Time to hang up those rock 'n' roll shoes

There are defining moments in every life. Call them revelations or call them epiphanies. But when those moments pass, you know you are a different person than you were moments before. Mine happened about 9:15 p.m. Monday night.

I was covering one of Bruce Springsteen's rehearsal shows in Asbury Park, and Springsteen's publicists had been kind enough to supply a pass to the show. When I arrived, well ahead of time I might add, I looked for my seat and was told that my ticket was a general admission ticket. There was no seat. I was to stand in front of the stage for the entire concert.

The show was swell, but along about the aforementioned hour, it dawned on me that my feet hurt. "I wish I could sit down,'' I thought, and that's when, if you'll pardon the expression, the other shoe dropped. "I'm getting old. Two weeks shy of my 48th birthday and I'm getting old.''
It's a short hop from complaining about your sore feet to frequenting restaurants for their early-bird special.

It's a sobering thought, this being old thing, particularly when you consider that Mr. Springsteen is 56 and brings the house down night after night.

If there is any comfort, it comes from children, who keep me young. When I told my 17-year-old about my epiphany, he was quiet for a minute. "For what it's worth Dad,'' he finally said, "I've thought you were old my whole life.''

I think I'll go take a nap now.

Doody duty

When you've been in the parenting game as long as I have - the oldest of my four sons just turned 24 - you get a certain reputation as something of an expert in the field. People know that you've been around the playpen a few times, and might be able to help.

Of course, not everybody knows that, so there are times when I happen to hear new parents wrestling with a particularly knotty child-rearing issue that I offer my advice, even when I haven't been asked. That's what we experts do. We're givers.

The proiblem of potty training is one we solved pretty early, ever since my wife, Sue, got her hands on a book called something like "Potty Training In Less Than A Day.'' I always recommend the book and the system without actually having read it. That was Sue's job. My job was to get any other kids out of the house so Sue could work whatever behavioral magic the program entailed.
It apparently involves M&M's. And Sue assures me it does not entail hooking up electrodes to the child's behind. So, it's got that going for it.

All I know is, the thing works. And the proof is in the pudding, or rather in the dry, empty diaper. Nothing is foolproof, of course, and even this system takes a day or two to fully kick in, as it were. I'm wondering if anybody else has found this book effective. Just so I can add some anecdotal evidence to my expertise.

Artie Bucco, my brother

Watching this past Sunday's episode of "The Sopranos'' gave me the willies. Not because Lauren Bacall got slugged but because of restaurant owner Artie Bucco's tableside manner. Here's a guy who doesn't realize he's an annoying kibitzer and makes people uncomfortable with his chatter.

I consider myself a gifted raconteur, who bedazzles folks far and wide. But believe me, I listen when Sue whispers in my ear, "Time to dial it back, love,'' because we don't always see ourselves as others see us and we need to trust those who love and can see us clearly.

Dr. Good and Feel-Good

According to a recent Mayo Clinic survey, people would like their doctors to be confident, empathetic, human, personal, forthright, respectful and thorough. Throw a few more adjectives, and you've got yourself a regular Hippocratic Boy Scout Oath.

At the top of any list of qualities I look for in a physician is competence. Neurosurgeons can be swell guys or gals, people I wouldn't mind having a few drinks with at one of New Jersey's healthy smoke-free saloons, but unless they know their way around a prefrontal cortex, I really don't want them taking a drill to our cranium.

But let's assume the crackerjack team of medical professionals working to make me whole in the hospital is full of top-notch doctors. Well, then, I'll take all the empathetic personal respect we can get. Because it can be disconcerting and disheartening to be lying in a hospital bed and finding yourself reduced to nothing but your pathology.

I remember when I was recovering from gall bladder surgery years ago, a doctor and a group of medical students gathered around my bed one morning, not to see me but the work the surgeon had done. "That's a beautiful scar,'' they all mumbled and then shuffled off without so much as a "How are you doin'?'' to the patient.

I understand the economics of patient care these days. Doctors see more patients in a day then they used to while the number of hours in a day has remained at 24. But does it really take more time to look someone in the eye, smile and call someone by name than it does to be coldly efficient and early rude? I submit that it does not.

