Finally the end of a year that has truly been nothing special

In 2013 ...

... I found myself wondering if the entire United States of America had jumped the shark.

Tom Hanks in "Cloud Atlas"

... I saw the best movie I've seen in more than 10 years, the Wachowskis' amazing "Cloud Atlas," a movie so complex you might call it the "Finnegan's Wake" of movies.

... I waited vainly all year for Republicans in Congress to say something that made any sense.

... I spent more time missing the various people who matter to me than I did seeing them.

... Except for being in the room when someone else was watching something, I didn't spend one minute on live television.

... For the second year of the last three, I didn't make it to even one baseball game all season.

... Weird coincidences? I ordered a used book from Amazon.com. When it came it was a book that had been in the public library in the tiny town of Pacific Grove, Calif. The only other thing I know about Pacific Grove is that my former sister-in-law lives there. Huh.

... People magazine named someone the sexiest man in the world, as it does every year, and I had never heard of the guy they chose.

... I started adding to my small collection of autographed baseballs by shopping on eBay, and just as my lovely wife got hooked on Jewelry Television earlier in the year, I became a ferocious eBay buyer.

... I even bought a baseball autographed by someone famous who never played, managed or wrote about the game. She was a pretty good actress, though.

... I didn't play much golf, and as a result my game went all to hell. Two years ago I was breaking 80 and now it's a struggle to break 90.

... I spent a lot of time missing my children, although Skype helped a lot with that and I got to see my two grandchildren grow.

... I became more acerbic in my comments on Internet sites, particularly Facebook, and less tolerant of posts I considered to be out-and-out false. I did, however, find two or three conservative commenters I developed a healthy amount of respect for, particularly Loren Piller. He was a year behind me in high school, although I didn't know him.

Lexington and Madison

... We didn't travel much this year, although the 10 days we spent in Jamaica were such a wonderful opportunity to see our grandchildren up close and personal. I'm still trying to figure out how my dark-haired daughter and her red-haired husband have such beautiful blonde kids.

... Lexington makes me feel stupid. I'm 64 years old and have never really been able to learn a second language. He's 2 and is basically bilingual.

... When it comes to music, I always enjoy finding something I like that was actually recorded in this century. This year I found three different acts -- classical singer Jackie Evancho (who not only records in this century but was born in this century), Fountains of Wayne and Spock's Beard. "We made a land where crap is king and the good don't last too long."

... It's ridiculous that we're less than one year into President Obama's second term and everyone is talking about 2016. No one other than Hillary Clinton passes the smell test at this point, and she will be 69 years old on election day.

... My son Virgile and his wife Sterling recently got a dog. I'm really happy for Virgile; it has been 12 years since he lost his beloved black Lab Maggie. I think he's ready.

... And so am I. I am very ready for 2013 to be finished in a little more than five hours. My beloved wife Nicole had three surgeries this year, two on her spine and one on her foot. She has been in pain the entire year, and 2014 almost has to be better.

... Happy New Year to all.

Pretty amazing to see how quickly the world changes

Once upon a time ...

This looks like an illustration from some sort of suspense novel, but it's actually a picture of something that really used to exist. The park, originally called Jazzland and later Six Flags New Orleans, has been closed since just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005.

It certainly will never reopen. For one thing, it's difficult to see New Orleans itself returning to pre-Katrina levels of tourism. For another, the park was pretty much underwater for several weeks, and much of what existed before Katrina would have to be replaced for safety reasons.

A wonderful photo blog -- Love These Pics -- shows 75 different photos, including the one above. What's fascinating about it to me is that things change so quickly in this country and it isn't often we can still see what existed before.

Pripyat

Another site I recently discovered, Distractify, had a piece called "The 38 Most Haunting Abandoned Places on Earth." It opens with a previously thriving Ukranian city of 50,000 that was abandoned all at once in 1986.

In fact, not only was Pripyat abandoned, it may be thousands of years before anyone lives there again.

By now you may have guessed that Pripyat was a city built to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which basically blew up on April 26, 1986. The city was evacuated two days later.

The Distractify piece is really lovely, and not all the abandoned sites are so tragic. The City Hall subway station in New York City was in use from 1904-45, and was abandoned after that because even at its peak, no more than 600 people a day used the station.

Not everything that has been abandoned is as important. If you travel through Colorado, you will find all sorts of abandoned towns and camps, most of them connected with mines that played out long ago.

On a smaller scale, I have written before about my mother's home town of Crestline, Ohio, which was once a major railroad center. Up through World War II, Railroad Avenue had restaurants, hotels and stores that accommodated people who were between trains.

By 1960, when I was 10, all those businesses were abandoned, and within a few years after that they had been torn down.

Crestline was never a big city -- I think it peaked at about 6,000 -- but I remember at some point in the '60s riding on Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) just west of town. There was nothing but countryside and an occasional farm, until we passed a wooded area on the left. Back behind the trees, in an area that was pretty much overgrown, was the framework of part of a wooden roller coaster.

All things must pass, but some pass less quickly than others. Maybe the biggest chill -- of a good sort -- that I ever had was one day in July 1977 when I visited Rome for the only time in my life. My first wife and I were sightseeing, and we had lost track of where we were.

At one point, we turned a corner, and there in front of us was the Colosseum.

