Category: Orphans

Some of the traveling for my part-time gig involves staying in hotels. And recently I have become enamored with the one-cup coffee makers often found in my room.

Such machines have been sold for some time but have really caught on, despite what ultimately becomes a steep price for one cup of coffee at a time. The Keurig “K-Cup” is not just a brewer but a coffee “brewing system.” Green coffee beans are packed into the plastic container and brewed as a cup of Joe once overrun with hot water. That it is such labeled as a system no doubt contributes to it $100-plus price tags.

The one-cup machines I have frequently used when in hotels contain a packet or pouch that can be laid into the brewing holder and water is poured into a reservoir inside the brewer.

Since I frequent stores as part of my job I have been looking for one-cup brewers. Alas, I had only found those cheaper than $80 to $100-something until yesterday.

Inside a store that I am forbidden to identify I found a Kitchen Selective brewer for $16. With tax it came up one penny shy of $17.

The feature in the model I bought is its reusable, so-called “permanent,” filter along with a white ceramic mug. I just now brewed my first cup and it tasted good, though I probably could have put a bit more Folgers grounds into the filter. I will see how the machine holds up and note the quality of my cup of Joe.

Now, I probably could have woven into what I have just written, an anecdote, maybe two, of my tale of a cup of Joe. But unfortunately, for whom I’m not certain, I am writing this in the middle of laundry. That will come off as a flimsy excuse once you finish reading this, but a flimsy excuse is better than no excuse at all.

In the Navy — Clap for a cup of Joe

My post-high school days were spent in the service of the United States Navy. I may need not, but will mention that this was in the final days of the Vietnam War. By final, I mean the peace accords had been signed, the draft was no more and the finale was the fall of Saigon (and the remainder of what was South Vietnam) to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. the North, or the “commies.” The latter took place about nine months after I enlisted but the closest I got to Vietnam was several hundred miles away while transiting the South China Sea enroute to the Philppines.

Today, I normally drink about two cups of coffee a day, though I usually partake of a cup of iced tea at lunch and take it with me. The tea gets watered down sometime and usually doesn’t provide much of a caffeine blast. Likewise, that all is about the sum of my total caffeine intake.

That wasn’t the case during the days I spent in the Navy.

I used to drank coffee like a fiend and did so pretty much for about 30 years. Somewhere down the line. I decided about two cups were all I needed of the stuff.

Now coffee, like getting s**tfaced and chasing women, were pretty much ground into Navy culture. Pardon the pun. That was at least the case of the male-dominated society during my tour from 1974-1977. The Navy even explained why coffee was an important part of the life and culture on film while I was in Boot Camp at Great Lakes, Ill. The training film I saw was named “A Cup of Joe.”

It was such a long time ago when I saw the film that I remember few details. Whether it mentioned the long-standing tale that the slang for a cup of Joe came from the name of a long ago Secretary of the Navy I don’t remember. That secretary the Hon, Josephus Daniels, a tee-teetotaler under President Wilson,  banned drinking alcoholic beverages onboard the ships — yes, sailors could actually drinks a bit onboard in the olden days — with his infamous General Order 99. Thus coffee allegedly became the beverage of choice due to this prohibition.

No proof exists that the slang a Cup of Joe, actually came from Daniels.

I told my friend Warren this story around the time we were semi-roommates. Semi meaning Warren worked as a mud logger on an offshore oil rig and came in after a week on the job. He thought the whole Navy film and the phrase concerning coffee were hilarious concepts. I suppose the word Joe was what led us into another discussion.

Cartoon cussing in college course

My friend Waldo, who by then had his Master’s and was making “do-dads from the woods,” had suggested before I started college that I take some courses that might be of interest as well as fun rather than taking all required ones which might have left me burned out.

I followed his advice. One such course I took during my first semester was a Psychology course on Human Sexuality. Yes, the good old college “sex class.” This was edgy for many students, mainly the ones who had recently left their neat little suburban lives outside Houston and Dallas.

In addition to learning all one needs to know about sex and more we had an optional class one day which was taught by our late, great Professor Dr. Wayne Wilson. The class was on profanity. This specifically dealt with sexually-explicit words. I found it quite eye-opening as this funny-looking cartoon character on film showed tons of dirty slang words and phrases. One must remember, I had been a sailor not too terribly long from the sea. It being legendary how sailors cursed, I thought I had heard it all. Alas, I had not.

One of the words I found funny was “Old Joe,” which was given as slang for “the clap,” a.k.a. gonorrhea. I looked at several online dictionaries today and have seen a few definitions that said Old Joe could be a catch-all slang for sexually-transmitted disease. But it was explained in that Psychology course by a little cartoon man on film — with the dirtiest mouth I have ever witnessed, I might add — as clap.

