After my 6th grade year, I was hospitalized briefly for a stomach virus. We lived at Two Rock Ranch Station Army post in rural Sonoma County CA that year and the year before. TRRS was a secure base enclosing 800 acres of mostly farmland, small forests, creeks and rolling hills, a great place for kids to grow up, as my brothers and I found. At that time, 1962, the post belonged to the Army Security Agency and was a signal intercept station. Dad was an ASA Captain there and we lived on a hill with other officers' families in a housing area of large duplexes.
That summer I was dispatched to spend a week in the nearest Armed Forces hospital. (My whole childhood and young adulthood was spent receiving medical care through this government run system with good results. I think a single-payer system is the answer to our present woes, or at least a public option. But that's another story.) I didn't feel bad once the stomach cramps were gone but tests had to be run to rule out things.
Since I felt lively, this week away was an adventure for me, a vacation from the norm. I spent long hours making up stories for my journal, illustrating everything with drawings. I wrote protracted fanciful letters to my girlfriends back home, Shelly Mathis, Gail Gerwitz, Fie Hay. I pasted on false fingernails and painted them lilac, alarming the nurses who came in to take my pulse morning and evening. I listened to my new transister radio and danced to Four Seasons songs when no one was looking. The hospital staff transferred me out of the children's ward quickly because I was too old, too long and tall for the beds, but they were nervous about my being in the women's ward. There I shared a room with up to four others, and they didn't like my overhearing all the "women troubles," which I, of course, urgently strove to hear and worked on like a detective with mysteries to solve. Miscarriages, ectopia, unwed pregnancies, and uterine tumors became the subject of many of my short stories at this time.
From my time in that hospital, with its steel gray walls, large sunny windows, and billowy curtains between our patient beds, most of all I remember the food. Children always remember food, don't they? Especially desserts and treats, and more especially if they are different and new. Because my family moved to a different place every year or two with my dad's Army transfers, I could tell you all about new food, from tacos and corn chips in Southern California in 1957 to fresh avocado, papaya, and coconuts in Hawaii in 1953 to divinity candy my dad made in 1959 but my Aunt Arlyss perfected the next year.
In this hospital, after my 6th grade year, they had plenty of snacks. It was as if we lived in England and were having elevensies, tea time, and "supper," that is, two between meal snacks and a bedtime one.
I was always excited about these snacks. Chocolate chip cookies! Koolaid! Gooey caramel anything? No? What, fruit? I like fruit, but ... oh, I had a sweet tooth in those days. Whenever a snack was brought, my eye saw what I was used to, or maybe it was only what I wanted, and then my taste buds were alarmed at the startling difference of the reality.
This hospital was determined to serve healthful snacks. What horror. What I thought were gooey coconut cookies were...oatmeal. My eyes saw sugary grape Koolaid, but no, what's this? My mouth wasn't used to it (too expensive for Mom to serve at home) but it had to be-- real grape juice. The final outrage occurred when I saw arriving my ideal, the perfect confection, a buttery brown-sugary, melty-chocolate-chunky, big-as-your-fist Tollhouse Cookie. (That's what chocolate chip cookies were called back then, when Nestle held the copyright on the recipe.)
I savored the look of it, the heft of it, as I slowly arced the cookie toward my mouth, inhaling deeply to anticipate the flavor-- but what's this? No butterscotchy scent of brown sugar and butter? Instead I caught an odd hint of cinnamon, and such a lack of butter as can only be described as a flatness, almost a cardboard smell.
I momentarily stopped the cookie in its ascent, to take a closer look. Yes, it was the proper tan color, richly studded with dark brown dollops. What else could it be? Throwing caution to the winds, disregarding the suspicions of my senses, I bit down. Alert! Alert! Warning! Imposter! Ersatz cookie alert! Ugh, phew. Oh, nooooo. It was a raisin cookie.
Now, I like raisins. I like those little boxes of Sun-Maid Mom packs in my lunches. I like raisin and carrot salad. I like raisin pie. But when one's 6th-grade mouth is set for chocolate chip and instead the cookie you taste is raisin-- there is no measure that can plumb the depths of your disappointment. How could the medical establishment think the nutritional value inherent in these cookies could substitute for the flavor, the mouth-feel, the deliciousness of a true cookie, a chocolate chip cookie? I have not yet, as you might have guessed, recovered from the trauma.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
The no fear public option in health care insurance reform
My uncle and also another friend have been kept alive thanks to sixty-four years (!) of Veterans Administration free health care which they love and are appreciative for, qualifying after having served as little as 8 months in the Armed Forces during WWII. My dad and his wife are the recipients of phenomenal and virtually free health care through his retirement from the Army called Tri-Care For Life. All my (slightly older) friends who are now on Medicare would fight to the death to keep their coverage, and I would love to be able to get it, would be grateful to be able to buy into Medicare.
