The Corona Diaries

December 2, 2020

I woke up in a white world this morning. We received our first covering of snow for the winter. It was like Mother Nature looked at the calendar, saw that it was December 1 and said to herself, “Oh crap, I’d better make some snow!”

Though it has been a while since we had a significant snow fall, the old girl managed to spread a beautiful frosting of snow over everything. This was a “sticky” snow, wet and heavy covering every twig, branch, weed and blade of grass. The woods around my home looked like the Irish lace doilies my grandmother used to crochet.

Like everyone else that grew up in Western Pennsylvania, I have a suitcase full of memories involving snow. I have the usual recollections of building snowmen and snow forts, of snowball fights and sledriding. I can picture my sled like it was right in front of me. In those days, all of the kids had American Flyer type sleds with wooden decks and steel runners. My first sled was one of these, it was a “hand me down” from my sister and was a little beat up.

One year, I found a new sled under the Christmas tree. It wasn’t like the other kids’ sleds, it was a shaped like a rectangular tray with low sides and an upswept tub. It was made of red fiberglass and had a glass smooth bottom.

Of course, it was one of the rare Christmases in those days when we didn’t have snow so I had to wait a few days to give it a try. When it finally did snow, it was “love at first slide.” My sled was super-fast leaving the old style runner sleds far behind.  It would run on just a dusting of snow.

The only downside of my sled was that it was difficult to steer. The old style sleds had a steering bar but steering my sled required shifting my weight. This ended in tragedy when I sideswiped a tree and cracked my sled; the fiberglass was brittle in the cold.

I was heartbroken but my dad saved the day by fixing it with a piece of angle iron bolted over the crack. He brought home two pickle jars full of “goo” from Westinghouse in his lunchbox. This was the first time that I had ever seen epoxy; at my dad’s work it was used to seal the coils of copper wire on the generators they made.

Using a Popsicle stick to scoop out an equal amount of the goo from each jar, and then mixing them on the metal lid of a coffee can. Once mixed, he smeared the goo over the crack on my sled. In a few minutes, the goo hardened like plastic, my sled was almost as good as new. I kept riding that sled until I got too big for it.

I outgrew my sled but not my love of the snow. When I was a young man I took up cross country skiing and snowshoeing and still enjoy walking in the winter woods. The only thing I don’t like about winter is driving in the snow.

I live on one of the highest hills in the Mon Valley, the road to my house is steep with many twists and turns. It can be a challenge to get home when the roads are icy. For many years, I kept a ski pole in the car to help me climb our hill like Sir Edmund Hillary when the car couldn’t make it.

Going to work on winter mornings before the borough snow plows did the secondary streets could be very exciting. There were times when I came within inches of going over the hillside or into a tree. Ironically, I never owned a four wheel drive vehicle until after I retired and could roll over and stay in bed on snowy mornings.

Fortunately, I am a good winter driver. I often was able to ascend our hill when some of our neighbors got stuck in their SUVs. A good part of my working years was spent as a salesperson on the road, in all those years I never needed to be towed out of a ditch or slid into another car on the ice.

I did have a few adrenaline pumping moments when my car decided to fishtail or spin out. I was always able to regain control of the car before it required any bodywork.

I credit my dad for teaching me how to handle a car in the winter. My dad loved to drive and took pride in his skills behind the wheel. He had been a truck driver in the late 1930’s and loved to tell stories of his days on the road. He drove fast and he drove hard but never had an accident.

My mother wouldn’t let him teach me how to drive. He had lost his temper and yelled at my sister when he tried to teach her. She tore up her learners permit and 65 years later she still doesn’t have her driver’s license. My mother wisely sent me to driving school, my dad was a better driver than the teacher.

Somehow, my dad did teach me to drive in the winter without giving me a nervous breakdown. In fact, it was a lot of fun. We had an early snowstorm on a November Sunday in 1968. There were cars all over the road as we drove to church in McKeesport and back.

My mother was a nervous wreck but my dad had no problem navigating the snow and ice. After brunch, my dad told me, “Grab your coat.” My mother said, “Where are you going in this weather?”

My father’s only response was, “We’ll be back in an hour or so,” and headed for the car. I jumped in the passenger seat and he backed it out of the garage. We drove down Lincoln Way, turned on to Fifth Avenue and went up the hill on East Pittsburgh Boulevard.

