The Old Coot solves a mystery. (Tioga County Courier, Sept 23, 2020 Article)

 

The Old Coot is elbow challenged.

By Merlin Lessler

 I’m sitting in a window seat at the Owego Kitchen, watching two robins waddle around, pecking at worms in front of the post office. Not too exciting you say. You’re wrong. It is. For an old coot, anyhow. It’s a nice distraction from a changing world. When you’re young, you can’t wait for change – to graduate from school – to get a job – to get your own place - to get married – to buy a new car. Eventually, you go the other way; you don’t want change; you want things to stay the way they are. That’s when you officially become an old coot. You’ve decided that change is not for the better, at least not for you.

 It means another friend moved away; he gave up winter and moved to Florida or Arizona. It means your favorite restaurant just went out of business. It means you’ve heard yet another clerk say, “They don’t make that anymore.”  You just want to block out the changes that pop into your life in an endless parade: eggs are bad for you, coffee is bad for you, meat is bad for you, it can’t be repaired, the lawn mower won’t start unless you squeeze the handle (and keep squeezing it the entire time you are mowing).  CHANGE! UGH!

 Today’s change is my elbow. The right one, to be specific. It hurts. It’s a new pain; I’ve never had it before. So, I sit here drinking coffee with my left hand, dribbling a few drops on a clean shirt, distracting myself by watching two robins. Eventually, I’ll have to get back to the elbow and try to puzzle it out, to wonder why I didn’t appreciate it last week when it felt so good. And, I’ll have to face the question, “What did you do to it?” When I reply, it will be the same answer I’ve had for every other new pain. “Nothing!”

 I did some “old man” push-ups (standing up and leaning into a wall). I moved some books to different shelves and sawed a board in half with a hand saw. Not really much of anything! I hate this conversation; it always gets me the same response, from everybody I complain to: my doctor, my wife, my friends. “You’ve got to expect that at your age!”

 I’ve learned to deal with these things, to turn lemons into lemonade as the saying goes (easier said than done, I might add). I’ll complain enough to get out of some unpleasant chores. I’ll make a sling or buy an elastic elbow support to let the world know that I’m sporting an injury. I’ll tell people it's tennis elbow. I won’t mention that the last time I played tennis was in 1991 when my daughter Amy beat me for the first time. That’s when I paraded out the tennis elbow excuse. Now, the pain that I faked so long ago, has finally arrived. It would be even more embarrassing than losing to a seventeen-year-old if I had to reveal the real cause. I figured it out as I sat here watching the robins. The pain comes from constantly walking around with a coffee container in my hand. My elbow finally gave out. I have coffee elbow! Ouch!      

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The Old Coot watches the show. Tioga County Courier Old Coot Article - 9/16/2020

 

The Old Coot Has a Day at the Beach.

By Merlin Lessler 

“You’ve come a long way, baby!” So touted the ad for Virginia Slims, a new cigarette that was marketed to independent minded women in the late 1960’s. It was true. It is true. Women had, and have, come a long way, breaking free of the shackles that held them back. Now, they stand or fall on their own merits. It isn’t true though, as some social progressives would have you believe, that there is no difference between men and women. Old coots know better. The fundamental difference hasn’t changed since we lived in caves. Men hunt. Women gather, and nest (and do everything else, I might add, including hunting). 

I stumble on these differences all the time, pursuing my favorite pastime – people watching. I’ve reported back on many of them - men can’t fold - men don’t listen - men don’t understand the good-bye process - men tape over their wedding video with a Giant’s football game and wonder why their wives are upset. And, as I observed at the beach, men can’t pick out a spot to set up their gear on the sand.

 It was warm and sunny, a perfect day to sit by the water and relax. I watched a brother old coot come out of his car, plop down a combination beach bag/cooler and set up two folding lounge chairs & an umbrella at the first open spot he came to. He sat down, lit a cigar and opened the paper to the sports section. He was in heaven! Then the storm clouds blew in; his wife arrived. The battle was on! Mind you, I was too far away to hear a word they said, but, I’m a master at reading body language, especially when the sparks are flying. She barked a few sentences in his direction; he shrugged, got up and gathered their stuff and stood there like a dummy, something us old coots do when we’re being supervised. She patrolled the waterfront, measuring the wind, the angle of the sun and other factors.

 Finally, the selection process came to an end. She signaled to the “dummy” to bring their stuff. She told him where to set up the chairs and the umbrella and freed him from her apron strings. He plopped down on his chair but quickly got back up, an appropriate response to the quick jerk of her head and the sharp glare she hurled in his direction. She then brushed off some microscopic grains of sand from the chairs and stood back to assess the layout. The nest was ready! He sat with a sigh, took a puff on his cigar and reopened the paper. Her work was done, she headed up the beach to examine the goods on sale in a craft market a hundred yards or so off the beach. She went by herself, knowing full well that men don’t know how to shop and she didn’t want a two-year-old (equivalent) tugging at her skit and whining to go back to the beach. I didn’t notice if she was smoking a Virginia Slim or not. I was in enough trouble as it was for repeatedly saying, “Yes dear, Yes dear,” while not listening, as is usually the case when I’m distracted by drama such as this.

