Lullaby and Good Night

When I wrote a few months ago about my affection for Gene Barry and Burke’s Law, my friend Ed wrote that he had the same fond affection for What's My Line. He said he used to fall asleep listening to it as his parents watched it downstairs.

I can well understand his affection because I do that now — fall asleep listening to old television shows. I used to take Excedrin PM to help me sleep, but it eventually stopped having much effect. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I just pop in an old TV show DVD. I have no memories of being sung to sleep, or being read to, but when I hear the familiar shows, the familiar cadences, sometimes even the familiar lines, they're just like a lullaby.

I suppose that if most people wanted something hauntingly familiar to lull them to sleep, they'd turn on classic music. I prefer a different kind of classic. The characters' soothing voices, whether Perry Mason's gruff bluffs or Lt. Columbo's humble grumbles, imbue a sense of comfort and safety as I get swept off into the darkness. It's as soothing as a mother singing a lullaby — except, in this case, my mother is played by either Mary Richards or Ethel Mertz.

I wish I'd known I was always going to be able to hear these voices. I am embarrassed at the times when I cut short outdoor adventures and even dates to get home in time to see a Twilight Zone rerun on Saturday afternoon. Today the entire collection sits on my shelf, including episodes that were never released into syndication, along with the entire collection of I Love Lucy, Columbo, M*A*S*H, Friends, among others.

Of course, it doesn't have to be a television DVD. It’s equally easy to pop a classic like An American in Paris or The Wizard of Oz in and have Gene Kelly or Ray Bolger serenade me. Slipping off to sleep is like slipping surreptitiously back to post-war Paris or the Emerald City.

There's nothing like having a little time machine in the bedroom, one that lets me wander back to adolescence, childhood, and beyond.

Expectations, Interrupted

One facet of middle age that I've grown to appreciate is the smooth flow of the days, and even the prosaic milestones that punctuate them. The Sunday paper, a favorite weekly television show, putting out the garbage cans, winding the chime clock. The word routine is too negative; it's more of a rhythm that, if you're lucky, comes into your life and evolves into a comfortable sweater or pair of shoes.

The scramble of ambition that permeates our younger lives has slowed; we've settled into a fulfilling career or we've found that mythical "last job." It may not be perfect, but we've splashed in enough frog ponds for us to know that it'll suffice for a while. Life has the languidness of tropical sunshine.

In this rhythmic life, the only interruptions are usually those we plan ourselves — vacations, parties, new cars, sometimes even buying a new house if we're really motivated for change.

But there are the interruptions that are thrust upon us, the ones that remind us that languidness never lasts for long.

When I got home last Thursday night from a local high-tech conference, my wife greeted me not with hello but with an anguished sob informing me that her father had found her stepmother dead in their hot tub.

That's not a break in routine; it's a fracture.

The news was all the more astounding because, not five days before, Annelies had sat across the table from me at my father's 90th birthday party, engaging, bubbly, spirited, inquisitive as always. She could have a conversation with anyone about anything; she listened carefully as one niece talked about her excitement at working at the National Institutes of Health, her first job out of school; she engaged another niece's boyfriend in a discussion of European capital cities.

If you step back and looked at the rhythm of Annelies' 77 years, there was comfort to be found there. For someone who saw the Nazis march into her native Czechoslovakia as a little girl, it’s not so bad to pass away in a hot tub high on a hill overlooking Monterey Bay. Sitting in that warm water was a rhythm she'd cultivated over the last 20 years, as long as she and my father-in-law lived there. On that one day, though, according to the coroner's report, she stood up too quickly, passed out, and drowned. The initial shock is palpable, even as insight flows in around it.

But Annelies’ passing — as sudden and sad as she was happy — has reminded me that even as you luxuriate in the soft flowing rhythms you've created, you still never know how the day will end.

Summer, 1972

Two weeks ago I wrote about my inability to stop writing fiction, even after many failed attempts to sell anything.

Because my id keeps the creative impulse alive, and my superego tells me I'll never sell anything, I decided that I would write something that I wanted, not something I thought would sell. I'm finally tackling a story that I've wanted to tell for years.

In the summer of 1972, I took a student tour around the United States via Greyhound bus (it cost $900; today’s student cost more and last a week). There were 35 of us, mostly from Palo Alto; we were astonishingly homogenous — white, middle-class, mostly strait-laced, even though it was a time when the rules of what constituted "good morals" were being re-written.

Perhaps everyone thinks the summer they were 16 is grist for the Great American Novel, but I (or my id) would argue strongly for 1972. It was the fuzzy transition between the Sexy 60s and the Subdued 70s. It looked like the war in Vietnam was ending, but a cloud was hovering in the form of corruption, inflation, and the oncoming era of limitations. The people we called Jesus Freaks were the beginning of the fundamentalist movement (I dated one). The way women saw themselves was shifting like a loose tectonic plate. Engineers here in Silicon Valley were inventing the microprocessors that would power the computers that would change the way we lived.

