BoomSpeak

The Last Cool Year

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digital lotteryIn the world of recreational mathematics—a crowd I am decidedly not a member of—a strobogrammatic year is one that remains identical when rotated 180 degrees. I know this despite having no business being in the “mathlete” circle. I’m so far removed from the math world that for years I thought Avogadro’s Number was just the secret ingredient in a really expensive batch of guacamole. (It turns out it’s 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is roughly the number of times I’ve had to explain to a cashier how to make change without the computer telling them what to do.)

But as it turns out, I’m a member of an elite mathematical club whether I like it or not. Boomers (and our elders) are the only people alive on earth today who have experienced a strobogrammatic year.

I was fourteen years old when the world last flipped: 1961. I remember 1961 because my brother graduated from high school that year. When he got his class ring, it had “19” on one side of the stone and “61” on the other. In an era where we had an “etiquette” for everything—how to tie a tie, which fork to use for salad—that ring was a rebel.

It was a big deal that he could wear it any way he wanted without having to think about it. It was the only part of 1961 that didn’t come with a manual on proper decorum. Upside down or right-side up, it always read the same.

To pull off this trick and be in the Exclusive Digit Club, you need digits that cooperate. In the world of “pure” symmetry, you only get five players: 0, 1, 8, 6, and 9.
The Singles: 0, 1, 8
The Doubles: 11, 88
The Big Leagues (4-digits): 1001, 1111, 1691, 1881, and our crowning glory, 1961.

We are currently in a very long, very messy 4,000-year “dry spell.” Because the number 2 is a stubborn, jagged little digit that refuses to look like anything else when rotated, there are no strobogrammatic years in the 2000s. The kids today are living through a millennium that is, mathematically speaking, visually illiterate. They’re stuck in a world that only makes sense if you keep your feet on the floor.

Unless medical science makes some terrifyingly successful leaps, none of the “disruptors” alive today will see the next flip. We won’t see another symmetric year until 6009. After that, things finally start looking organized again. We’re not just old; we’re mathematically balanced.

Mark Van Patten used to write a blog called Going Like Sixty and has been married to the same woman since 1968. Now he’s a songwriter…kind of…sort of. See what he’s creating at GitmoJams.com 

Game Drive

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a couple of lions showing unity and loveEver heard of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania? It’s a huge sunken bowl of an extinct volcano making a kind of enclosed zoo for many species of African fauna. I was part of a tour into this self-contained Eden conducting what are called ‘game drives.’ Basically, eight us Americans sat in an open-sided Land Rover while our driver pointed out the elephants, flamingoes, jackals and lions, dik-diks and gazelles. At one dull point we even paused to study a dung beetle pushing a huge turd. Another time we tracked a leopard stalking a waterbuck in the tall grass. Elephants, as you might imagine, were easier to spot. Also giraffes. Herds of gazelle and thousands of wildebeest circled flamingoes. Our guide used his radio to draw and be drawn to hot action spots with other guides.

But not all the wild life was out in the bush. One guy in our group, Alfred, was a roaring pain. He caught two lions mating with his iPad. Of course, he shared the pics with the village lads crowding and gawking like teenage boys drawn to a Playboy magazine. That bothered me. Here we were trying to appreciate a simpler throw-back life style…maybe they weren’t as simplistic as they seemed, but still, we had to respect their way of life. Alfred insisted on forcing modern tech on laid back locals, as if they needed cell phones and screens for a fulfilling life.

He was the kind who wandered to the river at dawn to hang over the riverbank on a rickety fence to watch hippopotami return from a night of foraging. And when we got to our camps for the night, he wandered all the more. I mean, we were squatting in the middle of wild-life territory—in a zoo without cages. Hell, I took out my hearing aids to miss the grunts of nocturnal lions ghosting between our tents. If there was any vantage point close to the edge of—you name it—that’s where you could find him.