Of course, adding Old Joe as slang for the clap following a Navy sea story on a cup of Joe, had my friend Warren rolling with laughter. He would amuse us when stopping at the 7-11, asking “Care for a cup o’ Old Joe.?” To which I replied, “I think not.”

I suppose you had to be there.

By the looks of its city Website, Ferguson, Mo., appears a rather pleasant place to live or visit.

Two static pictures bookend the top of the site. One shows a drawing or picture of a fishing rod apparently cast out into the water. A duck is pictured just below it. It is uncertain as to whether the duck is giving the invisible angler moral support or whether the person is fishing for ducks. Over on the right bookend is a rather cute young lady riding a bicycle. She wears modest shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. The shirt is sometimes called a “wife-beater” when worn by men but since a woman is wearing it, maybe it is a “husband-beater” or “boyfriend-beater.” Maybe T-shirt is safe.

Several pictures in the middle of the Ferguson page fade in and out. They include some historic railroad cabooses and a picture of the city fire department’s only ladder truck spraying a stream of water on a couple of kids in T-shirts and shorts, presumably during a summer day. Perhaps given the rioting along with several businesses burned down over the last couple of nights, the ladder truck photo is maybe the most unfortunate of the Web pictures.

Of course, one can probably find many signs and pictures or symbols of where the infamous occurred.

I recently stayed in Dallas for a week of meetings which meant a drive from our hotel off the Stemmons Freeway to downtown near the Convention Center —  the latter now named for former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison — and back. The route took us under the triple underpass past Dealey Plaza. It was under that triple underpass where the presidential limousine carrying John F. Kennedy sped through after he was shot and was pronounced dead a short time later on Nov. 22, 1963.

A colleague of ours from Colorado rode with us on those days to our meeting in downtown Dallas. This associate told us he had never either been to Dallas nor seen the site where Kennedy was assassinated. He found the site fascinating and even professed it to be on his “bucket list” of sites to visit before he met his end.

One particular topic of discussion on the way back to our hotel was while driving in front of the old Texas School Book Depository where alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald worked and fired the rifle that killed Kennedy. Elm Street, which ran in front of the famous book building and on which JFK rode when he was shot was marked with a couple of  “Xs,”  painted where the bullets fired from the sixth floor of the depository building.

I have been to Dallas many times. I even lived in two different suburbs for short periods of time. I have also been downtown to the assassination site on more than one occasion. I did not remember the Xs being there.

Apparently, the Xs have been painted on the street for years and the city would remove them, both for street work and from keeping tourists who would dodge traffic for a picture near the X from ending with the same ultimate fate as Kennedy. My colleagues and I had a discussion about the Xs and I found several stories including this one from the paper of record in Big D.

The police shooting of Mike Brown and all the unrest it has spawned will never match the infamy as that of what happened in Dallas 51 years ago this month. But some recognition will always remain in Ferguson for those who appreciate even the biggest warts on our American history. Most cities with former black eyes even Waco, Texas, — despite, boosters of that Central Texas city still point out, the onetime Branch Davidian compound is 12 miles northeast of Waco — ultimately come to grips with their past. And while these dark times are not particularly celebrated, they do become a rightful place in local and sometimes even national history.

What Ferguson — in the landing path of Lambert International Airport — will become someday is hard to guess. Perhaps just as soon that all the discord came to town after the police shooting of Mike Brown, so will it eventually disappear. Then may once more people may fish with ducks, or for them, and cute women wearing sleeveless Ts will roam the suburban St. Louis landscape.

Last week I finally got the shingles vaccination that I had waited several years to receive. I know how old and pathetic I must sound. Still, my father and a brother both had shingles when they were alive. It sounded like a living hell.

I had the chickenpox as a young man and so I was a supposed walking target for shingles.

Around 1-in-3 will develop shingles in their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

 “Anyone who has recovered from chickenpox may develop shingles; even children can get shingles,” says the CDC. “However the risk of shingles increases as you get older. About half of all cases occur in men and women 60 years old or older.”

The same virus that causes chickenpox — varicella zoster virus — causes shingles. If I had a supposition, I would suppose that the 60-year-plus age when shingles tend to occur most was a reason that the Veterans Affairs people told me I had to wait until age 60 to receive the shingles vaccine. Then one day, when I was 58 years old or so, I saw a sign in the VA and later one in a pharmacy that said one could get the vaccine at age 55. So I scheduled a shot but later had to cancel it because I was having arthroscopic knee surgery. That finally went on by and about two weeks ago I had a flu shot. It was followed a week later by the shingles vaccine.