It was a wonderful summer that affected me deeply. It brought me a best friend, who introduced me to my wife. It gave me an interest in travel, which blossomed into my first career as a travel writer. It showed me how different the rest of the United States was from California, an education in itself.

Surprisingly, creating the atmosphere of 1972 has been simple. While I have been religiously dragging around ephemera and memorabilia from 1972, the irony is that researching the elements of the past is remarkably easy, thanks to the web. One baseball almanac site lists the score of every single baseball game that summer. eBay posts auctions of postcards from our destinations the way they were. The brochures from the Civil War battlefields we visited are online, refreshing my memory on why the heck we were visiting them.

And, like any novelist, I get to (or my id gets to) tell the story differently, with a little more sex, a little less stupidity, and a little more insight into the angst many of us must have been harboring.

Best of all, I get to plunge headlong into a time of promise and pleasure. We told ourselves we were living lives of "divine decadence" (a phrase we stole from Cabaret), even though it was all pretty tame in retrospect. But after that summer, there were colleges to apply to, jobs to compete for, gas lines to sit in, rising prices to worry about. Life was never the same after that summer, and I was too young to know that life was never the same after every summer.

Economies of Scale: Sweet Music or Sour Notes?

A couple of news stories in the last two weeks vividly contrasted the chasm between the questions the government is trying to answer and the questions the government should be asking.

The first story relates to President Obama proposing legislation to Congress that would keep banks from becoming "too big to fail." I can partially see the logic in this. The FDIC guarantees consumers' deposits; the failure of a large bank would bankrupt this program. Before regional banks were approved in the 1980s and interstate banking approved in 1995, this wasn't an issue.

But on the other side, what if this trend doesn't stop with banks? What if Congress decides that an airline shouldn't be too big to fail, because it has too many employees that would be out of work, or its loss would limit competition at certain airports?

The second story relates to an article in Parade about cities and counties considering consolidation in order to make municipal services — police, fire, garbage, utilities, animal control — more efficient. It identified Buffalo, Natchez, and Pittsburgh as cities pondering the possibility.

The trend is nothing new. The city and county of San Francisco have been coterminous since 1850; the city and county of Philadelphia since 1854. New York City's boroughs used to be separate cities until a vote in 1898 consolidated them. The logic was the same in 1898 as it is today: achieving economies of scale and thus lowering administrative costs.

This is why entities, whether they’re in the public or private sector, merge. It's not a question of cheap money or bad management; it's a question of economies of scale. I admit to seeing this through the prism of technology: the costs of developing or deploying efficient software and hardware are lower when you spread them over a greater number of employees, branches, or offices. If you write software to manage your automatic-teller network, is it more efficient to write it for 100 branches, or for 1,000 branches? Ask Bill Gates, who made his fortune off of writing something once and selling it a gazillion times. (In this regard, economies of scale relate more to white-collar than blue-collar work.)

As much as I respect President Obama, I think that worrying about entities becoming too big to fail is exactly the wrong tack. If government is to become more efficient, we should start thinking not about too big or too small, but the right size to begin with.

This was hammered home to me by an opinion column commentator Tom Brokaw wrote for the New York Times last year, in which he asked why the Dakotas needed 17 educational institutions:

In my native Great Plains, North and South Dakota have a combined population of just under 1.5 million people, and in each state the rural areas are being depopulated at a rapid rate. Yet between them the two Dakotas support 17 colleges and universities. They are a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.

I know this is heresy, but couldn't the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?

In California, we have the University of California (10 campuses); the California State University (23 campuses); and California Community Colleges (110 campuses within 72 districts). That may not seem like a lot for a state the size of California, but within a 15-minute drive north or south, I can choose from three community colleges. Is that financially prudent?

This is the 21st century. We have a global economy. We have created technology that makes economies of scale scale even larger that ever before. We should stop living with 20th century (or worse, 19th century) perspectives and start thinking creatively about how we can be more efficient, how we can adapt quickly to the way the world is changing.

Cities that are considering consolidation shouldn't be anomalies — they should be the norm. Yet because of political will (or more likely, lack of it), no one wants to consolidate the fiefdoms that they've built. Worse, the government is telling us that big is bad.

That's not true. Big badly run — whether in the public sector or the private sector — is bad. The Titanic didn’t sink because of its size; it sank because of its design and how it was run. Big run well could be the best use of our increasingly limited financial resources.

When Should Boomers Euthanize Their Dreams?

What did you want to be when you grew up? Such an American question, imbued with the ideals of choice and determination and freedom.

And how'd that work out for you? Did your dreams come true? If not, when did you euthanize them? More important, what made you decide to kill them?