I was puzzled when he turned into the old Eastland Shopping Center, in those days the blue laws meant that all the businesses in the center was closed. My dad stopped our station wagon in the middle of the empty parking lot.

He turned to me and said, “It’s time you learn how to drive in the winter.” I had passed my driver’s test on my 16th birthday that summer but hadn’t tried to drive in the snow yet.

He gave me a brief lecture on the art of winter driving, telling me about invisible “black ice” and how “slippy” bridges could be when the roads were okay. Finally he said, “That’s enough BS, it time to show you what you need to do.”

First, my dad gunned the wagon and then slammed on the brakes sending the big car into a spin. While he brought the car under control, he explained how a smart driver turns into the spin.

We did this a number of times and I could tell by the smile on his face he was really enjoying this lesson. He intentionally drove to a low spot in the parking lot that was a solid block of ice. He showed me how to get started on an icy road.

Dad stopped the car and threw the shifter into park. He opened his door and said, “Your turn.” I walked around the car, almost falling on my backside before getting to the driver’s seat. My dad talked me through the maneuvers he had just done.

Several times I sent our Impala wagon into a complete spin. My dad was yelling, telling me what to do. I realized he wasn’t mad, he was yelling because he was excited. After a number of tries, I managed to get the car under control.

We kept at it until I instinctively turned the wheel in the right direction on every try. Just for fun we did a number of “doughnuts” in the lot before driving home. My dad never let me drive, but on this occasion he stopped me when I went to open the door. Driving home in the wintry roads was the final exam for my winter driving class.

Every year when the first snow covers the ground, my mind goes back to all the winter times I have enjoyed. It might not be as much fun as flying down a hill inches from the ground but it still puts a smile on my face.

I also get a good feeling when I’m driving and feel an icy patch on the road. I steer the car out of the skid, I again smile and think, “Thanks, Dad.”

    - Jim Busch

December 1, 2020

The evening news report led off tonight with a rare bit of good news. It appears the pharmaceutical industry may start delivering the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine within the next month.

This couldn’t come at a better time, the coronavirus is raging through the country like a wildfire in California. At the present moment, Covid-19 kills another American every 40 seconds. That’s almost 2,200 people every day.

Incredibly, the same news report also featured a video of massive unmasked parties held over this past weekend. The people attending these parties either believe the political rhetoric that the disease is “no worse than the flu” or even that the entire pandemic is a “hoax.”

Last week, I had to deliver some pies and other items to my sister-in-law in Mercer County. I was careful and left the items on her porch so we didn’t have to be in contact.

On the way home, I passed through an Amish area in Lawrence County. Since they lack refrigeration, the Amish milk can’t be sold to dairies. It is legal to use it to make cheese so the presence of the Amish has caused a thriving cheese industry to grow up in the area. I decided to stop at “The Cheese House,” a cheese outlet and Amish food store along Route 18.

I knew I was deep in “red” territory with the highway lined on both sides with Trump signs and banners. I even passed a couple of barns painted with big, red, white and blue Trump signs on their sides.

I pulled into the Cheese House parking lot, put on my mask and headed for the store. A nice lady in a car rolled down her window and offered this warning, “Be careful in there…there’s a lot of idiots not wearing masks.”

Alerted by her comments, I approached the door cautiously. I noticed the double glass doors of the store lacked the now familiar signage, “Masks required,” and “Please practice social distancing.” These warnings were conspicuous by their absence.

Once inside, I glanced around the barn like interior of the store. I noticed that while the employees were all properly masked most of the shoppers were not. Of the fifteen or so people in the store, only four people were wearing masks.

After so many months of mask wearing, this struck me as a strange sight. I felt like I was taking part in a historical reenactment of the days before Covid changed everything. Since bright red MAGA hats far outnumbered masks, I’m sure that this flaunting of the safety protocols was politically motivated.

Ignoring the medical professions’ warnings about avoiding coronavirus for political reasons seems to be the height of stupidity to me. Science, and now experience, has taught us that masks, while not a 100% effective, go a long way to preventing the spread of the disease.

Unmasked public gatherings have become “Super Spreader” events resulting in needless suffering and deaths. I heard an interview with a nurse who described being with one of her ICU patients as he died. Up until the last minute, he maintained that Covid-19 was a hoax. Finally, just before he breathed his last breath, he said, “I guess this is serious after all.”

