Embarking on this Blog

Okay, after weeks of tinkering, I'm finally ready to launch this blog I've been talking about for months.

Those of you who know I have been in K(ansas)U(niversity) Med Center with my partner, Jim Long, helping with the aftermath of his recent nephrectomy, may be surprised by the photo above.

No, that is not Jim. For updates on that adventure, you can visit thisgownhasnobackside.

 The patient you see here is my best straight buddy (and ringer duplicate bridge partner) Bill Daly, Chairman of the Board of Voter Contact Services. He has been in the hospital a lot longer than Jim recently, and they are racing each other to see who gets home first.

Bill is in Honolulu, where it is much harder to give him and his family the love and support I want to lavish on them. Guilt swirled around me, until I recently had a nice note from Betty Daly, assuring me they appreciated whatever oomf I could send their way.

I love this picture of Bill, taken some weeks ago, when he was first able to sit up, out of bed. I received the photo as a tiny insert in an e-mail, but I didn't fully appreciate it, until a mutual friend said, "Wasn't that a wonderful picture of Bill?"

I opened a larger image, and there I could see Bill's beautiful eyes, and the expression of contentment, which is partly, "I'm sitting in a chair, finally," and mostly, "Thank GOD I can scratch myself whenever I want!"

Bill comes to mind particularly now, as I launch this blog, because my first post is somewhat political and sprinkled with the warped humor I favor, which he seems to like. I am so thankful for his friendship.

Brief thanks here, too, for my friend and fellow author, Sylvia Cornette, who volunteered to help me shape some of my Dang Near Native columns into the book form which will serve as the backbone of this blog. (More on Sylvia and all of this process later.) I'm basically cracking open that book in the middle, and giving you a peek, as the primary season gets underway.

Hopefully everybody is ready for a story which mentions a Democratic National Convention without any of the current candidates, and with more humor than strife.

I welcome your comments, so tell me what you think. And please, subscribe to the blog if you enjoy it. If you know someone who you think might enjoy my writing, use the prompts to e-mail them a link to this blog so they can check it out for themselves.

With my best regards,

Josh

His Waterloo in '72 wasn't Watergate

I used to give Elderhostel programs on Ozark food and culture at the Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas. I always enjoyed the
interesting retired people I met there.

Usually I would join the participants for breakfast on the morning of my presentation. The groups were
always lively and animated, having had time to bond for a day or two already. But I usually sought out the “loner” of the group, if there was one, and I would ask to sit with them during the meal. As a result, one day I met a delightful, erudite man.

My breakfast companion was a retired forensic psychologist from New Jersey. We soon found we had several things in common. We both graduated from the University of New Hampshire.

When I mentioned I had been a social worker, we discovered we had both worked with a certain nationally renowned forensic psychiatrist. My breakfast companion and I shared some peculiar East Coast prejudices, of which we were stubbornly proud.

But while I am a huge fan of the Ozark region and its culture, this gentleman seemed to feel he had been dragged to the godforsaken end of the Earth by the friends who had insisted he join them on an Elderhostel adventure. A recent widower, he seemed to view everything with a jaundiced eye.

As I chattered on about the activities I knew he
would participate in during the week, he remained
skeptical and snobbishly aloof. I was almost at a loss
to think of something he might like. Then I remembered
the groups always tour Blanchard Caverns.

“You’ll love Blanchard Caverns,” I gushed. “It is a
magnificent, virtually pristine cave.” To emphasize
my point, I added, “The Forest Service took over a
year to create the entrance and public walkways, and
in the process they only broke three stalactites.”

He raised an eyebrow and gave me a funny look.
“Stalactites,” he spoke the word very slowly. “That
word was my Waterloo,” he said cryptically, and his
voice trailed off.

I guess my expression spoke my confusion at his
strange remark, because he went on to explain.

“In 1972 I was picked to give a speech on national
television before the entire National Democratic
Convention,” the learned doctor told me. “At one point
I was to say the sentence, ‘We must not descend as
slowly as stalactites!’”

I was going to comment on bad speech writers, but I
held my tongue.

“Like everybody else, I’m always getting those two
cave words mixed up,” he continued, “so for weeks I
had been practicing and repeating to myself:

‘Stalagmites grow up, stalactites grow down;

stalagmites grow up, stalactites grow down. I can

do this. I will get this right,' I promised myself.

“So on the fateful day, at the appointed hour, I
strode to the podium and stood proudly before all the
assembled delegates of the National Democratic
Convention. With cameras from every major network
focused on me, I began my speech.

“When I came to the part I had been so worried about,
I shouted out passionately, ‘We must not descend as
slowly as . . . testicles!’”

He glowered at me over his glasses, as if daring me
to laugh. I tried not to spit out my coffee, but it
nearly came out my nose, as I made little snorting
sounds.

“First a hush fell over the hall, and then the rolls
of laughter began,” he told me woefully. “They laughed
for several minutes, and just when the laughter would
seem to subside, it would crop up somewhere else in
the huge hall, and people would begin laughing all
over again. When the room became more or less quiet,
the recording secretary broke in to ask me,
officially, ‘Was that really what you meant to say?’

"That caused the entire audience to break into an

uproar of hysterics yet again." he lamented.

“Then,” [to my surprise there was obviously more to his tale]
“several years ago I was touring a group of colleagues
around Yugoslavia. I’d been to Yugoslavia dozens of
times,” he told me in his slightly snobbish, East
Coast way, “and so after several days tromping around
the same old tourist sites, I was bored. I sent the
whole bunch of them off to tour one of the islands
with a local guide, and I went to the nearby nude
beach.”

This portly, retired man was clearly neither prudish

nor shy. Even in my wildest college days I had only

read about places like the cosmopolitan nude beaches

of Yugoslavia. (I think they were mentioned in one of
those in-depth articles I read in a Playboy magazine
once.)

“As soon as I got to the beach,” he told me, “I
stripped out of my clothes and ran down to the water’s
edge, just in time to see the entire boatload of my
colleagues go churning by. Of course they all saw me,
recognized me, laughed, hooted and waved.

“That evening when they got back to our hotel, some
of the women hunted me up. They giggled and teased me,

saying, 'We SAW you. We saw ALL of you!' One of them

asked if I was terribly embarrassed.

“Absolutely not!” he told them. “After what happened
to me in 1972, I’ll never be embarrassed again!”