Dave Williams is a radio news/talk personality originally from Sacramento, now living in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Carolann. They have two sons and grandsons living in L.A.
Today is Misao Okawa’s birthday. She’s 116, the oldest person alive on Earth.
From time immemorial it has been human compulsion to beat a path to the eldest of our tribe in search of epiphany, the spiritual and dietary recipe for eternal bliss.
What is the secret to a long, satisfying life?
Today that path brings us to Misao Okawa, the Sage.
And do you know what she said?
She said, — and this is apparently the direct quote:
“Eat and sleep.”
And that was it.
The multitude waited for more but no more was forthcoming. Misao Okawa just smiled through those ancient eyes as if to say, “There you go, run along now. And keep off the lawn!”
Eat and sleep.
As a mere toddler of 62 I’m a bit disappointed. But she obviously knows what she’s talking about.
I just stumbled across this quote again. I’ve seen it from time to time before but now that we’ve lived in Texas for awhile it makes sense. In the words of Texan Dan Jenkins it rings “dead solid perfect”.
“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
–John Steinbeck, 1962: Travels With Charley: The Search For America
I don’t imagine that anybody in the world can get it except those of us who get it.
John Steinbeck was no Texas braggart, he was a Californian at a time when California was a wholesome youngster of a state just beginning to flower.
I’m no historian or philosopher but it seems to me that between the two Texas has had a rougher time of it and refuses to forget.
But, even if you don’t get it, as Lyle Lovett sings in his song of the same name, “Texas wants you anyway.”
Philip Seymour Hoffman was discovered on the floor of his bathroom with a needle in his arm and a lot of heroin nearby.
His body was found when he failed to pick up his three kids from their mother.
Five days later the media continue to pick at the story like flies on a carcass while hailing Hoffman as one of the greatest actors of his time, a wonderful man and father. Our cultural loss is apparently immeasurable.
Avoidable death is always tragic. Beyond that, I don’t know what to think.
I understand that addiction is an insidious disease that claims many innocent victims. On the other hand, this guy left three young children to grow up without their father.
I had a treasured friend I’ll call Harvey who killed himself a few years ago. He put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His son found him a couple of days later.
I still love Harvey and but I also hate his guts for what he did.
As the media fawns over Philip Seymour Hoffman I find myself curiously unmoved. And, I’ve just decided that’s okay. There are some things I just can’t figure out.
I write less than I used to. As time goes by I am becoming convinced that I don’t have anything original or interesting to say.
When I was young I was much smarter. Wisdom came to me so fast I couldn’t explain it all.
But, over the years I’ve come to realize the older I get and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.
That was an original thought when I thunk it. Nobody enlightened me. I had never heard or read anything like it. It was a brilliant and original epiphany. But now we have the Internet and ego crushing reality is just a search away.
A minute ago I typed “The more I learn…” into Google and here’s what popped up:
The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother to learn? — George Bernard Shaw
And:
The more you know, the less you understand. — Lao-Tse
And the real stunner:
The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know. — Socrates
Socrates had my original thought some 2,400 years before I did and said it more succinctly!
AND, in ancient Greek!
Socrates was a wise guy.
Worse yet, I’ll bet he wasn’t the first guy to figure this out, either. He just had a tremendous publicist.
I suppose having an idea expressed by one of the great thinkers in history come to me all by itself is cool but there’s no point in my passing it along. It obviously occurs to everybody eventually.
Plus, if we all regurgitated every brilliantly mundane original thought we have what would become of the poor philosophy majors who have nothing else to do with their educations?
The other reason I don’t write much anymore is because Americans don’t read much anymore.
We don’t consume information, we spew it.
We Tweet. We text. We spend our days expressing every banal thought that crosses our mind in such a way that we don’t have to bother hearing or reading a response.
Maybe we don’t want response. We’re just spewin’.
Maybe we’re just trying to shut off the noise and hear ourselves think.
I could be wrong about this.
Maybe, but how can I know?
I’ve learned so much, so fast, I’m rushing toward total ignorance.
I’m one of those word nerds who drives his family crazy by correcting their speech and writing. I do it to be helpful, I really do. I’ve learned to lay off in public because people are embarrassed if you point out an error in spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, or word choice. They protest, “You know what I mean,” but they’re really just embarrassed by their ignorance.