I think there is a “macho” component to the behavior. By not wearing a mask, some people seem to be saying, “Look at me! I’m no mask wearing wimp, I’m not afraid of some Chinese virus, besides I’m strong and healthy, germs bounce off me like bullets off of Superman.” This is not the message I took away from seeing these maskless people at the Cheese House. I grabbed my cheese and headed for the door.

The other reason for not wearing a mask and practicing social distancing is what sociologists have called, “Covid Fatigue.” People are simply tired of taking the simple precautions required to keep themselves and others safe. They let their desire to “get back to normal” overcome what they know is the right thing to do.

They want to go back to the way things were before the pandemic struck, that they convince themselves that they don’t have to be so careful. I wonder if our soldiers and Marines serving in combat zones ever get tired of wearing their helmets and protective vests.

They are much more uncomfortable and constricting than a thin face mask. Do they chuck their flack vests, put on a baseball cap and simply pretend that the bullets and mortar attacks don’t exist.

As absurd as this sounds, this is essentially what people are doing when they ignore the safety precautions recommended by the CDC. We are in a biological war zone and it is up to us to protect ourselves and those around us.

The serious nature of this pandemic was brought home today when my wife talked with her niece, Marcy. She is a Licensed Practical Nurse who works in a nursing home. She has been working twelve hour days and is constantly exhausted.

In addition to the long hours, the stress of trying to keep her patients, herself and her family safe from Covid is taking a toll on her. At work, she wears a surgical gown over her scrubs, two masks, a face shield and gloves.

Marcy has two sons, one a recent college graduate and the other in high school. She is terrified that she will bring the disease home with her from work. The older boy is asthmatic and although he still lives at home, she seldom sees him. When she is home, he quarantines himself in his room and avoids his mother. 

As a reward for agreeing to work through Thanksgiving, Marcy actually got the weekend off work. Two glorious days to rest and restore her sanity. When she left work on Friday, the home had nine confirmed cases of Covid-19. When she returned on Monday morning, the number of cases had jumped to 42.

This is happening all over the country putting a severe strain on our medical system. Because of people who selfishly refuse to take precautions, we have reached a point where the disease is spreading exponentially, a point where we may not be able to bring it under our control.

I will continue to wear my mask and avoid others until our medical professionals sound the all clear signal. I don’t particularly like wearing a mask and restricting my activities but these actions are not that hard to follow.

At worst, they are mildly inconvenient. I know how awful I would feel if my selfishness or carelessness would harm another person. The people who blather on about how being required to wear a mask or stay away from their favorite bar and restaurant is a violation of their freedom.

They have forgotten that personal freedoms are inextricably tied to personal responsibilities. Taking precautions to stop the spread of Covid-19 requires more than following medical recommendations, it involves following a higher rule, the Golden Rule, “Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you.”            

 - Jim Busch

November 30, 2020

I took advantage of the warm weather today to complete a major project. Actually, I should say my wife, Glenda, and I completed a project today. We built a fence to mark the boundary between our backyard and our neighbors.

This project actually began over a year ago, I bought some 6 feet cedar fence palings and milled them down to 3 feet tall. This was a lot of work but was significantly cheaper. I stored them in my shed to dry over the winter. I had some treated four by fours salvaged from another project to use as posts.

When the weather got cooler in October, I used a 50 foot tape measure to lay out the places for the posts and I used a clamshell posthole digger to dig six holes. I then set the posts and leveled them. This was as far as I got for a few weeks.

Looking at the calendar and at the weather report on television, I knew that if I didn’t get the project done this week, it probably would have to wait until spring. I told my wife with great conviction that I was going to finish the fence this weekend “come hell or high water.” She responded with just as great a conviction that she was going to help me complete the fence.

I tried to discourage Glenda from helping me to build the fence. It wasn’t ego or chauvinism that fueled my objection. I was genuinely concerned that she wasn’t up to this task. It would require staying on our feet for many hours outside in chilly weather.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal but for the last eight months Glenda has been undergoing treatment for stage four pancreatic cancer. After barely surviving a chemotherapy regimen, just this week she started receiving radiation. Both the disease and the treatments have sapped her energy and left her feeling weak.

