North By Northwest

No, we're not going to discuss the movie, this is the third installment of my genealogical Peripherals trilogy. 

However, if you're being strafed or buzzed in a wide open area with no cover, like Cary Grant was, the safest position to take is not to run, but to lie down horizontally to the plane's approach thus offering the smallest target. When I was managing people, I used this trick all the time, that's how I survived. Geez, Cary, think things through, you make me nervous. 

Years before I knew anything about Giovanni Venturella, I had gone on a search for the hospital where I was born. Shouldn't be too hard, right? My brother Dave had been born in Jackson Memorial Hospital, one of the largest and most highly regarded medical institutions in the South, so I was probably also born there. Right?

Wrong.

According to my Birth Certificate, I was born at Northwest Hospital in Miami. Well, that should be easy enough. Wrong again. Even the magical Internet had nothing about it - absolute radio silence. Perhaps it was a ghost hospital. If you search today, the only results for 'Northwest Hospital in Miami' are my plaintive requests for photos and information. So, back to the Polk City Directories of Miami and yes, there it was on 79th Street.

My guess was that it was no longer a hospital, but that wouldn't stop me from getting some photos of the place. When I traveled there on one of my sentimental journeys to Miami, I went to the address as listed. Here's what I found.

There, just beyond the Rotor Rooter van was an empty lot, and I couldn't get a really good feel for the place from that. And it turns out that I hadn't missed my photo of the hospital by just a couple of months (wouldn't that be annoying!). No, as near as I can determine I had missed it by fifty years. Fifty years gone and it's still an open lot? Holy crap, was it a toxic waste dump? What the hell happened here? Was it because of me?

Maybe the hospital had been really, really old and had collapsed from the weight of years? But I checked the 1943 Fire Insurance Map, and no, it looked like farm land. But there in the 1948 Fire Insurance Map, there, Northwest Hospital in the Red box! Yay!

Wait a minute.

Northwest Hospital was about as large as a medium-sized McDonald's. Definitely smaller than Jackson Memorial Hospital by a factor of 1,000. So my brother is born in the fancy upscale hospital and I am born at McDonald's. There are no photos of Northwest Hospital because there weren't any cameras small enough! 

However, you may have noticed two other colored boxes on that Fire Map above. The address of Northwest Hospital was 1060 NW 79th Street, just across the street from 1015 NW 79th Street where Giovanni Venturella was operating the Fannie Grill (Green Box) which was next door to 1005 NW 79th Street where Giovanni's Restaurant (Yellow box) was built that same year. See how this all ties together? Well, do you? I made Giovanni's box yellow in honor of the Yellow Meat Market now located there. See what a nice guy I am!

On the Google aerial today, the outlines of some of the Northwest Hospital buildings are still evident. The hospital and the Fannie Grill are gone. Giovanni's lives on as the Yellow. 

I must speculate on how I came to be born at Northwest Hospital. Did Giovanni Venturella tell my parents about the new, little hospital across the street from him? Or perhaps they saw it as it was being built when they went to one of Giovanni's places. Or was it all just a coincidence? There is no one left to ask. Bummer.

There is another possibility. The doctor who delivered me at Northwest was Dr. Paul Vincent Dunn an Osteopath who was a co-founder of the hospital. His address at the time was 1054 NW 79th Street, next door to the hospital and right across the street from the Fannie Grill and Giovanni's. Perhaps my parents met him in one of those places. Or some other bar. 

For Dr. Dunn was an alcoholic. Later, in 1975 when he was Medical Director of Dade County's Alcohol Detoxification Program, he described his experiences to the Miami News and explained that he did not stop drinking until 1970. That was about the time the hospital went away.

His description matched perfectly with what I had seen working with my friend Mike Mulhall when we traveled all over the US together. Mike drank continuously and prodigiously and other than getting redder in the face, never showed it. Is that the way it was with Dr. Dunn?