So why are some (irritatingly vocal) folks and members of Congress so afraid of the public option? Perhaps they don't know the definition and don't realize we have in fact government forms of health care which are working very well, thank you. Read on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care That Works
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 2, 2009
Here’s a paradox.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Health care reform may be defeated this year in part because so many Americans believe the government can’t do anything right and fear that a doctor will come to resemble an I.R.S. agent with a scalpel. Yet the part of America’s health care system that consumers like best is the government-run part.
Fifty-six to 60 percent of people in government-run Medicare rate it a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. In contrast, only 40 percent of those enrolled in private insurance rank their plans that high.
Multiple surveys back that up. For example, 68 percent of those in Medicare feel that their own interests are the priority, compared with only 48 percent of those enrolled in private insurance.
In truth, despite the deeply ingrained American conviction that government is bumbling when it is not evil, government intervention has been a step up in some areas from the private sector.
Until the mid-19th century, firefighting was left mostly to a mishmash of volunteer crews and private fire insurance companies. In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting.
So almost every country moved to what today’s health insurance lobbyists might label “socialized firefighting.” In effect, we have a single-payer system of public fire departments.
We have the same for policing. If the security guard business were as powerful as the health insurance industry, then it would be denouncing “government takeovers” and “socialized police work.”
Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where governments fill needs better than free markets: fire protection, police work, education, postal service, libraries, health care. The United States goes along with this international trend in every area but one: health care.
The truth is that government, for all its flaws, manages to do some things right, so that today few people doubt the wisdom of public police or firefighters. And the government has a particularly good record in medical care.
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
A study by the Rand Corporation concluded that compared with a national sample, Americans treated in veterans hospitals “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.” The difference was particularly large in preventive medicine: veterans were nearly 50 percent more likely to receive recommended care than Americans as a whole.
“If other health care providers followed the V.A.’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system,” Rand reported.
As for the other big government-run health care system in the United States, Medicare spends perhaps one-sixth as much on administration as private health insurers, although the comparison is imperfect and controversial.
But the biggest weakness of private industry is not inefficiency but unfairness. The business model of private insurance has become, in part, to collect premiums from healthy people and reject those likely to get sick — or, if they start out healthy and then get sick, to find a way to cancel their coverage.
A reader wrote in this week to tell me about a colleague of hers who had health insurance through her company. The woman received a cancer diagnosis a few weeks ago, and she now faces chemotherapy co-payments that she cannot afford. Worse, because she is now unable to work and has to focus on treatment, she has been shifted to short-term disability for 90 days — and after that, she will lose her employer health insurance.
She can keep her insurance if she makes Cobra payments on her own, but she can’t afford this. In her case, her company will voluntarily help her — but I just don’t understand why we may be about to reject health reform and stick with a dysfunctional system that takes away the health coverage of hard-working Americans when they become too sick with cancer to work.
On my blog, foreigners regularly express bewilderment that America may reject reform and stick with a system that drives families into bankruptcy when they get sick. That’s what they expect from the Central African Republic, not the United States.
Let’s hope we won’t miss this chance. A public role in health care shouldn’t be any scarier or more repugnant than a public fire department.
• A version of this Nicholas D. Kristof article appeared in print on September 3, 2009, on page A31 of the New York edition of The New York Times.
So why are some (irritatingly vocal) folks and members of Congress so afraid of the public option? Perhaps they don't know the definition and don't realize we have in fact government forms of health care which are working very well, thank you. Read on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care That Works
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 2, 2009
Here’s a paradox.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Health care reform may be defeated this year in part because so many Americans believe the government can’t do anything right and fear that a doctor will come to resemble an I.R.S. agent with a scalpel. Yet the part of America’s health care system that consumers like best is the government-run part.
Fifty-six to 60 percent of people in government-run Medicare rate it a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. In contrast, only 40 percent of those enrolled in private insurance rank their plans that high.
Multiple surveys back that up. For example, 68 percent of those in Medicare feel that their own interests are the priority, compared with only 48 percent of those enrolled in private insurance.
In truth, despite the deeply ingrained American conviction that government is bumbling when it is not evil, government intervention has been a step up in some areas from the private sector.
