kenlassblog

In 1989 Sharon and I moved our family from the Birmingham, Alabama city limits to the northeastern suburb of Trussville, about 20 miles away. At the time, our new home was about two miles from the heart of this scenic little town, borderline “out in the country”. It sat on a fairly big lot, in a cul de sac, with a half acre backyard and a full basement in a peaceful subdivision sparsely dotted with similar homes.

We built a screened in porch off the back, and finished the basement, which, at differing times, would become living quarters for both of my adult children when they moved back home. When they eventually went off and got married, it became my man cave, gloriously repainted in the colors of my beloved Green Bay Packers.

Progress being what it is, much has changed in the last 31 years. The town pretty much sprawled out to us. Where once we were on the periphery of civilization, now we find ourselves right in the middle of it. The town built its beautiful sports and recreation park next door. Two of the finest elementary schools are on either side. Access to the interstate is just up the street. Shopping and restaurants have sprung up all around us. Our subdivision has expanded into four phases, most all of which are completely built out and lived in.

Combine this with everything that is happening today in the housing market. Interest rates are incredibly low, and new houses on large lots with full basements are hard to find, especially in central locations such as ours.

All of which is to say our humble little burg is suddenly in very high demand. Because of the interest rates, young couples with small children are able to pay top dollar for homes like ours. Many of my neighbors, seeing the ridiculously high prices they can now get for their abodes, have not been able to resist the temptation to put them up for sale, and they usually sell instantly.

People are constantly telling us its time to do the same. That we’re crazy if we don’t capitalize on the current housing climate. My own daughter is among the loudest voices, repeatedly reminding us of the money we could make on the deal (of course, with the ulterior motive of having us move next door to her for purposes of instant child sitting). Apparently we are fools if we don’t sell.

Here’s the thing. I love our place. Everything about it. Walking my dog in the backyard as he investigates the trees that I planted three decades ago, working crossword puzzles sitting in my porch, cheering on my team in my man cave, taking walks along the creek that winds around the sports park.

We’re content as two pearls in a clam, and I refuse to feel anxious about it just because there is money to be made.

I suppose home ownership for many is simply viewed as an investment. You buy it, make the trendy renovations, and when the time is right, you sell at a nice profit and restart the cycle somewhere else. Not the case for me. To me, a home is a place in which to grow roots and to seek refuge when the world gets too crazy, as it has during this Covid-19 madness. My kids were raised here. Now they bring their kids here. The walls witnessed the twisting trail of my middle-aged life, and ushered me into the senior stage. I know every inch of it, cleaned it, painted it, treated it with tender loving care for all these years. All of my victories were celebrated here, all of my defeats consoled.

Likely, there will come a day when all of our familiar and treasured neighbors will be gone, and we’ll be surrounded by young folks who will form their own social relationships, uncomfortable with including old fogeys like us. A day when I will no longer enjoy the smell of freshly mown grass when I cruise the backyard on my rider, a day when the increasing traffic around us will be too busy to bear. A day when we will eventually sell this place.

By that time, the housing bubble will probably have burst. Any profit we might make will be minimal or non-existent, and we’ll wonder if we were foolish for waiting so long.

In the mean time, if you need me, I’ll be on the two person rocking chair on my porch, listening to the blackbirds and mourning doves chirp me into taking a nap.

Well, I’m about to have one of those landmark birthdays. In a few days I will turn 70 years old and, quite honestly, I’m not handling it well. It’s got me a bit depressed.

I have no justification for being down. I feel great. By the grace of God I have no physical limitations. Just finished my annual physical exam whereupon my doctor pronounced me fit as a fiddle. I have an incredible wife, loving family, wonderful friends. I lack for nothing.

Yet, there’s something about that number. Why is it that 70 sounds so much older than 69? I was okay with 30, 40, 50, and even 60. But 70? Ugh.

I made the mistake of taking out my phone and asking Siri what the average life expectancy of a male in the United States is. She came back with an answer of 76.3 years. Gulp. That rocked my world.