For the first time in my life, I realized, I was standing in front of something that had existed for more than two thousand years.

Since then I have seen Carcassone in France, which has existed since the seventh century A.D., and I have walked on the Great Wall of China, which has existed since hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.

Yes, things pass.

But they remain in our memories, and maybe that's all they need to last forever.

Holy Father making it difficult for right-wing Americans to disagree

Sometime I wonder how politicians are able to say some of the things they say and still keep a straight face.

For the last 30 years or so, as we have reduced government regulation of big money more and more, wealth has been traveling upward in our society. The top 1 percent of wage earners in our society have nearly tripled their percentage of our national income.

Supply-side economics didn't make any sense when it first came on the scene, and it makes even less sense now. Why anyone thought making the richest people even richer would somehow help the working class is beyond me, but Republicans have been far better at selling their message than Democrats in recent years.

It helps that the so-called "liberal media" is really only liberal when it comes to social issues. Whenever it comes to questioning things like our economic system or what if anything we do to help the less fortunate among us, you can pretty much count on the media standing up for the status quo.

Those on the right seem to be favoring a much more punitive system. They claim that unemployment insurance makes people less likely to look for work, even though there are roughly three unemployed for every available job. And then they have the nerve to say that those who won't work should not be allowed to eat.

Of course their "Christian" message is anything but, even if they do have the evangelists of the so-called Christian Right marching with them in lock-step. They have also been reasonably successful getting the votes of older Catholics as well, but the new pope has made that far more problematic.

It had to come as a big shock to the right wing when Pope Francis started attacking unrestrained capitalism as one of the world's biggest problems.

Talk radio hosts said the pope was pushing Marxism, although it's hard to believe any of them would recognize Marxism if it came up behind them and bit them.

Last year's vice-presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan, has made a big deal of his Catholicism and has spoken of how his austerity plans are somehow more moral than the government actually helping the poor.

He had been able to get away with it because he was in the right place issues-wise when it came to the church's stance on abortion and homosexuality. But when Francis replaced Benedict at the head of the church, he said Catholics were wasting too much time on peripheral issues like same-sex marriage and that they should concentrate more on Christ's admonition to care for the poor.

That put Ryan in a tough place, and he came out of it on the attack.

“The guy is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina,” Ryan said. “They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system.”

And we do? We have a system in which contacts don't matter, where the best always finish first?

Sorry, Rep. Ryan, but your free-market ideal doesn't exist, and even if it did, unrestrained capitalism was never a good thing in this country.

But I guess it makes it difficult when the leader of your church says you're walking down the wrong path.

***

Jennifer Jones

I've once again been watching one of my favorite World War II era movies, David O. Selznick's "Since You Went Away." The movie is a look at the Home Front in 1943, with Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple as a mother and her two daughters at home in Ohio while the man of the house is in the service in the Pacific.

John Cromwell is listed as the director, but it was very much Selznick's deal and it's a lovely movie.

Of course the movie is in black and white, and there are several places -- a canteen dance and a railroad station, to name two -- in which shadows are used brilliantly.

There are many wonderful things in the movie, but one of the nicest is the way it ends. "Since You Went Away was released in July 1944, when things were definitely looking up but the end was still not in sight. The last thing audiences see on the screen is the house, with these words superimposed:

"Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord."

'You've Got Mail' not that old, but it seems so innocent

I felt like watching Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan this afternoon, and since the last five times I felt like this I watched "Joe vs. the Volcano," I decided to go a different direction.

I don't think I had seen "You've Got Mail" since its theatrical run in 1998. The whole America Online thing was getting kind of corny by then. I had been hearing "You've got mail!" since 1993, and I think by '98 I had dropped my AOL account in favor of a cheaper Internet provider.

"You've got mail!" always seemed to me to be a little bit goofy, especially when the icon on screen said "You have mail."

It has been only 15 years since the movie came out, but so much of it seems almost quaint. The sound of dial-up Internet and the idea of pages that loaded at no more than 57,600 bps. I remember just before we switched over to a cable modem, my son complained to me about how slow pages loaded at just 57,600.

I had to laugh at that. As I have mentioned before, when I first used computer modems at work in the early '80s, they were only 300 bps, which meant my 500-word game stories would take five or six minutes to send.

You've Got Mail

But the interesting thing about the movie was that it was reminiscent of the time when it was still so much fun to get e-mail, when many of us thought up cute names instead of using our own names as e-mail addresses.

America Online didn't really offer the Internet anyway. AOL's heyday was before Amazon took over retail and before newspapers and television networks started putting everything online.

Mostly AOL was about chat rooms, some reputable and some far from it.

Actually, it was anything but original. More than a decade before AOL came alone, France Telecom offered its subscribers free computer terminals (on loan) to participate in something called the Minitel.

Minitel

Users could make purchases, access databases, post on message boards and chat with other subscribers. At its peak in 1999, Minitel had more than 25 million subscribers out of a total national population of 60 million. It still exists, and is certainly a big reason France has been slower than some other countries to fully buy into the Internet.

This will come as a great surprise to many Americans, who automatically assume everything in the way of progress originated in this country.

But when it comes to the Internet, we weren't first or best except in finding ways to make money off it.

