Author: Fran Johns

General interest
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Conversations With Cars

by Fran Johns


Some of us talk to ourselves, some of us talk to cars.

As in a recent parking episode, at the intersection of 9th Street and Bryant in downtown San Francisco. It happened at the precise spot where traffic from the Hwy 101 off-ramp muscles its impatient way into the mainstream maelstrom of 9th Street. I was late for a lunch meeting on Bryant.

“I don’t think I want to go into reverse,” said The Volvo.

I was, at the time, pretty much parallel to the far-right curb in a metered space on one-way 9th. But I was interested in getting a little closer so as to reduce chance encounters with cars making reckless right turns. This required only the slightest maneuvering back and forth, but The Volvo, as I mentioned, was interested only in forth. I eyeballed the off-ramp traffic on the left, and the rather aggressive Bryant traffic dead ahead.

“Oh, please,” I said, inching ever farther into Bryant every time I tried the reverse gear and The Volvo chose not to reverse.

It should be noted that The Volvo, which went only by that uninspired name from the time my husband purchased it, new, was a 1977 two-door stick shift. We had had similar conversations before. “I am, after all, Scandanavian…” it would murmur on days when, left alone in hot sunshine, it would refuse to restart until the cool of evening. Or, “Do you realize you are confirming my image as an old geezer lady,” I would say, gently – well, sometimes not – when it choked up in front of two Yuppies driving BMWs.

Eventually, at 9th & Bryant, I put the thing in neutral, got out, pushed it more or less into a parking place and went to my meeting. Thence I drove it, in forward gears, a few blocks to the Popular Mechanix Volvo place, with which we have a long and intimate relationship.

“I can get home on foot or on the Muni bus,” I said to Jon the P.M. guy and the assorted Volvos hanging around, “but if you by any chance have a loaner it would simplify my day.” Jon understands both Volvos and Volvo owners in distress. Out came a lovely little ’98 number named True Blue. Wayyy fancier than Popular Mechanix’ regular loaners Goldfinger and Black Beauty, True Blue boasted all manner of things I had long coveted: right-side mirror, four doors, automatic everything, functional radio… the works. I sensed right away that we might communicate well.

En route home, while True Blue was beginning a sort of sexual identity epiphany which would lead to knowing herself as The Blue Iris (my favorite flower), we became ardently conversational.

“I could be yours,” she said. And lo, there, affixed to her dashboard was a small card proclaiming, “This Car Is For Sale.” Jon is no dummy.

The next day I signed the adoption papers, and two days later we delivered the ’77 – now fully repaired and running like a Rolls Royce – to the auto dismantlers, where the State of California paid us $650 to get it off the road. I felt a little like I was leaving Great Uncle Philemon at the county home for the indigent. But The Volvo said, “Don’t you work all the time with end-of-life issues? Didn’t you provide palliative care? Doesn’t the time come for many of us when physician-hastened dying is the best choice?”

And Iris said, liltingly, “Hmmmmmm….”

economics
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The Dow, the campaign and the surgery

by Fran Johns

While the country was wobbling and reeling, my husband set about having spinal fusion surgery in order to stand up straighter. The country still lists and lurches, but my good husband Bud, thanks to some extraordinary surgical skills, is upright. More upright by several serious percentage points, even. Would that the Dow might do the same. Would that the campaigns might also consider uprightness.

These financial and political sagas have done an inordinate amount of roller-coastering of late; but seen through the lens of modern medicine it all makes perfect sense.

First there was the move across the corridor from ICU (heavy duty wires and tubes and interventions) into TCU (fewer attendants, longer interims between pulse checks, etc) and thence to another floor with spare breathing room and long halls for physical therapy. This was roughly during the run-up to the second presidential debate.

Then the Dow took a dive and Bud went upstairs once again into telemetry, for a closer watch on the erratic heartbeat and recurring fever. The papers were crammed with stop-the-bleeding stories. Bud got a transfusion and the rescue package finally passed. Helped a little, for a while.

But deep breaths are only intermittent these days. Having fallen asleep over an article comparing Democratic/Republican health plans, I woke up to a 3 AM phone call saying Bud was headed back down to ICU. “So we can administer continuous medications…” Try going back to sleep after that.

Another day, a little more physical therapy, and the husband will come home. But the Dow keeps diving, businesses keep hand-wringing and the last presidential debate was hardly uplifting. (Although I thought my guy exceedingly presidential.) Here, though, is a relevant question: after the much-discussed 3 AM phone call, what’s our next president likely to do? Leap into action? Go back to sleep and let events take their natural course? Or lie there writing a blog in his head?

economics
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These Financial Times

by Fran Johns

OK, let’s see. Derivatives; mortgage-backed securities and collateralized investments (which means stuff that is insecure and lacks collateral); credit-default swaps; tranches and bonds and TARPs oh, my; these are the words one needs today to throw around in casual conversation. In addition to the Rescue plan, formerly known as the Bailout.

For those of us who never wanted to know anything about the economy other than that it was, as Mr. McCain recently assured us, fundamentally sound, all these additions to the everyday vocabulary can be more than bewildering. But we are learning.

Being married, as I happily am, to an old-school economics geek who supports the family quite comfortably with online NYSE and Nasdaq reports plus old-fashioned ledger and a hand-held calculator, my learning curve has enjoyed patient support. Primarily in the form of courses in Economics 101 nightly at the dinner table. He maintains, actually, that we are now up to somewhere around Economics 4; I’ve got my own doubts about retention of earlier class data.