I was talking to a high-school classmate of mine a few months ago about this. Dan and I had acted together in high school plays; he was frequently the lead and I was always a supporting character. He had gone to UCLA and pursued an acting career, one that never really went anywhere. Now that there’s DVD technology, he says wryly, you can pause Steven Spielberg's 1941 and find him as an extra in the crowds.

But eventually, he told me, he realized he wasn't getting where he wanted to be. "I had to say, you know what, I gave it that shot, and now it’s time to grow up. Time to move on."

I'm trying to make that same decision about writing fiction, but I'm not having much luck. I find myself staring into a chasm of fruitlessness, and yet I can't stop myself from edging across this rickety, dilapidated rope bridge. I used to say that I'd give up my fiction writing when I turned 50. It didn't happen. I don't understand why I still cling to a shred of raggedy hemp.

I had my chances. I wrote a screenplay after college that I managed to get into Universal Studios, thanks to a national film essay award I won. I got a partial story credit on a Remington Steele episode, but only because I was dating Stephanie Zimbalist's best friend at the time. This is why I can say in all truthfulness that I slept my way into Hollywood. If you want to see the episode, called "Steele in the Chips," it’s on Disc 7 of Season 3, available through Netflix. (Be sure to listen to the commentary, especially when executive producer Michael Gleason asks Stephanie who I am, and she replies, "Some guy — I forget." I'm thinking of using that for my epitaph.) I had an agent once that half-heartedly sent a novel around New York, but it was just after 9/11 and I don’t think anyone was paying attention.

What I'm facing, I fear, is a classic clash between my id and superego. My pleasure-prone id still lusts after fame and fortune, the fantasy of celebrity and philanthropy.

My rational superego insists the dream is not necessary to my life. My wife would live with me in a mobile home if it came to that. The friends I had before Remington Steele are the same friends I have now; our camaraderie was not based on my being successful in Hollywood. The cats are completely indifferent, as long as there's Fresh Catch in the pantry.

My id hones in, scud-like, on the stories of elderly authors like Helen Hooven Santmyer, who published And The Ladies of the Club at 88. My superego responds to stories like these by noting that family or other connections usually escorted them through the publisher's door.

My id believes I am still young, still a potential prodigy, with stories to tell. My superego deems the whole idea ridiculous, and doubly so in light of the fact that I have friends and colleagues who have gotten agents, and have sold novels, and who have even seen them made into movies, without any significant impact on their lives.

But still I am drawn back to the keyboard and characters I want to know better. I hear my superego asking, why spend the time? But this particular dream refuses to slip away.

The compromise sits clearly within semantics. On one side of the chasm is writing; on the other side, getting published. Unlike my friend Dan, I don’t need a stage and an audience. My fiction writing may never amount to anything, and that's okay. We play the piano, knowing that we'll never be concert pianists. We swim, knowing that we’ll never compete in the Olympics. We exercise, knowing that we will never get our 32-inch waists back. I make up stories, knowing they may never live anywhere else except my heart.

Addressing An Aggravating Issue

If I were boss of the world, my first order would be for all high-tech CEOs to have to drive themselves to a randomly chosen office on one of their own campuses. Then they'd see just how difficult it is for outsiders to find where the heck they’re going.

If you've ever been to Silicon Valley, you know that it's the land of expansive campuses of tilt-up buildings, so-called because they're low buildings, usually two to three stories, the walls of which were lifted up into place, not unlike an Amish barn raising (though with mechanical assistance).

Because the valley was originally farmland, valley real estate tends to be spread out, separated only by parking lots. As the industry has consolidated, you have more and more employees clustered into clusters of buildings — most of which have addresses that are either marginally visible, non-existent, or just plain obtuse.

I visited one high-tech company (which, like the others, shall remain nameless, since I am a contractor to many of them) last month using the address on its Web site. What its Web site failed to include was the directional designation of the street.

Now, there are two problems here. First — I'm embarrassed to admit — I had traveled this particular street thousands of times and had never noticed a) that it had a directional designation and b) that at what thoroughfare it switched from one to the other. When a street is a mile from your house, you don't look at those things. Also, I was fairly confident that I knew the general area where this company's offices were — except I was wrong. They had been there at one time, of course, but had moved; as I'm fond of saying, don’t tell me what’s there now — tell me what was there 20 years ago, and I'll find it.

Second, directional designations present a special challenge in Silicon Valley because of the way the peninsula curves between San Jose and San Francisco. The direction you frequently think is north is actually west. Even though I grew up here, I'm still surprised to see the sun set where it does.

Okay, so last month's lost-in-the-valley was on me. But this month, I headed out to another company, looking for the number I was given by my contact there. When the buildings on the street shifted to residences, and the number of digits dropped by one, I knew I had crossed over into the next town. I pulled over, punched the address into my GPS (which, believe me, is no guarantee of finding anything), and headed back. The GPS cheerily told me that I was approaching my destination on the right, and then said, "You have arrived."

