Most people's TV binges aren't my shows

I had no idea just how out of touch I am with modern popular culture until I had to wait for some prescriptions to be filled.

I picked up a special edition of Entertainment Weekly, The Binge Guide.

Star Trek

The magazine listed 32 different series, and I was a little surprised to realize that more than half of them were either shows I never watched or ones that I had seen no more than one or two episodes.

I've never seen Arrested Development, Battlestar Galactica, Community, Daria, Deadwood, Dexter, Doctor Who, Felicity, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, Futurama, Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life, Parks and Recreation, Party Down, Sherlock and The Wire.

I have seen fewer than three episodes of 30 Rock, fewer than 10 of Friends and The X-Files (two separate shows, not New York Jews and UFOs together) and only a dozen episodes of Twin Peaks.

I saw only the first episode of Breaking Bad and never watched any others.

Twilight Zone

Most of those left are shows I either have seen or intend to see every episode. I have finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Sopranos, Star Trek, Veronica Mars and The West Wing. Eventually I will see all of the Twilight Zone, True Blood, Walking Dead and the Wonder Years.

The one remaining show is sort of an anomaly -- 40-something years of Saturday Night Live.

There are shows that didn't make the list that have mattered a lot to me. I've seen all 217 episodes of "Smallville," all five seasons of "Angel," all nine seasons of "24," all of "Moonlighting" and "Quantum Leap."

That's our Bush

I've seen all of "Mad Men" except the last season and I'm working my way through "LA Law." And I saw all eight episodes of Comedy Central's wonderful, cancelled-too-soon spoof, "That's My Bush."

It's pretty rare that the shows I really like are the big popular hits. The ones I really like get cancelled. Steven Bochco's "Bay City Blues," just about the only show ever about minor-league baseball, was cancelled after eight episodes were made and only four of them were broadcast.

I really liked Tru Calling, where Eliza Dushku not only saw dead people but heard them begging to be saved, but it only survived one full season and six episodes of a second.

I've always been something of an outsider when it comes to extremely popular stuff. I never read any of Tolkien's books or saw any of the six movies made about them. I didn't watch Mission: Impossible or The Man from UNCLE, two of the most popular shows while I was in high school.

Some shows I eventually came to on my own, but in general, the best way to keep me away from a show is to tell me how wonderful it is. That's probably the main reason I'll never watch Breaking Bad.

Hell, it's only a TV show.

How baseball can deal with home run records from the steroid era

The return of Alex Rodriguez to active duty with the Yankees this year reminds us yet again of baseball's steroid fiasco. Rodriguez is doing well enough this year that he has passed Willie Mays for fourth place on the all-time home run list.

It won't happen this year, but he has a reasonable chance to pass Babe Ruth for third place, although the top two spots still seem like a reach.

I think it would be accurate to say only a small minority of real baseball fans want to see that happen. Rodriguez has 665 career home runs as of today. It's bad enough that he passed Mays, but it would be much worse if he reaches 700 homers.

It would be very difficult to overstate how badly baseball screwed up when it came to steroids. Going all the way back to the late '80s, and then with the whole "Chicks dig the long ball" ad campaign, the people responsible for the stewardship of the game might just as well have been trying to destroy it.

Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927, and Roger Maris hit 61 34 years later.

That ought to say a lot about how difficult it was.




But starting in 1998, with baseball recovering from a disastrous work stoppage that actually saw the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, there were plenty of longballs for the chick to dig. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa staged a battle for the record in 1998 that saw McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sosa hit 66.

Remember the what? Lots of dates mean lots of different things

This Saturday, we're going to hear what a momentous anniversary it is of such an important event. If any newspapers or electronic media outlets fail to mention it, they will doubtless catch hold hell from people.

"How could you fail to mention the 71st anniversary of D-Day?

"Some dates should never be forgotten."

Well, we forgot February 15th.

In fact, we pretty much forgot that one before I was born, but on the Ides of February in 1898 the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor and provided an excuse for us to go to war with Spain.