This makes me really wish I had been there when I was born. Yeah, I guess I was, but I wasn't actively taking notes, I was too busy squalling. But you know what I mean. In addition to what was described here, Dr. Dunn was also a big-time hunter and fisherman with a houseful of trophies and championships in pistol marksmanship and skeet shooting. The Doctor had some interesting elements in his personality. I wish I could have met him again after that first brief encounter.

As I indicated at the outset of this little trilogy, it is the Peripherals that add the spice to a cold, analytic document like a birth certificate. And this particular chain of connections turned out to be spicy indeed.
  
UPDATE: June 3, 2018 - Thanks to the magic of social media, I can now provide a photo of Northwest Hospital. It turns out, it was just a very small place as I had presumed. Very plain and simple.

And that's probably Dr. Dunn's house visible through the underbrush off to the left. It turns out the Internet does have some value!
 

The Peripherals

 
  In the world of genealogy, many people concentrate on their direct ancestors, those who are the DNA-contributors to their current condition. In this instance, 'direct' would be one's father or grandmother and not an aunt or great-uncle. Often, however, those 'indirects' are where you discover your connections to Presidents and winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, so we don't ignore them. As you can see from this example, there are usually two direct ancestors per generation and over time this gets very large, even overwhelmingly large. 

Over time, there are other connections you come across in your research, the people and things that may not be related to you by blood at all. These are what I refer to here as the 'Peripherals'. Anyone who has done genealogy for a while has run into such marginal characters, bit players who keep cropping up, just tantalizing enough to look into. They're not absolutely necessary, but they seem to add something to the context, like when a cook adds spices to the stew.

Some such factoids are so marginal they practically fade away. Things like our milkman's name which was Wally. Wally the Milkman. Or that the doctor in North Miami who took a mole off my forehead was named Dr. Peppercorn. Bert Peppercorn to be specific.

All right, I've set this up long enough, time to get to it.

One such Peripheral in my life may have played a fairly significant role. You see, I don't know how my parents met. I had decades to uncover this tidbit, all I had to do was ask. But this is one of those woulda/coulda/shouldas that didn't happen because I was too dull or unconscious (see previous posts) to just ask the simple question. Such is the bane of all late-blooming genealogists.

Back in the 1940's, people did not have online dating apps on their smartphones. Any Millennials out there reading this (really?) probably just passed out. But it's true. My parents were not the church-social or hospital-volunteering types, they did their socializing in bars. Hey, that's the way it was, deal with it. At least if you saw a person in a bar, you knew they weren't Photoshopped. What you saw was actually a living human. Not like when they tried to jam Oprah's enormous, misshapen head onto Ann Margaret's body. Ain't happenin'!

Miami, Florida in the 1940's had a lot of bars, I mean a LOT. It has a lot of bars now, too, but proportionately it was almost silly how many they were. My father, Leon, was a connoisseur of bars, places like the Doghouse, the Hide-Away and Jimmie's Blue Room, names that I heard growing up. My mother, Sophia, on the other hand found a place she liked and concentrated her energies there, not exclusively, but to a large degree. Yes, she went to the Park Avenue 'Stuff' and the Bottlecap Inn, but mostly it was the Betty B.

The Betty B.

My mother was working for the von Neida family who lived on Normandy Isle on Miami Beach for the winters and back to St. Paul for the summers. Here's the von Neida winter home in 1938. When she was off, my mother would occasionally travel the couple of miles on the 79th Street Causeway to the Betty B. Actually, 79th Street was called Everglades Boulevard in those days and the Causeway was put there to get people from the beach to the Hialeah Race Track, so the buses ran regularly.

The Betty B was originally the Betty Jane but there was probably some huge corporate takeover (yeah, right!) and the name changed. It was located just on the Miami side of the Causeway at 700 NE 79th Street. I went back to visit it, but it's a boat sales lot now. It's rare for things in Miami to stay the same for very long.

By a freakish coincidence I DO have photos of the real Betty B! Quite a few, actually. More, in fact, then there are of me growing up. Well, there you go. That's my mother, Sophia, second from the left. I don't know any of the other characters, but the well dressed gentleman with his arm around my mother looks strangely like the evil Nazi from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', you know, the one whose face melted.