The only problem: the location at which I had arrived was not leased by the company I was looking for. Suspecting that I was at least close, I turned into the next driveway — which had a completely different street address from the one I was looking for — and discovered that while the buildings were numbered, none of them had their actual street address on them. I called my contact (thank goodness for cell phones), and he said he'd come get me.

This is not a random occurrence. I've been to Silicon Valley buildings that do have clearly labeled address numbers, but they were set back far enough from the road that the numbers weren't visible until you'd already arrived. I’ve been to buildings where the address numbers are like bas-relief ornamentation that's impossible to see unless you’re standing underneath it or know to look up at the corner of the sixth floor.

And to be fair, I shouldn't vilify Silicon Valley alone. I once visited a company north of New York City that purposefully, as a security measure, had absolutely no signage identifying itself. A defense contractor? No, it was online service Prodigy, which gives you some idea of the high regard in which its executives held themselves. Incidentally, this was the company that was vilified for pioneering online advertising, and while it died a sad, lonely death, the Web looks today what Prodigy looked like 20 years ago. Irony sucks.

There is another challenge here in the valley. The original cities grew from their original downtowns into farmland until their boundaries met and melded: there are streets that run from one side of the valley to the other, but may have two or three names along the way, a vestige of the old days. Of course, municipal leaders could improve this, but they choose not to. It means actually collaborating with counterparts in other cities and possibly looking weak because if the street is changed from what it was in city A to what it is in city B. This means the businesses on the street in city A have to change their advertising, their stationery, and so on, and that gets the business owners angry at the municipal leaders — who, if they can be voted out of office, avoid that sort of outcome like the plague.

So if we can't control the names of the streets, that means it's doubly important for companies to make it easier to find their damn offices.

Are Boomers’ Bad Habits Spreading To Their Parents?

Boomers are stereotypically self-indulgent, but now there's the possibility that they've spread the attitude to their parents. If so, it proves the adage: insanity is hereditary — you get it from your kids.

The New York Times published a story on Friday entitled Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure. Talk about maddening. It was about seniors — people in their 80s and 90s — continuing to engage in adventurous pursuits. One of the sources was a man who engaged in wing-walking at 89.

The story's anecdotal lead told the story of an Ocala, Fla., woman who, at age 90, went hiking in South Africa. At some point during the three-week trip last August, she sprained her ankle, and because no one had thought to bring crutches along, she had to cut her trip short.

What the story doesn't mention is what "cutting the trip short" entailed, and what effect it had on the itinerary, the guides, and the other participants. I have some limited experience with this, one that was not pleasant. We took a cruise through Tahiti for my 50th birthday, and one of the optional shore excursions was a jungle walk on Raiatea. It was blatantly advertised as a strenuous hike, involving the use of ropes to climb up dirt slopes.

There was a very sweet man on the cruise named Henry (see photo), who, though well into his 80s, thought this would be a fun excursion. He lasted no more than about a third of the way through the journey, when he became short of breath and realized his folly at coming with us.

So what then? My spouse, an internist, was reluctant to leave him alone on what could barely be described as a trail. But there was only one guide; for him escort Henry back to town would mean essentially cancelling the trip. Henry insisted he would be okay, but my spouse wasn't confident of that. So what happened? She stayed with Henry, and missed a spectacular hike through the jungle that ended at a swimming hole at the base of a picturesque waterfall.

Back on the ship, our inquiries as to why a man of Henry's advanced age had been allowed to sign up for this excursion were met with shrugs and apathy. Nor was there any offer of a refund for my wife.

I don't want to sound ageist, for a variety of reasons. First, I realize that everyone is different. Back in the days when I was a travel writer, I spent a week in Morocco on a familiarization tour with a group of travel agents. One of them was 77, and after a day’s activities, she would jump into a cab with a couple of other agents and visit other hotels in the city to jot down notes.

Second, I know that there's only a narrow sliver of years from the time you have the discretionary income to travel adventurously to the time you stop collecting frequent flyer miles entirely.

Third, and most important, I know that I'm going to be making this decision myself someday. I only hope that I have the common sense to recognize my limitations. My own father, who will be 90 next month, went to Venice and Dubrovnik a couple of years ago with one of his granddaughters. I tried to explain to him, having just been there myself, that Venice is the quintessential walking city. But you can't just hail a cab to take you back to your hotel if you get tired. You can hail a gondola, of course, provided your hotel is actually on a canal and that you have converted most of your retirement fund into euros. To my father’s credit, he swore off European travel after that trip.

I'm all for staying active, but have some consideration for your fellow travelers. That certainly is not the case with the woman from Florida who sprained her ankle. She's going back to South Africa this year to complete the journey. Sheesh.