Until the mid-19th century, firefighting was left mostly to a mishmash of volunteer crews and private fire insurance companies. In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting.
So almost every country moved to what today’s health insurance lobbyists might label “socialized firefighting.” In effect, we have a single-payer system of public fire departments.
We have the same for policing. If the security guard business were as powerful as the health insurance industry, then it would be denouncing “government takeovers” and “socialized police work.”
Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where governments fill needs better than free markets: fire protection, police work, education, postal service, libraries, health care. The United States goes along with this international trend in every area but one: health care.
The truth is that government, for all its flaws, manages to do some things right, so that today few people doubt the wisdom of public police or firefighters. And the government has a particularly good record in medical care.
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
A study by the Rand Corporation concluded that compared with a national sample, Americans treated in veterans hospitals “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.” The difference was particularly large in preventive medicine: veterans were nearly 50 percent more likely to receive recommended care than Americans as a whole.
“If other health care providers followed the V.A.’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system,” Rand reported.
As for the other big government-run health care system in the United States, Medicare spends perhaps one-sixth as much on administration as private health insurers, although the comparison is imperfect and controversial.
But the biggest weakness of private industry is not inefficiency but unfairness. The business model of private insurance has become, in part, to collect premiums from healthy people and reject those likely to get sick — or, if they start out healthy and then get sick, to find a way to cancel their coverage.
A reader wrote in this week to tell me about a colleague of hers who had health insurance through her company. The woman received a cancer diagnosis a few weeks ago, and she now faces chemotherapy co-payments that she cannot afford. Worse, because she is now unable to work and has to focus on treatment, she has been shifted to short-term disability for 90 days — and after that, she will lose her employer health insurance.
She can keep her insurance if she makes Cobra payments on her own, but she can’t afford this. In her case, her company will voluntarily help her — but I just don’t understand why we may be about to reject health reform and stick with a dysfunctional system that takes away the health coverage of hard-working Americans when they become too sick with cancer to work.
On my blog, foreigners regularly express bewilderment that America may reject reform and stick with a system that drives families into bankruptcy when they get sick. That’s what they expect from the Central African Republic, not the United States.
Let’s hope we won’t miss this chance. A public role in health care shouldn’t be any scarier or more repugnant than a public fire department.
• A version of this Nicholas D. Kristof article appeared in print on September 3, 2009, on page A31 of the New York edition of The New York Times.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
My husband thinks I should start a support group for all of us who have over 600 documentaries on our Netflix queue
Well.
I feel certain this must be close to normal. Any time a new subject comes up that one wants to know more about, which is at least daily, or if one hears anew about a movie from, say, 70 or 80 years ago that is of historical interest for any reason (or has Conrad Veidt in it), one must add it to the Netflix queue. The queue naturally becomes lengthy if one is interested at all in the world, or in hearing a story told well, or in studying the ways of storytelling.
Then one becomes absorbed in the two or three books one is reading at the time and can't be bothered to watch a movie. And so the queue patiently waits, and grows fat and pleasantly familiar.
Evan gets a good laugh at the length of our queue. I prefer to think he chuckles fondly, musing, "That's my adorable wife, with her quirks I love so much." However, all I actually hear is his laughter. Even the support group idea was accompanied by a roar. (I dearly love his laugh, by the way, subject for another blog entry.)
Could this laugh mean Evan believes I will not find a sufficient number of members for my support group? Does he think others haven't suffered the emotional trauma I have at being told I had reached my limit and could not add a movie I wanted? (With trembling hands, and sniffling back almost-tears, I scrolled through the list to find a few movies to delete, vowing solemnly I would remember them and add them back later.)
I submit that there are many out there who work the queue the way I do, who cherish the idea that the knowledge contained in those 1,200 hours of viewing is poised to be theirs (mine), at the click of a mouse. Now, if I discover this to be true I hope this new fact of my strength in numbers will somehow also be a source of jollity for my dear spouse.
I feel certain this must be close to normal. Any time a new subject comes up that one wants to know more about, which is at least daily, or if one hears anew about a movie from, say, 70 or 80 years ago that is of historical interest for any reason (or has Conrad Veidt in it), one must add it to the Netflix queue. The queue naturally becomes lengthy if one is interested at all in the world, or in hearing a story told well, or in studying the ways of storytelling.
Then one becomes absorbed in the two or three books one is reading at the time and can't be bothered to watch a movie. And so the queue patiently waits, and grows fat and pleasantly familiar.
