Harrumph!

Surely it’s too late to become a person who dickers for everything…or anything. I wasn’t raised that way.

However this afternoon I found myself forced at my end of a complaining phone call to negotiate. It’s damn tough for me.

I grew up observing people who haggle, which suddenly became common when I went to high school in New Jersey and later lived a decade in Manhattan. Although here living in Cambridge for a while during college, I had one chum who took her sport to the Haymarket and got phenomenal deals, matching resolve with the stall vendors.

In many ways, I envy the hagglers. I’m not clear why I can’t get over this part of my upbringing. I feel very uncomfortable where others would jump right into proposing a deal, and then enjoying the back and forth, then being ready to walk away at any moment if there’s no progress.

Today’s haggle was thrust upon me. A tub refinishing company showed up to work when I was not back from the gym yet. The $399, plus $50 for a color other than white, bid suddenly shifted. The tub tech said the residual glue from the liner needed to go to get the glaze to bond — at an extra $150. I had gotten and agreed to the bid and she felt kind of stuck. The rest of the bath rehab depended on the tub refinishing.

I called after the job and the check writing. The manager alternated between unctuous and paternal.  Ha ha ha, he called his tech, and reported back to me that the extra cleaning was absolutely necessary, it took over an hour, and that we got off lucky, at the low end of the service fee. Then suddenly, we want happy customers. And so it went, with me expressing my surprise, disappointment and anger. He said he not only had the smart-phone image, but that my wife had approved the big bump. I said $445 suddenly becoming about $600 was unreasonable and that I’d told them before they arrived and even before our bid that there was glue from the old liner, as well as that their site said cleaning was part of the operation. Back and forth, back and forth, each of us added angles and details and posits.

I continued to feel and think the fee unreasonable. Then just as suddenly, he shifted to bargaining. When we were at an impasse, he asked what it would take to make me happy.  Suddenly I was back at the Haymarket, watching Peggy at work, dickering for a box of fruit. While I normally would turn away, I did feel the discomfort but felt compelled to get some morsel from the deal.

We went back and forth a few more times, but now to force the other to make an offer. He wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. I remembered from my articles for business magazines that the first one to make an offer loses.  Eventually though, he wore me down. He had no intention of telling me what he thought would make me happy. So, I looked internally at the $150 and figured he’d bite on on the low end, $50, or the silly fee for biscuit, instead of white.

He did. We did.

That is nothing to someone who grew up in a haggling family, but it was remarkable for me. I don’t do that.

I thought of Peggy and how easy that would have been for her. She attributed her attitude and skills to being Jewish. I have come to downgrade that stereotype. I do believe it is cultural though. My tub refinishing manager seemed by accent clearly Middle Eastern. Peggy was from a German, Ashkenazi heritage. As I learned working for a Roman Catholic, German deli owner, the traits that many attribute to Jews are often common among Eastern Europeans instead, everything being negotiable included.

Today’s bargaining session also made me recall the only time I got shipped to my adviser’s office in my three years of high school. I was a smart ass but skilled at knowing my edges, my limits. I’d push a teacher with over-familiarity and wisecracks, but ease up when she or he tensed.

My tub guy said a few times, “I want you to be happy. What will it take to make you happy?” That put me back in history class, senior year, in Mr. Sidney Mace’s room, and my moment of ignominy.

The wisecrack that broke my three year of magic was far from my funniest or worst too. Mr. Mace (or Misssssssster Maccccccccccccce as we said for his hissing sibilants) would on occasion scold me and my best friend, who sat directly behind me in the A-B row, for talking in class. That happened often as he still lived lived his WWII personal history and that was the period we studied.

It was only three days before classes ended, we’d done our papers and exams, all we had to do was to listen to yet more stories of the war campaigns he remembered.  He hissed, “Misssster Ball, it would make me very happy if you and Misssster Blumert would stop talking.” I recall then my throwaway line, “We want you to be happy, Mister Mace.”

There was a long pause and I knew that was another safe insult. However, perhaps it was the proximity to graduation or something less obvious about the moment, but after a few seconds, the whole class of perhaps 30 exploded in joyful laughter.

