What If?

I wonder if everyone plays the "What if?" game from time to time? That is, what if this happened instead of what really happened and how that would have changed a complex series of events?  Like you start out your front door and then remember you forgot to bring the letter you wanted to mail and you go back to get it, just as a piano falling from the 12th floor crashes onto your entrance.  And would have ended your stay on this planet had you not returned for the letter. What if?

What a mysterious matrix of life we live in where every second of our existence has so many "What ifs?" that can change everything for so many other people.  A large What if? occurred for me in 1944 when I was 14 years old.  We lived next door to the Robinsons who had a son, Calvin, who was an only child two years older than me.  Calvin's doting parents gave him every toy a boy could wish for. Best bike. At a time when comic books were big he had them all.

One day I was in Calvin's room sitting in a chair reading comic books while he was across the room playing with a 22-calibre pistol he had received for his 16th birthday.  I heard him say, "Alright, Landers, your time has come."  I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at me and then the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel as he pulled the trigger. It flew past my left ear and lodged in the wall behind me.

At the sound of the shot Calvin's mother, Effie, came running down the hall and immediately sized up the situation, seeing her stunned son sitting with the weapon in his hand and me sitting in shock next to the door. Effie's instinctive reaction was to turn to me and scream, "You go home right now."

She didn't have to tell me twice. I was out of there. Looking back I think of all the lives that would have changed, or not existed, If Calvin had been a better shot.  What if?

A 50th Year Anniversary

Whoever first observed that "time flies" nailed it. Yes it does on bumblebee wings.

The year, 2019, we now see in our rearview mirror, marks the time 50 years ago when I received a call from newly appointed University of Oregon Athletic Director Norv Ritchey.  "Let's have lunch," he said. We did and he offered me the job of public relations director for the athletic department. I asked him to give me three seconds to think it over.  He would later promote me to Assistant Director.

Goodbye Bon Marche feather merchant, hello player in the big time intercollegiate athletics game.  Plus, I would get paid to work there.  The next six years were the most fun I ever had in any work environment.  Who's to say what we accomplished 50 years ago did not lay the foundation for Oregon's current dominance in the Pac-12 star-lit universe? Some things just take time to kick in:

Football Conference Champion/Rose Bowl Champion

Basketball Champion-Men/ Payton Pritchard, Player of the Year

Basketball Champion-Women/Sabrina Ionescu, Player of the Year
Both men's and women's teams given #1 seed in March Madness regional brackets

(March Madness will play without spectators but still have bracket pools)

The friendships I developed in those years give me a basket full of name for dropping in conversations with fellow inmates in my current commune.  Let anyone bring up any sport and I have my list ready (c'mon memory, don't fail me now)..  And every name is attached to a half-dozen stories, while every story has a half-dozen variations.  That is, the protocol of sports stories dictates that you never let facts screw up a good yarn.

So get comfortable in your chair.  I'm going to tell you about that blazing hot Spring day in Husky Stadium where the Ducks were in a dual track meet with U-Dub. Wunderkind Steve Prefontaine would compete in the 5,000 meters on the artificial track surface that looped around the football field. The track had been heating up for hours and was at grilling temperature by the start of the race. After Pre won the event, he took off his shoes to reveal how his feet had been fried to a mass of bloody, burst blisters served up medium rare. His time for the win was excellent.

At This Point

I blame John Dean, the Watergate miscreant who now makes his living appearing on television recounting how he tried to warn Trickey Dickey that the feces was in the air-conditioning unit. I'm almost certain he was the first to use the phrase , "At this point in time". Like a vocabulary virus it made its insidiously evil way into the national newspeak.  And over the years since Watergate it has transmogrified from hideously pretentious nonsense to accepted corruption of intelligent discourse.

Listen to supposedly educated TV talkers say, "At this point in time, yadda, yadda, yadda."

At this point in time, irregardless of...  Double insults.

"So what?" you might ask,  It doesn't send you to the hospital or cause a tax audit so who cares?  I do.  Because adding that verbiage to make a simple declaration poetic is just wrong.  Like picking your nose.  So stop it.