The chemotherapy took such a toll on her body that the doctors postponed the second course of treatment until she had regained some of her strength. She has been feeling fairly good lately but we know this will not last as the radiation starts to beat her up again. I didn’t want her using her precious reserves of energy helping me.

Glenda and I are true partners in life. We have always worked well together. One of the things that attracted me to her is that she has always been a bit of a tomboy. She liked to go camping, hiking and was her father’s hunting buddy.

She actually beat me out for a position on the high school rifle team. When she was just eight years old, her dad tied blocks to the pedals and taught her how to drive his old flatbed truck through a hayfield while he threw bales on the back.

Glenda was never the kind of woman who worried about breaking a nail or messing up her hair. She only owns two or three dresses and her closet is filled with blue jeans and tee shirts. On average, she only goes to the beauty parlor once a year for a trim and seldom wears any make-up. To me she is a natural beauty and doesn’t need to enhance her appearance to appeal to me.

We’ve always been amused by the stories other couples tell about doing projects around their homes. We’ve had people tell us that they would never take on another remodeling job for fear that it would result in their getting divorced.

We’ve heard about DIY projects that ended with shouting, tears and an expensive call to a professional. This has never been our experience, our projects may not all turn out like they do on This Old House, but none of them ever put our marital bliss in jeopardy. In fact, if anything these experiences brought us closer together.

Over the years, we accomplished a lot of projects together. Early in our marriage, we lived in a cabin in the big woods of Northern Pennsylvania. We heated with wood and had to carry our water as we lacked modern plumbing. Glenda and I would cut logs in the forest, bring them home and cut and split them without the benefit of power tools.

We created a garden together and raised rabbits for meat, I don’t remember hearing Glenda utter one word of complaint, but I do remember a lot of laughter.

In our 50 years together, we have built buildings, remodeled rooms, repaired plumbing, installed water heaters and a furnace. We have hung doors, installed windows, done electrical work and poured concrete.

Glenda is actually much better than I am at floating cement; she says that getting a smooth surface on a sidewalk is a lot like icing a cake. Not so long ago, our old Subaru was running rough so we googled the problem. Glenda downloaded a video from YouTube and we managed to take the top of the engine apart and clean the fuel intake. I am certain that without her, I would have had to take it to our mechanic.

I am a little ashamed of the fact that I did not push back harder when Glenda insisted on helping me with today’s fence project. I really wanted her help and not just because it would make the job go faster and easier.

I knew I could use clamps to hold the pieces together as I built the fence. I was quite capable of completing this job on my own.  Glenda’s help would save time because I would not have to fuss with the clamps but this was not why I wanted her with me on this job.

I think that after working together so long, we both wanted to do one more job together. One of the secrets of a good marriage is finding joy in helping one another as you go through life. I love it when my wife asks me to build something for her; I find a lot of satisfaction in a simple shelf or some implement for her kitchen. I knew she wanted to help me today as much as I wanted her at my side.

We worked from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. Where just a few posts were set into the ground when we started, there was a 30 foot fence at the end of the day. When we finished up, there was barely enough light for me to pick up my tools. Glenda walked across our neighbor’s yard and stood looking at the fence with her hands on her hips. She had a look of satisfaction on her face.

I knew that, like me, she was thinking back to all we had accomplished together. We had raised two children who turned into intelligent, responsible and caring adults. We had played a big part in the first 14 years of our grandson, Max’s life.

We had opened and run a business and we had done a lot of good for people. In the books and movies, lovers are always singing and dancing together or doing some other recreational activities together.

My wife and I have had more than our share of those fun activities but those aren’t my favorite memories. I like to think of her standing next to me when we were completing a job that needed done.

She was never so beautiful to me as when she had a claw hammer or a mason trowel in her hand and her hair falling in her eyes and smiling at a job we had just completed together.      

- Jim Busch

November 29, 2020

I felt like I experienced a miracle today. It’s just a few days until December begins and we had a rose ready to bloom in our backyard. I don’t know if it is “The magic of Christmas” or the threat of global warming that motivated the rosebush to produce this bud, but it was lovely in either case.

A bloom like this, so far out of season would have frightened my grandfather and sent him to his room to pray the rosary. For him, a flower blooming in the wrong season meant that a death in the family was imminent.