I'm not sure that, even if every physician was the very model of a modern Mayo Clinic sensitive doctor, we'd get better faster. But we'd all feel more human. And that is a very good thing indeed.

Sex around the world

A study published in the April issue of something called the Archives of Sexual Behavior has shown that out of folks in the 29 countries surveyed, Austrians are most satisfied with their sex lives. And the Japanese apparently are the least happy with the whoopee being made (or not made) in the Land of The Rising Sun.

Americans, by the way, are pretty pleased with the way things are going in the boudoir. We come in at No. 5 on the list.

The author of the study reaches the conclusion that sexual satisfaction is highest in cultures where men and women have relationships based on gender equality, rather than on, well, whatever else you could base such a relationship on, or at least what a lot of Japanese base theirs on.

Apart from the question of what the Austrians (and the Spanish and the Canadians and the Belgians) have on us, I'd say the conclusion is pretty obvious. Let me use a Biblical metaphor: If you and your partner are on the mountaintop, ready to enter the Promised Land, and one of you consistently runs ahead to get there first ... well, let's just say that, over time, you're both going to spend 40 years in the wilderness.

Things you think about while lying next to your wife at night

I have a couple of medical conditions that require me to take a prodigious number of pills each day. And by prodigious, I mean I take so many pills that Elvis himself would take a look at them and say, "Hey, man, maybe you should take it easy there, Bubba.''

I have a weekly pill holder that allows me to dole out my pharmacological needs on a daily basis. My wife, Susan, does me the favor of filling the thing up at week's end and allows me to be ready to be drugged up for the next seven days. It's a nice arrangement.

But as Sue and I were lying in bed the other night, I somehow began to think of palace intrigues in Italy about a half-millennium back, about the Borgias and such. I turned to Sue and said, apropos of nothing except my own reverie, "You know, you could probably slip poison into my pill box and I would never notice until it was too late to do anything but turn blue and expire.''

"You're right,'' she said. And she kissed me on the cheek, smiled sweetly, turned off her light and went to sleep. Which is more than I can say for me.

The night of the living bon-bons

The kids are getting older, so my wife Sue and I could be excused for not remembering to buy Easter candy until late Saturday night. We hit the local Wal-Mart after 9 p.m. and the candy aisles looked like one of Saddam Hussein's palaces after the newly liberated populace used their freedom to pillage and before the United States Armed Services secured the joint.

Candy was strewn everywhere and jelly beans rolled on the floor like sucrose ball bearings, although it should be noted that those orange Circus Peanut things were left untouched.
Sue began to examine the remaining confections shelf by shelf, item by item, picking one up, looking it over and then putting it back. This was a time-consuming task.

I, on the other hand, found a huge bag of assorted candies for sale, and shoved it at her.
"Here,'' I said, "Let's go.'' And we did.

"You know,'' Sue said as we drove home, "with a little more time I could have found a better bargain on the candy and better candy to boot.'' I try not to make judgments on classes of people, preferring to dislike them as individuals. But I have come to see that there are gender differences. This love of shopping, for example, of comparing and contrasting beyond any reasonable explanation, seems to me to be a woman thing.

When I buy shoes, for example, it's a 10-minute process. For Sue, it can take days, what with the making of base camp, the hiring of sherpas and all. Am I right about this man/woman shopping dichotomy or just all wet?

The words

You can't really argue with the Writers Guild of America's list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays (found at http://www.wgaeast.org/greatest_screenplays/2006/04/03/list/index.html .) I believe a screenplay has achieved greatness if more than a few lines from it wind up as a shortcut in family conversations.

This list is full of those kinds of lines, from ''I'm shocked, shocked that there's gambling....'' in "Casablanca'' to "Use enough dynamite there, Butch?'' when the train blows up in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.''

I think words matter in movies and music and it drives me crazy when my kids like a song but can't tell me the lyrics because they never paid attention to them. "What are they there for?'' I yell at them, and they shrug.

With screenplays, one or two good lines don't make a screenplay great, which is why, I suppose, "Animal House'' and "Caddyshack'' didn't make the list.

What's also interesting about the Writers Guild list is how many of these greatest screenplays had parts in them played by Paul Newman when they hit the screen.

But I'm really wondering if the folks who made up this list missed any? Let us know what you think.