But here’s what I do know: Father knew best. As did Mother, grandparents and probably ancestors to the nth generation. And here’s what they knew and taught:

If you have a dollar, you put 10 cents in the savings account. Then you give 10 cents to the church (synagogues, mosques, etc would have qualified with the ancestry) and another 10 cents to your favorite educational institution, preferably the one that educated you in everything but Economics. The next three dimes go to the grocer and the next three to the landlord (or maybe, if you’re lucky, the mortgage holder.) After careful consideration, you might want to spend the last dime on an ice cream cone. Unless you decide to put it in a separate piggy bank for eventual purchase of a new coat. If the ancestors had approved of borrowing 10 cents from your cousin so you could buy the coat before winter – which they might or might not have – I’m certain that repaying the loan, next paycheck, would have come in before buying the next ice cream cone.

Worked for a long time; when did we forget?

General interest
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Old Words, New Words

by Fran Johns

My friend and fellow Compassion and Choices NCA co-chair Stewart Florsheim recently had his fine book of poetry, A Short Fall from Grace, featured in Pedestal Magazine, in a thorough and insightful review by Alice Osborn. Early on, Ms. Osborn declared Stewart a “master of the ekphrastic poem…” which sent at least two of us rushing off to our dictionaries. Alas, nothing there. Not in the Random House, the Oxford American, not even the OED three-volumes-with-magnifying glass. My friend Merla, a dictionary person if there ever was one, e-mailed that she had found ecphrastic, as in “clearing away obstructions,” and since his poetry quite often does just that we declared Stewart a master of the ecphrastic poem and were ready to let it go.

The poet himself, however, having been copied on these e-exchanges, finally weighed in rather gently with the definition: poetry in response to art. He then provided a Web link to the Puddinghouse Magazine site, featuring articles and references and gracious knows what-all on ekphrastic poetry. A chapbook edited by Jennifer Bosveld, Elastic Ekphrastic is an anthology of these gems. I have been feeling, since then, a little like the only person in the literary world previously unfamiliar with ekphrastia. Except for Merla, thank goodness, as she is highly literate.

The word popped up again during a conversation a few days ago, and it took my friend Jim (who is decidedly new school as opposed to old-school Merla and me) exactly eight seconds to whip out his iPhone and find ekphrastic in Wikipedia. Well, of course.

This brings up some interesting questions: Will Wikipedia render the OED obsolete? Is the old-fashioned dictionary, the kind you could put on a shelf, on the way out? Or should I invest in a new OED (ours, I admit, is a 1971 edition, and half the English language has been invented since then) at 275 pounds sterling for the new compact edition with magnifying glass? With at least one word person defending Sarah Palin’s “nucular” (the way no one ever defended Eisenhower) as correct because it is a regional thing, are we on our way to establishing our own definitions and pronunciations without regard to dictionaries anyway? Considering all this instant information and opinion, are we being dumbed down or smartened up by the shifting winds of wordage?

At least I have been smartened into ekphrastic poetry. My spellcheck still doesn’t believe that ekphrastic is a word, but the ghost of my college Greek professor Miss Mabel K. Whiteside is undoubtedly at peace.

General interest
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Reading about it in the morning

by Fran Johns

What with the Olympics, the conventions and other breaking news these days, there seems an awful lot of TV-watching going on. I don’t do TV very well. For one thing, the Comcast people – whom I actively loathe and despise so I hope your mother doesn’t work there – in their infinite wisdom furnish us with 82 channels, which is 76 more TV channels than I could ever possibly want. There are, of course, one or two I would like to have that are somehow not on the Comcast radar, but in order to get them I would need to add another 40 or 50 more, and my poor old curved-screen TV would collapse of its own weight.

It appears that everybody who is not following the news on TV is checking in on her iPhone or Treo or laptop. I can’t handle that kind of newsgathering either. My assorted home pages and RSS feeds do indeed give me headlines at every turn – and I appreciate that and congratulate you if your mother works for iGoogle – but I am not inclined to zip right over and read the whole story and this is why:

Nothing will ever beat picking up the morning paper, sitting down with a cup of coffee and finding out what’s going on around the globe. Even if it went on 6 or 8 hours ago. The sky will fall if you miss knowing about the invasion of Svenghalistan by 6 hours? Under the old morning paper system the universe unfolds in proper time. You catch the first line of the big head just below and to the right of the New York Times’ “All the News That’s Fit to Print” box as you’re picking up the paper, and the adrenalin kicks in, ever so gently, even before the caffeine. Maybe your candidate won! Or you glance at the smaller typeface just below the slogan and get an instant clue about who’s beating up on whom around the globe. Then you settle down, let everything else wait while the day gets underway, and digest the news and a piece of toast at your own speed. This is good not only for the digestion, but also for the blood pressure (your candidate didn’t win?!) and the furniture that ordinarily gets in the way when you throw things at the TV.

The daily newspaper may be condemned to die, leaving hard news analysis and investigative reporting to the bloggers and the Wikipedes and perhaps some good hearted nonprofits, which many friends of mine believe will work out just fine. I’ve got my doubts (and Newshour still, at least.) But the need to know everything that happens everywhere at the moment of its happening is not high on my priority list.

I want to read about it in the morning. Over coffee.

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