After our farewell lunch, I pulled him aside, showed pics of him drooping over the hippo river. I told him I was planning to publish a book for African safari trips and wanted to use him as an example of the ‘problem customer.’ He shrugged, smirked and walked away. I sighed, resigned. What happened in Africa, had to stay in Africa.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

Hotel Humanity

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brightly lit hotel barIt has long been a secret desire of mine to spend my life living in a hotel. It doesn’t matter where, although the larger the city, the more appealing that life becomes. If money were no object, if family could re-adjust the values I planted in them about hearth and home, kith and kin, yeah, I could live indefinitely in a hotel. Sure, having your room cleaned, your laundry washed, and your bed made by someone else every day, not to mention the convenience of hotel restaurants, room service, reduced long-term rates and all that, makes it a sweet trade off for utility bills and fees we pay to “sit tight,” but there’s more to it than that. Hotel life isn’t for people with children, dependent elderly parents, or collectors of Hummel figurines, but it works for some people.

It doesn’t matter in what city I’ve stayed, or what hotel. As long as they have a bar the clientele never changes. There’s the woman in the slinky dress sitting on the corner of the bar sipping a split of champagne. Is she a hooker? Hard to tell. There’s the older businessman, distracted, but eyeing the women from either the end of the bar or from a table while he tries to look important as he makes text after text. There’s the loudmouth who bellows about his room, the service, the price of the drinks, anything he can think of. Anything to be noticed by everyone else, who largely ignores him. He’s the one who pisses off the bartender, who angrily throws the empty beer bottles in the trash with a deafening clang while she impatiently watches the last fifteen minutes of her shift tick by on the clock. There’s the couple, usually sitting at a corner table kissing and nuzzling, preparing to go upstairs to their room for a night of wild monkey love. There’s the dad who slipped down to the bar for a beer (no glass) after his wife and kids finally fell alseep in their room. There’s the group of conventioneers complaining about the traffic and sweating themselves through glasses of Jim Beam and gobbling the overpriced burger plate while trying to outdo each with how early their wake up calls are going to come in. And then there’s me, sitting at the bar, largely invisible, listening to the conversations and studying the human condition.

Yeah. That’s what I love about hotel life. It’s not about the room or the service or the little soaps, it’s about the people. Forget the gym, forget the pool, forget the spa. The bar is the only place you’ll encounter hotel humanity.

(Best of Boomspeak, February 2017)

Steph Waller is an author and composer. Books One and Two (With A Dream and With A Bullet) of her rock and roll series, Beyond The Bridge,  takes places in late 70s London. 

Notes from a Non-snowbird

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Here is something I haven’t seen in awhile – sunshine. The sky has been layered in ashy gray light for the whole month of January. Today, though, the sun pours over the snow and turns it white and shiny. Long, inky shadows from the trees criss-cross this canvas like lines of calligraphy. A soft breeze lifts puffs of snow off the roof tops and scatters it across the land. The sun pierces the icicles dangling from the branches and lights them from the inside out. This is the light that flows through my window and across the pages of my notebook.

Many of my friends don’t like snow. They fly down to Florida and gather in trailer-pod parks for the winter. I appreciate how the balmy, perfumed ocean breezes, powdery beaches, and tropical water serve as a tonic for a frozen soul, but its a little too crowded for me. The state is a hodgepodge of strip malls, amusement parks, congealed highways, chain restaurants and hospitals and instant care centers wrapped in a gorgeous coast line. Its a little too flat and congested for me, a crowded and cluttered foreground beneath a vast, empty sky. I prefer the contoured, gently rolling hills covered with evergreens, corn-stubbled fields, fresh water ponds and lakes scrimmed with ice and cattails, and skies filled with purple-bottomed snow clouds. I crave the clean, metallic smell of the air and the silence that blankets the the forest trails I walk on. I love to visit Florida, but if I stay too long, the inland breezes don’t quite cover the smell of gasoline and car exhaust, or the moldy aroma of decay.