Only a wild bird flying into one’s home was a worse omen. I am not very superstitious and do not believe in signs and omens, but I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to see that one branch of our Firebush was filled with bright red blossoms on the frigid February day in 1969 when they laid my grandfather in the ground. The rest of that old bush flowered as it normally did two months later in April.

Actually, it is somewhat of a miracle that this geriatric rose is even alive, let alone bloom at any time of the year. My wife’s father, John, planted it 40 or so years ago. It was not an expensive bush. He bought it as a bare root plant from the garden center at the North Versailles Kmart.

He was a good gardener and planted it at the proper depth and fed it with top dressings of rotted cow manure. It thrived for many years. John loved that rose bush and would often cut one of its yellow blooms for my wife. She was the only one of his three daughter’s with blond hair and he liked to call her his “Yellow Rose.”

As John’s rose grew older, it produced fewer and fewer blossoms. When John planted it, the rose received a full day of sun but eventually the neighbor’s mulberry tree grew taller and blocked out the morning and early afternoon sun. Each year it was outpaced by the younger and healthier roses in the yard. The new roses were hybrid Knock out roses which grew more aggressively and bloomed throughout the growing season.

Still, we couldn’t bear to dig out the old rose; it had become like a member of the family. As John’s health declined, he could not care for the rose like he had when both he and it were younger. I took over the role of family “rosarian,” but I didn’t have John’s knack for tending them.

John died in January of 2000 and after that, the rose became almost a sacred object for my mother-in-law, Eleanor. One of the keys to growing healthy roses is regular and aggressive pruning. Cutting them back encourages new growth and branching. Roses also like to produce blooms on new wood.

Because it was “John’s rose,” Ellie wouldn’t let me take my pruning shears to the yellow rose. She told me, “It’s old and I’m afraid you’ll kill it by cutting it back too far.”

As instructed, I didn’t touch the rose for 15 years. It became our “Jack and the Beanstalk” rose, its three spindly stems reaching a height of 5 to 6 feet each. Barely clinging to life, the rose stopped blooming to conserve its flagging energy.

I fed it on a regular basis with Miracle-Gro Rose Food, compost and manure, but I’m not so sure it ever reached the leaves waving in the wind 6 feet above its roots.

Every spring I examined its leaf buds looking for signs of life. I was relieved every year when a handful of leaves made their appearance; I knew that if it died, my mother-in-law would hold me responsible.

In the end, the tough old rose outlived Ellie. She passed away in July 2014 when the rose was still stretching its leaves up toward the sun. I started my efforts to restore John’s rose in January of 2015.

With the plant dormant, I pruned each of its stems back by about a foot being careful to leave a bud just below each cut. In the spring, I took a hand cultivator and agitated the soil around the roots at the base of the plant before doing the usual feeding.

I didn’t notice much change that first year but I repeated the process, pruning a bit more in the second year. That summer we were rewarded by three yellow roses; two in the springtime and one more in the late summer “flush” of roses.

Now, after six years, I have John’s rose down to a more manageable, yet still spindly, 4 feet tall. It produces a handful of nice big yellow roses each summer. I had hoped to stimulate the growth of more shoots from the base of the plant but so far I’ve had no luck. As rose bushes go, John’s yellow rose seems to have an incurable case of anorexia.

Glenda is less superstitious than I am and far less interested in spiritual matters. She is a pragmatic, practical woman who doesn’t believe in ghosts, spirits or other otherworldly beings. Yet, she often senses her dad’s presence.

She was very close with her father. John had three children, her twin sisters and Glenda, he would’ve liked to have had a son but that wasn’t in the cards. As the youngest, Glenda took the place of the boy he never had.

He taught her how to tune up a truck and took her hunting with him. When she was just a little girl, he would take her with him to the local bars and showed her how to play pinball. John loved all of his girls but he and Glenda had a special bond.

Glenda and I lived with John and Eleanor for over 25 years. They helped us raise our children and we all enjoyed living in our extended family unit. This living situation reinforced the bond between Glenda and her dad.

We still live in the home where Glenda grew up and where we all lived together so long ago, so we are surrounded with memories. I think of John and Eleanor every day, but with Glenda, it’s different.

She literally senses her father’s presence. She swears that she feels him nearby and that sometimes she can smell his Camel cigarettes in our kitchen. She isn’t frightened by these encounters, it’s not like she has encountered a scary ghost or terrifying specter.

