The Old Coot is losing his vocabulary. Published in the southern tier of ny..

 The Old Coot is losing his vocabulary.

By Merlin Lessler

There are certain words in the English language I can’t use anymore. It’s an old Coot thing. Words like “hop,” as in hop on a bike. I tilt mine at a severe angle, swing my leg so it barely makes it over the seat, straighten the bike back up so I can mount it and pedal away. But first, I feel for a pedal, push it up high, and then off I go, like a newborn colt trying out its legs for the first time. Another word is “dash.” If I applied for a Door-Dash job, they would have to replace the word dash with limp, shuffle and weave to the door.

Equestrian is another word I can’t use, not as it applies to me anyhow. I rode a horse on a trail in Utah at Zion National Park a couple years ago. His name was Frosty. It suited him to a tee. He was chilly, to say the least. He knew I was a hesitant rider and decided to make it my last time in the saddle. He kept trying to bite my leg and paid no attention when I pulled the reins. He bounced me along for more than an hour; I ended up with a nice blister at the bottom of my spine. I was never much of a rider anyhow. A horse I rode when I was a kid, bolted from the group, and galloped back to the barn. I ducked just in time to avoid smashing my head into the door frame. At my daughter Amy’s wedding, I led her on a white horse to an outcropping on a mountain in Colorado. The horse constantly nipped at and pushed me. No more equestrian antics for me.  

 

I can’t say “skip” anymore. Ten years ago, I got it into my head that I’d like to skip; it was something I loved to do when I was a kid. I skipped all over the south side of Binghamton. You can cover a lot of ground, and fast, when you skip. Close to running speeds. Ten years ago, it was still in my vocabulary. I tried it the other day. It wasn’t skipping; it was a jerk, wobble and stumbling kind of thing. Skip, as in skipping, is lost to my vocabulary. As is chin-up, hanging from a bar and pulling yourself up. That’s gone as well. I did 1/4 of one last week. What’s my point? Hang onto your vocabulary as long as you can.

 

The Old Coot looks back. (Published 08/12/2026)

 The Old Coot notices the old dress code.

By Merlin Lessler

Gerald R Smith, the former Broome County Historian and now Executive Director of the Tioga County Historical Society, had a column in the Binghamton Press a few weeks ago. It included a picture of a group of Endicott Johnson Shoe Company workers, circa 1935. The picture captured the images of fifteen workers and one foreman. The foreman was standing next to a rack of leather soles that the workers had carved out of thick, leather slabs.  He wore a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a tie and suspenders. It kind of surprised me.

Then, I looked at the workers; even more of a surprise. All 15 were in collared shirts, protected by work aprons; nine of them had on ties; two wore bow ties. One worker wore a derby hat, another wore an old fashion golf cap, sometimes referred to as a news boy cap. This crew was better dressed than most people you see in church today. Even better than some people at wedding receptions who call their dress style, casual chic. I’m sure none of those guys took their shirts to the dry cleaners, nor were they made from permanent press material. You can be sure they were cleaned in a ringer washer, hung out on a clothesline to dry and as you probably guessed, ironed by their wives. That’s the way it was in circa 1935.

My grandfather was a foreman at EJ’s in the early 1900’s. My mother worked in an EJ office in the 1930’s and I worked there in my teens during summer break, pushing around racks just like the one the foreman in Gerald Smith’s article was leaning on. Years later, I acquired three of those oak racks that became available after EJ went out of business. I removed the glue that had layered up over the years and refinished them. They were unique shelves for books, quilts and other vintage items that we collected. The only one left is in my daughter, Amy’s house, holding up quite well after 100 years of service. What’s my point? People were better dressed 100 years ago.

 

 

Photo From Gerald Smith’s column

The Old Coot had phone fun. (Published 08/05/2026 in NY)

 The Old Coot made crank calls.

By Merlin Lessler

I love my cell phone. It makes life easier in so many ways. Even fierce resistors to technology can now be seen scrolling through their devices in public. Ninety-seven per cent of our adult population has a cell phone. It has saved lives and eliminated millions of inconveniences.

But, and there is always a but, we have lost some things in the transition from land lines to cell towers. Like the crank calls kids of my generation made. We’d call strangers and ask them, “Is your refrigerator running?” When they replied that it was, we’d burst into laughter and say, “You better hang up and go catch it.”

If a woman answered, we asked her if she was the lady who did the washing. If she said no, and she always said no, while breaking a gut we’d say, “Why you dirty, filthy thing.”

With cell phones you can’t listen in on a party line like we did in my day, where several households shared the same wire coming down the street. Only one household could use the line at a time. You had to wait your turn, or like we sometimes did, listen in and then break in to claim to have an important call to make or an emergency, and need the line. The only phone snooping we do today is when we hear one side of a conversation from a rude, loudmouth yakking away on his phone in public.

 You can’t slam down your phone when you get mad like you could with an old Bell telephone. If you do, you ‘ll demolish your expensive phone. If your phone battery is dead, or you forget to bring it with you, good luck finding a public phone or someone willing to let you use theirs. Even if you do, you probably won’t know the phone number of the person you want to reach.  You can’t hail a taxi either; you need your phone to catch an Uber. I think the people who miss the landline the most, are the men who sat in a bar in the old days and shouted when the bar phone rang, “I’m not here!” They can’t avoid their wives like that anymore.

You can’t call directory Assistance to get someone’s number anymore. I tried. I got an A/I voice telling me that directory assistance wasn’t available from my location. You also can’t get the satisfaction of making a free long-distance call, which was expensive in the old days, by having the operator place a “person-to-person” call to your house and ask to speak to yourself. When I did it, my mother would say, “Merlin isn’t here.” Then she knew I’d made it to my destination, and it didn’t cost her a dime! I do love my cell phone, but I also miss those things you could do with a land line. I’m sure you can think of many others.

The Old Coot is positive? Maybe? (Published 07/27/26)

 The Old Coot is Positive, Almost, Maybe, Sort of!  

By Merlin Lessler.

 

I’m positive,” is something we say when we’re young, a time when our memories are firing on all eight cylinders. As we get older and discover we are sometimes wrong, it gets modified to, I’m almost positive.  With each new decade, our statements lose their assurance. I’m almost positive evolves to, I’m fairly positive, and then to I’m somewhat sure. By the time we apply for Social Security, all bets are off; we qualify every statement, with things like: “Or so I’ve been told” – “At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe” – “According to so-and-so.”

 

Every time we are corrected, it decreases our use of positive statements, transitioning us to where we aren’t sure of anything. Our language proves it: “I think his name is Bill.” – “I’ve heard the Murphys and the Johnsons are back from Florida.” – “I guess that we turn the clocks ahead this weekend.” We don’t know anything!

 

Then, a magical thing happens. All of a sudden, we’re positive again. It’s not that we’ve gotten any smarter, just the opposite. We know less than we’ve ever known. It’s just that we’ve moved into our 80’s. It’s a wonderful time of life. We don’t care what other people think. It doesn’t matter that we are corrected when we say that Owego celebrated its bicentennial in 1985 instead of 1987. Or, when we are talking to Daphne and call her Darcy. We got the first letter of her name right and that’s good enough. Old phrases come back into our vocabulary: “I’m positive!” – “I’d bet my life on it!” – “There is no question about it!”

 

People who stop me on the street and ask for directions get a full dose of my know-it-all, cocky attitude. It doesn’t matter where they want to go. I give all of them the same instructions. I send them to the high school. That’s where most strangers want to go anyhow. With great assurance and positivity I tell them to turn left on George Street and then right when they come to the statue of an Indian on a horse, even though the statue was removed a few years ago. 

The Old Coot misses the bumper Published in NY (07/22/26)

The Old Coot Misses the Bumper!

by Merlin Lessler

 I first aired this gripe, in print, 24 years ago. It’s time to recycle it in modified form.

 The car bumper is history. That shiny, chrome, steel bar that once graced the front and rear of our Detroit dinosaurs has disappeared; it has been replaced with a plastic, bumper-like object that shatters when it “bumps” into something. Some pick-up trucks and a few SUVs still sport a metallic bumper, but not cars. It’s another change I didn’t notice taking place. Now it’s too late.

 It’s too bad. It’s not just the shine that’s gone; so is the pride that we took in slathering chrome polish on our bumpers to finish off a ritualistic Saturday afternoon car wash. We lost functionality too. Where are you going to tie the baby shoes and tin cans when the bride and groom drive away from the church? And, where are businesses going to wrap the thin pieces of wire that held their cardboard bumper ads saying, “We had a blast at Hershey Amusement Park,” or “I visited Howe Caverns?” There’s no place to wrap the wire. Where will you stand to pick apples from a farmer’s tree when he isn’t looking and where can you attach a piece of rope to pull a friend out of a ditch? It’s more than the shine that’s gone. It’s a way of life that slipped away. And nobody said a word.

 When I tell my grandchildren about my favorite childhood Halloween prank, tying a stuffed dummy to somebody’s car bumper when they stopped for a red light in downtown Binghamton, they won’t know what I’m talking about. “What’s a bumper,” they’ll ask? They won’t be able to understand how we got even with the “meanest” woman on the south side of Binghamton on a blustery fall day in 1956. - The stealth we employed to fasten a length of clothesline to her bumper while she was in her backyard hanging out clothes to dry. -The care we took to cover the rope with leaves so we could connect it to her garbage can without it being visible. - The patience we exhibited as we waited for more than an hour in the shrubbery before she finally came out of her house and drove off. She turned left on Pennsylvania Ave, hell bent to get to a sale at Fowlers Department Store, oblivious to the racket she was making, oblivious to the now empty garbage can bouncing, rattling and leaping in the air behind her. My side still hurts from that laughing fit so many years ago.