That was all too much for Misssssssster Macccccccccccccccce. He in turn exploded. He ordered me to report to my adviser, Mr. Otto, the short, patient guy with the fly-away wispy hair. I showed, he seemed confused, saying he hadn’t seen me in trouble before, noting that we had only a couple of days of classes, and told me to walk about the halls until the period ended and go to my next class.

The tub guy wanted me to be happy. I wanted Mr. Mace to be happy. None of that was sincere, but everything worked out for all involved.

I bet this is not the start of a bargaining life for me though.

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Humans are bundles of marvels. I think of how much like cars we are in one key way — both have so many systems and subsystems that should any of them malfunction, everything stops, maybe forever, and yet we generally perk along without these single points of failure failing. More broadly, we also react to similar mental, physical or emotional trauma and stress very, very differently.

That latter concept first clarified for me in the 1960s when I volunteered in a veterans’ hospital. While I knew WWI and WWII vets who had lost limbs, gotten holes shot in their heads, were blinded and more in battle, in the hospital, others in seeming better shape remained. They spent most days in bed or sun rooms, too emotionally harmed to function in larger society. Their contemporaries had largely gone on with their lives, marrying, parenting and working. One man’s very painful, very inconvenient maiming was another’s cause for permanent surrender.

Thus it is too with abuse. That may be sexual, physical or emotional, bullying, rape, incest or myriad other forms of cruelty. Most common surely is the sadism that hides under parental discipline, beating your children with hands or objects under the guise of discipline or training, replete with Biblical allusion to a single nasty verse. (Other Proverbs verses riff on this — 22:15, 23:13 and 29:15.)

It no surprise to readers here that I do not approve of parents beating their kids any more than of bigger children bullying smaller ones. I was not hit as a child and did not hit my three. By itself, my parenting proves little, but all three of my young men are polite, considerate, non-criminal and socially functional.

Belatedly it seems and prompted by such as youth suicides, bullying is finally OK to call out. Notably, Emily Bazelon’s Sticks and Stones book has lots of coverage, leading to nationwide chatter.  More personally, my friend who blogs as Uncle postd a series on his own considerable experiences with being bullied.  There’s even related junk science, like attempts to link a mother’s childhood abuse to her having an autistic child.

Truths include though that bullying and child beating are pervasive in our allegedly civilized America. For corporal punishment, most of Europe and Asia as well as Canada prohibit it in schools and in many places it is assault and battery. Here, parents can still take hand, paddle, stick or even belt to their kids legally, so long as they don’t cause massive or permanent damage. Lord love a duck, as my mother used to say in frustration.

An oddment to me is that people I have known and read of discussing their beating of their kids invariably say something like, “I was paddled and it never hurt me!” When I hear that, I invariably respond, “Other than leading you to be a child abuser yourself.” And we’re off to the races, as the punisher tries to find some justification for terrifying and physically hurting someone in his (actually more likely her) care.

How is it that some of us and be so bereft of words, so lacking in judgment, so in the control of transient passions that you can communicate your disappoint and anger only in violence?

To circle back to the concept that we differ in our responses to trauma, let’s consider how adults deal with childhood physical abuse like beatings. Some decide never to hit their own children, which I deem a rational and humane response. Others retain vivid memories, recollections/reliving, along with the anger and fear those bring…maybe forever. Others take sticks, hands, belts and such to their subject children in some perverted pay forward, when it is really their parents they should direct their hostility toward.

Quite a few adults have told me how their parents hit them. I don’t see any direct relationship between the level and intensity of abuse, and the resulting long-term response of the adult. What I do conclude is that beating kids is cruel and irrational. It does not teach by example or any reinforcing message. Instead, keeping a grip on your own emotions gives you a lot better shot at teaching and showing proper behavior.

Kids can be infuriating and destructive. The temptation to hit them can appear hundreds or thousands of times in the years you raise and train them.Maybe the key question we should ask ourselves when we are suddenly mad at them is what sort of parents do we want them to be to our grandkids?