She actually finds these moments comforting, like a visit with a loved one you haven’t seen in a longtime. She describes this as, “I feel like my daddy is looking out for me.”

This is also how she took the very unseasonable blooming of John’s yellow rose. She did not see this as an omen of ill tidings but as her father’s way of telling her that, "Everything is going to be okay.”    

- Jim Busch

November 28, 2020

Today, is Black Friday, normally the busiest shopping day of the year. All the news channels were abuzz with speculations on how the pandemic would impact retail sales.

The CDC and the medical community are advising shoppers to stay away from the malls and stores, much to the delight of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and to the horror of brick and mortar retailers.

Many shoppers actually seem to be ignoring the warning and venturing forth in search of bargains. “Sure, I may die or kill my grandma, but I just couldn’t pass up saving 20 bucks on a flat screen TV!” Call me an old fuddy duddy but I just don’t understand this type of thinking. Maybe I’m just a lousy consumer.

On the other hand, I can understand the concerns of the retailers. Black Friday is a big day for them. The term comes from the fact that sales in the Christmas season push them out of the red and into the black.

Everything they sell from January to October barely covers their overhead and expenses, it is the money that they take in during November and December that goes into their pockets. I could see this in the Thanksgiving Day newspaper.

Until the last year or so, the Thanksgiving edition had more ads in it than any other paper throughout the year. The Black Friday ads strained the system and had the printers who produced the physical paper scratching their heads on how to make and deliver such a massive document.

The paper that I bought yesterday was bigger than the average paper these days but it was a mere shadow of its Black Friday ancestors. It is a victim of the shift to online shopping and the closing of so many local and chain stores.

My own activities on this day have remained virtually unchanged by online shopping or the pandemic. Instead of celebrating Black Friday, I always considered it the first day of “Sawdust Weekend.”

When I was still working, I was usually off on Black Friday. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to go shopping, I saw it as three days of uninterrupted time in my shop, Like Santa’s elves, I could go to my workshop and make stuff for Christmas.    

I have always enjoyed making personalized Christmas gifts and ornaments. I come by this honestly, in a back corner of my garden shed is a green wooden kid-sized wheelbarrow that my grandfather made for me as a child.

I loved it as a child and my children and my grandson have played with it over the years. Though it is a bit small for me to use these days, I can’t bear to part with it. In that same shed is a tiny sled I built to pull my kids around in the winter when they were toddlers.

Several years after I built it, my parents were cleaning out their attic and showed me the sled my grandfather had built for me. I had, of course, forgotten about it but it was almost exactly the same as the one I built. This made me ponder whether this design was buried somewhere deep in my subconscious.

Over the years, I have made everything from a mahogany four poster bed sized for a Cabbage Patch doll to a complete set of miniature Ninja tools for a GI Joe.

The first year my wife and I were married, I grew some gourds in the garden and dried them. In December, I drilled holes for hangers and my wife and I painted them. Two of them still have place of pride on our Christmas tree 48 years later. When our kids got older I cut out some wooden ornaments for them to paint. I have made ornaments for our tree every year.

When my grandson came along, I made an ornament to celebrate Max’s first Christmas as a gift for his parents. When I showed it to my wife she had two comments, first, “Where’s mine?” and, “You should make one every year.”

Now fourteen years later I have made two ornaments featuring a photo of Max each year. My wife keeps them together in her sitting room. Looking at them we can see how he’s grown through the years.

Initially, I made toys with his face on them but in recent years I have mounted and cut out a photo of him from a particular moment from the year. Each summer his grandmother and I would take Max on vacation and photographs from these trips often ended up on our tree.

As he got older, I would printout a brief narrative about the photo and mounted it on the back. These ornaments have become a chronology of our grandson’s life, when we look at them they trigger wonderful memories. This year we didn’t get to travel with Max, but I have started looking at pictures for this year’s ornament.

I also get requests. Today, I worked on a copy of a vintage miniature Christmas fireplace my nephew saw online. I managed to make all of the parts out of scrap wood I’ve collected in my shop. Much of it was fabricated out of wood salvaged from an old dresser that a neighbor threw out for the trash.

My grandfather had a hand lettered sign in his workshop that read, “I have been doing so much with so little for so long that now I can make just about anything out of nothing!”