Why, then, are dictionaries enabling rather than informing them?
English is said to be the most difficult language in the world to master. But, for its complexity, it is also the most glorious.
There are no true synonyms. Every word that essentially means the same as another has its own unique feeling and implication. These implied emotions and judgments allow excellent writers to write between the lines, to manipulate perspective and emotions by inference rather than directive.
The best writers never tell you what to think or how to feel, they merely lead the way and allow you to discover yourself in their path. That’s the power of the language.
Words are my business. I talk on the radio for a living and write a bit on the side, so this stuff is a big deal for me. I don’t expect most people to understand or care about the subtleties and nuances of the language.
I don’t point out slightly off-target utterances, not even to my wife, just the ugly errors that may lead people to misunderstand or misjudge her. But I do ask English speakers everywhere to join with me in protest of officially redefining perfectly good, very specific words simply because so many people are too lazy to learn to use them correctly.
The Oxford English Dictionary has thrown in the towel and declared that the constant misuse of the word, ‘literally’ is now acceptable. It can mean literally or it can be used for emphasis as in, “It was literally raining cats and dogs.”
These horribly conflicting definitions are 180 degrees out of sync. The word “figuratively” is effectively dead. “Literally” is now meaningless.
Education is apparently no longer the Dictionary’s purpose. The arbiters of our language seem to have decided it is nobler (and perhaps, more politically correct) to reflect rather than guide communication. In doing this they leave it to the reader or listener to determine if cats and dogs are actually raining down from the sky or if it’s just a figure of speech.
And what difference does it make, you may ask? In this example, probably none but it does empower hyperbole in ways that make purists like me panic for our sudden blindness.
If I can’t trust you to say precisely what you mean or to understand what I’m saying, what is the point in either of us saying anything at all?
These days we’re all giving up. We shrug and say, “Whatever.” Even the Dictionary is doing it.
We all suffer when our ability to communicate with specificity and clarity is eroded.
I understand that language is fluid and always evolving. I’m okay with that even though it can be annoying. I ply my trade using colloquial English and I adore slang, it’s the spice that enriches the language but is useless by itself.
Definitions can’t be allowed to contradict themselves just because people are lazy. At this rate, in a couple of generations communication will have devolved into grunting and pointing at things.
(That’s neither literal nor figurative, it’s just sarcasm.)
Let me repeat and clarify that: a gold crown fell off of a tooth while I was eating ice cream. Not while I was chewing on taffy or beef jerky…
Ice cream.
Not crunchy butter brickle ice cream; not nutty sundae, rocky road or Ben and Jerry’s Preposterous Peanut Brutal ice cream…
Just plain old chocolate ice cream.
And guess what? It doesn’t hurt at all, not a bit. I have no need to rush to a dentist for an extortionately priced bicuspid emergency. The tooth has been dead for years. My whole mouth is dead, apparently. I’m just going to leave it be.
And that, friends, is the thin silvery lining surrounding the big black cloud of aging. When you reach a certain point pain apparently serves no purpose.
I got my first kiss from a girl when I was in third grade. That’s what, about eight years old? That seems ridiculous, though I’m pretty sure of it. I was there.
Her name was Lorraine Latorre and I recall her only vaguely before and after the moment she appeared out of nowhere and, for no reason I can recall or imagine, kissed me on the cheek on the playground.
Let the record show I did not return the kiss.
But I liked it.
I don’t remember if either of us said anything before or after the kiss. I don’t remember if I thought she was cute before then, though I sure as heck thought so afterward.
(Stock photo of kids; sadly, not Lorraine and me.)
And let’s stop for a moment right there and ponder something psychologists have no doubt picked apart into tiny, tasteless, tedious pieces:
How can pre-pre-pre-pubescent kids be instinctively attracted to a person of the opposite sex? Isn’t there a biological component required to engage a chemical reaction that third graders haven’t begun to physically develop?
I didn’t desireLorraine and I’m sure she didn’t have any such feeling for me. We were eight, we weren’t capable of desire.
So, why was it a happy thing? Lorraine kissed me on the cheek and I liked it.
But, why?