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A good chum, who blogs as Uncle at Scratches, wonders on occasion on such as physical and sexual abuse. His latest was on bullying, rather on who does or does not become targets.

He wondered about the markers, perhaps brain, and other criteria that might lead to being the victim of others. I confessed on his site something he and I have discussed when bar-stool lubricated that I was pretty much out of these common cycles. Much like not overly regretting not having fought in Viet Nam, after hearing many decades of browbeating, bloody-faced, and unwanted sexual contact vignettes, I can’t say I would rather have experience those.

He did set me to thinking again in his vein though. Why did and do some boys and girls attract verbal, physical, sexual molesters?

Working backwards from my own life, I wondered how it was that I escaped and was not targeted.

Today I’m fairly large, with absurdly big shoulders and chest, and considerable muscularity. I wasn’t that way as a kid though. I was a bit shorter than others. While my Granddad nicknamed me Horse because I was strong, I was not the big, intimidating kid either in body or personality. I grew slowly and behind most other boys. Only at 15 and beyond when I was on the wrestling and then swimming team, did I bulk up.

I was also a scholarly, literary sort. Not only did I read everything and get good grades, I was out of sync with many classic boy pastimes, like stomping, stabbing and shooting small or large animals.

Seems to me that I ought to have been the target of the bad boys and men.

From another angle though, my family life was rather pacific. I have a single sibling, a sister 18 months my senior. She was as close as I came to being bullied, and that was in kindergarten and elementary ages. She’d take my stuff and hit me…what’s a sister for, eh? Our mother who had two younger siblings of her own kept telling her to cool it. The refrain was, “One day, he’ll be bigger and stronger than you.”  As almost always she was both terse and correct. When we reached physical equilibrium we quickly came to peace and have remained so since.

That very same mother did not beat us either. We came from a threesome that did not experience regular violence. My sister and I used to joke with each other as well as as friends who were regularly hit with hands, paddles, belt and sticks that we’d just as soon our mother was violent. Instead, she demanded to know why we had done something destructive or dumb or mean. We had to deal, actually deal, with our shortcomings. There was no catharsis of confession and penance that came with getting smacked around. It was a cerebral, emotional and moral experience.

Likewise, there was no sexual abuse in our home or our maternal grandparents’ where we spent our summers and vacations. Our deadbeat dad who remarried and disappeared was not a factor. Granddad and a set of great uncles delighted in playing the father role, particular to me. I had a gang of stable, long-term married men to mentor and watch out for me. None abused me in any way.

Thinking of my youth though, I do have a triple-sided theory of how I rolled to adulthood without the traumas it seems the bulk have endured.

1. Always moving. With my absent father who did not keep up his child support (military out of country and irresponsible), my mother took work running Red Cross chapters. The pay was only OK for women (by policy half of what a man would make running the same chapter), but she made it work. The deal though was that we moved every few years to the next chapter a man had hosed that my mother would come in and turn around…at half pay. That meant we were never in a school system long enough to become part of the native cliques. We weren’t stereotyped and thus were not relegated to some out-group that “deserved” ridicule, ostracizing or punishment. We floated until we left. In fact, I was better at that than my sister. I hated not knowing people and had great anxiety, but unlike she, I’d suck it up and pick the people I wanted for friends…and make that work. It did work.
2. Standing firm. Our mother was remarkable in many ways, not the least of which was teaching simple WWII-era virtues. She taught us to be honest and candid and responsible, without fail. If we goofed up, we admitted it and took our lumps. That also meant when someone confronted us or tried peer pressure to get us to behave in their bad ways, we said, “No!” That was always tough, but standing firm always paid off for me. (It still does.) In retrospect, I am surprised that the overbearing, bullying sorts took that from the shorter kid, with the glasses and armload of books. They did though. Resolve intimidates in its own way.
3. Glibness. I am not an astrology/sign guy. I was always amused though to read that my Gemini house supposedly is a tricksy sign, quick with words and skilled at getting our way. Actually that fits. I had a double talent when I was around folk who might do bad things to me. I was skilled at reading intent and I could almost always verbally defuse situations. When someone was turning one me, I didn’t ignore it, rather if I could not remove myself, I’d whip out my considerable joking and nice-guy skills to get the bully and ideally any hangers-on jolly and harmless. 