You can buy almost anything on the Net these days. I've bought several dozen autographed baseballs recently. But stores are closing everywhere. It's funny. In "You've Got Mail," a book superstore drives a wonderful small bookstore out of business.

But the real irony is that in the 15 years since that movie, Amazon and other Websites have begun driving the superstores out of business. Borders is gone, Barnes & Noble is struggling.

But hey, we've got mail.

The only problem is, most of it is junk.

What do we know when we know it's coming to an end?

Editor's note: This is a reworking of a piece I wrote more than four years and two websites ago. I'm not sure why it is we become more reflective as calendar years end, but we do.

What would you do if you knew you had a year to live?

Would you walk away from all your responsibilities and spend 12 months doing everything on your "bucket list?"

Would you do things that previously scared you too much, like bungee jumping or hang gliding, or would you double down on your efforts to make sure everything you needed to do was finished before you ran out of time?

You might think that last year would be all for you, but very few people actually see it that way. Most folks live their lives the way they always have ... for as long as they can.

What would you do if you had a month to live?

Make sure your finances were in order? Take one last shot at trying to hook up with the love of your life? Go on one last vacation?

Would you spend a lot of time regretting the things you never did, or would you take pride in the things you managed to get done?

Although those 30 days would pass quickly, for a lot of us, routine would hold sway at least until the last couple of days.

What would you do if you had a week to live?

A week isn't all that long. Seven days, 168 hours ... you'd spend a good chunk of it just sleeping. But what about the time you're awake?

A week might be devoted mostly to saying goodbye, both to the people and places that have made up your life. Some fun, but probably not so much.

What would you do if you had a day to live?

A day isn't much, but I think you might try to stretch it by not sleeping. If you had 24 hours, my guess is you would try to squeeze as much living as possible into that time. I doubt you'd want to spend much of the time traveling.

There might be some place that you still want to see, but losing time getting there wouldn't be much fun. You might just want to spend that last day with someone you love.

In a wonderful 1998 Canadian film, Don McKellar's "Last Night," a group of people in Toronto know that the world is ending at midnight. Most of them look for people with whom to spend their final hours.

That's very human.

What would you do if you had an hour to live?

I know I would want to spend that time with the folks I love most -- my wife, my children and my grandchildren. If any part of me lives on after my death, it will be in the effect I have had on their lives and the lives of the other people close to me.

I wouldn't spend a lot of time giving them advice. In fact, I don't think I would do much talking. I would rather look at them and listen to them, memorizing their faces and voices to carry with me into eternity.

What would you do if you had a minute to live?

 A minute can be the blink of an eye ... or an eternity.

But if I knew I were about to die, I would spend the final 60 seconds praying. I would thank God for everything He has given me and I would ask His blessing and continued guidance for the people I love. I think I could make that minute stretch long enough to get that done.

Have you noticed what's missing in all of this, whether a final year or a final minute?

Anger.

Hatred.

Revenge.

Some folks do spend time regretting things left undone or things poorly done, but not many people go to their death cursing old wrongs. I doubt that even Richard Nixon spent his final moments thinking of those folks on his "enemies list."

Life is a precious gift.

There used to be a sculpture in the United Nations building -- I don't know if it still exists or not -- with a caption on it.

"It is a privilege to live this day and the next."

It really is.

Sometimes we can do things we never dreamed we could do

Sometimes you never know what you can do until you try.

For many years, when it came to cooking, I was just a guy. I could grill steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs, and I could make spaghetti. But when it came to trying something that actually required a recipe, I would generally pass.

Especially when it came to difficult, time-consuming things like Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner, if I didn't have a mother or a wife to cook for me, the thing I could do best was make reservations.

In the first 21 years of my marriage, we didn't cook a turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas even once. For Thanksgiving, we went to a nice restaurant. For Christmas, Nicole always made a delicious lamb ragout.

Thanksgiving in Jamaica

When we were in Jamaica for Thanksgiving this year, Pauline made a wonderful turkey for the six of us. A lot of effort went into it, and the result was spectacular.

It didn't really surprise me. The one person I know who does everything she sets her mind to is Pauline. But I don't want to diminish her accomplishment at all. It was a truly delicious meal.

But for Christmas, we were at home.

Home alone. Just the two of us.

Nicole is recuperating from foot surgery, so we were limited in what we could do. I decided to buy a turkey and try to prepare one -- for the first time in my life.

Christmas in Georgia

The smallest one I could find was a little less than 10 pounds. I bought it, a roasting pan and a meat thermometer. I struggled a little, especially when I couldn't seem to get the temperature up to 180. But in the end it worked. In the end it turned out pretty good, especially for a first effort.

We had a good meal, and we have enough turkey left for the next couple of days.

It wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better than I expected.

Nothing all that profound to say except Merry Christmas to those I love

This is the 65th Christmas Eve of my life, although I would be surprised if I have specific memories of even a quarter of them.

Each year I try to think of something original to say. As a writer, you're always supposed to be able to call on insightful thoughts, but most of the time I realize I'm only recycling thoughts I've written of at some point in the past.

In the final years of the last century, when I was working as a newspaper columnist, I had a good friend who probably had the greatest take on Christmas of anyone I've ever known who wasn't some sort of saint. My friend Sally Jenkins, who was a mother of two in Rancho Cucamonga, California, said there was one reason Christmas was such a wonderful time of year.