She was a beauty, I remember that. She had long dark brown curls and a complexion that was just slightly darker than mine.
If I was writing a sizzling novel of elementary school lust I’d probably describe her skin as “florid” and I’d throw in a passage about the flirtatious, dancing fire in her eyes. Frankly, I don’t even remember what she looked like except for my vague description of her hair and skin. The experience of an eight-year-old sifted through five-plus decades of life is very sketchy and requires a dash of imagination.
Lorraine had an older brother named Ron, I remember that for sure. He was probably in fifth grade at the time. I steered clear of Ron because he was older and just too cool to approach. He was Eddie Haskell to my Beaver Cleaver. And, because I was afraid he’d find out what happened on the playground that day and beat the ever-loving snot out of me even though it was his sister who had kissed me, not the other way around.
But I didn’t just fear Ron, I envied him, too. He was grown up (ten or eleven!) and cool. He lived in the same house as Lorraine. He watched TV with her, ate dinner with her, went on vacation with her for cripes sake and probably even saw her every night and morning in her pajamas!
Lorraine Latorre changed me forever. She injected an Adam and Eve aspect into my life I couldn’t possibly understand at the time and still don’t. But I do remember that moment.
She kissed my cheek and I liked it, though I have no idea why.
Like you, I worry a bit. Okay, maybe more than a bit. We all do.
We worry about our jobs and money, our personal relationships and whether our kids are healthy and happy.
We worry about big stuff like climate change and politics, we stress over little stuff like our weight or a new gray hair.
Worry, worry, worry!
We even worry about that.
On Friday September 12, 2008, 25 people got out of their beds long before dawn, prepared themselves for work, kissed their families good-bye, left the house and died. They were killed in a freak commuter train crash in Southern California. My KNX radio partner, Vickie Moore, and I told their stories with relative dispassion because that was our job but I never got over the soul-jarring realization that you can walk out of your home one morning and never return.
It happens every day all over the world, of course, but we never imagine it happening to us. Among all the trivial stuff we worry about it never occurs to us to be worried about sudden, dumb luck death.
Caught on video: The explosion in the town of West, Texas, April 17, 2013.
It happened last night in the nearby, very small town of West, Texas, which one resident described on the radio this morning as “a Mayberry kind of place.” There was a fertilizer factory in West which employed and supported a good portion of the 2,600 people who live in the town. It caught fire at 7:30 p.m. and 25 minutes later it blew away everything within a five block radius.
Now, almost 18 hours later, they’re still looking for bodies, alive and dead. Texas officials tend to play their cards quietly. Ten hours ago they allowed that there may be as many as five to 15 deaths. Most likely there are dozens of others who died with no warning, people who hadn’t even been aware of the fire but were close enough to have life literally blown out of them as if they were birthday candles while they finished supper, watched TV with their families and fed their dogs.
When things like this happen and my work day is done I wonder about that. What’s it like to die with absolutely no warning? One moment you can be laughing and the next moment you’re nothing.
There is no sense to be made of this sort of thing.
But today I’m not worried about anything. Nothing at all.
It’s early April. The North Texas wind is, as they say, blowing like a bandit. White, fluffy clouds are scooting quickly and I have that wonderful aching feeling again, the one I’ve had every March and April of my life for as long as I can remember.
Cool, soggy dirt, the smell of new wet grass. It’s spring.
Baseball season is back.
In the early 1960s, when I was a kid of 13 or 14, I spent my summer days on a baseball field on Thomas Drive in North Highlands with my buddy Norm Miller. We always got there right after breakfast and didn’t leave until nearly sundown.
Sometimes we were eventually joined by other kids. Often we were not. Didn’t matter to us. Norm and I would throw baseballs at each other, taking turns swinging for non-existent fences, hearing cheers from imagined crowds.
My hero, Willie Mays
The stars of our daily fantasy were our San Francisco Giants heroes: Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, Jimmy Ray Hart, Tom Haller, Jose Pagan, Jim Davenport, and the Alou brothers. We loved them all and paid tribute in our two-kid fantasy game by batting left or right-handed as they did and even mimicking their unique batting stances.
Mays looked at the pitcher with both eyes, not just one. Cepeda held his monstrous piece of lumber straight up and circled it slowly. Matty Alou was an odd duck. He always held his bat head pointing at the ground behind him as if it weighed 40 pounds. He made it work quite well.
As make-believe Giants hitters, we advanced to the plate mimicking Candlestick Park public address announcer, Jeff Carter.
“The batter, number 5, Tom Haller!” We heard the cheers in our heads as we had in our occasional real-life visits to the Stick.
That’s how Norm and I spent our summer days, in baseball heaven.
One day an old man wandered up behind the backstop and watched for a while as I threw slow fastballs and flat curves to Norm, who was always a sucker for any pitch high and away as many of mine were.
Balding, portly, and puffing on a cigar the man behind the backstop watched. We thought nothing of him until he eventually hollered, “Hey, mind if I take a swing?”
In those days it never occurred to any kid to say no to any adult request. It was a weird thing for an old fat guy to ask but we never thought about running home in fear and suspicion. Bad things didn’t happen to kids in the 60s.
He just wanted to hit a baseball and we said, “Sure”.
Together, Norm and I had collected a kid’s treasure trove of baseballs, maybe three or four between us. Some had their torn covers taped shut. Maybe one had all its seams intact. That’s the one I picked up as Norm ran out to center field.
Something told me I should impress this old guy with my best stuff. I was only 13 or 14 but on that particular day I had never been older and I had never played baseball with an adult.
I concentrated, scraped my toe at the non-existent pitching rubber, peered in at the non-existent sign from non-existent Tom Haller, and fired in my best non-existent fastball.
Thwack!
The fat, bald guy slammed it on a line into centerfield and hadn’t missed a puff from his cigar.
Two or three more times I threw baseballs as hard as I could and the old man peppered them around the deepest outfields, left to right. Poor Norman was run ragged chasing them down.
The old man smiled, dropped the cigar on the grass beside him, and got down to business.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
He slammed everything I had that came anywhere near the plate. A couple of wild pitches he let pass but had to chase down because there was no catcher. He casually ducked the ones that were flying straight toward his head.
The game ended when the bat splintered. It simply gave up, glued, nailed, and taped together as it had been to begin with.
When the old, fat, cigar-chomper came out to the infield, grinning from ear to ear and offering to pay for the bat, we said nah, it was already broken. We were just amazed at what he had done and asked him, with the ignorance of youth: “Did you ever play baseball?”
He smiled again and took the wallet out of his back pocket. Then he carefully fished out a yellow newspaper clipping nearly twenty years old.
I’m sorry to say it didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I remember nothing about it now. But his wallet also displayed his driver’s license and his name caught my attention.
Wikipedia explains the rest of the story.
Carl Anthony Furillo (March 8, 1922 – January 21, 1989), nicknamed “The Reading Rifle” and “Skoonj,” was a right fielder in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. A member of seven National League champions from 1947 to 1959, he batted over .300 five times, winning the 1953 batting title with a .344 average – then the highest by a right-handed Dodger since 1900. Noted for his strong and accurate throwing arm, he recorded 10 or more assists in nine consecutive seasons, leading the league twice, and retired with the fifth most games in right field (1408) in NL history. – Wikipedia
Did you know that people really do have biological rhythms which define us as morning people or night people? Neuroscientists have discovered some fascinating differences in how our brains are wired.
For one thing, night people apparently get stronger and more energetic as evening grows late. We morning people tend to hit our peak well before noon and then our energy and brain functions level off until drowsiness overtakes us just after the evening meal.
On the other hand, morning people are supposedly happier than night people! Who would have guessed that? I always suspected there was a party starting just as I was going to bed. That’s apparently a large part of the problem for you owls. One study calls it “social jet lag,” a disruption of circadian rhythms caused when you stay up late but are forced by responsibilities to get up early the next morning whether you want to or not.
(And by the way, your grumpiness really puts a damper on our bubbly morning effervescence. Try to keep it to yourself, okay?)
Here’s one final scientific finding that supports everything we’ve long believed: the older we get almost all of us become morning people even if we were night people when we were younger.
Does this sound a bit suspicious to you? I believe the science but the more I read I keep coming back to a physical reality that circadian studies just don’t seem to support.
I’m tired because I’m old. I wake up at four or five a.m. because I fell asleep in front of the TV ten hours ago.