So there you have it. In your 70’s you have to start seriously contemplating the big finale, the end of the road, the home stretch. I’ve reached the stage where, whenever I learn of the passing of an acquaintance or a celebrity, the first words out of my mouth are “Gee, how old was he?” All too often the reply comes back “Oh, he was seventy- ______”.

I have made absolutely no arrangements or plan for my final resting place. I’ve never wanted to think about it. Do I want to be buried or cremated? Who wants to ponder that? How do you even make that decision? On one hand, it would be kind of nice to have a grave with a nice headstone, a place where my kids and grandkids could occasionally visit, a cute epitaph like “I told you I was sick”.

But families travel their own path and one day mine may move on and leave me to the worms and the erosion of the wind.

Cremation seems cheaper and less hassle for all involved. Maybe my ashes could be split and lie in separate urns on the mantels of my son and daughter. Until the cat knocks it down and spills me all over the living room carpet, at which point I wind up getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner and deposited into the trash.

Maybe Michael Jackson had the right idea. I could be frozen in a hyperbolic chamber and reawakened when they find a cure for what killed me.

Nah, that won’t work. I get the chills when someone turns on a ceiling fan.

(Deep sigh) All this thinking about one’s demise can make you feel forlorn. Dang 70’s. It’s your fault.

Wait a minute….I just found another article on life expectancy. It says because of medical advances, the chances of a man reaching 80 are now about 62 percent. And the chances of reaching 90 have doubled from 50 years ago. Says here one of every seven Americans is over the age of 80!

Wow. That’s more like it. Looks like there’s a whole new chapter yet to be written. I feel much better. Guess I’ll put away that phone number for the cemetery office for awhile.

Happy Birthday to me! Anybody want to go jogging?

Before there was e-mail, before text messaging, before Face Time or Facebook or Face Masks or whatever, if you wanted to catch up with family and friends at this time of year, you would do so via Christmas cards. You’d go to that hard-to- reach drawer or shelf in your closet where you put things you knew you would only use once a year, and pull down that red box containing cards and envelopes……and……The List.

Yes. The List. It might be an address book. Might be a legal pad. Maybe just a ripped out sheet from a notebook. No matter how hard you tried to keep it organized, it was a mess of crossed out names and addresses, with updated names and addresses scribbled into the margins. It might well have coffee stains and sticky spots from where food and drink was spilled on it during long hours of writing and updating.

It was a pain keeping it current, and, of course, making those critical decisions about who stays on it and who goes. Did they send me a card last year? Exactly how many years should I send them a card without getting one in return before I take them off? What if I take them off, and they send me a late card after Christmas? Do I send one back? Wouldn’t that tip them off that I took them off my list?

Regardless, it was worth the stress, because sending them out usually meant you got several back in return. Each one would have a little hand-written summary of how things were with them and their family, maybe even a photo or two. It was your life line for staying connected. I looked forward to the mail arriving every day in December, anxiously anticipating another stack of news flashes from loved ones I seldom got to see.

Over time, much has changed. It seems fewer folks every year are motivated to put in the time to work through their list and write out the cards. So much easier, I guess, to bang out a group e-mail. I get it. Life is busy. Time is short. Still, I can’t help feeling something has been lost.

Those few minutes it took to write something personal to us in the card meant that, if only for a moment, that person thought about us and thought enough of us to want to share their own highlights, if only briefly.

Sharon and I still get several cards, and I’m still excited to open them and see who they’re from. Very few have any kind of personal message hand written in them. This makes me sad because I really want to know more about what’s going on with them. But I’m thankful nonetheless to still be on their list, and I console myself by keeping in mind that maybe they did have to think about us for a moment as they addressed the card.

At this point, I must engage in full disclosure. I have easy talking. Sharon takes on the task of writing out and sending our cards. Sometimes we consult together about…..The List…..but she does all the work. I just reap the benefits of reading the cards that come in. So I don’t mean for this blog to come off as being critical. As I said, I get it. I appreciate the time it takes to commit to the task.