"It's the one time of year we give ourselves permission to be nice," she said.

Christmas 2011

What a great way of putting it.

People who might be suspicious or even selfish all year allow themselves to be nice, to be generous, once the Thanksgiving turkey is finished.

My late grandmother once told me the story of a family with three children. By the time the youngest was 18, they were no longer getting excited about Christmas and no one was making the effort to be awake at dawn to see what Santa Claus had brought them.

Then, surprise of surprises, their parents had a fourth child. A little baby girl was born, and all of a sudden, the older kids were excited about Christmas again. For years after she was born, they did whatever they could to give their little sister a wonderful Christmas.

The reason for the season.

In a way, having grandchildren has done that for me. Seeing how much Madison and Lexington enjoy their gifts -- indeed, enjoy everything about the holiday -- has done more to heal my heart than almost anything else could.

We don't decorate anymore. At least we haven't for the four Christmases we have spent in Georgia. We have both been battling health problems, and with it being just the two of us, we have kind of let it slip past as quietly as possible.

This Christmas, there are so many people I love scattered to the four winds. Most of my family is in Boston at my sister's house, my daughter and her family are in Jamaica and my son and his wife are in Mexico. I hope they all know I love them, and that my Christmas would be better if we could all be together.

Without anything truly profound to say, I'll leave you with the Christmas carol I have always loved best.

Proud of being white? You're getting excited about the wrong things

"I'm free, white and 21. ..."

It may seem difficult to believe, but once was the time people actually took pride in the color of their skin.

Seems strange to me, just as it seems odd that people take pride in their ethnicity, their gender or any number of other things they have little or no control over.

It's like being proud because you have red hair.

Or hair at all after a certain age.

Actually, I figure if you're male and you live long enough, you're going to lose either hair or teeth unless you're very fortunate. Theoretically, at least, you can increase your odds by taking really good care of your teeth. But if there's a teenager who listens when someone says if they don't floss every day, they'll be wearing dentures by age 50, I have yet to meet him.

Heck, all teenagers know they'll never be 50.

Yes, there are things in which we can take pride and things we have no business caring about.

White man

Proud to be white? Well, a fellow named Hitler was white, and I'm not sure anyone ever took greater pride in being white than old Adolf did. And those Americans who are such failures at life that the only thing they can be proud of is the color of their skin won't let him be forgotten.

Amazingly, as the role of white people seems to shrink as years pass, there are those who try and compensate by insisting that everyone who ever mattered in history was white.

Santa Claus is white?

Actually, it's more important to remember -- at least if you're past the age of 7 -- that Santa Claus is a fictional character. He can be whatever you want him to be.

Jesus was white?

Uh, probably not. Most of the folks living in the Middle East 2,000 years ago were hardly white, although I suppose the occupying Roman soldiers would qualify as a swarthy white.

It's all such bullshit, though. Look at the flip side of it. If people who are born white get to feel proud of themselves, then it follows that people who aren't born white should feel ashamed of themselves -- or even inferior.

Ruling the world

Still, the greatest flaw in the argument is that if it's best to be white, if white people truly are meant to rule the world, it would follow the the best thing you could be is an albino.

Nobody is whiter than an albino.

Of course that's silly, just as the whole "white pride" thing is. Still, I do have to say one thing.

To steal a joke from the legendary Dave Barry, I have to admit that Adolf and the Albinos would be an excellent name for a rock band.

Christmas has changed in many ways, but not the most important one

Christmas is so very different now than it once was.

I suppose that's probably true for everyone who lives a life of normal span. As a grandfather, I suppose I'm living through my third incarnation of Christmas, from child to parent to grandparent. Things have changed quite a bit over the last 60 years, particularly in the way we shop for gifts.

Those of us who were children in the 1950s will always remember trips to downtown shopping areas to see the window displays in department stores. One big difference between then and now was that the decorations didn't go up before Thanksgiving. The Christmas shopping season was basically four weeks, depending on what day Thanksgiving fell.

A Rikes window.

Those who know me or are regular readers know that I grew up outside Dayton, Ohio (at least till age 13), so we had access to two wonderful department stores. Rike's in Dayton had lovely displays, but the one that was really difficult to top was Lazarus in Columbus.

Decembers were colder back then, and walking down the street from window to window left us with cold ears and noses at the very least.

When we would go inside, the nicest surprise for children was that the size of the toy department would be about triple what it ordinarily was.

And of course there was Santa.

South Coast Plaza

By the '70s and '80s, the downtowns were dying in cities all across America. Shopping malls in the suburbs had become the center of commerce, and shopping became much more of a one-stop deal. Whether it's massive edifices like the Mall of America in Minnesota or upscale destinations like South Coast Plaza in Orange County, Calif., the mall was the place to be.

Then even that started changing. Many of the larger malls included large bookstores (Barnes & Noble or Borders) and/or major record stores (Virgin Records). But a fellow named Jeff Bezos came along. His Amazon.com came along in 1995, starting as just an online bookstore and eventually selling almost anything anyone would want to buy.