I've heard "Remember the Maine" before, but never with a date attached to it. That particular February day in 1970 has always had a special significance to me because ....

Well, shucks.

Jumping for joy? Nah, 1966

I guess the most delicate way to say it is that was the day I first experienced one of the great pleasures of adulthood.

Before you find yourself thinking what an incredibly guy thing it is to remember the exact date of that particular event, I have to say the reason I remember the date is that it was well after midnight after a really great Valentine's Day party.

And unlike D-Day or the Maine, no one died.

There were a few times I sent the young lady involved e-mails. After all, the date had the same significance for her than it did for me. She's a judge now in a state far from Georgia and I have seen her exactly once since 1970. It was the 2000 Democratic Convention at Staples Center in Los Angeles. I was there as a newspaper columnist and she was a delegate.

Joyful? Yes, me in 1970

But as a country, there are so many dates we try to remember and others we would prefer to forget. We still make a big deal out of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, but I rarely hear anyone making a big deal out of April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King was murdered.

The fact is, we tend mostly to remember events that happened during our own lives. There's no one alive who actually remembers the Maine, and ever-shrinking numbers every day who remember Pearl Harbor or D-Day. In fact, far fewer than half of Americans now alive remember any of the eventful happenings of the '60s.

Even Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 only has meaning to a minority.

Probably the oldest major event that more than half of the country actually experienced was the Challenger disaster in 1988, and then there was Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995. The great irony of that one is that if my first marriage hadn't failed, that day would have been my 20th anniversary.

Then of course there's Sept. 11. But long before the Twin Towers and My Pet Goat, Sept. 11 was the birthday of two of the greatest football coaches ever -- Bear Bryant and Tom Landry. In addition, Brian DePalma, Virginia Madsen and Kristy McNichol were born that day.

In a world of 7 billion people, dates mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

But I'll still remember February 15th fondly.

Oh, one weird note there.

It's also my mother's birthday.

The newest grandchild gets her own role after visit to Georgia

I never had much to do with babies.

I had siblings born when I was 2, 7, 9 and 11, but all that was a very long time ago and I have little memory of it. I had nephews born in 1996 and 1999, but they were on the East Coast and I was in California, so I wasn't extremely involved with their infancy.

In fact, it was grandchildren that gave me my first real involvement. When Madison was born in Beijing in September 2008, I heard her cries over the phone before she was 10 minutes old. Less than two weeks later, she slept for an hour on my chest while I sang tunelessly to her.

I still consider it one of the 10 best moments of my life.

Lexington and Madison

Three years later, Lexington was born in Seattle. Before he was much more than a month old, I was meeting him. It seemed to me I had both boxes checked -- a granddaughter and a grandson. Since Pauline was the only one of my two kids planning to have children of her own, it all had fallen into place.

Or so I thought. Then at the beginning of 2014, Pauline told us she and Ryan had decided to have a third child.

Huh? Granddaughter, grandson and ... what?

My own grandparents had two children and nine grandchildren. Five girls and four boys. They never seemed to have trouble remembering names and ages. Maybe they didn't overthink these things in the way I obviously do.

Anyway, the third grandchild was born on Halloween. Thanks to ultrasounds, we had known for some time the baby would be a girl and her parents had decided to name her Albanie.

Albanie, May 2015

She was only two months old when we visited them just after Christmas, so she wasn't that involved. But last week Pauline came to visit for three days and brought Albanie with her. The baby is nearly seven months old, and while she isn't walking or talking yet, she is definitely reacting to her surroundings.

Just like her big sister and big brother, she has a great smile. They get it from their mother, who has a truly world-class smile.

What was wonderful about it was getting to know her as her own person. Now Albanie isn't just the baby or the third grandchild. She is my wonderful granddaughter and every bit as special to me as the other two.

We won't see her all that often, But the glories of Skype will allow us to be more frequent spectators as she starts doing more and more different things.

She will travel the world, just like the rest of her family. She may not do what Lex did -- circle the globe before his first birthday, but to paraphrase Dr. Seuss:

"Oh, the places she'll see."

Learning the real meaning of John Prine's most wonderful song

I was 21 years old when I first heard of John Prine.

It was 1971, and his first album was in the stores with all sorts of amazing songs. The humorous "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore" was wonderful, as were "Sam Stone," "Spanish Pipedream," "Illegal Smile" and others.

"Sam Stone" in particular touched my heart.

"There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes ..."

 I played the album over and over, but there was one song that just didn't quite resonate with me. I was just 21, Prine himself was 25, so what was he doing writing a song about the loneliness of getting old?

But "Hello in There" was a wonderful song, and as years passed and I was no longer so young, I began to understand exactly how sad the song was.



"You know that old trees just grow stronger, old rivers grow wilder every day. Old people just grow lonesome ..."

It really hit me in 1991. I've written about this before, but it's a story that is definitely worth telling again. I was covering the then-Los Angeles Rams, and weekday interviews generally took place at the end of the morning practice.

I was 41 that year, older but still relatively young. While waiting for practice to end, I was talking with an older man who had been an actor but was now a freelance reporter for CBS Radio. Biff Elliott hadn't been a big star, but the Internet Movie Database lists 76 acting credits -- movies and television -- for him from 1950-86.

He actually played the lead in one movie, "I The Jury" from 1953.

All I knew about him was that he often asked silly questions and he didn't seem to have many friends among the other media types.

But we talked that day -- for at least half an hour -- and I learned a lot of interesting things I would never have known. Biff was 68 that summer, and he had been friends with some very famous writers who were no longer around.

He was with playwright Clifford Odets in 1963 when Odets was on his deathbed, and he also had been friends with the legendary Tennessee Williams. Another good friend and golfing buddy of his, actor Jack Lemmon, had surprised him on his last birthday with a brand-new set of golf clubs.

When practice ended and it was time to work, he thanked me for listening to him.

I told him it was my pleasure, that it had been a fascinating conversation. What he said next nearly broke my heart.

"When you get old, people just don't seem to want to talk to you anymore. It's like they wish you would just go away."

That was a long time ago, but I have never forgotten those words. I stopped covering sports in 1996, and I don't remember ever running into Biff again. When I looked him up on IMDB, I saw that he had died in 2012, two years after my wife and I moved to Georgia. He was 89, so he had a good long life.

But in 1991, when he was 68, people already thought of him as an old man.

In another 2 1/2 years, I will be 68. If I'm not already there, I'll be the old guy some people wish would just go away.

Now when I listen to John Prine sing "Hello in There," I know exactly what he means.

Two more generations of wonderful mothers I can call family

"Put them all together they spell mother ..."

I think my mother's generation was the first in which significant numbers of women made the decision to combine motherhood with a career. Of course, it was a new enough thing that many of them -- including my mother -- had lesser careers than they could have had in later years.

Since it was the years after World War II, the years of the baby boom, many of them had large families. My mother had five children, and she was past 50 before the last two finished high school.

Nicole, 2005

The next generation -- my generation -- had far more choices. For quite a few, family took a back seat to career. Of the first three women who played important roles in my adult life, including one I married, none of them ever had children.

All are now on the far side of their child-bearing years.

When I met the love of my life, Nicole and I were both 42. She was in the middle of an amazing career in space science, and she also had two wonderful children.

She combined motherhood and a career and did both of them very well. In the years just before we met, she would come home from a long day at work, prepare dinner for Pauline and Virgile and then do something that must have been very difficult. Each night, she spent one hour with each child doing whatever it was they wanted to do.

We made a lot of fun of yuppies and their "quality time" in the '80s, but that two hours every night was truly quality time.

Add to that the fact that she was tougher than any tiger in defending her children against anyone outside the family and she was a pretty amazing mother. So amazing in fact that every year Mothers Day came around, we celebrated Mothers Day Weekend.

Pauline with Maddie & Lex, 2011

Pauline certainly learned from her. So far she is a wonderful mother to three children and is on her way to an exceptional career in the Foreign Service.

She has something the three previous generations of mothers didn't have, and it has made a big difference in her life. She has a husband who put his own plans for a career subordinate to hers. Ryan works, but when it has been necessary, he stays home and looks out for the children.

That's anything but easy and it says something exceptional about him.

Without any sarcasm at all, I think when Mothers Day rolls around, maybe he deserves a little salute as well.

On Mothers Day, remembering wonderful women who did their jobs well

I have known four generations of mothers.

It's actually five -- my great-grandmother was with us till I was 17, but the infrequent contacts I had with her didn't really show her in her role as my grandmother's mother.

But the four I have known -- my grandmother, my mother, my wife and my daughter -- would all rank in any Motherhood Hall of Fame I could create. While only one of them was actually my mother, I would have been lucky to have any of them fill that role.

I have been so fortunate. My grandmother Florence Kindinger lived to be 94, which meant she was with us until I was 40. She lived almost her entire life in a small town in north central Ohio, a town I found almost impossibly boring when I was younger, but a town I have missed desperately since the last time I was there in 1990 for my grandmother's funeral.

435 N. Henry St., 1985

I will never forget something my cousin Peter Kindinger said when we went back to my grandparents' house after the ceremony. "We have spent so many wonderful times in this house, and this is probably the last time we will ever set foot in it."

Sadly, he was right.

The group shot on the left is from five years earlier, when we came to Crestline to bury my grandfather. My grandmother is in the middle of the top row. Peter is lower left in the white shirt.

The front steps are completely blocked from view, but I realized in 2010 when I was thinking about good memories that I realized those steps may have been the place where I was most happy in (then) 60 years on earth. For something like four summers, from 1959-62, I used to stand on the sidewalk at the end of the walkway and practice pitching by throwing a rubber ball against the steps.

I measured my success by the strike zone, and I worked hard to catch the ball as it came back.

My parents, 2006

I never had the opportunity to play in organized leagues, but during the time I spent visiting my grandparents each summer, I got the chance to play in semi-organized games down at the park. I wasn't great -- certainly not a prospect -- but I was well above average. My love for baseball was not unrequited.

That wasn't why I was there. The best part of summer was always the time I spent with my grandparents, and when those times came to an end I was sad. The last time I visited them was in 1985, when I was returning to St. Louis after going home for two weeks for my vacation.

My grandmother had more common sense and basic insight than anyone else I have ever known. She was also very kind. I don't think I ever heard her say anything mean or sarcastic about anyone else.

Unless I live to be 80, I will always be happy to say she was a part of my life for more than half of my life.

Crestline was where I also discovered a connection over the years with my mother. I was a voracious reader, and I went to the public library every couple of days to check out a handful of books. The librarian always put them on the card my mother had used as maybe the smartest kid ever to graduate from Crestline High School.

I hardly know what to say about my mother. I have said and done things over the years that have hurt her, and I wish I could unsay every one of them.

All my earliest memories are of her, which is no great surprise, but the one that seems to come almost out of nowhere must be from 1954. I was 4 years old and we were living in Dayton. I have the vaguest memory of the tiny apartment we shared, but I remember playing with Lincoln Logs in the evening. That's it. Nothing else.

If there was one thing I always believed, it was that no one ever loved me more than my mother did. And through some pretty awful times, and problems I caused that she never could have expected, she never abandoned me or even tried the "tough love" some people use that is way too tough and not nearly loving enough.

She was also as hard a worker and as talented as anyone I knew. When I met and married my second wife, I was amazed to find someone else who was as talented and dedicated as my mother.

I still have two generations to go -- my wonderful wife and my amazing daughter -- but I'm going to wait till tomorrow for that. My mother and her mother are plenty for this one story.

Two truly wonderful mothers. I was a very lucky boy.