Hooked

It all started so innocently.  In casual conversation with my friend, Lou Barrett, a fellow inmate here at Russellville Park,  I mention that I liked caramel corn.  I don't know why I said that because I hadn't eaten caramel corn since I don't know when. But Lou replied that his wife, Mary, also liked caramel corn.

It was probably a week or two later that I went to the Lloyd center to buy some pants; as I left Macy's with my purchase I smelled...caramel corn.  The distinctive aroma was wafting out of Joe Brown's Carmel Corn store in the Mall and it triggered that innocuous conversation with Lou a week or two before.  Hey! Why not bring Mary Barrett a box of caramel corn?

Let's understand what's going on here. Don't compare Joe's Carmel Corn with what you might pick up at the market that was made six months to a year ago.  No, no. Joe rolled his succulent, fresh concoction out of his machine just a short while before your arrival.

Joe knows what he's doing to keep you coming back for more.  He fills your $5.00 box to the top then puts it into a cello bag and dumps two more scoops on top that spill over into the bag.  Look at that.  Mary won't miss a few of those slop-overs so I take a couple to sample and then a couple more. OK, maybe a few more after that. Then I leave the bag of caramel corn at the Barrett's door.

We see each other at lunch the next day and I learn that Mary did indeed like the caramel corn.
She adds that the next time I go to the Lloyd center she would like me to bring her more. So a few days later I brought Mary an $8.00 box and since she was paying for it I knew it would be unethical of me to pilfer her overflow kernels, so I buy a bag for myself.

Time to face the truth:  Both Mary and I are hooked.  A day or two later I see the Barretts across the room at lunch, eating with a friend. Mary sees me and without moving her lips, sends the message with her eyes: GET MORE CARAMEL CORN.

Not only that but she's now hooked her friend who I now must include in the caramel corn runs.  What to do?  We know it's not good for us.  All that sugar.  All that butter.  But it's there and  available.  We can buy all we want and it's cheap and it's legal and it tastes so darn good.

I know others will become hooked and soon I will be making daily runs for larger and larger numbers of the $8.00 boxes.  Where will it end?  Probably with the after-midnight knock on my door and the Russellville Park Security Team taking me to their interrogation room.

Busted. How do I tell my children?

Spelunking 101

If you enjoy cold, damp places that might create feelings of claustrophobia in normal people, you could be into exploring caves.  You know, a spelunker.  Or if you are even more enthusiastic about underground adventures you probably call yourself a "caver."  Whichever name you use, include me out. Been there.  Done that.

The Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon define a large part of the border with California and there are caves inside some of those mountains, the most famous being the National Monument, Oregon Caves south and west of Grants Pass where I was raised.  Marble Mountain, in the foot hills of the Siskiyous, a few miles south of our home, was the site of an open pit mine that produced a mineral used in making cement.  The father of one of my school friends worked at the mine and told my friend that a recent blasting of rock had uncovered an entrance to a cave.

Imagine that.  A cave. Like in Tom Sawyer.  Time to make some plans, I told my two pals, the Wardrip brothers, Bob and Lee.  Bob and I were 12 and Lee was two years older.  The excitement of exploring a real cave grew the more we talked about it and so our plan:

We knew the owners of the mine would not welcome our visit, so we would go up the mountain on a Sunday.  We had a large ball of kite string we would feed out from the entrance so as to not get lost in the caverns.  We had my father's railroad lantern. What could go wrong?

On an early Sunday morning we rode our bikes to where the mine access road started up the mountain. The steep slog to the landing was about two miles but we reached it by mid-morning and soon spotted what had to be the entrance to the cave. The mine crew had put railroad ties against the rock wall face to seal the opening and we easily removed them. What we uncovered was not encouraging.

 The opening started about three feet up at a 45% slash that went another 10 feet and stopped. The entrance was shaped like a hinged lid being lifted off a box with no opening on the left but about 15 or 20 inches on the right. Shining the light into the hole we could see a flat shelf that went a few feet and then dropped off into a large, dark, cavern. "Well," I said, "You're the oldest, Lee, so you go first."

"No,"  Lee said, "We've got to be smart about this. Bob's the smallest so he should wiggle in and see what it looks like."

"Not me," Bob said. "This wasn't my idea."