Meanwhile, bookstores, record stores and video stores are vanishing. Christmas shopping has become much more sedentary. A large part of the shopping I did this year involved little more than visiting websites, pointing and clicking. I purchase things online now that I couldn't have imagined just a few years ago, things like clothes and shoes.

Of course, Christmas is about a lot more than shopping. The earliest memories I have are of Crestline, Ohio, the small town where my mother was born. I think I was 4 or 5 years old. We went to Christmas Eve services at my grandmother's church and then went back to the one house I could never forget. I remember my stocking hanging on the staircase, and the first Christmas gift I remember was a Lionel train set under the tree when I was 4.

Somewhere in my mother's house are the 8mm films my dad used to shoot on Christmas morning. I'd love to get some of those transferred to DVDs, although the film folks shot in the '50s and '60s didn't have any sound with them. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics about gifts, but I do remember they were very happy times.

Pentagon City Mall

My parents were children of the Depression, and I think they were proud they had done well enough to give their five children nice Christmases.

I don't have a whole lot of Christmas memories of the '70s and '80s. The only one I remember from my first marriage was 1977, when we were living in Vienna and spent Christmas week in London.

I remember 1984, when I covered a hockey game in Buffalo on Dec. 23rd and then flew to Columbus on Christmas Eve for my grandfather's last Christmas, the last one I spent in Crestline.

And 1989, when I covered a college basketball game in San Diego on the 23rd and then flew from Los Angeles to Virginia the next day. It was my grandmother's 95th and final Christmas and my chance to say goodbye to her.

I have wonderful memories from the '90s, when I became a parent at age 42. Ever since then, I have seen Christmas through the eyes of my two wonderful children and in the last few years, through my two adorable grandchildren.

It has been many years since I have cared about what I got for Christmas. But rarely has a year gone by that I haven't thought about a gift I've gotten for someone.

I may not have known it when I was young, but Christmas really is much more about what we give than what we receive. Maybe that's why it's our best holiday, and that's the one thing about it that never changes.

The worst kind of crimes are people who prey on the weak and the poor

I don't believe in capital punishment, but there are certainly people -- actually types of people -- who I would just as soon be separated from the rest of us in some way.

Of course all crime is bad in one way or another, but people who take advantage of other people's trusting nature are among the worst. During the subprime mortgage scandal, there were mortgage brokers who took advantage of nervous customers by telling them they didn't qualify for regular mortgages even though they actually did.

The crooked brokers made more money, and many of the people who were tricked into subprime mortgages lost their homes.

The confused and cheated customers didn't understand it. "Why would they lie to us?"

Why indeed? Why are there so many people now who choose to make their living by cheating others instead of doing honest work?

For one thing, we seem to have become a society that glorifies the tricksters and con men among us. We glorify them and ridicule the people who work hard and just get by. We pretend to value virtues like honesty and hard work, but the people who become celebrities are the ones who cut corners.

How many times have you heard this expression in the last 20 years?

"If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'."

If someone steals $100 from a rich man on the street, the odds are pretty good he'll do time. But if someone swindles a thousand middle- and lower-class people out of $100 each, the odds are he'll either get away with it or get off with a fine that only takes back part of his ill-gotten gains.

Generally the only time the big-time swindlers get serious punishment -- say Bernie Madoff, for instance -- is when they've made the mistake of stealing from other rich people.

Pryor

I think Richard Pryor said it best back in the '70s, although he might have been a little too limiting in his view of who was getting hurt. He looked around and saw only black defendants. He said he realized that the "justice" system stood for "just us."

It isn't that I want to see the rich punished. As far as I'm concerned, any crimes they want to admit within their so-called class can result in a free pass. If Mike Bloomberg wants to kill Donald Trump, I would look at it the same way I would if two Mafia families went at it.

But if either of them goes after folks who are just getting by, I want to see them pay a real price for it.

As for the late great Mr. Pryor, who died eight years ago this month, I wouldn't denigrate his racial observations by saying that we're all black these days, but my guess is that Trump and others like him don't have much respect -- let alone love -- for folks struggling to get by.

***

It's funny how some really great memories just disappear until something reminds us of them.

Gabe Alvarez

In 1995, when I was covering minor-league baseball, I saw the rarest of all plays, and I forgot all about it until I found an autographed baseball on eBay signed by Gabe Alvarez for only $4.95.

Alvarez was playing second base for Rancho Cucamonga, and there were runners on first and second bases with no outs. The batter hit a line drive up the middle, and both runners took off. Alvarez made a spectacular catch, stepped on second base for the second out and then tagged the other runner coming into second to complete an unassisted triple play.

When I interviewed him after the game, he told me something really fascinating. The season before, when he was still playing for USC, the exact same thing had happened. But that time, rather than tag the last runner, he threw to first and the first baseman completed the triple play by stepping on the bag.

"One of my teammates told me I could have had an unassisted triple play," he said. "I told myself if it ever happened again, this time I would tag the guy."

The coolest guy I know was a big-time ballplayer and a great singer

Who is the coolest guy you ever met?

Columnist Bob Greene once wrote about a similar subject, interviewing football great Frank Gifford about what it was like to always know he was the coolest guy in the room.

Flan.

I never met Gifford, although I did interview him over the phone in August 1983. I would have to say that if any one person stood out to me as the coolest I ever met, it would have to be Tim Flannery.

