Those of you who have long memories may recall that there were a series of essays three or four years ago that were entitled “Random Thoughts While Shaving.” Now similar random thoughts continue to occupy my alleged mind. I had hoped that they would be transient in nature, but unless I record them, they will stay in my mind when I actually wish for them to become, as the Army says, “permanent party” elsewhere.
None of these thoughts have anything to do with any of the other thoughts that are recorded here. They are independent thoughts and stand on their own two feet. And so I offer you some random thoughts that have been occupying my brain for perhaps the last six months or a year.
This afternoon, April 15, the Roman Catholic Pope has arrived in the United States. I gather that he is going to offer a mass at the new Washington National Baseball Stadium in the capital of this great country, to be followed by another mass at Yankee Stadium in New York. This shows that the Pope is conversant with American affairs in that his mass in Washington will be delivered in a National League stadium while the one in New York will be delivered in an American League stadium. There is great rivalry between the National and American Leagues, so it becomes clear that His Holiness wishes to offend no one, even Bud Selig, the Commissioner of Baseball. It is doubtful that his mass at Yankee Stadium will allude to the designated hitter rule, which is the main bone of contention between the two leagues.
Perhaps the Pope is conversant with Walter Johnson, one of the greatest pitchers of all time who played in Washington for the Senators, and with Joe DiMaggio, the great center fielder for the New York Yankees. I intend to ask my wife to read the full transcript of the Pope’s remarks to see if the Pope notices that the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees have produced less than stellar records so far in the 2008 campaigns. But the Pope is from Bavaria, where soccer is the major interest, and he may think that Joe DiMaggio was only a former Mayor of New York.
The Pope has arrived at the same time that the Dalai Lama is conducting a series of conferences in the Pacific Northwest on compassion. Bishop Tutu of the Anglican Church is attending the sessions led by the Dalai Lama and may offer a South African thought or two. The best I can tell is that the Pope has taken no notice of the conferences led by the Dalai Lama. It seems to me, as an objective observer, that the Pope is missing an opportunity to meet with one of his brethren in the preaching business. I am fully aware that the Dalai Lama is not a practicing Catholic. Neither is Bishop Tutu. But I believe that the Pope is missing a glorious opportunity to get together to trade war stories. There is even the possibility that if the Pope plays his cards right, he may convert the Dalai Lama and Protestant Bishop Tutu to the Roman Catholic faith. I doubt that this will happen, but to an objective observer such as myself, it would seem worth a try.
Yesterday I spoke with my old and treasured friend, Howard Davis, who lives in Yorkville in New York. Howard Davis comes from a clan of preachers where the family business is spreading the gospel. Mr. Davis reports that from one of his windows he can see a Roman Catholic church called St. Joseph’s. If Howard Davis’s reports are accurate, the Pope will visit that church. A good many years ago that church was located in the heart of a German community. But as time has gone on, the Germans have moved away, intermarried with Protestants, and left Yorkville to millionaires such as Mr. Davis. At St. Joseph’s, the Pope may deliver his homily in his native German language. If that is the case, I suspect not many people in the congregation will understand what he has to say.
But there is a footnote to the Pope’s visit to St. Joseph’s Church in Yorkville. Mr. Davis reports that the block in front of that church has been repaved. If His Holiness is driven to St. Joseph’s in his Popemobile, he may be moved to tell the people in New York that the streets here are smoother than the Via Veneto in Rome. And to think that the street was paved at the behest of Mayor Bloomberg, a practicing Jew. I am here to tell you that ecumenism is in the air everywhere.
Now that we have delivered our thoughts on religion to start this sermon, let us move to another subject or two. Both have to do with times that are long since past.
Some of you who may recall American football as played in the 1930s or 1940s, will remember a maneuver called the drop kick. In those days, the football was much more round rather than the slim version that we find today. When it became apparent that professional football had a big future, efforts were taken to make it easier to pass the ball, which would result in higher scoring to please the fans. To accomplish this end, the football was reduced from a sort of oval shape to a long slender shape so that quarterbacks with small hands could get their fingers around it and throw spirals. This made for easier passing, which the owners sensed that the patrons wanted to see. But when the football was elongated to make it easier to pass, it became much more difficult to drop kick the ball.