Working from a photo he sent me, I drew a paper pattern, cut out the pieces on my band saw, and then carved the surface to look like bricks, I even cut twigs from the yard to make logs for the hearth. I find this kind of creative work far more interesting and satisfying than going shopping in a store or clicking a mouse.

I am what psychologists call an “intentionalist.” This is a fancy way of saying that I feel the meaning of an object is as important as its utility. I feel making a gift for someone is a way of giving them something of yourself. People seem to be impressed with the objects that I have made them over the years.

I have a number of projects in the works for this holiday season. I have to make some decorations for my wife. She wants Hooten, our owl sculpture, to have a red nosed reindeer and a Baby New Year costume.

I have some other ornaments and gifts to make. I am looking forward to my time alone in my shop with my tools, my ideas and my memories.    

- Jim Busch

November 27, 2020

Today, is Thanksgiving Day. This year I did not have to think too long about what I am thankful for. As I sat in my house with my wife, my children and their families I was very thankful that we are all here to celebrate this day.

We all know the numbers, a quarter of a million Covid-19 victims will not be here to celebrate the holiday with their families. There are many empty chairs at American tables this year.

I am so happy to share Thanksgiving with my wife. This past April 21st, Glenda was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. This was undoubtedly the worst day in my life and the worst news I have ever received. On that day, eight months ago, the doctor told us she had as little as six months to live.

We worked with her medical team to fight this disease with an aggressive chemotherapy regimen. This approach stopped the tumor from growing but almost killed Glenda.

After a break to let her regain her strength, this week she started receiving daily radiation treatments. So far, all we have done is put off the inevitable, but we have hopes that the radiation will shrink the tumor.

My wife is gravely ill, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the spread she put out for Thanksgiving. She served up a fresh roast turkey so tender that my son could have carved it with a plastic butter knife.

In addition to the big turkey with bread stuffing, she also made a roasted turkey breast with a cranberry cherry glaze and cherry pecan stuffing. My son’s wife is largely a vegetarian, so a “Tofurkey” was also included on the menu.

The meal started with herb stuffed portabella mushrooms for an appetizer. Side dishes included roasted carrots, Brussel sprouts, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweet corn, cheddar cheese corn pudding, Waldorf salad, stuffing balls, homemade gravy, homemade applesauce and pear sauce and whole berry cranberry sauce.  I have enjoyed the buffet at the Golden Trout restaurant at Nemacolin Woodlands, and it paled next to my wife’s spread.

The dessert table included my personal favorite, pecan pie with vanilla ice cream, Pumpkin pie with whipped cream, graham cracker pudding pie and coconut pudding pie.

When my kids were very young they used to argue over whose piece of pudding pie was larger. To insure peace and tranquility at the Thanksgiving table, Glenda started making an individual mini pie for each of them.

Though they are both in their 40s now, this tradition continues to this day and both of my kids had their little pies waiting for them. A big bowl of cranberry “fluff” and a cheesecake completed the dessert spread.

If my wife’s famous caramel apple cheesecake had been around in medieval times, I am sure that the wandering bards would have composed ballads about it and spread her fame as a baker throughout all the realm.

Normally, Glenda’s culinary expertise would have attracted a much larger gathering. We have had as many as 22 people around the table. My sister and my daughter’s-in-laws usually attend plus a number of family friends.

Since my daughter’s house is bigger than ours, we usually serve dinner there. This year we had to makes some special coronavirus adjustments. The guest list was pared down to just us, my kids and their families. We had to forgo the traditional “Norman Rockwell family gathered around the big table” format for this Thanksgiving.

Instead, my wife and her helpers set up a buffet line in the kitchen. I discovered it required two trips to do it justice, because a single plate couldn’t hold every item even if one took only a tiny amount of each.

Once we had our food, we each retired to our assigned place. Two places were located at the kitchen table with all the boards in place allowed for a proper social distance. The rest of us were seated at TV tables strategically placed around the house. This solved the problem of eating without a mask on.

Our Thanksgivings tend to be loud but this was downright cacophonous. Being six to eighteen feet away from a family member is no reason not to talk with them, you just have to crank up the volume.

The meal was delicious, chaotic, loud and wonderful! I enjoyed having our “brood” all under one roof and I know it thrilled my wife. She told me later, that it was worth all the work she put into the meal.

This evening, after everyone went home and the house was quiet again, we started talking about our plans for Christmas. I was glad to see her looking forward to something, it made both of us happy.