Think about it. If you look at two of the greatest things a guy could do to be cool, you might come up with ballplayer (in whatever sport) and singer.

Flannery has done both -- in spades. He played 11 seasons in the majors with the San Diego Padres and since then has stayed in the game first as a minor league manager and then as a third-base coach for his friend Bruce Bochy.

Flan.

He has earned two World Series rings with the San Francisco Giants in 2010 and 2012, but he has done something else as well. Beginning more than 20 years ago with a band that covered Jimmy Buffett songs, he has gone on to make a dozen albums. The boy can sing.

I have one of them -- "Highway Song" -- on my iPod, and I definitely plan on adding a few more as time goes on.

I became acquainted with Flan in 1994 when he was manager of the Class A Rancho Cucamonga Quakes of the California League. I was the only reporter covering the team, so we had numerous opportunities to talk. It was always enjoyable.

Like I said, the coolest guy I ever met.

***

A lot of the people I worked with knew me only as a metro columnist (1996-2001) or as a business reporter and editor (2001-08), but I did spent my first 16-plus years in the business covering sports.

When I first decided to become a journalist, my ultimate goal was to be a baseball writer, covering a big league team year round -- spring training, home games and road games. I never quite accomplished that, although I covered 80-90 Dodger games in both 1990 and 1991.

The one season I covered a team home and away for the whole season, it was a minor league team. In 1995, when Tim Flannery moved on to manage at Las Vegas and former Red Sox second baseman Marty Barrett took over the Quakes, I traveled to cover road games. At least four of the away trips were day trips, and there was nothing outside California. Still, I went as far north as Visalia and Modesto in the Central Valley, and Stockton and San Jose up near San Francisco.

It was definitely fun.

Idiocy rules in argument over race of Santa Claus, Jesus Christ

What's the dumbest possible thing we could possibly be arguing about at this time in our history?

How about the race of a fictional character?

When Megyn Kelly brought up the "controversy" the other day, telling the children of America not to worry, that Santa Claus was of course a white man, I wasn't aware there had been a huge debate about it.

The real question is which "kids" she was addressing. Since her broadcast started at 10 p.m., the "kids" would have to be old enough to stay up that late, interested enough to watch what passes for news on Fox yet still young enough and uninformed enough to believe in Santa Claus.

It's a silly point to argue, but at least Santa comes from northern European legends and was "created" by white people.

Where Kelly stepped off the cliff into the abyss was when she reassured those same "children" by telling them Jesus of Nazareth was also a white man.

Now that is about as likely as learning that Jackie Robinson was white. The problem is that at the time Jesus lived and in the part of the world where he preached, there weren't really any white men. The closest was probably the Roman troops who were occupying that part of the Roman Empire, but very few of them were the blonde-haired, blue-eyed ideal that seems to show up in recent depictions of Christ.

Jesus? Maybe.

Of course Jesus was Jewish, and being from the Middle East, he was far more likely to be dark and swarthy than he is now depicted.

Still, Kelly doesn't seem to want to admit that, and things got even stupider when a libertarian talk-radio host got into the act.

Neal Boortz was filling in on the Herman Cain Show, and he defended the portrayals of both Santa and Jesus as white men with a very strange analogy.

“You know, I’m going to scream and complain because Martin Luther King is always portrayed as black. It just ain’t right.”

I don't know whether Boortz was joking or serious. With libertarians, you can never be sure, but the problem is that even if he was joking, a lot of people in the audience wouldn't get the joke. We have gone way too far into satire and irony, and a week doesn't go by that someone ostensibly doing the news is fooled by someone else's intricate joke.

It's tough being white these days, at least for those who care about it. White people ruled the world for hundreds of years, and as recently as the middle of the 20th century, people were still openly discussing the geopolitical situation in racial terms.

Those days are passing, though.

Jesus isn't white anymore.

And neither was Martin Luther King.

Once upon a time long ago, there was Johnny Carson

To anyone under the age of 30, Johnny Carson is probably as relevant as Fred Allen or Edgar Bergen were to those of us born after World War II.

Indeed, just the idea of a time before Netflix, DVRs, DVD players and videocassettes -- a time when if you wanted to watch television, you had three choices -- seems almost ridiculously primitive.

In the early '70s, as I recall, if you weren't ready to fall asleep when the news ended at 11:30, your choices were the CBS Late Movie, whatever second-rate talk show ABC was trying or the gold standard -- the Tonight Show on NBC. Cities with more than three stations usually had an old movie or repeats of an old show, but most people watched NBC and Johnny Carson.

Here's Johnny.

At least during my lifetime, I'm not sure anyone ever epitomized the concept of "cool" as well as Carson did.

In his opening monologues, he told America every night what mattered and what didn't, what was worth taking seriously and what was worth laughing at.

Legendary film director Billy Wilder nailed it when he said why Carson meant so much:

"By the simple law of survival, Carson is the best. He enchants the invalids and the insomniacs as well as the people who have to get up at dawn. He is the Valium and the Nembutal of a nation. No matter what kind of dead-asses are on the show, he has to make them funny and exciting. He has to be their nurse and their surgeon. He has no conceit. He does his work and he comes prepared.

"if he's talking to an author, he has read the book. Even his rehearsed routines sound improvised. He's the cream of middle-class elegance, yet he's not a mannequin. He has captivated the American bourgeoisie without ever offending the highbrows, and he has never said anything that wasn't liberal or progressive. Every night, in front of millions of people, he has to do the salto mortale [a circus parlance for an aerial somersault performed on the tightrope]. What's more, he does it without a net. No rewrites. No retakes. The jokes must work tonight."

On the rare occasions that it didn't work, Carson was often just as funny in his reaction.




His tenure as "Tonight Show" host lasted 30 years, spanning presidents from John F. Kennedy to the last year of George H.W. Bush's administration. His first guest was Groucho Marx and his last was Bette Midler.

I hadn't watched him much for a few years, but I reacquired the habit in 1992 when I was living in Anaheim, Calif., and working as a sportswriter. Most of my work was in the evenings, but I was usually home by 11:30 and reclining on my sofa in the living room watching Channel 4 out of Los Angeles.

Johnny and Bette

I watched Carson and then usually switched over to HBO or played a videocassette. By 2 a.m. or so, I would either wake myself and go to bed or just fall asleep on the sofa. It was the last time in my life I lived alone, but I didn't truly feel alone till Carson went off the air.

I gave Jay Leno a chance, but it wasn't the same. Where Carson's monologues always had a point of view, Leno always seemed like he was balancing his jokes so that no one would be offended.

I don't watch late-night television anymore. I don't think I could endure the incessant commercials, and I'm usually too tired by then anyway.

Besides, there's no Johnny Carson anymore.

Forty-four years seemed to pass in the blink of an eye

November 25th, 1967. September 12th, 1992. February 12th, 1980. September 29th, 1973.

I have a really strange memory. Half the time when I leave the house to do an errand, I forget something I meant to take with me. But if I hear a song from the '60s or the first half of the '70s, it's probably 10-1 that I'll be able to identify the performer and the title before the words actually start.

Weird.

I can remember the lyrics to the theme songs of most of the TV shows I watched as a kid, but I have to look up the birthdays of my son-in-law and daughter-in-law or I'll forget them.

The four dates above were all significant ones in my life, although to be fair, I had to look the first one up. I remembered it only as the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Those dates signify the beginning of four of the five most significant dating relationships of my life. Two of the four ended in marriage, one of those in divorce.  A third was someone I almost married, and the fourth -- the oldest one -- was the first time I dated someone long enough to think I was in love.

Ah, seventeen.

There's a fifth date I didn't include in the list. I wanted to put it out there my itself because it's the story I want to tell you today.

December 13th/14th, 1969.

I'm not sure I ever had a year with more ups and downs than 1969. I washed out at one school early in the year and was at another one in the fall. I got noticed one afternoon starring in a pickup football game on campus and got myself invited to a rush function at the jock fraternity. I went to one function and they invited me to pledge.

Pledging in 1969

That was the time in my life I was totally incapable of balancing the different parts of my life. I had been a classic social misfit for most of my first 19 years, but in the year of Woodstock, all of a sudden I seemed to be popular. I even seemed to enjoy some modest dating success. Of course, I got so wrapped up in the fun I was having that I forgot I needed to study for my classes.

I was already about two-thirds of the way down the slippery academic slope by the beginning of December, and when they held the first draft lottery of the Vietnam era on Dec. 1st, I could have been in big trouble except for one thing. When I was not enrolled in school the previous spring, I had been called by the Selective Service to report for a draft physical.

Thanks to a really good letter from a doctor and a childhood illness that I was on the verge of outgrowing, I had been classified 1-Y, which meant that in the event of war, I was a hostage.

Thank you, Woody Allen.

Actually, it meant "draftable only in case of declared war or national emergency." Nixon's dominoes didn't qualify, which was good since my number was 39.

Things got even more weird the next week. Saturday the 13th was the fraternity Christmas party, and for some reason I can't remember, my date fell through at the last minute. My big brother in the fraternity had been trying to fix me up with his girlfriend's roommate Shelley. She had come to one of our fraternity football games and had reportedly thought I was "cute."

I told Jim this might be a good time for that fix-up, but he said he had already gotten a date for her with one of the other pledges. My only hope for a date on such short notice, he said, was another friend of his girlfriend. This girl was really nice and had a good personality.

Uh oh.

There was, as you might guess, just one problem, and there's no way to tell you what it was without sounding like a jerk. She had a cleft palate, what people back then generally called a harelip.

GWU, 1969

Hey, I was not the most enlightened 20-year-old in the world.

It was suggested that Shelley and I could find a way to be together at some point during the evening, which sounded like a great idea. All I had to do was crap all over the poor girl with the cleft palate and also steal a date from one of my pledge brothers.

I obviously wasn't the smartest 20-year-old either.

So the tough part of the evening was Dec. 13th and the good part was Dec. 14th.

In the end, the fraternity decided someone who would do that to one of his brothers might not be such a good member. I received a severe warning, which didn't matter anyway because I went the rest of the way down that slippery slope and found myself out of school again.

You could say the rest of it didn't work out either, since Shelley and I never got married, but that's sort of like saying all the teams that didn't win the World Series had bad seasons. There's success and then there's success.

We were together for six months, the first important relationship of adult life for both of us. And if I went into a tailspin for awhile after we broke up, it wasn't her fault. The fact is, every significant relationship in our lives builds on the foundation of the ones that went before.

It's strange for me to think that all that started 44 years ago. I'm 64, not 20, and she just celebrated her 31st birthday for the second time (do the math). She's successful and important, while I'm retired and mostly happy.

I've seen her once since 1970, a two-minute encounter at the Democratic Convention in 2000 in Los Angeles. We both looked a lot different. She looked better.

The world has changed so much. Forty years ago, when people broke up and went their separate ways, it was rare that either learned how things worked out for the other one. These days, with Facebook and all sorts of other social media, we find ourselves connected to people we never thought we would ever see again.

It's nice. It's like walking out of a movie halfway through and finding out years later how it ended.

***

My baseball collection keeps growing, and I have had the opportunity to pick up some unusual ones.

The real challenge is to find signatures of older players at good prices, and old signatures are the best. Most of the older players I've managed to acquire signed the balls at autograph shows as older men. One ball I landed recently was my first from a player whose career started in the 1920s. Bill Terry started with the New York Giants in 1923, and in 1930 he became the last National Leaguer to hit .400.

Gates Brown

One that meant more to me, though, was finding a ball signed by Gates Brown.

Brown is best known as the most successful pinch-hitter in American League history. His entire career was spent with the Detroit Tigers, and he was part of their World Series-winning team in 1968.

But what he meant to me was that he was the only major league ballplayer from Crestline, Ohio, the little town where my grandparents lived. As a young boy, Brown had earned money shining shoes, and he often came into the police station where my grandfather was chief and shined his shoes.

My grandfather was so proud of him, and when he introduced me to him before a game at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, I remember Brown saying, "Hi, Chief. How have you been?"

My grandfather died in 1985, and I hadn't thought about Brown in many years. He died three months ago in Detroit at the age of 74. He had lived his entire life there after baseball, but I was pleased to see that he was buried back in Crestline, the town where he grew up.

With the Pope speaking out on inequality, plutocrats are running scared

"And perhaps we give a little to the poor if the generosity should seize us. But if any one of us should interfere in the business of why there are poor, they get the same as the rebel Jesus."

-- JACKSON BROWNE

I hadn't thought of this song for awhile. It's the closest thing Jackson Browne ever wrote to a Christmas song, and it speaks volumes about what has been wrong with our society for the last three decades or so.

Only now it's getting even worse.

Now we're completely losing our sense of outrage about the fact that people are hungry ... or homeless ... or unable to raise their children. Worse yet, we're allowing feelings of outrage toward those people, blaming them for their problems instead of a system that makes it impossible for them to get ahead.

And when Pope Francis speaks out against the system, when he condemns the love of money and the increasing inequality in our world, the defenders of wealth and privilege do everything they can to marginalize him.

They call him a Marxist, and they speak the language of their new religion when they say that helping the poor discourages them from taking responsibility for their own lives.

That's a bitter, Calvinistic kind of religion, one that seems to do more to tell rich people how wonderful they are than to succor the afflicted.

Listen to right-wing politicians and their answers to people who don't make enough money to live on are simple:

"Get a job."

"Get another job."

"Get a better job."

How difficult is it to understand that if someone works full time, he ought to be able to make enough money to support himself without needing food stamps to make up the difference.

Millions of good jobs are gone forever, and two-thirds of Americans are now working in the service industry. That would be bad enough in itself, but in real dollars, service industry wages have fallen 30 percent since 1981.

That might make sense if everyone's wages were falling, but those at the top have gained a bigger and bigger share of the national pie. In 1981, the top 1 percent of income earners had 7 percent of national income;  the most recent figures (2011, I believe) gave the top 1 percent 19 percent of the income.

It gets even worse when you look at overall wealth. The 2011 figures show that the top 1 percent holds 38 percent of national wealth.

Worst of all, mobility between the lower and upper classes has all but vanished. Horatio Alger stories were always more myth than reality, but shockingly, the chance of someone born into the bottom 20 percent ever making into the top 20 percent is less likely in the U.S. than it is in France, Germany or other European countries.

Are we approaching a tipping point? It's hard to say, but when fully 70 percent of American families are at best living paycheck to paycheck, and when politicians like Rand Paul of Kentucky speak in the most incredibly patronizing terms, folks don't really have much of an investment in the status quo.

As a Catholic, I am very pleased to see the Holy Father speaking out on what seems to me the most important issue of our time. His voice has far more impact that a politician on either side of the political divide, and hearing the angry voices of the right-wing media attacking him shows just how frightened they are of his message.

Will he make a difference?

At this point, it's difficult to say. But one thing is clear. At least in the United States of America, we can't continue along the path we're currently on and still remain the United States of America. One could argue that we're already a plutonomy, that it's almost impossible to accomplish anything without the rich and powerful on your side.

As much as conservatives rant about "Obamacare," the fact is that both insurance companies and pharmaceuticals get a major windfall from it and were behind it from the start.

If you want to see the fate of things truly benefiting common people these days, look at the cuts in food stamps and the failure to extend unemployment benefits.

Then try to find someone in Washington other than Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren standing against the plutocrats.

Good luck.