I’ll kick it around with Uncle some more. The topic is intriguing, particularly as those types of abuse seem to be the norm for so many. Why is always a good question. Sometimes meaningful possibilities appear.

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For the life of me, I can’t remember the Christmas tune the white church played in our house. It had music-box works and I enjoyed winding it up, returning it to the cotton “snow” lawn, and grokking the season.

My mother, Wanda, loved Christmas and did it up right. She’s dead, but we have retained much of her joy and rituals.  I’m very sure my sister dumped the oldest fixings and does not decorate as intricately. Here, we almost do.

Perhaps like the proverb of dubious provenance, there are no atheists in foxholes,  pleasure in and even obsession with this holiday season may not be limited to Christians. Indeed for me, I was raised as a Christian and was a devoted one when young. I got better. Yet, I generally go to a Christmas eve service, often the old-fashioned New England one, with the fillip of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus performing, at the Arlington Street Church. There’s nothing like an apse filled with bald or gray chubby or saggy men in dinner jackets with beautiful voices singing God’s glory to scream, “He is born!”

Wanda though picked up from her father Bill, my Granddad. His often grumpy wife Mable, Baba per my sister’s dubbing as the privilege of the first grandchild (she similarly named the paternal version Bubu) was not such a Christmas aficionado.  Granddad started with the two three-story blue spruce on the front mini-lawn. He festooned them with strands of those gigantic colored bulbs we boomers knew.

Then he and I could get in Charlie Long’s pickup with him — the kind where you had to use a hammer to change in and out of 4-wheel drive by pounding the hub. We’d thump over the fields and across the shallow South Branch of the Potomac to get to his land that had evergreens. I’d pick the tree I liked, as by far the junior man-let in the group and we’d saw it down. They always let me make the last few cuts that caused the TIMBER moment.

Mable never cared for this treasure. It was work to trim, although she was not involved except for huddling, directing and scolding. It always meant she had to haul out the vacuum daily to inhale the needles. It was more trouble to undress, plus shedding seemingly half its tags on the trip out the front door before trash day. Harrumph, indeed.

Wanda was in Bill’s mode and then some. Most personally obviously, she bought presents, not only many, but exactly what people wanted or would have asked for had they been as perceptive as she. Very much unlike those who wrote checks, gave gift cards, or approximated age-appropriate gifts, Wanda looked to the soul (and lifestyle) of each recipient. She made sure you got what would delight you. Your delight was hers.

Yes, the outside of her house was lit and tarted up with red, green, yellow and white. Inside tough, it as a monument to Christmas traditions. Bookshelves (of which she had many, many and table tops were layered with chorister candles (never burnt, God forbid), creches, scenes of shepherds with angels, ice skaters, lighted model villages and on and on and on.

I loved it all.

We decorate here, replete with a substantial creche molded and painted by my late mother-in-law. My wife does the Martha Stewart deeds of garlands, lights and more. I and one or more of our sons sets out the luminarias. We get a to-the-ceiling evergreen butchered for our pleasure. We as a family and often with a daughter-in-law real or to be, rig it up with three decades of ornaments, chili lights, a porcelain angel topper, icicles and candy canes.

We do Christmas. It seems genetic now.

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An elegant microcosm of our fustiness appears in a Think Progress piece on a 13-year-old big sister. She’s riled because her little brother wants to use Habro’s EASY-BAKE oven, which the company markets as a girl thing. It is on the company site and catalog in “gifts for girls”, and this girl asks them to get their act together and start including boys in their ads and promotion.

I’m there with her. I’ve been a or the family cook since I was six or seven. My father was a deadbeat Army office who disappeared to Germany with his second family, ignoring all this responsibilities to his first. However, my role model and mentor was my maternal grandfather, Bill Michael, who among many talents and duties cooked and was a tailor.

Oh, he had a stereotypical “man’s” job on the B&O Railroad, but he was like a t’ai chi master, hard and soft at the same time. He saw no shame in honest labor or in food prep or in sewing. He did it all.

His wife, my grandmother Mable, was queen of her kitchen though. She did not allow her two daughters to do more than act as scullery maids. She was the cook and never let anyone forget it. My mother had to learn to cook in Japan from a book for similarly ignorant American Occupation Army wives.

On those rare occasions when Mable was visiting relatives or in the hospital with an asthma attack, Granddad cooked. He had the touch.

First of all, he grew the family veggies, in what he called “patches.” These were one or sometimes two one-acre gardens of remarkable diversity. You don’t know asparagus until you eat it five minutes after being cut, and only those with home gardens know a real tomato plucked as the ripest and most fragrant on the vine.

We loved it when Granddad cooked. We also were savvy enough never to say to her that we preferred his hand in the kitchen.

Yes, let the little boy cook.

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I’m at nature a gentle sort, so much so that in the frenzy of the Vietnam-war draft, my beloved grandfather unbidden handed me a conscientious-objector reference letter. While he had sneaked away from the farm to enlist in the WWI American Expeditionary Forces to fight the Hun, he knew that I would never be one to kill another person.

Yet at a much lower level, he and I had teamed for years to slay insect pests. He had long farmed “patches” as he called them. These one-acre farms, one or two every summer were wide, deep expanses of vegetables and fruits, 150 running feet each. He’d plant, and from my elementary school time, I’d weed, water, train to trellis, cull, harvest, and more. Inherent in this was the elimination of bugs.

Many years later in my master-gardener course, I learned nifty terms such as integrated pest management. I already knew that part of the curriculum.

Early on, he used nasty chemicals, like DDT. He’d strap big spraying drums to his shoulder and squirt the toxins. Yet, also early on he somehow ran across the Rodale pub, Organic Gardening and quickly converted. We were out there with the pyrethrum (fundamentally a natural, harmless-to-humans insecticide made from marigolds) and with our eyes and hands. Destructive bugs did not like and died in innocuous baths of soapy water, beer, or water that had soaked the juice from a nickel cigar. I’d knock the hornworms, Japanese beetles, potato beetles and their ilk into my coffee cans of to-them toxins. While time-consuming, it killed them, did not hurt me, and did not poison the veggies and fruits.

With that background, I was a bit amused when my wife called to look at this thing on the back deck plants. Asked, she agreed it might be a bug but she was not sure.

What we had, and what had been ruining my wee, grown-from-seed tomato fruits was a tomato hornworm. What it had was parasites. The white thingummies festooned on its back were the growing offspring of a parasitic moth. It was infested and near death with wasp babies eating it from the inside.

There’s a conflict for the gentle guy.

This dreadful caterpillar has been destroying my tomatoes, fruit and plant. These wasps were gnawing at it en masse. Shortly the hornworm will die, the wasps will grow and fly off to create more parasites.

Who should feel sorry for whom?

Truth be told, as a gardener from childhood and by avocation and certification, I have little use for insects that live to eat my crops. Yet a small part of me empathizes with the reality of being eaten alive from the inside by nasties.

I think we could well do without the hornworm. Some versions of it munch on tobacco, which distresses me far less. I don’t have tobacco salads and sandwiches. I also think we could do well without mosquitoes, even though many bats and birds consume them as main parts of their diets.

My wife is very unhappy at the sight and thought of of the besieged caterpillar. I had no problem clipping the leaf and tossing the mess aside. I know that the wasps will finish their business and thrive. I might even hum The Circle of Life.

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My comminuted (multiple breaks and pieces) collarbone got the latest treatment or non-treatment. As an example of how medicine changes and maybe or maybe not advances, conventional orthopedic wisdom has again shifted.

Pic note: Click for a somewhat larger view.

Where a badly broken clavicle used to require holding the big pieces together with a plate and screws (pins, in surgeon lingo), recent trends favor non-surgical benign neglect. This surgical info page describes the options.

Previously, the idea and ideal were to stabilize the whole bone and keep the pieces together to promote faster, stronger bonding healing. Now, according to both my ortho surgeon and physical therapist, the new wisdom is that outcomes are no better with plates/screws than letting the components find each other and form enough bone to made a renewed clavicle.