Evan gets a good laugh at the length of our queue. I prefer to think he chuckles fondly, musing, "That's my adorable wife, with her quirks I love so much." However, all I actually hear is his laughter. Even the support group idea was accompanied by a roar. (I dearly love his laugh, by the way, subject for another blog entry.)
Could this laugh mean Evan believes I will not find a sufficient number of members for my support group? Does he think others haven't suffered the emotional trauma I have at being told I had reached my limit and could not add a movie I wanted? (With trembling hands, and sniffling back almost-tears, I scrolled through the list to find a few movies to delete, vowing solemnly I would remember them and add them back later.)
I submit that there are many out there who work the queue the way I do, who cherish the idea that the knowledge contained in those 1,200 hours of viewing is poised to be theirs (mine), at the click of a mouse. Now, if I discover this to be true I hope this new fact of my strength in numbers will somehow also be a source of jollity for my dear spouse.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
what did I just say?
Hmmm, I just said "too fun not to share" in my last post, after claiming I am writing only to/for myself in the previous one. I may have to amend the way I am thinking of this blog. Pretending to have a readership seems to be my direction, perhaps is my as heretofore unrecognized (by me anyway) wont-- mock sharing with the world. Yes, that's it. "Dear Diary..." There's a history of this, Anne Frank.
As ever,
MH
As ever,
MH
Interview with anagram-elicious Brave Combo member
This is too fun not to share. (My husband Evan does this sort of thing, too!) --MH
The Anagram Times Interview: Jeffrey Barnes
Anagramming is an art as well as a science. From time to time we'll interview master anagrammers who combine the two to produce anagrams that are filled with ingenuity and display their passion and devotion to anagramming. Our first interview is with Jeffrey Barnes, a Grammy Award winning musician from Texas.Q How did you get into anagrams?
A Circa 1980 I began writing palindroems, little "poems" whose lines are spelled the same backward as forward. Trying to make some kind of crazy sense within a very constrictive framework was fun!
Books by authors like Willard Espy showed me other ways of "making the alphabet dance", including word squares (the apotheosis of palindrome), charade ("poems" where couplet lines are spelled the same, but with the word breaks in different places), and anagrams.
Q Do you remember the first anagram you made?
A I don't remember my first, but Thursday night as I was going to sleep, my brain jumbled the word "Batman" into "Bantam". I had a short dream about a guy fighting crime in a chicken suit and woke up laughing. My wife woke up too, but not laughing.
Here's an early "poem" where every line is an anagram of the title:
Existentialism
X is a silent item.
Examine its list:
It's man's exile. It
is Time's tax line.
Next it is a smile
-- snail-exits Time!
Next, a missile. It
lies in state. Mix
six mentalities...
Mine is late. It's X.
Q Do you have a favorite anagram?
A Surely "Twelve + one = Eleven + two" is hard to beat!
Q What do you do in your non-anagram life?
A I'm a musician. My wife Gina teaches dyslexic children to read. We're both interested in language.
I've played in a band called Brave Combo for 26 years. I perform on saxophones, clarinets, flutes, harmonicas and other noisemakers. We play many different musical styles, but won the Grammy for Best Polka Recording in 1999 and 2004. (Sadly, that Grammy category was discontinued several days ago.)
My band appeared on an episode of The Simpsons, called "Co-Dependence Day", for which I arranged the closing theme.
Q Describe the moment when you are working on anagramming a phrase and the last few letters just fall into place and you realize that you have an outstanding anagram on your hands.
A After choosing the source, separating and alphabetizing the vowels and consonants, putting carats on every five letters so the count is correct, finding a starting word that's rife with promise, separating the other letters and trying to use the odd ones (j,k,q,v,x,z et al,) repeating the process over and over using Anu's amazing Internet Anagram Server or little wooden letter squares or just a cocktail napkin, sometimes reaching blind alleys and disassembling words for their parts, one winds up with a small handful of letters and...*click* everything comes together! Not a word (or letter) is wasted. The result is a cogent, pithy, pertinent comment on its source -- often hilarious, but sometimes serious, or even heartbreaking. The anagrammatist has manipulated the primary elements of language with great skill. All the elements of artistic performance are there, except...the anagrammatist is not really responsible for the result. He or she is like a pythoness at the Delphic oracle -- only the conduit for a message from beyond, one of many that existed within the source before the anagrammatist even began.
Q Approximately how long do you spend on an anagram?
A Sometimes it clicks in at 15 or 20 minutes. Sometimes I'll run into all manner of blind alleys, get obsessed, work for hours, and finally (1) get a satisfactory result or (2) give up in disgust.