"OK," I said, "You two chickens wait out here. I'll go in."

I started into the hole with my two arms sticking out in front of me, the lantern in my right hand. As I wiggled in, the rock above me got lower and as  I had my legs almost all the way in I thought I felt the ceiling coming down and I went into complete terror panic.  I think I was screaming as I started violently wiggling, bumping my head, frantically making my escape from the cave.

As I escaped the collapsing mountain that was actually still in stable condition, I sank to the floor of the landing with both of my elbows bruised and bumps on my head. "What the hell are you hollering about?" Lee said to me.

I didn't answer him.  Bob said, "I think this was a bad idea.  I'm going home."

It was plain that the adventure was over and without more conversation we headed back down the road.  We probably should have put the railroad ties back to cover the cave entrance but we didn't.

I

I Think That I Shall Never See...

a poem as lovely as a tree.  Author Alex Ross, who wrote a long article about bristlecone pines in the Jan. 20, 2020 New Yorker Magazine, would likely support Joyce Kilmer.

Readers of the Methuselah Report know that "Breaking News" is not our forte.  We are drawn to what has been seasoned by time (like all my neighbors here at Russellville Park).  And that's what brings us to the bristlecone pines (pinus longaeva) that grow exclusively in America's subalpine region of the Great Basin, which stretches from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the Wasatch Range in Utah. You can find bristlecone pines growing on the western slope of the White Mountains in Arizona, and that growth is exceedingly slow.  It takes decades for a bristlecone to reach the height of a human.  One special characteristic of this tree is that no two are alike; each one being an individual and as the millennia go by becomes contorted and wraithlike.  But the most mind-blowing feature of the bristlecones is that they are the oldest living organisms on planet Earth.

What was considered the oldest Bristlecone ever tested (by taking a drill core and then counting the rings) was found on the western slope of the White Mountains in Arizona. It was named Methuselah. It lost that honor when a graduate student named Donald Currey created a heinous crime against nature when he cut down (with permission from the Forest Service) a huge Bristlecone named Prometheus because he couldn't get a good core sample.  A count of the rings proved Prometheus to be the oldest known living organism on earth: 4,900 years. Now murdered by a a soulless idiot and a complicit Forest Service.

It is mind-boggling to think of all the human history taking place while Prometheus was slowly growing on that mountain in Nevada.  Migrations of humans over continents.  The thoughts of Pyramids dancing in the heads of Pharaohs. Empires rising and falling.  Lawrence Welk charming the music lovers of America. The now-oldest Methuselah bristlecone is protected by anonymity.  Its identifying plaque has been removed (visitors were breaking off souvenirs) and today looks like just another nondescript bristlecone.

If you're landscaping your backyard, planting bristlecone pines might prove to be a poor choice since you would get only three or four inches of growth before you die. 

To Bake a Pie

Everyone take out your time machine viewer screens. Set the time for 9:AM, October 12th, 1942 and dial the location coordinates for the kitchen of my mother, Eunice Landers. See her gathering the ingredients for making her world-famous apple pie. But look, her tin of whole cloves is empty and the pie cannot be made without whole cloves because it is one of her secret ingredients.

Eunice calls her son, Billy, to come run an errand.  Go next door and ask Mrs. Robinson if I can borrow some whole cloves, she tells him.  When Mrs. Robinson comes to the door Billy delivers the request he heard from his mother:  "Mama wants to know if she can borrow some old clothes?"  Mrs. Robinson pauses and then says, "I'll see what I can find."  She soon returns with with a well worn sweater belonging to her son, Calvin, an undershirt that belonged to her husband, Reggie, and one of her blouses.

Billy returns with the items that will not improve the flavor of the pie. A puzzled Eunice asks Billy what he told Effie Robinson and hearing his answer, breaks into laughter.  Then she returns the old clothes to her neighbor and sharing the laugh, returns with the borrowed whole cloves and soon, another iconic apple pie is on its way to a 350 degree oven.

Where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy?

Where have you been, charming Billy?

I've been to seek a wife, she's the joy of my life

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother.

Can she bake an apple pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?

Can she bake an apple pie, charming Billy?

She can bake an apple pie quick as a cat can blink an eye,

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother.