Archive » August 2023 » Columns

Aug. 8 was a Tuesday and the Old Men of the Mountain met at Hillbelly’s in Westerlo. There was some fog and a menacing sky, but at least in the area the OMOTM traveled, nothing happened.

Last week, the column mentioned it’s a small world. Well, during the week it got even smaller.

One OF reported, after hearing the story about how a college friend’s daughter, not niece, worked at the Chuck Wagon when it was in Champaign, Illinois, another OF said he went to college in Urbana, Illinois, which is part of Champaign.

And, after the story of the Chuck Wagon was told, he said he met his wife at college there, so he too is part of this group of OMOTM and has spent some of his time in Champaign, Illinois. The world just becomes smaller and smaller.

Many of us have stories of how small the world is; this scribe sure has some very strange and unusual ones.

Frustrated fans

In this nefarious group are a contingent of Yankee fans who are completely frustrated with the Yankees waddling around in last place of the Eastern Division in the American League. Many are just fans as fans, but some are radical enough that they think they should be managing the Yankees, and the rest of us are sure they might do a better job.

There are fans of other clubs in the OMOTM, and others who don’t give a darn about any of that. They would just as soon fuss with their cars, trucks, and tractors; however, some do both.

The Yankees are, in some instances when brought up at the breakfast, a team that brings certain consternation and frustration because these guys are not playing up to the quality of ball all that money was supposed to have bought. Some of the OFs say they could play (and did play) better than these high paid professionals who are right now no better than a team of little leaguers.

One OF in an off-handed remark to defend the Yankees said that all the teams in the Eastern Division could be a division leader in any other division. To which the other OFs say, “So what”; these are the Yankees.

Foiling Google geniuses

Somehow one of the OFs mentioned the word “typewriter” in a sentence that was part of a normal statement and was not meant to mean much other than an adjective describing whatever — this scribe forgot what — but it started a conversation on today’s technology and how fast the OFs, at least this group of them, was falling out of the loop. One OF said “he was never in it.”

Most people, including many of the OFs, carry around in their pocket the instrument we called in the last column a phone, and many of these are connected to the search engine Google. This makes those from ages 5 to 105 automatic geniuses; all they need to know is what question to ask that device and click, there is the answer.

“But,” one OF said, “those of us over maybe 65 or 70 have it over them and we could have our own secret society and communicate back and forth and they would not have a clue what we were talking about, or for that matter planning.

“All we would have to do is reinstate a secure dial-phone service and the dial phone with letters and numbers like the forties and fifties. Re-introduce the typewriter, and carbon paper, and include the mimeograph as part of the hard-copy system, and the bonus would be all our written communications would be written in cursive. Any 16-year-old would be so befuddled, they wouldn’t know what was going on.”

The other OFs said, “Hey, this guy has a point. Now the question is: How do we start this retro-techno-revolution?”

Most important

job on this Earth

Last column, the discussion was on the weather and farming and basically how related the two are. One OF, who is still farming, spoke for many OFs who did farm.

Farming is hard work, both physically and mentally, plus the pay is low. Another aspect of this endeavor is that it is a blood job.

Blood on the outside and on the inside; farming gets in your blood with the realization that, if the farmer did not do his job, everyone would die. It takes a farmer so you and everyone else can live. There is no more important job on this Earth than being a farmer.

Then the OFs discussed farming back when it was done with horses. The OFs mentioned how intelligent these animals are.

The horse seems to know what they are here for. They are here to serve and today people seem to be losing that insight.

No better lesson to show this, as one OF put it, is to hear him tell his 7-year-old to go and get the horses. (This is not a statement to illustrate a story but an actual sentence told to one of the OFs more than once.) The little tyke would trot off and come back leading two huge draft horses with a couple of ropes and for the most part these ropes would be slack.

Here you have a 50-pound kid leading 2 tons of horse with  ½-inch ropes and the horses are going to be leathered up to go to work, and the horses actually seem to be smiling.

Child labor baloney, respect and love from adult to child to animal.

The Old Men of the Mountain who made it from horse to three-hundred horse-powered cars used to get to Hillbelly’s Restaurant in Westerlo for breakfast were: Miner Stevens, Rich LaGrange, Ed Goff, John Muller, Frank Fuss, Wally Guest, Harold Guest, Bill Lichliter (with guests Daniel Lichliter and Elissa Lichliter, here getting away from the heat; they actually called it like winter), Marty Herzog, Jake Herzog, Gerry Chartier, Pete Whitbeck, Warren Willsey, Russ Pokorny, Frank Dees, Paul Whitbeck, David Hodgetts, Bob Donnelly, Rich Vanderbilt, Elwood Vanderbilt, Rev. Jay Francis, Henry Whipple, Lou Schenck, Jack Norray, Dick Dexter, Herb Bahrmann, Paul Guiton, and me.

As has been mentioned here before, Pope Francis, during a six-day visit to the United States in 2015, was invited to (and did in fact) address a joint session of Congress — on Thursday, Sept. 24. He was the first Pope of the Holy See ever to do so.

In a subtle way — paradoxically — he was being quite bold, giving the kind of sermon a deeply-Christian preacher might give to his congregation at Sunday service. There were more than a few in the politically savvy conclave who thought they were back in college listening to a lecture in The Politics of Social Justice 101.

The Pope started by calling attention to the elements a society needs to evolve successfully into the future. He said, “A political society endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.”

By satisfying common needs he meant meeting the needs of all, which was then, and remains, the calling card of his papal administration; in Congress, he was challenging America to see if it had the brass to adopt such a view.

In using the word “vocation,” as in “having a calling,” he was describing the inner energizing force a society needs to help the least of its members, “those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk,” without resentment, where the undying care for others is a cardinal rule.

The Pope was more than intimating that societal instability does not arise when neighborhoods and communities attend to “the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.” The gloss on the text is: He was calling for the needs of the poorest person in America to be responded to in the same way those of the richest person are. He is not one to brook benevolent triage.

But, when we look at American society today, we see social-movement-like rivulets of dystopian resentment springing up everywhere toward those in need, those who require extra (special) attention, more time, more money, more care. If the dystopians had their way, the weak and needy would fall off the face of the Earth and wither from memory.

The Pope is very smart — and not just because he’s a Jesuit — more because he’s ingested the core message of Jesus, which he lives out each day with humility. From the start, he rejected all the trappings of papal royalty — like living in the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo — in favor of his namesake Francis of Assisi.

As the Senators and Representatives — the Supreme Court judges were there too — listened to his every word, the Pope drew attention to those Americans who “shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people,” a spirit that enables a country to withstand “crises, tensions and conflicts, while always finding the resources to move forward, and to do so with dignity.”

He mentioned four Americans who fostered such a spirit: (1) Abraham Lincoln; (2) Martin Luther King Jr.; (3) Dorothy Day; and (4) Thomas Merton — for which he received a rousing applause.

Lincoln and King everybody knew but Day? Merton? Puzzled faces abounded: “They aren’t in the history books!”

I greatly admire Dr. King, as I do our 16th president — though not fully understanding all he did — but what more than thrilled me that day was to hear the Pope mention two visionaries who helped shape the ethical foundation of my life: Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton — and by ethical I mean the values I live by each day.

I started reading their works more than 50 years ago and, in the case of Merton, I read him still — he’s the person who’s most influenced my life.

With respect to Dorothy Day, some members of Congress were aware of her because a group of Catholics had been feverishly pushing Rome to make her a canonized saint. And on April 28 of this year, millions more knew her because the New York City Department of Transportation led the inaugural ride of a 4,500-passenger Staten Island Ferry called the Dorothy Day.

In the 1940s, Day had a cottage on Staten Island she used as a respite from running her Catholic Worker soup kitchen and house of hospitality on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She took the ferry back and forth, which she no longer does because she’s a permanent resident of the Island: Section 10, Resurrection Cemetery overlooking Raritan Bay.

But in the case of Merton, who has no boat, the average person walking down the street in any-town-America can no more identify him than they can the local Roto-Rooter man.

Merton was a poet who entered the Trappists in 1941 and almost never left the monastery’s grounds in Kentucky for 27 years. In 1968, when a new abbot took over, the abbot gave Merton permission to travel to Bangkok, Thailand to make a presentation at an important international gathering of monks from East and West.

Many at the time considered Merton — Christians and believers of other faiths alike — the most important spiritual writer of the 20th Century; he kept emphasizing how important it is for a person to be his/her/their authentic self if they wanted to be with God.

After his talk at Bangkok on the morning of Dec. 10 — he was slated for a Q and A in the afternoon — the tired traveler took a shower but, somehow on the way out, grabbed hold of a faulty fan and was electrocuted on the spot: dead at 53. His first big trip outside the walls in 27 years and whammo.

In addition to his many works on peace and justice and embracing a life of solitude, Merton left seven volumes of journals containing thoughts from nearly every day of his adult life. Every page is a Rorschach card revealing a man in search of peace within.

He mandated that the contents of the journals not be released to the public until 25 years after his death — he’d named names. Thus, in 1995, the first of the seven volumes appeared, which all together run to 2,966 pages. I’ve read all seven several times and Volume Seven as many as eight times. It’s on my bed now; I’ll read some tonight.

The great spiritual writer, Madame de Guyon, says in her treatise, “A Short Method of Prayer,” that every soul needs to take a few minutes out each day for meditative reading to assess if they’re going in the right direction.

She says every such soul needs to have a book that shows them how to be a more mature and happier person; the aspirant should start reading just “two or three lines, [to] enter into the full meaning of the words, and go on no further [until] satisfaction [is found] in them … not reading more than half a page at once.”

In other words, she was advocating for meditative self-reflective reading so that a person can assess his/her/their progress in becoming a better, happier, more sensitive person each day.

To those sympathetic to Guyon’s urging, I recommend Merton’s journals, all from beginning to end, 1941 to 1968, to see how one thoughtful solitary struggled to rid himself of falsity and be at peace with himself and the world around him.

Of course such reading requires laying down the phone and iPad and finding a quiet place to sit in peace and ponder for a while.

For those bothered by Merton being a monk, a Catholic, and forever talking about God, I suggest simply viewing him as a poet, a man, who sought to transcend every one of those categories — monk, Catholic, God — himself, unwilling to be hemmed in by any construct that stifles the authentic self within.

In his “Disputed Questions,” the poet prefigured Pope Francis by 50 years when he said, “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.”

Tuesday, July 25, it’s almost time to pay the rent again. So far, it has not been a nice summer, according to the Old Men of the Mountain, as they met at the Your Way Café in Schoharie. 

The Old Men of the Mountain gathered at the outside of the restaurant, waiting for it to open like bees gathering on a flower. Then they all go in as a group to harvest the nectar but the OFs are not going to share it. It is all going to be used for energy to keep the OFs going until lunch when it is time to gather more nectar.

The OGs discussed how much rain was dumped on the Hill, while some who live off the Hill received only a squirt. According to the weather guys on the TV, Knox and that area received 3.4 inches of heavenly liquid in a short period of time.

This deluge prompted the OFs to talk about pollution and how years ago only a few paid any attention to this problem. How we treated our trash, what we used to make paint, and insulation, plus how we did a lot of things that was ruining our atmosphere, and not only that but our bodies too, the worst of which was smoking.

Some of the OFs told of how we paid no attention to how batteries were disposed of in the forties and fifties, even the sixties. The product of lead was used for many things; now we are much more careful on how and what lead is used for.

Batteries are used more today than they were back in the day and, with the advent of electric-powered cars, tools, computers, watches, and since just about everything else nowadays has a battery in it someplace, we hope people are more aware of how to dispose of them.

Droning on

And speaking of drones (from last week), the size of these things is getting to the point where soon they will be able to carry a human, or humans. One OF said that in Illinois some of the large farms use drones to spread pesticides instead of using crop-dusting airplanes.

These drones are powered by batteries, but this scribe bets a small engine could power a drone to get the operator off the ground. This scribe also thought, “Darn, why am I so old that I am going to miss all this and not have a drone of my own?”

Sleep intrusions

The OFs had a discussion on dreams and nightmares. It seems everyone is subjected to these sleep-time mental intrusions.

It was found that some OFs think that it could be a result of work-related stress that causes sleep disturbances. Some thought that current experiences that were out of the norm, frightening or pleasant, caused a number of these occurrences

For some people, dreams are gone in the morning; the OFs knew they dreamed but are unable to recall the dream. On the other hand, others can remember dreams so vividly they are able to recount the dream almost word for word.

One OF said his nightmares got so bad he did not want to go to sleep at night, or even take his naps during the day. This OF said that, at a visit to his cardiologist, he off-handily mentioned this situation to the doctor.

The doctor mentioned a med that he had put the OF on and told him not to take another pill, and then the doctor replaced that med with something else and the nightmares went away immediately.

Another OF said that sometimes his dreams are so real and the dreams have gone on through the night that when he wakes up in the morning it is like he never slept at all and the OF is not rested one bit.

Reading the signs

The OFs are, in a way, restaurant connoisseurs and in many restaurants they have cutesy signs and decorations throughout the restaurant. One OF thought that the more signs and collectibles they have throughout the place, the slower the service.

This OF thinks the signs are there to keep the customers amused because there are only a couple of cooks in the kitchen.

However, one of the signs that come to mind is in the Your Way Café, which by the way does not have a slew of them around, and it reads: We guarantee quick service no matter how long it takes! 

A second sign in another restaurant reads: Today has been canceled — go back to bed!

This must be a common theme because another OF said the way the sign read in the restaurant he was in was: Today has been canceled due to lack of interest!

So many of these clever bits of useless (and maybe not-so-useless) information and knowledge on bumper stickers and signs generally have no relationship to trying to sell something or impart any bit of information on the establishment displaying it. Apparently the signs are just there to fill up wall space except the ones that have a political or specific point of view to express.

Then there are ones that make no sense at all like the one stuck in many car windows: Baby on Board. What does that mean; is it OK to whack other cars in the rear end but not that one because there is a Baby on Board? Duh.

The Old Men of the Mountain who made it to the Your Way Café and made it a point not to hit any car whether there was a sign or not were: Pete Whitbeck, Mark Traver, Glenn Patterson, Joe Rack, Bill Lichliter, George Washburn, Otis Lawyer, Miner Stevens, Marty Herzog, Jimmy Darrah, Rick LaGrange, Ed Goff, Wally Guest, Harold Guest, Frank Fuss, Frank Dees, Russ Pokorny, Jake Herzog, Rev. Jay Francis, Paul Guiton, John Dab, Roger Shafer, Lou Schenck, Jack Norray, Dick Dexter, Dave Hodgetts, Bob Donnelly, Elwood Vanderbilt, Rich Vanderbilt, Herb Bahrmann, Dan Pelitier, and me.