door. I should update my perspective and think of her as Doctor Larissa Dobransky. I bet she doesn’t respond to her elderly patients like the medical people I deal with. If I complain that my arm or leg is doing something weird, or something else on this “vehicle” I’m walking around in, I always get, “You’ve got to expect that at your age.” I’m going to ask her about that, if I get a chance. None of us old guys and gals expected any of this stuff. Anyhow, my wife thinks we’re all packed. Dresses, suits and casual clothes. But, that’s not enough for an old coot. I need special old coot gear.

Picture this! Some old guy asleep in a lounge chair by the swimming pool in a swanky hotel, flat on his back, arms akimbo, eyes closed, mouth wide open and snoring as loud as a leaf blower. I plan to pack in my old coot kit, a baseball hat, a newspaper, an operating room mask and the like so my wife will have something to cover my face with when I drift into la la land. She can activate the blue tooth portable speaker I’m bringing and play loud music to drown out my snoring. Some old coots use a straw hat to cover their whole face and quiet the noise; I find them awkward to carry around and if you do so by wearing it on your head, you become one of those quirky old guys in a straw hat. I’m leaving mine at home.

I also plan to bring a few work zone cones to place around my lounge chair in case I get hit with a leg cramp while I’m sleeping and leap up and do the “kick your leg and spin around” dance to free my leg from it. I don’t want to knock anyone into the pool. This should keep people safely out of the cramp zone.

My wife doesn’t know it, but I’ve made a reservation to rent a baby stroller. I can use it to push around my old coot vacation gear. I’m hoping to rent a baby too, to put in the stroller; it will distract other hotel guests from looking me over too closely and thinking, or saying, “What’s an old coot like that doing at the swimming pool?” It will transform my image into a positive one, that of a doting grandfather (or, great grandfather). If I can’t get a baby, a small dog will work. But, not a little puppy; it would draw too much attention and I’ll never get to nap. It ain’t easy going on a vacation when you’re an old coot. (But, I guess I have to expect that at my age.)  Congratulations to Larissa Dobransky and Ryan Stuhlreyer on your September nuptials.

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September 7, 2016 Article

The Old Coot is newsed out.

By Merlin Lessler

It was a single moment in time, 5pm, August 1^st, 1980. But oh, what a moment! A frontal attack on American culture with a catastrophic outcome. It came with a whimper, hardly noticed by an unsuspecting population. Pundits laughed. Major TV network executives scoffed. Yet, the fuse was lit and we now live with the bomb that exploded across the airwaves. Because on that moment, 36 years ago, CNN launched their 24 hour-a-day news channel. 

It’s turned out to be one of the worst disasters in American history. That’s a bit of a stretch. What happened at that moment in time isn’t on a par with the invasion of Pearl Harbor, D-day, 9/11 or other disasters of that ilk, but those aside, it was a significant attack on our way of life that grew from an innocent beginning into a festering thorn in our side. Well, my side anyway. .

When CNN launched its’ all day news format, it was met with laughter. “Who would watch a channel that has news on all day?” – “How can they ever find enough fodder to keep people interested?” – “What a joke!”

Well, we were wrong, and now are living with the disaster that took root and blossomed after that fateful day in history. We live in a world where we’re barraged with all day, every day news coverage, Not just on CNN, but on every major TV network, plus way too many specialty focused “news-like” channels, such as the Weather channel and the Money Channel. We’re awash in minutia, with only a little news mixed in. We’re drunk on the underbelly of societal misbehavior. And, it is even worse in an election year (which in reality isn’t a year anymore; it’s a constant). We get endless garble from political pundits, analyzing every tick of activity, not just reporting it, but endlessly speculating on how it will affect the outcome. I misstated that point; the pundits aren’t just reporting and speculating; they are arguing about it, and constantly talking over each other creating a mishmash of noise. 

True facts are often lacking as news outlets race to be first with a new twist on the hot topic of the day. Everything and everyone is fair game: the family of the victim of a brutal murder gets a knock on the door and a mic in the face. The wife of a disgraced senator is rushed at a church service with none-of-your business questions on how she feels about her husband’s misbehavior. The victim, and the victim’s family are victimized all over again, just so the insatiable 24-hour news media can feed.

It’s an agonizing process as they repeat, again and again, the alleged facts. With an endless stream of repeated video running in the background, slicing and dicing the story into minute components and delving in depth into every morsel ad nauseum. And, we get hooked! We listen and watch, and to join the reporting staff by rushing to tell each other the latest tidbit we just heard on TV. Oh yes, August 1, 1980 was truly a day in infamy.  (Written in the Owego kitchen)

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August 31, 2016 Article

The Old Coot lived for recess.

By Merlin Lessler

The Florida legislature has been working on a bill that mandates 20 minutes of free playtime in elementary schools. House Bill # 833 passed the House in February and the educational elites went nuts. They don’t want to waste 20 minutes of school time on recess. So far, they have been successful in blocking the bill; it’s bottled up in a senate committee and most pundits think that’s where it will die.

Wow! Am I out of step (as usual). I never would have survived a school day without recess. We had two 15 minutes periods of freedom in an otherwise rigidly regimented educational environment. It was those recess periods that kept me going. Something to look forward to other than the 3 o’clock dismissal bell. It kept us in line too. We knew we could be sitting at attention at our desk while the rest of the class whooped it up on the playground if we misbehaved in class. My crowd, on the boy’s side of the room, considered it capital punishment. We could withstand getting sent to the cloakroom, to the corner of the room, to the hall and even to the principal’s office as punishment for our crimes. But, to miss out on recess; that was a death sentence.

All the boys had ADD in those days. It wasn’t called that, and wasn’t controlled with medicine. It was simply referred to as “ants in the pants” and passed off with the comment, “Boys will be boys.”  Recess kept it at bay. Both, the promise of freedom, and then the actual experience. Our excess energy was drained off as we ran around the playground playing tag, bat ball or that now politically incorrect game, dodge ball. Now that I look back on it, the teachers must have liked recess as much as we did, a break from facing a classroom infested with a dozen or more twitchy, ants in the pants, boys with an attention span that was measured in seconds. The teachers had 15 minutes of peace and quiet, twice a day and another break at noon when we walked home for lunch. This was back in the day when neighborhood schools were in vogue. We walked to and from school in all kinds of weather so we were equipped for outdoor recess, no matter what the weatherman threw at us. There weren’t any adult monitors on our playground, but Mrs. White’s 5^th grade classroom overlooked the play yard. We could spot her peering out her window every so often and that was all it took to keep us in line.

The legislative effort in Florida to force recess back into the schools shows how far afield the educational system has strayed. How dare the school officials deny kids their inalienable right to recess? Too many people making educational policy decisions forget what it was like to be a school kid. They are more focused on a narrow field of test scores than making sure the kids are well rounded. And, believe me, recess on a playground helps round out a kid’s education. (And, makes sitting in class a little more bearable.)

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