The Betty B was an open-air bar. In Miami! It had a westerly exposure, so in the afternoons, the sun would have beat in there like a blast furnace. Maybe they closed for a siesta, maybe they all snuck around back. I know it would have been too much for me and I was born in Miami. In this photo taken from NE 7th Avenue, the sun is already turning the ketchup to jelly. I've speculated that the cloth piled up on one of the bar stools there is hopefully some sort of canvas sun block they hung up, but I can't be certain. That's my mother sitting on the left being blinded by the sun.

My Uncle Richard, for whom I was named, also frequented the Betty Jane/Betty B. He also worked for the von Neida family. Here is Uncle Richard with Betty Jane Rickard. Hmm, 'Betty Jane'? Could this be the Betty Jane for whom the bar was originally named? I don't know, but rest assured I'll keep researching. He cuts quite the dashing figure here, huh. I hope his spine was okay.

That fence of signs espousing various beers like Old Bohemian is protecting the bar-goers from falling into or driving into Little River which is right behind the sign. Those are Australian Pines showing in the distance in this photo. They were often planted along canals and rivers in Miami.

Now that we're established the geography of this Peripheral, next time we'll discover the human Peripheral who may have played an important role in my family's events. Stay tuned, there are lots more non-essentials where these came from.
 
  

The Daughters

I am pleased to know something of my genealogy, my... 'family tree'. This knowledge is in sharp contrast to what I knew when I started a limited quest back in 1975. Following the death of my mother, I asked my father questions about his family hoping to get a grip on his side of my ancestry.

Unfortunately, if you look up the phrase 'close-mouthed about family matters', one of the first images is a photo of my father, Leon David Kleylein b. June 29, 1903, d. Dec. 29, 1992.

I didn't discover until years later the really good reasons he had for being so reticent, but that was no help getting me started at all. For example, I didn't even know my own grandmother's maiden name until the discovery of a marriage record in the Maryland State Archives twenty years later.

My daughter, Leah, was poking at me for information about my family and I literally had nothing to offer but about twenty names of relatives. I guess we could have turned to the Internet, but there were only about 10,000 primitive websites and newsgroups (remember newsgroups?) in 1994. It is estimated that in 2012, the number of websites will reach 582 million. Several of them will be about genealogy. (!)

So, instead, in those dark ages, we launched a succession of trips to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis and the National Archives in Washington DC. Microfilm became a close friend. And so it came to be that on December 29, 1994, it was determined by means of a marriage record that my paternal grandmother's maiden name was Harrison.

Now, it is seventeen years later and I have 11,148 names in my family file with 7,467 of them connected to my grandmother Hallie Violet Harrison.

Hallie was born Oct. 9, 1886 in Mt. Airy, Carroll Co., Maryland and died Sept. 9, 1971 in Miami, Dade Co., Florida. As research went on, it became clear that she is related to nearly everyone in Maryland. It's a very close-knit state. Apparently once you move there, you often stay.

In the case of my Harrison connection, it's been nearly 400 years in the new world. Hallie's mother (my great grandmother) was Sarah C. Watkins. Sarah was a direct descendant of James Watkins who sailed with John Smith.

Yes, that John Smith of Pocahontas fame, the John Smith who founded Jamestown in 1607, a full thirteen years before those latecomers finally got to Massachusetts on the Mayflower. I picture my ancestors waving to them from the shore.

Well, Smith and my tenth great grandfather James also sailed up the Chesapeake into the Maryland area. Watkins Point on the Chesapeake is named for my ancestor.

Just a few years ago, we could have celebrated our... whaddayacallit... quadricentennial? Don't forget, the King James Bible hadn't even been published at that point, it was a long fricking time ago!

There's no documentation that James Watkins, my ancestor, had any interaction with Pocahontas. This isn't an actual photograph of her, by the way. I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that if she DID look like this, history would have gone in a markedly different direction.

Which leads us to what I will never have in the genealogy world. It is demonstrable that I will never be a Daughter of the American Revolution.