I know that a lot of younger folks with kids are against vaccines, worrying that vaccinations may cause all kinds of maladies, like congenital autism, diabetes or multiple sclerosis. Whether these younger parents actually knew folks who suffered diseases some of the 20th century vaccines prevented — like polio, even seemingly benign diseases that could cause death such as measles — I don’t know.

I suppose it would be a fair question to ask why chickenpox was not knocked out by some shot? Well actually, there is now a vaccine as the government licensed one in 1995. Chickenpox, for most people, is a walk in the park considering the other childhood diseases most of us growing up in the 60s suffered such as German measles (rubella), the red measles (Rubeola) or the mumps. The latter, a disease of the salivary glands were always scary-sounding to us little boys because of its seldom ability to “go down,” meaning it could cause testicular atrophy leading to sterility. Of course, it was even scarier when you didn’t know what the hell people were talking about!

When I was a small fry I got all of those shots one needed. Of course, they hurt like hell. I am convinced that people who gave shots to kids for anything at all either didn’t know how to give it so it would not hurt, or else they were taking their day-to-day frustrations out on us little ones rather than on a swig of Jesus in a jar.

I had shots for everything when I was in the Navy. I swear some of the diseases must have been made up. I felt a little peaked after some of the shots. A few of the vaccines I received were given with some kind of gun. The only vaccine that made me really ill was for Yellow Fever. I spent the night shaking with chills in the dispensary at Boot Camp. For some reason, the corpsmen put me in an ice-cold shower. Ta-da! it didn’t work.

There may have been some environmental reasons behind some of the medical problems I have today: Type 2 diabetes, palsy, whatever that’s causing my lower back problems. I don’t know, as a people we tend to think something singular causes everything. I have had some exposure to some questionable substances and I’m not talking about the ones that makes objects appear closer than they really are. I was exposed to a place where leaking barrels of Agent Orange were stored. The old late 1940s destroyers on which I rode for a year was stuffed full of asbestos. And maybe I am wrong, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if those old buildings I worked in for about two decades that held printing machines and massive amounts of ink and chemical were a formula for a “sick building.”

I don’t know but I can tell you I never had diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, smallpox or Yellow fever. Those kind of things would have ruined your day, for sure.

 

Yesterday, during my monthly visit to the VA clinic for a methadone refill, I stopped to think of just how drastically the patient population at the facility had changed over the years.

There are still grayed and sometimes feeble veterans of World War II although that population is shrinking rapidly through attrition by time. The same is happening with Korean War veterans. And my generation, those vets of the Vietnam War and that era, are still in great number even though we too are getting gray and sometimes moving about much slower.

What struck me as I waited on a visit to my PA was the number of women who were getting called into the primary care practitioners’ offices, and they weren’t just those accompanying their veteran husbands. Likewise the faces of men seem younger and younger. Some may have lost limbs from roadside bombs although those disabilities are getting more difficult to spot because of better prosthesis and post-battlefield care. Sadly, there too are the growing numbers of young men and women who carry the burden of post traumatic stress disorder, the silent and sometimes crippling mental wound.

Much has been written lately about the significant failures discovered in the Department of Veterans Affairs. As one who has written professionally about the VA over the years and my status as a veteran who uses VA for health care, such problems are not so shocking. I had hoped when the President appointed former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki that the twice-wounded and one-time commander of the 1st Cavalry Division would set the VA straight on its shortcomings. I include both the benefits administration and well the health administration.

Sadly, that didn’t happen. Shinseki wasn’t responsible for all the problems about which employees blew whistles to the media. Still, the general failed his assignment.

I hope, as I do whenever a new VA secretary is chosen, that Bob McDonald will cause marked improvements to the VA. The West Point grad and retired head of Proctor and Gamble is talking a good game. Although, many leaders of troubled organizations often do that.

McDonald has laid out some explicit changes for the VA. Among these are: “Establishing a single regional framework that will simplify internal coordination, facilitate partnering and enhance customer service. This will allow Veterans to more easily navigate VA without having to understand our inner structure,” says a VA blog post on its Website.

That might mean little to those without a great knowledge of the VA organization. However, if this change is made — once all the corporate-speak is overlooked — this could make for a significant transformation in how the VA does business.

While it may seem apples to oranges when thinking about the VA shortfalls such as long waits for doctors this could translate to better and faster care down at the patient level. Think about it. Remove a whole extra, unneeded level and who knows what possible good might come.

I may be wrong. I have been many times before. But on this day of remembering veterans I think the VA could be on the course for better service in its health care, benefits and, yes, even in its cemeteries the VA maintains. That is my hope, at least. Those who fought and served before me gave us all the opportunity to hope. So why not take that chance?

Happy Veterans Day.