I just hope it’s a tradition that does not fade away, as so many do because technology allows it.

So election day is finally here. I’m not sure why, but elections, particularly presidential elections, seem to bring out the worst in us. I don’t remember this being true when I was growing up. I remember Republicans and Democrats. We don’t have that anymore. Now we have friends and enemies.

The side that I like represents everything that is good and true and wholesome and American. The side that you like represents consummate evil, falsehood and betrayal. Can we just sit down and debate the issues? No, because everything you say is a lie and a direct threat to my family, my health, and the future of our great country, so I must shout you down so that you cannot be heard.

Of course, the candidates feed off of this. They know full well that most of us don’t have the time and/or the ambition to delve into the issues in a comprehensive way. They know full well that the great majority of Americans will cast their vote based on broad perceptions. Perceptions that may, or may not, be accurate, but which the candidates will try to promulgate nonetheless.

How else to explain the brutally personal TV ads which accuse candidates of everything from being senile to not caring if Americans die of coronavirus? The allegations are then denied in a reply ad, and then reiterated in the next one.

You see, it doesn’t really matter if the accusations are true. Only that they help to reinforce your broad perception of the candidate as being incompetent, uncaring and misguided, if not downright evil.

I am naïve enough to think there was a time when we could at least rely on the national news media to walk down the center of the road, to objectively interpret the noise and sift through the lies and half-truths. Where have you gone Walter Cronkite? Huntley and Brinkley? Sam Donaldson? Alas, today it seems clear most national outlets have chosen a side. The tilting of their coverage toward the political philosophy of their chosen side of the aisle has never been more obvious. Their newscasts are now more a pep rally than an analysis.

So into this morass we cast our vote. We hold our collective noses and pray we make the correct choice for our country. Deep down inside we all want the same thing. We want what’s best for America. Come Wednesday morning when the ballots are counted and the electoral votes are awarded, we will have our president for the next four years. Then could we all be friends again?

No matter who wins, it won’t be the end of our country as we know it. Our founding fathers were incredibly wise and constructed our government with so many checks and balances that good old democracy is not going away any time soon. The country will go on…..at least until the next election, when once again the destruction of our great nation will be at hand. (sigh)

The other day my son asked me an interesting question. He wanted to know if there was this much division and demonstration and open conflict between races back in the days of Martin Luther King Jr. My son was born in 1984 so the MLK days were well before his time.

I thought for a bit, and I told him I did remember a lot of protest and demonstrations in the 1960’s, but most of it was directed at our involvement in the Vietnam war. I do recall some racial violence and tension, but I told him I did not think it was as intense and “in your face” as it seems to be today.

He asked me what I thought the difference was. I thought for another moment. I’m pretty convinced the difference is social media. Back in the 60’s there was no vehicle for the emotional back and forth dialogue that exists today. We saw news reports on TV and read them in newspapers, and if you wanted to be heard you had to take the time to write a letter to the editor and hope it would be published.

Now you can sit in your living room with your phone or your lap top and instantly react to comments and posts you like or don’t like. The result is the equivalent of people vehemently arguing with each other, with emotions rising as the words get more intense. Except you don’t have to risk physical intimidation by doing this in person. You can say anything to anybody and still remain safely isolated in your recliner.

I know many people who are sweet and amiable in person but who then get on social media platforms and express blunt and inflammatory opinions they would never verbalize face to face. My Dad used to tell me “just because you think something, doesn’t mean you should say it.” Yet social media allows us to do just that. To pour out our festering fears and emotions with no concern of personal intimidation.

It has brought us to a kind of verbal civil war. Our side against their side, whatever your definition of sides are….black against white, liberal against conservative, Christian against secular, young against old. The problem is everybody has a side these days and social media is the battleground.