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Old Coot versus the grocery store - Tioga County Courier article 9/09/20

 

The Old Coot turns in his wool coat.

By Merlin Lessler

 

It’s time for a new game plan! A new “Grocery Store” game plan! They’ve been herding us through their aisles like sheep for decades. Milk in one corner of the store, bread, as far away as they can get it. They try to entice us with goods along the route when we come in for a quick bread & milk run, the most common, dash-in-and-out, customer shopping errand. At least for nuclear families with a couple of kids. The bread supply used to be critical; you had to have it so your kid’s lunch could be packed for school. Nowadays, most kids eat school cafeteria food; my generation abhorred it. Even so, people still go on milk and bread runs.  

 

We’ve all suffered with it. You rush into a big-chain grocery store for milk & bread on your way home from work. Where’s the bread? - As far from the milk as you can get! Some “brilliant” marketing genius (I need to tread lightly here – I was a marketing guy at one time, but I was cured of the affliction) came up with this bread-milk placement plan. It’s a profit-based strategy, not a customer service strategy.

 

And, it works, to a degree. But for the most part, it annoys us. It’s been going on so long we take it for granted and put on our running shoes. Is it merchant bullying? It feels that way to me! Big-chain grocery stores aren’t the only ones that do it; how about running into a big-chain pharmacy to pick up a prescription? You have to go to the very back of the store, past the chips, the cereal boxes, the ice-cream cooler, the office supplies, the garden shop to get your prescription. Then we’re made to get in line behind a mark on the floor to comply with privacy regulations. But, we’re still within earshot and we make sure to listen when the customer talks to the pharmacist.

 

It should be no surprise that grocery stores and pharmacies employ the same tactics. They are basically the same entity, selling both food and drugs. As they continue to add products, merchandising will go full circle, back to the old general store. Except, there won’t be a warm glow from a potbellied stove with a cluster of old coots like me sitting around it in winter or out front in summer, perched on empty crates next to the fruit and vegetable racks. Milk wasn’t in the back of the store in those days; it was placed in the milk box on your front porch, waiting for you when you came down for breakfast.

 

How do we stop this debacle? I don’t know; it’s so ingrained in the store design philosophy it seems impossible to fix. I do the best I can; I get bread first, pick up a few extra loaves and leave them over by the milk cooler so someone who starts there can avoid a trip to the other side of the store. The geniuses in the corporate office haven’t figured out that the key to profitability is to focus on the customer, making the shopping experience hassle free, not some strategy that tries to trick us into an impulse buy. They think they can treat us like sheep? Will this ram ain’t saying, “Baa, Baa,” any more.  

 

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Old Coot encounters a battle-axe. August 2, 2020 Tioga County Courier Article

 

The Old Coot rediscovers the battle-axe.

by Merlin Lessler

I was hanging out with my friend Bishop in our backyard the other day. She’s married and has a different last name, but she’s still Bishop to me. That’s how old coots are; they don’t adjust to change. It was a hot, muggy afternoon and we were wading around in our tiny, shallow, garden pool like a couple of two-year old’s, shooting the breeze while my wife swept off the back porch, not quite ready to join us in the water. Then, I heard Bishop utter a word I hadn’t heard in decades, BATTLE-AXE! It’s funny how a word can transport you to another era, in this case, back to the 1950’s when battle-axe was a common term, at least in the Three Stooges, Abbot and Costello, W.C. Fields and other old rerun movies that I and my 10 year old friends consumed at the movie theater every Saturday afternoon. It was also in everyday use as well.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you are not familiar with the term or exactly sure what it means. It was quite popular back in those dark ages of my youth. I’m not sure exactly who Bishop was talking about; I was half listening as usual, but when battle-axe hit my ears, I laughed out loud. She’s a lot younger than me and I was surprised to hear her say it. Battle-axe, according to the dictionary, is an aggressive, domineering, antagonistic, overbearing forceful woman. A female bully in other words.

This is where I step in it, continuing on with a sexist topic from an era when women who didn’t act “lady like” were labeled with a whole array of negative terms. Terms that men escaped, even though their behavior was identical. A double standard of the vocabulary variety. How about: fish wife, old bat, hag, nag, backseat driver? Quite an array. Men were spared the critique; they were labeled with more positive terms like, strong willed, forceful, titan, sharp businessmen and the like. 

By the time the 1980’s rolled around, battle-axe fell by the wayside, but women still didn’t get a break. If they were the least bit assertive, they were called aggressive, pushy. Pushy men weren’t labeled. My wife and I have five daughters and seven granddaughters (not counting the boys), but I don’t advise calling any of them a battle-axe. You just might get a surprise. Or, a big laugh, like the one I gave Bishop.

 

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