Cannons to the left of me, cannons to the right

A story in today's Press provides another example of why New Jersey is a wonderful place to live: You're allowed to shoot a cannon on your farm and the neighbors can't do a thing about it, as Colts Neck farmer John Samaha found out recently when the courts ruled that he can continue to fire off his Thunderbird Scare-Away cannon to shoo birds away from his corn.

Seems like birds aren't big fans of the 1812 Overture and tend to flee at the sound of the explosion. At least one of Samaha's neighbors is something of a philistine as well, and went to court to prevent the guy from using the liquid propane noisemaker.

As a nonfarmer, a cannon to scare crows strikes me as a typically American sledgehammer solution to a rubber mallet problem. But if you take cannons away from the farmers, only those wacky Civil War re-enactors will have cannons, and nobody wants that.

Also, it's not like Mr. Samaha is shooting off his cannon willy-nilly or even every day, just when the big balloon scarecrows don't work. Plus, he's not allowed to fire the cannon until a half-hour after the sun comes up, which means the landed gentry nearby can get their beauty sleep.

Here's a big, noisy salute to farmer Samaha and his battle against the birds.
Read the story at: http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060412/NEWS/604120438

Idiots and angels

Every now and again, when an idiot like me finds himself bumfuzzled and harried, he often does something stupid. And this world is not generally in the business of rewarding stupid.

I was at a local convenience store on my way home from work yesterday when I got a call to return to the office. Managing phone, car keys, packages and wallet proved too much for me. The lid on the fountain soda I bought came loose and begin to spill as I dropped one of the bags I was carrying. So, to set things right, I put some stuff down on a flat surface in the store parking lot, got myself organized and went back to work to care of business. I drove home and discovered that my wallet was gone.

I hoped that I had left it at the office, but suspected I had left it in the parking lot.
The wallet was not at the office. I drove to the store and looked around the parking lot in the gathering dusk. If you've ever misplaced your wallet, you know that sinking feeling that comes when you imagine replacing all the plastic and stuff that makes up a life. It's that feeling I had as I walked into the store.

My wallet was in the store vault. Somebody found it and turned it in. Intact.
The store manager said that whoever it was hadn't given his name. So I just to want to thank whoever it was for saving me a world of trouble and for letting me remove the giant imaginary "Kick Me" sign from my backside.

Vito and me

I asked a straight colleague here at the office whether he would mention to our peers that he had seen me all dressed in leather at a gay bar, a la Vito in the most recent Sopranos episode.
"What would I be doing in a gay bar?'' he said, making this a lot more complicated thought experiment than I'd originally intended.

Once we worked through a scenario in which he would be there for some reason unrelated to sexuality or gender identity, he said that he would in fact tell our peers what he had seen. He would do it, in fact, with an alacrity which would make my head spin.

"Uh-huh,'' I said. "But what if I asked you not to?'' At this point, he pondered, sighed and said, "Then I guess I wouldn't.''

I was impressed with this guy's decency and honor until I shared that conversation with yet another colleague.

"Riley,'' he said. "I don't think you understand something. No damage would come to your reputation if word got out that you were leather-clad in a gay bar, because you don't have a reputation of any sort to protect. Nothing you say or do would surprise anyone who even had a passing aquaintence with you.''

Which was meant, I suppose, as a kind of insult, but which I have come to see as a kind of compliment. There is a certain liberation that comes from not being predictable, a freedom from knowing that you can be whoever you are or live life in your own way without worrying about what the world thinks.

That liberation should, of course, be accompanied by a kind of honesty in your life, an honesty denied those who live in the workaday world of Soprano's mob thugs. All anybody really wants in this world, straight or gay, is dignity, the courage to be who we truly are and the knowledge that those we love stand by us.

Tramps like them...

For the last three mornings, my editors have sent me to the Paramount Theater in Asbury Park to lean my ear against the wall to listen to Bruce Springsteen rehearse with a kind of hoe-down band. And to report on the comings and goings of fans who gather in the chilly April air to do the same and possibly get Springsteen to sign some album, picture, doodad or body part.

Many of these fans come some distance to do this. They spend days at this activity. Now, I'm a big fan. I know the lyrics to "If I Was The Priest.'' I know who Zero is - and Blind Terry. I have his albums and have seen him perform a dozen or more times. I've shaken his hand and gotten his autograph. So I've got credentials.