Not that I don't have lots of connections to the American Revolution. The Harrison ancestors arrived soon after the Watkins ancestors along with Lewis, Moxley, Carter, Fitzgerald, Randolph, Saffell, Waugh, Becraft, Norwood, Holland, Shipley, Stevens, Lucas, Chamberlaine, Landon, Burwell, Smith, Ludlow, Isham, Beverley, Peyton, Gassaway, Lamb, Tydings, Green, Beall, Hungerford, Howard and more.

Two of my direct ancestors, Kinsey Harrison and Jeremiah J. Lewis were soldiers during the war. Two other directs, Jeremiah Watkins and William Shipley took the Oath of Fidelity. And one direct ancestor, Nehemiah Moxley Sr. has a very special place.

Everyone is taught about the Boston Tea Party, patriots dressing up like Indians and throwing tea into Boston Harbor because of unfair taxes. Well, on October 19, 1774, Maryland patriots addressed this issue differently. In Annapolis Harbor, the 'Committee of Observation' (sounds like a terrorist group, doesn't it?) which included Nehemiah had the brig Peggy Stewart, along with a ton of tea on board, burned right down to the waterline.

This seems to me a bit more direct and confrontational than some wimpy costume party with folks dressed up like Pocahontas, but what do I know? I wasn't there.

So, sure, I can be a Son of the American Revolution many times over but that doesn't really have the caché of the DAR. But my daughters... they can be daughters and Daughters!

Yay!

White Knight

A Parable for Our Time

He was a peculiar little boy, an odd little boy. What made him peculiar... odd... was that he was so ordinary. Perhaps a bit taller than average, perhaps a bit thinner than 'normal'. He did not intuitively know how to play the piano, he had no linguistic skills and there was no way he was going to be hitting any balls out of any parks.

In a crowd, he would simply fade into the background.

His friends would prefer to watch paint dry rather than spend a lot of time with him. He was well on his way to downtown Dull. But by happenstance, he noticed one good feature, one limited positive attribute. He was pretty good at remembering stuff. No, not a photographic memory (actually it's called eidetic memory) but wouldn't that be cool? Imagine a genealogist with an eidetic memory! Whoooaaaa! The connections would be fast and furious! No, the boy's memory was only slightly better than average. But since he had no creativity or raw intelligence, he determined to parlay this tiny advantage to the best of his 'ability'. So he memorized things in school and by dumb luck stumbled into the one occupation where he could really exploit his memory.He was too dull (see above) to take up card counting in gambling games so the only thing left was computer science. His memory and the use of that memory to recognize patterns made the boy a prime candidate for geekdom. His accidental entry into this field is probably the only thing that kept him from the poorhouse (do they still have poorhouses??) and a steady diet of cat food.

It's possible he couldn't have even afforded Fancy Feast. It's more likely the generic store versions would have been on his menu.

So his memory carried the boy into sort-of-manhood on its shoulders, dragging him part of the way when it needed to. It saw him through computer programming and analysis and even a primitive kind of management where he could remember who did what well and then told them to do that.But time passes. Arteries harden. Synapses poop out. It's a thing.

His neurotransmitters began to stay at lunch longer and longer. Sometimes his post-synaptic density became... how-you-say... a bit too dense.

The boy's memory wasn't what it was. His one positive attribute was going the way of all flesh.

The boy thought, "Crap!"

But then an event occurred which altered his perception. He was doing some genealogy work digging into his days as a student at William Jennings Bryan Elementary School. One of his favorite memories was about his first grade teacher, Mrs. White. She was his first teacher and it was such a positive experience that his whole view of school may have been properly set by this woman. The boy had remembered her through all these years and years and she had actually come to his mind occasionally and he would wonder how she was and what she was doing.But he didn't know who Mrs. White really was. What did she look like? He recalls that she was impossibly old, but since he was six years old, what did that mean?

The only thing he recalled for certain was that she had white hair, but that hardly narrowed down the pantheon of possibilities.

So the boy went back to do what research he could. Here's his photo from the first grade. He also found his first grade report card to look for clues. Would you like to know what he discovered?

The idiot had her name wrong. The smartypants who presumptuously believed that his memory was good and was only now beginning to fail due to physiological issues beyond his control had mis-remembered a crucial fact for decades!

Her name was not Mrs. White, it was Mrs. Marjorie S. Knight. So, the boy realized in a flash of clarity that he had never had a memory worth a damn, it had always been bad. In a bizarre way, this was comforting. He wasn't losing his memory, he never had any!

With his soul refreshed, the boy turned to his crack genealogy toolkit to research Mrs. KNIGHT. He discovered she was born August 28, 1910 possibly in Texas where her social security number was issued. She had married James Weldon Knight in the early forties and had a son Jimmy in 1945. James Weldon was born in 1907 and had lived in Amarillo solidifying the Texas connection. They divorced in 1954 so it is possible that she was going through this rough period while the boy was her student in the 1953-54 school year. He then used all the math skills at his disposal to cypher that when she was teaching him, Mrs. Knight was 43 years old. He had been right! She was impossibly old!

During that period, she had lived only a few blocks from the school. Here's an aerial photo of North Miami from 1952. If you click on it, you can make it larger. In 1984, she moved to Ft. Lauderdale and died there March 20, 1991, twenty years ago. This was also oddly non-stressful to the boy, since he had not just missed her by a week which would have been really annoying.
This is the apartment where she lived and this is the door she went through nearly every day of her life in North Miami. The boy still doesn't have a photo of Mrs. Knight, but that's only a matter of time.

Somewhere little Jimmy Knight who is now 66 years old carries a part of Mrs. Knight with him. Let's hope he is carrying on her tradition.
  
By now, some of the more clever readers out there have divined that this boy we've been discussing is actually ME! How about that! Quite a little twist at the end, huh?

So, what's the parable I referred to at the opening? You can't lose what you never had, so shut up and enjoy yourself. You can take that to the bank.

Update 06/19/2013: I told you the boy would get a photo of Mrs. Knight eventually and so he has. 

Thanks to the collaboration of the wonderful people on the William Jennings Bryan Facebook page, we now have this image of Mrs. Knight from June 1952.

Residue of Years

Ah, the holidays are over and retirement is no longer something new and unusual. So, it's time to get down to business, YES, I have all that backlogged genealogy and about fifty more years of photographs to scan. But first, there is one last leftover task to complete that relates to my late 'career'.

You've probably read that in today's job market, it is projected that people will be changing jobs (and companies) every couple of years. And I had quite a few different jobs in different industries when I was younger, but once I found a place I liked with people I liked - I stayed. So I was with Shared Medical Systems (SMS) and then Siemens who bought SMS for 33 years. Geez. If you stay at a company only a couple of years, you're not going to gather that much flotsam, but three decades? Whoooaaa.

So, what's the task? Why, the 33 years of stuff! I wouldn't consider myself a hoarder, but even the most careful person is going to accumulate a lot of stuff in timeframes that span epochs. When I was clearing out my office and storage I threw away mountains of materiel that I thought I might need some day but never did. I'll bet there are a lot of people relieved that I've gotten rid of some of that! I no longer need it as 'insurance'. But even so, I brought home fifteen boxes (small boxes, OK) of stuff that needed further sorting plus my awards and plaques and crap from over the years.

I brought them home and put them all in the basement to cool. It might have been dangerous to handle all that stuff while it was still warm. Some of it might have gone off!

You see, this is an instance where my genealogy experience had me err on the side of caution. What if there was something in that mess that some future biographer, tired of picking through this blog and trying to time-sequence it, might need to finally determine what the hell it was I did for a living!

Heaven knows I don't know.

Just to set the record straight, that's not what my office looked like, it actually looked like this, but you can't see the crap because it's hidden or in storage. What you can't see doesn't exist! I learned that a long time ago. Hah!

So, down in the basement, I've got boxes and it's time to take care of them before they go bad and start to smell. I'm guessing a lot of it is going to be recycled, but it's time to close the chapter. Even at the risk of nostalgia and a ravaging paper cut.

And I know some of you are wondering who was in the early photograph I posted at the beginning of this post. Well, that's Katherina Pokornoski and her husband Stanislaw Zak c.1873. She's my half great-grandaunt. And I've got her photograph!

My Bucketed List

Yes, 'Bucketed', not Bucket. As with most creative endeavors, I got this idea from one of my children. Instead of going on and on with a list of what I haven't done, let's list the things that I have done that I'm glad I did. The list of things I've done that I'm not glad I did would be way too long. So I searched my rapidly declining memory for those things that were worthy of being on such a list. I apologize in advance to those events I've forgotten or underplayed, but I had to limit the list to the top forty.

Top Forty Bucketed List Items

1. I have been married to my first wife, Deb, a very tolerant woman, for forty-one years.


2. I have seen my children grow up into beautiful, decent, respectable and successful adults.

3. I have looked into the eyes of my grandchildren and I liked what I saw.

4. I have traced each of my four major genealogy lines back at least five generations, in some cases much more.

5. I have stood at the graves of my father, grandfather, great grandfather and great great grandfather.

6. I have used my bizarre and twisted humor in creative and sometimes even positive ways.

7. I have discovered that my immense flaws are also my greatest assets.

8. I have slept on the fantail of a Destroyer under a sky so filled with stars you would imagine you could read by their light.

9. I have communicated with Kleyleins all around the world although for years I believed my family was the only ones.

10. I have walked around Stonehenge and stood on the moors in the wind and rain.

11. I have dipped my hand into the Mediterranean Sea.

12. I did not fall into a life of crime unless you call management a crime - which is kind of a gray area.

13. I have retained many of my teeth long after my parents had lost most of theirs.

14. I have walked in the Parthenon.

15. I have visited Unterrodach, the town in Bavaria where all the Kleyleins come from.

16. I have walked the same stones in Ephesus where Anthony and Cleopatra walked and John the Baptist preached.

17. I graduated from college. This is noted because there is no record of anyone in my family doing so before me. I've seen my daughters graduate as well.

18. I have spent time doing basic electrical work, mechanical work, carpentry, concrete work, roofing and most other such trades.

19. I have walked on the Great Wall of China.

20. I have climbed trees, dug holes and written on sidewalks with chalk.

21. I think I have a pretty good relationship with my brother, Dave. At least it's much improved from all the fighting we did as children.

22. I have been to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and most other destinations in the Caribbean.

23. I have been very, very hot and very, very cold. Sometimes even just right.

24. I have swum in the turquoise water of a motu in Bora Bora.

25. I have ridden a train between Miami, Florida and Saint Paul, Minnesota.

26. I have been on a submarine under da sea.

27. I have traveled the Chunnel several times.

28. I have been to London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Munich, Athens, Stockholm, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangalore, etc. and even Silver Lake, Minnesota.

29. I have ridden on a bullet train in China at 431 km/hour.

30. I climbed the steps to the top of the Washington Monument and then took the elevator down just to be contrary.

31. I scanned my mother's photographs from the 1930's and 1940's, studied them, tracked down the original locations and rephotographed the scene 60 or 70 years later.

32. I have had as many as 700 people working for me.

33. I have been to the top of the Empire State Building.

34. I have a degree in Computer Science but am only a couple credits short of a second degree in Math.

35. I have been able to locate many of my long-lost high school friends by means of social networking.

36. I was able to parlay my ability to recognize patterns into a pretty good career.

37. I have seen the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Devil's Tower, the Redwoods, the St. Louis Arch, the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls, the Everglades, the Black Hills, Diamond Head, the Great Salt Lake, Skyline Drive, the bayou, the forest, the desert, the plain, the swamp, the Pacific Coast, the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes.

38. I have worked for a lot of different employers in a lot of different fields in a lot of different occupations.

39. I have had a number of ex-employees tell me that the best time in their careers was when we worked together. Hah!

40. I have never taken, ingested, smoked, chewed, smeared on, snorted, huffed, shot up or otherwise imbibed any illegal or illicit drug. I probably should have.