For those of you who remember the early football games, drop kicks were accomplished by a single kicker standing in the backfield who dropped the ball on the ground and kicked it immediately after it bounced. If the ball went through the two goal posts, it was a field goal worth three points. At that time the goal posts were on the goal line, not ten yards back as they are today.
I have a personal interest in this in that as a child growing up with few companions around where I lived, I became fairly proficient in drop kicking. But the slimmer elongated ball made drop kicking an obsolete art. When dropped from the hand, the new balls would bounce erratically. So to place kick the football now requires two men to accomplish. One is to hold the ball while the other kicks it. This means that only nine men hold off the opposing team, whereas in the former days the drop kicker, who kicked alone, had ten men to guard against those who wished to block his kick.
As luck would have it, I have fairly large hands, which could produce a spiral when passing even with the older ball. But the fans must be served so we now have the elongated ball which makes drop kicking a lost art. I lament the passing of this great art. But I know that drop kicking will never return while I am alive, and so regrets and laments are in order.
While we are addressing things of the past, there is the matter of watch pockets which used to be placed in men’s trousers. As I was growing up, nearly every man carried a round watch which was placed either in the pocket of his vest or in the watch pocket in his trousers. The trouser watch pocket was located just below the belt line and men would pull their watches out using a fob. You may recall that in those days there was a ring around the mechanism that wound the watch. The fob was attached to that ring.
A fob exists for the sole purpose of withdrawing the watch from the pocket of the vest or the trousers. It has no other use. Some are very fancy and others are very plain, but in both cases, the fob hangs outside the pocket and exists for the purpose of pulling the watch from the pocket.
Generally speaking, my recollection is that the foreman on any job requiring manual labor would carry the watch in his watch pocket. The foreman would take out his watch and when it reached say eight o’clock he would tell the men to go to work and when it reached noon, he would tell them to knock off for lunch. At 4:30 or 5:00 PM, the foreman would pull the watch out of his watch pocket and announce that it was “quitting time.” In those days men who performed manual labor did not wear wrist watches. It would be incongruous for a man performing some sort of manual labor to have a wrist watch. He would rely almost entirely on his foreman to tell him when to go to work and when to quit.
As I was growing up, my father carried a watch which he had acquired during his work on the Illinois Central Railroad. There were many makes of watches but this one was called an “Illinois” Railroad watch. The watch was produced by a company entirely separate from the railroad. The watch had a sweep second hand which I thought was a mechanical marvel. My father also believed that any man who wore a wrist watch was less than a full-fledged man. In those days, gayness connoted happiness. My father never heard of the word gay being attached to a man with homosexual tendencies. He might have heard of the term queer being used in those circumstances but my father generally believed that a man wearing a wrist watch was something less than a real man.
He also believed that cigars were the only proper smoke and that anybody who “sucked cigarettes” was peculiar. With the prevalence of lung cancer now afflicting the smoking public, perhaps my old man had it right all along.
But with the coming of wrist watches, watch pockets on men’s trousers have tended to disappear. None of my trousers has a watch pocket. However I do have a pair of blue jeans which has a small pocket inside of the larger front pocket. That particular pocket is of no great use, and if a man had a watch with a fob on it, he would find it totally useless.
For many years during my working career I did not use a watch at all. I used watches only when I traveled or when I had a speech to make. But nonetheless, I regret that trouser makers no longer provide a watch pocket.
When I passed my 40th year with the Bell system, the Long Lines Department of AT&T presented me with a watch. I chose a round watch, somewhat similar to my father’s, in anticipation of that anniversary. But the truth is that men’s vests have largely gone out of style. And the further fact is that there are no watch pockets in men’s trousers. I have one suit with a vest but as time has gone on, I find that there is no place to wear it. So the watch with its fob and gold chain lie in my top dresser drawer, with no one to appreciate their talents.
I regret that there are no more watch pockets in men’s trousers, just as I regret the thought that drop kicking is a lost art. If I had the opportunity to address the Pope, I suspect that he would agree that my lamentations are well placed. But in the end it may be that His Holiness will tell me to simply get used to it.