Problem is, there can be no winner in this kind of war. The casualties include our sense of love, trust and security.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The platforms we use to fight can also be used to understand and heal. Let’s try that. Imagine the possibilities if everyone would post something constructive and non-hostile.

If Martin Luther King were still here, he would click the “like” button on that.

I have two Facebook accounts. Well, anyway I used to have two. One is my “fan” page which I was required to set up by my employers when I worked in local TV news. The other is my personal account. While anyone is welcome on my fan page, I only friend people I know on the personal version.

If you got access to this particular blog post from a Facebook link, then you must have “liked” my fan page, for which I am very grateful. The reason I know this is because weeks ago I tried to access my personal Facebook only to receive a message that it had been disabled. I received a message saying this happened because FB has reason to believe that someone other than me was using the account. In order to have my account reinstated, the message went on to say, I have to “apply” for it by proving that it is really me trying to get in.

No problem, I figured. I’ll just call the customer service phone number and talk to a helpful tech person and we’ll straighten this all out………except that there is no customer service number. In fact, there is no direct way to contact Facebook whatsoever. You are directed to a “help center” where you can “send them a message”.

In order to get reinstated, I had to send them a recent photograph of myself. Whereupon I was informed that I then had to send them a photo of a valid picture ID, such as a driver license, to prove its me on the first photo.

I was convinced this was a scam from some hacker and I did some internet research on it. Turns out it was completely legit. FB does indeed require all these hoops just to “apply” for reinstatement. Then, having sent them the picture ID photo, I was tersely informed that it may take longer than usual to review my application because of the Covid 19 effect on their personnel.

That was about a month ago. I’ve never heard back. I still have no access to my personal account. Apparently Facebook will get around to it when they feel like it, if ever.

I couldn’t help but wonder how any business can get away with treating customers like this. But I have since come to some moments of clarity.

First of all, I now understand that I am not a customer. I paid no money for FB. The customers are the advertisers and the services that buy the email addresses of all the accounts. Secondly, the most recent public tally puts the world wide number of FB users at 2.6 billion……..2.6 BILLION!

Just think. You could have one billion unhappy users, and still have 1.6 billion more! With that kind of user base, Facebook doesn’t have to provide a customer service phone number. They don’t have to be in a hurry to help you get back on. They don’t have to care about you, period. And evidently, they don’t.

Turns out, there is life without them. The first several days I found myself trying to get back on just out of habit. but after about a week I have pretty much forgotten about them. If they never get around to reinstating me, I’ll be okay with that.

It does occur to me that if I was hacked and my account hijacked, the same could well happen to my fan page. I truly do appreciate you for reading my blog posts. If you get any enjoyment out of them, the best way to ensure you get them is to subscribe. That way you’ll get them in your email. In case you’re wondering, I don’t make any money off of these. I am not even remotely close to having enough subscribers to interest advertisers, and I’m totally okay with that. This is just a hobby and self therapy for me. Occasionally someone will comment that something I wrote made them laugh and brightened their day a bit and that is wonderful reward for me.

I will admit that Facebook has been good for me. It has enabled me to reconnect with several childhood friends and former co-workers with whom I had completely lost touch, in addition to keeping up with the day by day adventures of all my community friends. But if the FB gods never get around to plugging me back in, I’ll use the fan page and Twitter (@KenLass3) as much as I can.

Either way just know that your reading of my musings is a blessing to me and makes my day.

Being in self quarantine means spending a lot of time with……well….yourself. Inevitably this will lead to at least some self analysis. Over the years those who know me best have suggested that I have an obsession with avoiding waste. I have to disagree. I think my behavior is perfectly normal.