There is a 28-letter source, which uses only 1/2 the letters of the alphabet plus one, that I've worked on for a couple of years without exhausting. It's generated thousands of viable anagrams, which I'll put into a book eventually.
Long boring trips with the band make this sort of thing possible -- maybe inevitable.
Q Anything else you'd like to add?
A Oh, yes! Something about the ethics of anagramming:
There's a passage in Book XII of The Odyssey, where Odysseus must sail through a narrow pass between two rocks, one of which houses Scylla, a monster whose six heads devour sailors, and the other which has Charybdis, another monster whose giant mouth creates a whirlpool that can suck down a whole ship. (A less classical allusion would be "between a rock and a hard place" or "between the Devil and the deep, blue sea".)
This reminds me of our ethical plight. Remember that an anagrammatist, our "hero" surviving by virtue of his wits, is not completely in charge of what he expresses. He often risks saying something abjectly evil -- and you decide whether he's "channeling" some evil spirit or expressing a dark aspect of his own psyche -- to avoid the bottomless pit of nonsense which always threatens to engulf him.
Of course, "a little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men". On the other hand, we may be tempted to say something morally reprehensible because it's often richly comical to assume the persona of a villain, but it's probably a good idea to edit yourself -- or let somebody responsible do it for you -- than to have righteous people feel offended, or wicked people feel justified.
Some of Jeffrey Barnes's recent anagrams:
- Sotomayor hits Hill again as GOP's race rhetoric cools
- Will denying Kim cognac have any effect on N. Korea?
- Al-Qaeda deputy denounces Obama
What anagrammers would you like to see interviewed here? What questions would you like to ask them? Post your questions and comments about anagrams, this interview, or The Anagram Times below.
Ltr from Dad + and return to blogging
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Now that I have that off the table I can tell you that we left a 105 degree day time temperature to a 36 degree night time temperature the same day. If either of you have any control over temperatures would you please send some of ex-president Gores global warming up here. The MN natives like Suzanne Marline say “if you don’t like the weather wait 5 minutes and it will change’. And it does. The only thing we haven’t experienced since arriving ere a Kansas tornado or snow, sleet or ice.
now we are at the point of asking what is going on in the Evan and Mary John world and how do we tune into the splendiferous Evan John solo” As you probably know we as usual, forward our telephone number and our e addresses here just a tad south of the arctic circle.
I don’t know if I ever told you the story of Lady Di’s birth. Her blessed sainted mother Alyce was carrying Diane while working at the Marlin dry goods store in Osseous the bible mentioned, her time had come while she was waiting as usual on a customer so, without stopping work she mentioned to Diane that she was waiting on a customer and Diane would get first priority after she finished with the current customer.
At which time the biblical created of the world in 6 days, this was before the unions and he said to Diane, because you have been so good and patient, I will create you as the most beautiful and intelligent on my new planet. And he did but he said there is one stipulation for you by being so beautiful and intelligent. I will send unto you one of my greatest failures and you will marry him and cherish him until the end of his or your days, which ever comes first. She agreed and so it came to past in her third trimester of life he came upon her and thus endeth her care free, happy existence.
I am sorry to digress but since 2003, and with a cadmium mesh plate on the right side of my head (Where there was plenty unoccupied space, my mind wanders of its own accord. For example today I met a gentleman who is 49.5 % OJIBWA Indian formerly of the Sioux nation. Born and raised on the reservation, I learned in 15 minutes more about the MN INDIANS then I had ever even heard of. That was an example of my wundering wandering mind.
Sorry to have taken so long to get through the introduction to our move. Will have to wait until we hear from you regarding what you and Evan’s children and your children and grand children have been up to in the real world.
Love from dad, grand dad, great grand dad and long suffering Lady Di. Bye for now.
.........
There you have another of my dad's fanciful letters. It can be really fun to wander around in his mind. The composition is wonderful-- airy and light, yet not at all without structure. His "lovingness" always comes through.
I have not been blogging. I have not told anyone I have a blog. I have so many emails to continually write to a very large extended family I enjoy being in touch with that -- I don't write anywhere else. Oh, except in my numerous journals hand written and scribbled in and left lying in nearly every room of the house. I do have an ongoing novel I am piecing together, but I don't think that counts as really writing it if you don't sit down every day and pound out your requisite 2,000 words or so.
So here is what I think: I shall use this blog as for myself alone, consistency of content be damned. I shall plan to write something often, on whatever subject, and see what transpires.
Best regards, outside persona of self, and tata for now,
Mary H
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