I’ve only had surgery once in my life, three-plus years ago for a badly broken leg. I shall permanently wear a titanium rod inside my left tibia from my knee to ankle. I’m not eager for more cutting, drilling, pounding, and other internal carpentry.  Yet, I already have a tangerine-sized lump above my left pec. Chums who had broken their collarbones as teens or 20-somethings have insisted I feel their residual bumps, which are much smaller. They said they had simple, single breaks, which may account for the difference.

Several other folk with related knowledge, including Uncle whose daughter is in the PT/rehab biz, concur on the shift from plates/screws. While plain old logic suggests that bones that fuse into their original alignment will be much stronger than those that lump up more randomly, the surgeons say their studies don’t support that. Hard to believe, but in my case it’s a bit late to speculate.

What’s amusing to me, even being an non-controlling participant in this current treatment scheme, is knowing that the science in medical science is mostly not linear. Unlike the concept we grew up hearing, treatments don’t inch or leap ahead to better and better outcomes. Instead, they mostly seem to move in and out like the tides.

I recall my first awareness of that when I was in elementary to middle schools. My mother ran Red Cross chapters, which included planning for and overseeing such courses as first aid and home nursing. She was really annoyed to have to replace those texts and see her instructors were tweaked as the AMA and similar bodies changed their minds with new research truths. I think of covering wounds, particularly burns. Yes bandage; no, open air; no, salve; and on and on, somethings changing with each new major study more than once a year.

Truth be told, docs and medial societies can be incredible faddists. Studies can contradict each other, despite following precise and detailed methods and even being replicated by others. The science can be approximate or fungible, which leads to funky doc punditry. It’s the now-we-know syndrome that comes with the fad of the latest findings. Generally no one dies from the sudden shifts, but I long ago lost faith in the concept of inexorable medical advances.

Certainly even worse than shifts in perceived surgical best practices is drug pushing. So many adults end up with one to a dozen or even more prescriptions. I think of my late in-laws who’d each fill a window sill with their daily meds when they visited. My wife remarked to her mother that those were a lot of different drugs. Her mother agreed and said she asked her doctor if they were all necessary. She reported that he asked her which she’d like to stop, and when she picked one said if she stopped taking it, she’d die.

More commonly, docs find it far easier to treat symptoms with drugs than actually to diagnose the cause of the symptom and, to think back to the ideal of the profession, cure the patient with the like of nutrition, behavior modification and such. So, the docs are more likely to say that taking this or that drug will add two or five or more years to the patients’ lives.

These pharmaceutical company promises may or may not have validity per patient, but we can be sure the benefits don’t compound. That is if you have six prescriptions for drugs your doc says will add those years to your life, you can’t expect the benefits to add up. If it did, we might all expect to live to 150 or longer.

I hark back to childhood when I was never seriously sick, but a pediatrician seemed magic. Swollen tonsils got a single penicillin shot in the butt and cleared up quickly. Nowadays, I”m aware people past their 20s or 30s tend to end up with chronic conditions or ambiguous symptoms. Very much unlike the mystery disease article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine or an episode of House,  we don’t get a team of dedicated, resource (including time) rich doctors who do what is necessary to diagnose and cure us. In fact, we can be pretty sure, our nurses and doctors won’t have the time and inclination to listen to our symptoms and consider our self-diagnosis.

Back to my increasingly lumpy formerly unified collarbone, I didn’t have a lot of options. In the ER and next week followup, the orthopedic surgeons said the muscles would likely keep the bones close enough. I could have insisted on a plate at the time or when I saw the big gap at five weeks, could have pushed to the then big deal of opening me up, re-breaking the bones as needed and then using the plate. So, really, no choice by that time.

Now if I don’t have another trauma to that collarbone and if normal activity including free weights doesn’t snap the new version, the outcome will be acceptable. I won’t project or anticipate. I’ll just go with the idea that the current treatment trend is OK.