Finally, we come to a random thought that if it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Your old essayist has been around so long that he understands what an economic depression is. When people refer to our fortunes in this downward economy and call it a recession, it is nothing more than a euphemism. Our current situation has all of the dimensions of a full-fledged depression.
As in the 1930s, banks are failing and people are being laid off from their work. This morning one of the largest banks in this country, Wachovia, has announced such large losses that it may well go under. Last month, 80,000 jobs were lost, while in February there were 70,000 jobs lost. To complicate matters, there is the matter of inflation. Anyone who shops for groceries will tell you that their bill is somewhere between 30 and 40% greater than it was a year ago. There was a time when we made jokes about $4-a-gallon gasoline. Today the price of crude oil is at $117 per barrel. It may be that in the future, if someone is able to buy $4-a-gallon gasoline, it will be considered a bargain. If the price continues to rise, before long American consumers will be paying at least $5 per gallon.
Then we have the housing crisis with property being foreclosed and people being pushed out of their houses. This was a hallmark of the great American Depression that lasted from 1929 until 1942. We have an administration in Washington that does not seem to care much about people losing their houses. Their attitudes were summed up in the beginning by saying that if you signed mortgage papers for more than you could pay, it was your tough luck. The fact is that no one was overseeing the lenders and that they had eyes on rapacious profits.
Now we have one other aspect that did not exist in the 1930s. That is the disastrous war in Iraq. We are squirting away $12 billion per month, with no end in sight. Respectable elements in the financial community expect that we will spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 trillion before this war is concluded, if it ever is concluded. Our expenditures on the war in Iraq have led directly to the failures in the American economy. The dollar is at record lows, which enables foreign investors to buy our manufacturing base. And this country, which used to produce so many miracles, cannot produce an automobile that will compete with the Japanese or the Koreans.
In the meantime we are told by this administration and by the prospective Republican nominee for president, Mr. McCain, that the answer is in lowering tax rates. By lowering tax rates, we are obliged to borrow money to support the Iraq war from, of all people, the Chinese. This is bad news from beginning to end.
I do not have a limitless number of days to hang around in this life of mine. I regret that the current situation has happened so late in my lifetime. But no amount of cheerleading can fix this situation. The people who got us into this situation ought to be run out of town and/or jailed.
In the final analysis, these are lamentable facts. To call this a “mere recession” is nothing more than a euphemism. As one who has lived through the long depression of the 1930s, may I assure you that it has all of the dimensions or, in the language of Donald Rumsfeld, the metrics of a full-fledged depression. When you next buy gasoline or groceries, you may tell the attendant that this is a mere recession and that prices will return to normal in a few days. That might provide everyone with an uproarious laugh.
Well, there you have four completely random thoughts. None relates to the others, as I have promised. But it is good to have them dictated and soon to know that they are in print. That will let the random thoughts know that I have taken them seriously and that they have been fully recognized.
I will retire now and listen to radio and television accounts of the Pope’s visit. I have great hopes that he will mention my name in one of his homilies at the baseball stadiums or perhaps even at St. Joseph’s Church in New York. But the Pope and I are both veterans of the Second World War and are advancing in age. I will know that if he overlooks my name in his preaching, it is just an old-age oversight. As we would say in American basketball, “no harm, no foul.”
E. E. CARR
April 15, 2008
Essay 306
~~~
Kevin’s commentary: I had no idea that footballs used to be round. What I do know, though, and what Pop may be pleased to discover, is that “drop kick” is still absolutely a term used in sports. It simply is used in MMA fighting or fake wrestling instead. To preform a drop kick now is to jump at an opponent, orient oneself sideways, and kick out both legs at them like a kangaroo. Of course when one executes this technique he will generally fall on the ground himself, being that he has no legs to support him at the conclusion of the jump. However if done right this delivers a massive amount of force to the opponent’s core, which is a good thing in MMA fighting.
I’d also like to point out that punting can still be done with one person, and does not require a ball holder, so that’s a plus. I think. I actually don’t completely know, but yeah. I’ve seen people kick a football by themselves before. It works alright.
Lastly, I hope the new Pope will consider coming back to visit — he seems like an all-around better dude than the last one. Too bad he’s eschewed the Popemobile, though. I always did want to see that thing.