 The kid who also blew a gasket laughing while hiding in the shrubs with the rest of us, the kid who had tied the rope to his mother’s bumper, turned to me and said, “Now let’s do it to your mother’s car!” It can’t be done anymore. There is no bumper to attach to. We’ve lost a lot more than a shinny piece of chrome. We’ve lost a way of life. Let’s take a moment of silence for another passing, “The car bumper is dead!”

The Old Coot can't whistle. (Published in NY 07/15/2026)

 The Old Coot can’t whistle.

By Merlin Lessler

I was riding on my old friend, a 1984 Sears, Free Spirit bicycle the other day and tried to whistle. I thought it would help with the “Open Mouth Syndrome” that I’d recently noticed and have been trying to correct. It’s not good to go around with your mouth wide open; it ruins your image, especially when you are trying to look cool. I thought whistling would help, by exercising my mouth and jaw muscles. But I couldn’t whistle. I’d lost my embouchure. (*)

I tried to blow into a trumpet a few years ago. I thought it would be easy since I’d played the trumpet in the sixth grade and later moved on to junior high where the band instructor switched me to a French horn; too many trumpet players signed up to try out for the band, and I was the worst of the bunch. The French horn section was short a player and no one tried out, so I filled the void. I wasn’t even sure which valves to push to get the correct note. It’s similar to a trumpet, but some notes are different. I tried out by faking my way through a practice piece and somehow made the band. I was assigned to the fourth seat, at the bottom end of the pecking order where I wouldn’t be called on for solos or duets.

I spent three years dragging around that heavy French horn through school halls and home on the bus. I hated it. It shouted, “Nerd!” My image was as bad as that of the guys who carried a briefcase. There were no bookbags in those days and only a few students in the entire school used a briefcase. The rest of us (boys) carried our books and notebooks under a single arm. Girls used two hands and cradled their books in front of themselves.

 So, now with my weak embouchure, I ride my bike and whistle; it comes out more like a whisper than a whistle. I pretend it’s a supersonic sound, above the human hearing range that only dogs can hear. But no dog has reacted to it as of yet.

I recently discovered I can fake a whistle through my teeth if I clamp them down and grin while blowing. But that’s not the whistle I want. I want a real lip whistle. If you see some goofball riding around town appearing to whistle and you don’t hear anything, that’s me. But at least my open-jaw syndrome won’t be on display.

 (*) embouchure – is the use of lips, facial muscles tongue, and gums when playing a wind or brass instrument. (or whistling!)  

The Old Coot won't go out on a limb. Published in NY on 07/08/2026

 The Old Coot won’t go out on a limb.

In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in a damp New England kitchen while also attending to her 6 children. The book caused the greatest stir in American literature since Thomas Paine’s, Common Sense, selling 300,000 copies in its first year.  It received an even bigger reaction in Europe, causing over half a million women in England to sign an anti-slavery petition. She attended crowded receptions, first in England and then with an extended stay in France. 

She particularly loved sitting beneath the trees in the Garden of the Tuileries in Paris, watching families come to spend the day, while legions of boys and girls were frolicking, racing, playing ball, etc. without making a hideous racket.  Unlike what she experienced in America. (*)

Now to my point, if I could, I’d say to Harriet, “Nothing much has changed in America; it has gotten even worse. You can't go to a beach or public park without loud yelps and screams filling the air. (Now, accompanied by barking dogs). Just the other night we were having dinner on an outdoor patio at a restaurant. Two kids were running around, fighting, yelling and screaming. Where were the parents? Inside, sitting at the bar, totally oblivious.

 I've experienced noisy kids running in a disturbing and noisy way for decades. Always asking myself, “Why don't the parents do anything about it?” I know enough not to scold a kid myself. I don’t want to climb out on that limb. I’d end up with a black eye or being escorted away by a police officer. And, be labeled an “Old Foggie.” My deepest sympathy goes to the teachers who deal with this modern-day version of undisciplined offspring. 

It wasn’t always a bad as it is today. It’s been a gradual change over time. When I grew the whole village (or neighborhood) not only helped raise us; they disciplined us as well Many times I was scolded by a stranger or felt the vicelike grip of a little old lady on my earlobe. The most effective of all was being told, “Young man, if you don't behave, I'm going to tell your mother!” That would do it. You didn't want to hear your mother say, “Wait until your father gets home!” In my case, I didn’t have to wait; my mother handled it right then. A slap on the back of the head, a switch to the legs follow by being sent to my room. No TVs in kid’s rooms; no cell phones or electronic devices. Hearing a parent say, “Go to your room,” was the worst punishment of all for kids who wanted nothing more than to be outside.

(*) The Harriet Beecher Stowe information came from “History Matters” quoting David McCullough from an essay called “The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe.