Mary and I went to visit my grandmother Ruth in the hospital. A few months ago, Ruth was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which nobody ever survives. We presented her with an owl we bought in Prague for her collection, and we were told by my aunt that she was very weak and it would be better if we left. My aunt has been taking care of Ruth for a while, and we're grateful to her for that, but we were frustrated that we had not been able to visit her since her time is so short. Not wishing to argue about it, we told Ruth that we were leaving, and she seemed quite sad to see us go.
Ruth was really my grandfather's second wife. His first wife, Marian, had died from complications associated with diabetes in 1982 and about a year later, my grandfather married Ruth. She was the widow of a former co-worker of his who had died of cancer in 1980. At first, my family was a bit troubled with how quickly Maurice had remarried, but after meeting Ruth we had grown to love her. She was simply the kindest, most patient, generous person any of us had ever met. They were very much in love and terribly happy together since their wedding. She tried her best to make everyone she met feel welcome and comfortable, always quick to fix you some food if you didn't like what was for dinner. After the diagnosis, my grandfather tried to be optimistic, but had grown ashen and deeply concerned because she was his whole life.
Mary and I left at around 12:30 to meet my parents for lunch. On the way, as we were approaching a bridge near our house, we saw a man in a blue jogging suit climbing up onto the four-foot wall. For some reason, I thought he was fishing in the creek far below. Mary said she thought he was a workman who was preparing to work on the bridge. After we passed the man, I watched in the rear-view mirror as he stood on top of the wall and jumped off.
We quickly turned around and pulled over to the side of the road. There were already about twenty people running onto the bridge from the other side, and one man simply stopped in the middle of the road to get out of his truck (minutes later, someone looking at all the people on the bridge almost rear-ended him). Everybody was leaning out over the edge, looking down and trying to spot him. The bridge spans a small ravine that contains a creek and a four-lane highway. Since traffic was not stopping on the highway, we ruled out the road. Three people were calling the police on cellular phones at the same time, and in a manner of minutes several police cars screeched to a halt. Leaning out over the edge, one guy thought he spotted the man, but we were never really sure. I saw what he was pointing at, a vague blue shape on the rocky hill next to the highway. Soon, an ambulance stopped traffic on the highway below and workers tried to find the body.
Shaken, we left to meet my parents. The whole way there we were theorizing about the man and feeling guilty for not trying to stop him. Who expects someone to commit suicide right in front of them?
Later that night, I was working on the computer and I turned on the wall air conditioner in the bedroom to try to cool off the computer room. About an hour and a half later, a thunder storm started and I went into the bedroom to unplug all the appliances in case of a power surge. I noticed a strange odor in the room. When I reached for the air conditioner plug, it was so hot that it burned my hand. I dropped it and the prongs started melting the rug! I felt the wire and it was too hot to touch. I realized that if it were not for the electrical storm, we probably would have had a fire from the overload.
I went to pick up some some stuff from a place in Hightstown, NJ. It's about an hour and a half to the place, and I made some stops on the way back to check my mail. As I was driving home, the cars in front of me suddenly jammed on their brakes, and I did too. I heard the tires of the truck behind me squealing, and he hit my car pretty hard from behind. My car was propelled forward and bumped the car in front of me. We all stopped and got out to inspect the damage. Miraculously, there was no damage to the back of my car, only a few scuffs in the paint on my bumper. The front of the truck was mashed in but the driver assured me that it was from an incident the day before (maybe this will make that moron stay back when he's following people from now on). I really wanted to file a police report (in case I was injured and didn't know it), but nobody passing by would call the police for us and we were in the middle of a highway with little chance of finding a phone. After waiting for about 20 minutes, I just wanted to go home, so we left. Soon after I got home, I realized that the time of the accident was exactly the same time as the incident the day before with the man who jumped from the bridge, 12:46.
When I arrived home, I found a message from my mom on the answering machine. She sounded really depressed and the first thought I had was that Ruth had died. I called my mother back and there was no answer. I called the hospital and there was no answer. I called my sister's house and talked to my brother-in-law, who told me that he thought Ruth was dead. Later that afternoon, I found out that this wasn't true, but merely a big misunderstanding. I went to the hardware store to get some super glue, and on the way back I talked to my next door neighbor Joe about the bridge jumper and he gave me a copy of the article from the newspaper.
This was Mary's first day of graduate school. I stopped on the way home and got a big bucket of buffalo wings for dinner. I arrived home to find an indecipherable message on the answering machine. A man with the thickest Baltimore accent I have ever heard said that I had to call back before September 5th, then he left an eleven digit "case number" and a phone number, 1-800-829-1630. If you're near a phone, go ahead and dial that number right now before you read any more.
My heart stopped and I sat there in shock as the computerized voice on the phone said,"Welcome to the Internal Revenue Service," followed by an ominous pause. Even though I hadn't done anything wrong that I was aware of, images of corrupt accountants and hard jail time suddenly flashed into my consciousness (after all, I had never heard of them calling people!). I entered my social security number and followed the instructions. I waited on hold for fifteen minutes, eating my buffalo wings, before being told that the system was down and I had to call back.
I tried to call back every two or three minutes for the next two hours, but I kept getting the message that the system was down. By now the phone was pretty well covered with wing sauce and I was quite nervous.
I finally got through. After giving the necessary information, I got to speak with a live operator. I breathlessly read out the case number, and she asked me for my address and social security number. Then she informed me that they had called the wrong Ken Miller. At that moment I felt like I had won the lottery.
Terrible radio news yesterday. Philadelphia's only classical music station, WFLN, had announced that they were changing their format at 6PM and the DJ's kept mentioning "Max." I had recently started listening to the classical station more often in my car and this was a great shock to me. Surely a city the size of Philadelphia could support one single classical station.
Meanwhile, in a calculated move to get donations from the rich Temple alumni who like classical music, the president of Temple University made an announcement that the Temple public radio station will now play some classical music. The problem with this announcement is that Temple's radio station is one of the premier jazz radio stations in the country. Its programming is consistently innovative and I have been late for many an appointment because I had to sit in my car and wait for the DJ to come on to find out the name of a particular song.
Starting up my car today, I'm greeted with "Max," the new format of the former classical music station. What is "Max"? Apparently it is a machine that plays music. No DJs, no traffic or weather reports, no song names, just music and commercials, and the occasional slick station ID that says, "Max knows music." The music is totally geared toward a "target audience," in this case the plump 20-somethings-with-disposable-income market. Tunes range from "adult" top-40 hits like Sheryl Crow to older material from the likes of Peter Gabriel to the obligatory cheesy 70's disco song. It's completely devoid of any originality or spontaneity, and I'm sure it will be wildly successful. It's pure market strategy without those pesky DJs to play a cut that's not already popular. How do new songs become popular with this new system? The only conceivable way is through major record company promotion. You'll hear what they want you to buy, and nothing else. It's especially sad that it has replaced classical music. Classical music isn't catchy, it's longer than three minutes per cut, and you can't make a mountain of money selling something that's in the public domain. Sometimes life is so unbelievably ironic that it scares me.
The Temple university jazz station is ending its final week as a jazz-only station and the on-air personalities are more than a little irritated at the people who run the station for the format change, and with good reason. First of all, the change violates the mission statement of the station, which is to preserve and educate people about the history of African-American music. Second, since the radio station is actually member supported, the change violates the contract the station has with its members. The new format will be classical music from 6 AM to 5:30 PM, something called "The Temple Journal" from 5:30 to 6, with jazz relegated to the 6 PM to 6 AM "graveyard shift." To make it even more annoying, the first three hour segment of jazz is the comatose "Turn on the Quiet" show. In effect, to placate the former listeners of the classical station, most people will not hear any jazz on the radio at all, since almost all radio listeners tune in between 6 AM and 6 PM.
We visited Ruth today, and she looked quite bad. She was living out the rest of her days at home and was unable to eat any more. Even the IV feedings were making her sick at this point. She was literally starving to death. When people came to see her, she didn't want them to see her in bed, so she asked the nurse to help her walk out to the living room to be with us. There she slept on the reclining chair for much of the time, waking up occasionally to speak a bit to us. My grandfather seemed optimistic about her health, encouraged by the fact that she had asked for orange juice earlier in the day.
We drove two hours to this beach resort for the day to pick up some of these killer pastries called Elephant Ears. After buying the Elephant Ears, we ate lunch, and decided to get ice cream in this cheesy shopping center. After we paid for it (it was twice what we were used to paying, so we were a little pissed) and walked away, Mary found a dead fly in hers! We took it back to the woman and demanded that she give us our money back for it and the woman said it's their "policy" not to refund money. Then she accused us of putting the fly in the ice cream because we were mad about how expensive it was! We were outraged and stood there stunned while she prepared another cone for Mary and gave it to her (Mary was in no mood to eat anything after almost eating a fly). That's when I lost it and started shouting to everyone on line, "This woman is selling food with bugs in it, but don't expect a refund!"and "Look for bugs in your ice cream before you pay, everybody!"
So we walked away. At this point we were both too pissed off and sickened by the dead fly to eat so we decided to go back and leave the cones on her counter. When we got to the place and put them there, she said, "Are you going to give back the money you stole from my tip jar? That girl said she saw you put your hand in the tip jar" and she pointed to this "neo-hippy" teenage girl wearing a Grateful Dead shirt and sitting at a table. "I saw you take it" the girl said. Honestly, we hadn't had our hands anywhere near the tip jar and we were stunned and started asking her why she was lying (This witness also claimed that the woman offered to give us our money back). This was too much, and we left again.
We started to drive away, really pissed off and frustrated at the nerve of these people. That's when I decided to get the name and address of the place to report them to the health department (I must be part Italian or something, because I just can't let people do things like that to me). We turned around and went back one more time. I wrote down the name of the place and asked her for the address. She gave it to me and told me that the police had been called to escort us from the premises. I told her that I was going to see what my friends at the health department could do about her selling food with insects in it. We left and she followed us to the parking lot and wrote down the license plate number of Mary's car.
When we were driving down the main street to get off the island, we passed all these police cars sitting in the middle of the road checking out the cars going by (Hey! They had an APB out on us! "Attention all units! Be on the lookout for two people in a blue Toyota. The suspects are believed to have stolen two dollars. They may be armed with flies, repeat, they may have dead flies!"). They finally pulled us over and took our licenses, told us that the woman had "eye witnesses" that saw us steal money from her tip jar, and made us go back with them to the police station (We weren't under arrest, but the officer didn't want to copy all of our information longhand, and he had to go there to use the photocopier). It was there that the he told us that the single so-called "witness" actually works at the ice cream stand for the mean woman. He also told us that he was only filing an "incident report" and that they would not press charges, but that the woman could press charges against us and take us to court, and if we were found guilty, we would get a fine! He said that we'd find out if we got a subpoena in the mail. Mary's terrified that she could lose her job if they find out that she's been accused of theft.
Ruth's son Ernie, one of the people keeping vigil at her side, is a lawyer. I asked him what he thought about the whole thing and he said that she probably won't press charges for such a small amount, and even if she does we can ignore it because they'd never in a million years extradite someone from Pennsylvania to New Jersey on suspicion of stealing $2. Meanwhile the whole family got a much-needed laugh about our legal troubles. My grandfather said that he's going to hide all of his change the next time we come over.
Wednesday morning, I got the phone call that I had been dreading for the past three months. Ruth had died the night before in her sleep. I immediately called Mary and told her the bad news.
Arriving at the funeral home today, we found my grandfather looking fifteen years older than he had looked the week before. "I'm all doped up on tranquilizers," he told us right away. We tried our best to comfort him as the people arrived.
Both of Ruth's sons and my mother delivered eulogies, telling the story of her life. She was born in 1920 and became a first grade teacher in 1941, the same year she had married her first husband. In the 1960's she earned a masters degree and became a counselor for troubled inner-city youths, and along the way she taught untold numbers of people to read and write, gladly offering her services to any children she could. She had faced death with the same elegance and grace that she had faced life with, never complaining of her illness and insisting in talking about the people who came to see her rather than herself. Everyone in the chapel knew that every word was true. She would be sorely missed.
We listened "Max" on the way home and then checked our mailbox (once again there was no subpoena). We changed out of our formal clothes and went on with our busy day. Somehow the world seemed a little more empty today.