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Visiting #1 Son and DIL around Independence Day of course has been full of obvious and subtle examples of freedom and restrictions. While the Fourth is ostensibly about casting off colonialism and occupation, we boomers go far beyond that.

Growing up with WWII parents and WWI grandparents, we are filled with grand and even naive ideals of cultural and personal. Those were reinforced by that newish TV, movies and all around us. American exceptionalism and frontier concept of freedom characterize and drive us.

My curmudgeonly comment today includes exasperation with 20 and 30 somethings who would try to excuse ignorance and lack of analysis saying they weren’t born when this or that occurred. That shows only a lack of knowledge, curiosity and perhaps intellect. The world did not begin spinning when you nor I arrived.

With my hoary head, I noticed our airport experiences and the heavy symbolism of a trio to Alcatraz.

For the former, recap it with removing shoes and belts keeps no one safe. We are both delusional and sheeplike pretending otherwise. Chants about sacrificing for safety or even that the mere theater of arbitrary and ineffectual TSA regulations and procedure dissuaded terrorists from plying their hellish aims are sad and un-American.

More to the metaphor on the Fourth, ferrying to the Alcatraz tour was an object lesson in freedom as well. Ceding all liberty as punishment for crimes is an Independence Day meditation.

We coursed through our day and night until early on the Fifth, interacting with other revelers, residents, citizen, cops barkeeps and such. We experienced the relative liberty boomers idealize in most places. We did show our papers – train, and boat tickets, credit cards and such on demand. Some instances were silly overkill, like three times each in the snaking, cordoned ferry line for The Rock, but in the main, we perked and went at will.

As a nation, we definitely have freely ceded too many liberties to feed our collective post-9/11 insecurities. We’re not likely going to regain those soon or easily.

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My scream, I was told, would have curdled milk. Until that defining moment, I had a serious fear of bees…apparently a common phobia.

At around 7 or maybe 8, my very intimate, in-the-shirt encounter with what I recall as a huge bee changed all of that. Previously, bees and like critters such as yellow jacket wasps hurt me physically a bit and emotionally substantially. While an outdoorsy, tent-camping, walk the woods, leas and cow pastures, garden in my grandfather’s one-acre “patches”  kind of little guy, I dreaded the next sting. I’d walked barefoot on bees, which in retrospect understandably stung me. Sitting at family picnics dripping watermelon juice, I’d get attacked by a bee or yellow jacket for no reason I could fathom. In short, the pain, itching and swelling came on me suddenly and with no malice on my part.

Then came the gigantic bee in my shirt.

My grandparents’ backyard in their house where I summered, abutted the Mytinger place (apparently the oldest house in the state and at the time very neglected property). With my family’s carefully planted and cultivated flowers, and the neighboring overgrowth, there were flowers galore. In particularly right on the border, my grandfather had planted hollyhocks, which were basketball-player height and jammed with blossoms that bees loved.

Several of us kids where playing right there when a huge bumblebee flew down the back neck of my tee-shirt and scampered way down inside.

My grandmother loved slapstick and to her the essence of humor was schadenfreude, not surprise. That evening, she said how sorry she was that she missed the event. She added immediately that the neighbors who did hear me thought I was being killed. Apparently I let out a loud, enthusiastic and, as it turned out cathartic, bellow of terror. Then I literally tore my shirt off, shredding it.

To this day, the humor to me is that not only did the normally benign (just ask a country kid) bumblebee did not sting me. Rather, the incident with its scream exorcised the fear. From that moment, I’ve had no dread of any critter in that family. I keep a judicious eye on the unpredictable bad actors, such as hornets, but bees and wasps are just other insects to me.

If I’m sitting outside and a bee or two land on my arm. Well, a bee or two landed on my arm. I might let them crawl or just blow them away. No foul.

Thus recently, I have been taking a few snaps of bees making love to flowers (as above). Those are not telephoto, rather with the lens an inch or two from the subjects. When people ask if I am afraid of being with the bees, I just tell them no. Rarely, I’ll add my tale of tee-shirt release.