Here is my advice for surviving a northern winter: do not go gently into this good season. Do not let it push you back inside. Do not let the silent weight of the arctic cold tether you to the stale breath of the furnace. Instead, go out into the teeth of the season. Let the wind tear your cheeks. Let the cold numb your fingers and burn your toes. Let the icy pellets sting your eyes. Climb the frozen waves along Lake Michigan and spit back at the snow clouds scudding through the sky. Rage, rage at the fury of winter’s might. Stand at the edge of the freezing dark and wring the pleasures from its dying light.

(From the best of BoomSpeak, 2018)

Scott Peterson is from the cold North of Kalamazoo, Michigan

Happiness vs Gratitude

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wooden seesawMy husband and I decided to bring gratitude into our lives everyday by naming three things that made us grateful that day. In the beginning, and still often, Mark names the same three things, “My sweetie, my dog, my home.” But sometimes he ventures into new territory, “I got the lawn mowed today” or, “I finished cleaning the garage.”

I can see that getting those things done makes him happy, I’m just not sure the feeling is the same as gratitude. Without a doubt, happiness and gratitude are connected. They are like twins, very similar, often found in each other’s company but, different in deep and meaningful ways.

Feelings of happiness, though frequently accompanying gratitude, are deeply personal and often connected to an accomplishment or something manifested. It is not a gift and doesn’t lift you out of yourself or connect you with something bigger. I will feel happy when I finish this essay or sit down to a nice meal I cooked. It is surely worth noticing happiness in life, but it isn’t the same as being aware of gratitude.

Gratitude moments are transpersonal, bigger than the little “I” self. They stun you with their depth and beauty, they leave you awestruck and feeling lucky to be alive and conscious of the moment. A school yard of laughing toddlers, the smell of coffee gently drifting into the bedroom, a good thick acorn fall, all quicken gratitude into my heart. There was nothing I did to create acorns, or toddlers, or to influence what coffee smells like. All those events were simply gifts. There are no feelings of accomplishment to them, there is just gratitude to whomever, wherever.

My sixty-fifth birthday is coming soon. I will be very happy sharing a table full of food with family and friends. I will be grateful to have those family and friends to share the meal with.

Lauri Rose lives in the mountains of CA with a neurotic lab, a handy husband and eight geriatric chickens.

Cell Phone Phobia

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retro phone handsetI don’t do cell phone.

If you call me on my cell phone, I probably won’t answer. Usually the thing is on its charger way over in my bedroom, although I do carry it when driving or walking alone.

Physicians’ offices insist on using it to remind me of appointments, no matter how often I say “LANDLINE” to them. I have hearing loss (yes, I wear powerful hearing aids) and a tremor. Can’t hear on the dang cell phone, and can’t punch those teeny buttons reliably.
(Hearing on the phone: kids mumble and speak too fast, right?)

A friend, who is too old to qualify as a Boomer, *only* uses her cell phone, not her landline. She even uses it to look up things on the internet, then complains about how it “never tells me what I want to know.” I’ve tried looking up things on my cell phone, and she’s right. My computer works better for questions, because I can see my last question and modify it as needed.

Googling “what happens if you don’t use your cell phone” found many posts about how anxious people felt without it, then how wonderful they felt after they hadn’t used their cell phone for a few weeks.

“When I checked my screen time a few days ago, I was shocked to see that I was using my phone for an astonishing average of 8–10 hours a day, this is more than a 40 hour workweek. No wonder I felt like shit!”

OR

“The first 24 felt anxious. I was having trouble adjusting without a phone because I got bored doing nothing but walking and drawing. The next 24 hours I started feeling really anxious about how bored I was that I started distracting myself with all sorts of activities.”

On the other hand, I do spend too much time reading Twitter and Facebook on my computer. Us humans will do anything to keep from, well, being human.

Judith Pratt lives in Ithaca, NY

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