But I watch this hardy band of fans outside the Paramount and I know I'm not one of them. I'm paid to be there, for one thing. I asked them if they understood that what they were doing was a little peculiar? More than one of them said the exact same thing in response: "Bruce is worth it.'' A woman, acting as though she knew I was one of them, said, "You understand, don't you?''

It occurred to me then that there is a line in your head and in your life, the same line actually, and if you do not attend to it, do not pay attention to it, you'll slip over it and end up in a very weird place: your ear against a wall for hours and nobody paying you to do it. That's not quite a hobby - it's something strange.

A miracle on the rocks?

Doron Nof, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University, figures it was cold enough a couple thousand years ago for there to be ice in the Sea of Galilee.

OK. The guy presumably knows about bodies of water. Let's concede that it got a little nippy back in New Testament places and times. But here's the thing: Nof figures that Jesus didn't walk on water, but stepped onto a hunk of ice floating on the water.

Now my first thought is that if all Jesus did was walk on water, then any rube could do it. Even back in the day, something that anybody could do was not considered a miracle. Even 2000 years ago, people had standards when it came to wonders and marvels and such. If it was ice, then the bigger miracle would have been that Jesus didn't slip and fall on his holy derierre.

What Nof misses with his computer models and conjectures is that the historicity of a miracle is less important than its meaning. Miracle stories are not about abracadabra and sawing a lady in half and floating in the air, but, at least in Jesus' case, saying something about the Kingdom of God: How, with the coming of Christ, the Kingdom is breaking into a world where people sink, people drown, but God can save us in spite of the laws of nature and our own stupidity, which makes folks think they can, say, walk on water or even explain away a miracle story.

See http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/wireStory?id=1805951 for more on party-pooper Nof and his theories.

The etiquette of dealing with police

I've tried to teach my older boys not to let the man get them down, and to instill in them their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights. I'm certain that any of my older sons, if stopped by a police officer who asked to search their vehicle, would tell the officer that he would be perfectly willing to wait while a search warrant was obtained. They would do this even if they had nothing to hide. Our view of the Bill of Rights tends toward the "Use Them or Lose Them'' side of things.


My sons also know that they are to be unfailingly polite to any officer of the law. This for two good reasons: 1. It's the right thing to do, and 2. You always need to be nice to the person with a gun and a stick.

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia was surely out of line last week when she poked or punched or pushed a Capitol police officer who tried to stop her at a checkpoint when she wasn't carrying proper identification. She's posturing now in offensive ways, forgetting even another lesson I've tried to teach my sons: Don't go around acting like a big shot.

Grow up, Paulie Walnuts

I've been in pretty much the same place as Paulie Walnuts was in this week's episode of the "Sopranos,'' but you didn't see me go nuts and claim my life was all one big lie, did you?

Paulie finds out that his aunt was actually his biological mother, and loses all sense of who he is.
Given that he is a self-pitying sociopath, that might not be a bad thing. But when he loses himself, what he finds is that he is an even more self-pitying psychopath than before.

I was 17 when I found out that my biological mother was the woman I'd been taught to call my ''Aunt Judy'' and that mom was actually my maternal grandmother. It was a shocker, but only for a moment. ''Mom'' was the woman who fed me, loved me, took care of me when I was sick, and did all the rest it takes to be a parent.

Paulie needs to grow up.

The power of single words

  What we hang on to, what gives us comfort when we grieve is a glimpse
into the human heart. Now that certain 911 calls from the Twin Towers have
been made public, we get a glimpse into the heart of a man who has suffered
a loss that none of us should: the death of a child.

 I was watching the morning news yesterday and heard the 911 call of
one Christopher Hanley. Hanley was calm and collected and ended the call
with the words: ''Please hurry.''

 Hanley died on 9/11.

 So, now, those were the last words his father ever heard him say. Joseph
Hanley told a reporter, "It's nice that he said 'please'.''

 It was enough to bring tears to my eyes - as a father, as a son,
as a human being.

 Single moments, single words: ''Please.'' ''Love.''  ''Come.''

 Single lives are built on them and remembered through them.