Nature, Nurture, Whatever

Nature or nurture, genetics or care - which is it?

My hobby is genealogy and as a result, I know something about my ancestors. Most lines, excluding the presidents and governors and such were just good solid farming stock. They worked hard, they had no Social Security and they lived a gooood long time. Many lived into their upper nineties. Shown here is Nimrod Harrison, Jr. and his wife Sarah C. Watkins Harrison, my great grandfather and great grandmother. In this photo in 1910, he was 71 and she was 65. He lived on for another ten years and she for twenty. And they were the slackers of the family fading away so young.

Here's their whole family in that shot, my grandfather is here, Peter Kleylein, my grandmother Hallie Harrison Kleylein, my father Leon Kleylein and my uncles Stanford Wheeler Kleylein and Nimrod Harrison Kleylein. Families got big in those days.


On my mother's side, outside of one German line, all of her folks came from Posen, Poland. Here's my grandfather Roman Damos Pawlak and grandmother Wanda Marie Pokornoski Pawlak in 1963 when he was 82 and she was 76. They still worked their dairy farm right up until the end. The man standing behind them is my uncle Edwin Pawlak, I've written about him in this blog before. My point in all this is to discuss how long I'm going to be writing this thing. I'm sure you'll be sick and tired of it if you aren't already.

My company had a kind of 'health day' at work last week. They bring in some healthcare workers to do some simple tests to warn you if you're dying, I guess. And once more I was reminded that I'd better save my money or I'll end up eating catfood because I've outlasted the cash. And, yes, my daughter has kindly told me that she won't allow me to get into the state of eating catfood but I still have this nagging doubt. It nags at me. I got it from my mother, I think.

My mother grew up during the Depression, you know, the other really bad one. And her family was poor enough already, I bet the Depression didn't help any. I can clearly remember her swiping sugar packets if we were ever in a place that had them. I guess folks had to do that if they were going to survive. But my lines DID survive, lousy healthcare, no healthcare, whatever - they had the ability to survive. And part of that, at least, can be attributed to good genes. Good strong, Depression-era-fighting genes.

So, I went to the 'health day' thing with a pretty good notion that things would turn out OK. Part of that good feeling can be attributed to the three or four full-scale, all-day physicals I've had at John Hopkins in Baltimore. In my business, you come to know which hospitals can be really trusted to give you the straight skinny. And when the Chief of Medicine at Johns Hopkins tells you you're good, then head right out and have a big greasy cheeseburger. If you're going to have a physician tell you something about your life, then have an A-student physician from a top-rated hospital do it. You know?

So once again, my blood sugar was fine, pulse 58, BP 120/82. The Nurse asked me if I had any stress in my job. OOOh NOoooo. Apparently if I didn't have the stress, I'd die of low blood pressure. The real killer, of course, is cholesterol. Mine continued it's decline and is now 148.

But that doesn't tell the whole story because my HDL, the 'good' cholesterol, is very high, out of the normal range leaving me with very low LDL (the 'bad' cholesterol). So the Nurse checked my carotid arteries to discover if they were open or not (they were), gave me a box of Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts and sent me on my way to the next spot.

At the next station, they were able to analyze the condition and age of my circulatory system. No, Bones McCoy didn't wave a whirling knob around me but that must be next because this was also non-invasive. So now I know (supposedly) that I have the circulatory system of a man twenty years younger than me. I'm not sure how he's able to get along without it, but nobody grabbed me and told me I had to give it back, so I just kept moving.

They told me my skin is bad. I know my skin is bad. I spent too much time in the sun in Miami and I'm sorry. Every time I see someone at work come in after too much sun exposure, I just want to slap some sense into them. You can't take the damage back. There it is to stare you in the face forever.

And yeah, I go to the gym, but not enough - the job interferes a bit. But gym or no gym, as long as my wife doesn't kill me, I've got a pretty good chance of living forever. Just gotta make the cash last.