Memories by HenryM

People often ask “where were you when…?” The “when” is typically a disastrous event. During the early part of my five months in the hospital which terminated with my ileostomy surgery, nurses kept piling into my room, not to attend to my personal strife, but because of something on the TV. I was aware that I was hospitalized, but not alert to much else, so out of it that I had no ide ...

I POSTED RECENTLY ABOUT TAKING A BREAK from watching the news. I’d become a news junkie. The news pissed me off. It was disturbing, upsetting, inexplicable. So, I quit cold turkey. It didn’t go well. Before very long, I got jittery. My hands didn’t shake, but I think I began blinking more often. It was eye flutter as a symptom of feeling uninformed. I found that I couldn’t sta ...

DO OWLS HAVE EROGENOUS ZONES? Yesterday morning on my walk -- it was 5:30 AM and still dark -- I heard two owls in a tree just squawking away in what sounded like an owl’s version of sexual pleasure. Perhaps this is a topic to which you have given little thought. Animals, obviously, have sex. Lack of sex is not a reason that some species go extinct although, I admit, for some creatures, ...

HERE’S A TRITE TRUISM: There’s no such thing as a stupid question. They wouldn’t be asking if they didn’t want to know, and wanting to know is a good thing. That’s how we learn; that’s how we grow; that’s how we survive. As magnificent an instrument as is the human brain, we only use part of it, after all, and learning is an active, adventurous, two-way street that requires w ...

JUST BECAUSE WE NEEDED TO DO SOMETHING that felt good, we went out to dinner Saturday night. We usually save that sort of extravagance for special occasions but, I guess, we just decided to manufacture a special occasion. So off we went to our favorite mom & pop Italian restaurant. “We won’t need those menus,” I told the waitress. We always get the same thing. Why experiment when you kno ...

I KEEP IT IN A LITTLE ROUND GLASS BOWL in my bathroom with a dipping tool for convenient use whenever I feel that I need a little of the magic white powder. No, not cocaine. It’s baking soda, aka sodium bicarbonate, a wondrous, multiuse item that we can all benefit from daily. I stopped spending money for expensive ostomy deodorizers a long time ago. Baking soda does a better job, and it ...

SOMETIMES IT IS HARD TO PUT SOMETHING INTO WORDS. When asked to define pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart couldn’t do it, but claimed “I know it when I see it.” Similarly, the great American composer Aaron Copland, on the subject of music, once offered this gem: “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would ...

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, that sacred 1st Amendment right that sits upon a marble pedestal, polished into a brilliant sheen by the courts, has taken on a less honorable meaning these days. Freedom of speech is all-inclusive, like a cruise to the Bahamas. It includes freedom to lie, to dissemble, to exaggerate, to spew disinformation with not one whit of effort to verify validity. Freedom of speech ...

ODE TO AGING
This aging business isn’t fun; it’s weighty;

It hits me upside the head today, as I turn eighty.

The aches and pains, the medicines; I once felt fine

Back in my recent youth, when I was seventy-nine.
One knee is weak, my chronic kidneys balk.

At young attractive women I no longer gawk.

My doctor tells me how I’m doing great;

What’ ...

ON A RECENT TRIP THROUGH TOWN, I think that I caught every red light there was to catch. That has always been my cross to bear. It’s as if the traffic signal sees me coming. If I was a QAnon bozo, I’d likely think that the government managed to embed a chip inside me that signals the light as I approach it to turn red, here he comes! Maybe it permeated my epidermis when I entered the f ...

THERE WAS A DAY WHEN houses had mailboxes mounted next to the front door, and the mail delivery person walked up and plopped it right in there. Today, notwithstanding that I live in a residential neighborhood in the middle of a fair-sized city, we have to have what used to be referred to as ‘rural mailboxes’ planted out at the road and the mail carrier putters up in a small specialty vehi ...

THE TOPIC HERE IS ACTUAL MEATLOAF, not the recently deceased singer/actor, may he rest in peace. My meatloaves have typically been blah creations, slapped together when nothing else is available. But this week, I hit on an additional ingredient that made it really good: hoisin sauce. We have used this with stir-fry for years, but otherwise it just sat on a shelf in the fridge. It is made ...

SINCE I WALK EVERY DAY, it’s only natural that songs about walking would attract my interest. Here’s a baker’s dozen examples. Perhaps you can think of some I left out.
“I Walk the Line” Johnny Cash
“Walk of Life” Dire Straits
“Walking the Dog” Rufus Thomas
“Walk on By” Dionne Warwick
“Walkin’ to New Orleans” Fats Domino
“These Boots are made for Walkin’” Nanc ...

ONE OF THE UNSUNG GREAT THINGS about retirement is the simplification of one’s wardrobe. Not having to report to work every day means you are no longer bound by job requirements or social dress codes. You don’t even have to get out of bed, let alone put on clothing. There are disadvantages to that sort of layaboutism, of course. “Clothes make the man,” Mark Twain told us. “Naked ...

LAST FALL, I TURNED EIGHTY. I find that it has changed my life for the better. First of all, as many of you can attest, getting old takes getting used to, like an obnoxious relative. It’s not something that creeps up on you over the years; it shows up suddenly, a rather brutal realization that hits you upside the head in the dead of night and knocks you senseless. Up till then, you see, ...