For example, if there is a light on in a room with nobody in it, I am compelled to get up and turn it off. Wouldn’t anybody? If there is a TV on with nobody watching it, I simply must shut it down. My young grandkids have Ipads on which they watch cartoons and play games. Often they will set the Ipad down still playing and wander off to do something else. I just can’t sit there and watch the batteries run down with nobody watching it. I have to pick the thing up and turn it off. Nothing obsessive about that. In fact, I’ll bet you’re right there with me. Take this waste obsession survey:

Does running water drive you crazy? If someone in your house is taking a shower, do you find yourself timing it? Do you wash dishes in the sink because you can’t bring yourself to use the water it takes to run the dish washer? Or better yet, do you just stick to paper plates and plastic silverware?

When temperatures drop below freezing, do you let your faucets drip overnight to avoid the pipes icing up? Are you then unable to sleep all night because of all that dripping water going to waste? When brushing your teeth, do you squeeze every molecule of toothpaste out of the tube before disposing of it? Do you use toothbrushes and razor blades until they disintegrate before moving on to new ones? Do you save unused paint for years and yet remain shocked when you pry open the can and find it has morphed into something resembling asphalt? Do you keep that comfortable old pair of slippers until there are so many holes in it they function more like sandals? When the kids pick at their food and leave most of their french fries on the plate, do you feel somebody has to eat them up? And by somebody do you mean you?.

When you do decide to cut loose and overspend on some sort of guilty pleasure, can you do so without feeling you have to cut back on something else? For instance, if you want to go out and eat at an expensive restaurant, do you think “Fine, but no fast food for breakfast or lunch this week?” Are you collecting a pile of pennies in your car but can’t bring yourself to spend them on anything? Do you keep scooping from a jar of jelly until you can see your reflection in the bottom?

If you answered yes to these questions, you are just like me. Personally, I think we are just being smart and economically responsible. So just ignore those who think we have become obsessive.

Okay, I have to end this now. I just noticed the dogs haven’t eaten all of the food in their dish. I need to pour it back in the bag. I’ll see you at the therapist office.

The internet has been the driving force in American culture for about 30 years now. It’s the best thing that ever happened to us. It’s also the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.

There are so many benefits to having instant information at our fingertips. You hungry? Type your order in the app, the food will be ready when you get there. No waiting. Heck, they’ll even deliver it to you. Miss your favorite TV show? You don’t have to wait for the rerun. It’s there on demand any time. Need to renew your driver license? Do it on the website. No waiting in line at the DMV. Nope, you don’t have to wait for just about anything anymore.

And therein lies the problem, the source of so much frustration for all of us when it comes to dealing with the threat of the Covid 19 virus. We have run into something we can’t fix by pulling out our phones and clicking on the app. We are told to stay in our homes. We are told to keep our social distance from each other. But most painfully of all, we are told to wait. And we can’t stand it. Patience, the ability to wait, has been bred out of us. We simply don’t know how to do it anymore.

What? The virus may not peak and run its course until June or July? We might have to keep this self quarantine stuff up for another 4 to 5 months? We can’t comprehend that. Even President Trump can’t wait. He is publicly setting Easter Sunday as a target to begin reopening the country. Yet every time he mentions that prospect, you can see the health officials behind him wince a bit. I picture a thought bubble above their heads saying “please don’t say that….not gonna happen.” The frenzy in our grocery stores is evidence that we just can’t wait for the supply to catch up to the demand. We have to hoard. Let the next guy fend for himself.

We’re going to have to relearn this virtue the hard way. The virus isn’t going anywhere. There is no vaccination and won’t be for awhile. The economy will likely continue to decline in the short term. People will continue to lose their jobs in the immediate future. But there is a corner to be turned, and we will turn it. We just have to wait for it.

So take a very……….deep……….breath…………now exhale slowly…………..let yourself relax. Realize this: You are healthy. You have people you love and who love you. God’s beautiful world still unfolds around you. There will be many tomorrows to pursue your hopes and dreams. Everything that can be done is being done by the brightest medical minds on our planet. You have no control over that. So don’t worry about it.

We won’t win this battle with fear, lack of cooperation, panic and anxiety. We will win it by waiting it out. Patience is our best weapon. Find it deep down in your arsenal. It may save your life.