The bee interplay does remind me of that charming The Point! album by Harry Nilsson. Its bee scene has the protagonists hiding in a hollow log from a bee swarm, when the log rolls downhill into the Rock Man. He looked at them and said, “Say – what’s happening with you boys . . . it looks like you’re pretty shook up, been goofing with the bees?”

I can relate.

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Growing up in houses filled with cops and with relatives who were staties, I am predisposed to liking police officers. They make it hard.

In my childhood, my mother ran Red Cross chapters, which involved training police and such in first aid and water safety, coordinating with and training ambulance and fire folk and co-hosting disaster preparedness weekends. We knew a lot of cops.

The other side of my thinking cops are the good guys is expecting them to behave that way. I think they should act to protect the public, drive like the best examples, know the laws, and enforce the letter and spirit of those laws.

For three decades though, I’ve lived in a town where a running joke about BPD folk in blue is “no blood, no ticket.” They seem loath to do anything that involves a ticket book or other paperwork. Moreover, too many, including the Commissioner, B.S. their way through life. That makes it hard to respect cops.

Today down in Logan Square around 2:30 PM, I had another experience with incompetent make-it-up-as-you-go policing. An officer saw a serious traffic law violation, but instead of enforcing the law, he showed both ignorance and lack of concern. It’s wearing.

The short of it is that I was walking to Cleary Square, westbound on River Street by the Hyde Park municipal building. Still healing from a broken clavicle and several busted ribs, I’m tricked out in an arm sling with my bright orange windbreaker. At 6 feet and nearly 200 pounds, I’m not camouflaged.

As I entered the crosswalk, a woman whipped around the right turn on River Street, almost stopping at the stop sign. She not only continued rolling toward me, but blew her car horn, as though this crippled guy should disappear and stop inconveniencing her.

When she honked, I thought there might be an acceptable reason, as another vehicle or other case where she was blowing to avoid a wreck, you know, the legal basis for horn blowing. Turning to my right toward her as I made my way across the crosswalk, I saw her raise her fist, mouth what looked like obscenities and swerve around me. She never stopped, as required by law. She certainly did not yield to a pedestrian in a marked crosswalk, as required by law. Of course, as a minor issue, she also used her car horn  to threaten instead of its allowable safety purpose.

I pointed to her as she whipped past, barely missing me and called, “Stop for pedestrians in crosswalks!” Then the amazing happened.

A uniformed BPD officer appeared…and proceeded to scold me. I told him that she had just broken multiple state laws and deserved a ticket with fines, likely license suspension and six years of insurance surcharge.

Unbelievably, he told me:

• He would have gotten to it and handled it, if only I had not turned and pointed at the driver
• I had no right to point at her
• My actions, inexplicably by geometry and time, caused him not to apprehend the driver for the crimes he had witnessed
• Even though my walking through the crosswalk had slowed the aggressive driver, his not bothering to take two or three strides toward her and stop her was somehow my fault and not that of his indolence

I came right back at him. He saw the crimes and did nothing. He did not step forward and stop the driver when he easily could have. She violated the failure to yield  law and was subject to a $200 fine and she used her horn to threaten, which I said was a Boston regulation.

He countered that it was a $100 fine and that if I had not turned toward the driver, he was going to do something. Somehow, he implied, it was my fault he made no effort to apprehend her.

I checked and I was almost entirely right. It is $200 for the crosswalk violation. However, the horn violation is of state law and not city regulation, with a $50 fine.

Maybe I should have snagged the cop’s badge and recorded the scofflaw driver’s plate. I’ve wearied of that over the years, particularly with Commissioner Davis’  total disingenuous responses to his officers’ behavior.

Here before me was yet another Boston cop who did not know the laws, who made up what he thought violations and fines were, who saw crimes committed and did nothing, and who chastened the victim instead of taking a couple of steps (literally) to grab the perp or even calling in her plate to the nearby station. What a slug!

He even said to me, “Do you think they know the laws?” I was aghast, as in he didn’t even know the laws.

I’ve known good cops in various places, including Boston. For over two decades, I shared the block as well as the first name with one of the best in Jamaica Plain. That Mike though is not the norm.

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