Back in the summer we held “Christmas in July.” The idea behind this was my wife wanted to celebrate one more Christmas with the family in the belief that she would probably not be still here when December rolled around. I am exceedingly thankful that she is not only still here with me but still able to do some of the things that she enjoys and gives her life meaning.

I have always been one to enjoy the “little things in life.” I always try to fix every day we have spent together in my mind and to savor them like they were some special delicacy. I have to admit that Glenda’s cancer colors every minute we spend together.

Just riding home from the hospital after a treatment and discussing our plans for the balance of the day seems so precious. This is why this is what made this Thanksgiving so poignant and precious. I have now enjoyed 68 Thanksgivings though I have to admit that I don’t recall the first few too clearly.

I can’t really recall a bad Thanksgiving, they were all filled with good food and good company. I have to say that, out of all those wonderful Thanksgiving days, this one is absolutely the best.

The only thing that could top this one, is if I could celebrate next year’s Thanksgiving in exactly the same way.                       

- Jim Busch

November 26, 2020

Today, Kathy, my daughter’s wife, came to help my wife prepare tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast. We started the day bright and early with a trip to Allegheny General for her daily radiation treatment. One of the things we will be thankful for tomorrow will be that we get to skip her treatment for the holiday.

These treatments are quite quick; the actual treatment only lasts about three to five minutes. It actually takes her longer to dress and undress for the procedure than it takes to “zap” her. Along with the radiation, she takes three chemotherapy pills twice each day.

The combination of these two treatments take a lot out of my wife; she usually comes home and takes a nap. Today, she didn’t have a minute to waste - she had a turkey and all the “fixin’s” to prepare. Given her condition, this year her daughter-in-law’s assistance was greatly appreciated.

Some people consider cooking a chore, something they have to do. For Glenda, feeding her family is a calling, a gift to the people she loves. Her kitchen is her studio where she produces her masterpieces.

She has made me the envy of my guy friends. When we get together, after they inquire about my health, they ask me, “So what’s Glenda been cooking for you lately?”

Just this morning, my best friend Ralph called while I was driving her home from AGH. I don’t like to talk on the phone while I’m driving so I handed my phone to Glenda. Earlier this week, she had made me a delicious pot of cream of potato soup.

Like me, Ralph is a lover of soup, before the pandemic we would often meet at the Olive Garden for their soup and salad lunch special. I told Glenda how much he would enjoy her potato soup. Since she had Ralph on the phone, she offered to make him a pot.

He responded like one of the recipients of a giant Publisher’s Clearinghouse Check on TV. He could barely contain his excitement. Next week, Glenda will make him a batch of soup and package it up for me to do a contactless delivery on Ralph’s porch. Glenda was delighted to make a meal for someone who will truly appreciate it.

Thanksgiving is like the Super Bowl (“Supper Bowl?”) for my wife. It is the time she shows off her best work, when she pulls out all of the stops. In a normal year, making this massive meal is an endurance challenge.

I have seen years where she only slept an hour or two in the 48 hours before putting the turkey on the table. Planning the “T-day” meal begins weeks in advance. Long before the bird gets stuffed, she stuffs a folder with scraps of paper. Her planning includes menus, new recipes downloaded from the web or clipped from magazines and detailed shopping lists.

I am surprised she doesn’t keep these documents in a briefcase handcuffed to her wrist like the D-Day invasion plans.

This year, because of her compromised immune system, I am her designated shopper. I have been sent on numerous missions to Giant Eagle, Costco, Market District, the Monroeville Farmer’s Market, and Lampert’s Fine Meats & Deli.

I received advanced tutorials on the nuances of grocery shopping like the difference between chicken stock and chicken broth. Woe be unto me if I confused the two varieties of “chicken juice!”  

My daughter-in-law was put in charge of turkey procurement as there is a turkey farm near her parent’s home. Even though millions of Americans find a frozen Butterball quite adequate, only a fresh free range organic turkey will meet my wife’s exacting poultry specifications. 

By this morning, our kitchen was stocked with more supplies than the pilgrims had set by to survive the winter of 1620. Kathy arrived at our house at “Turkey minus 28 hours.” And Glenda set her to work.

Earlier this week I gave Glenda her Christmas present. I usually wait for Christmas Day and put her gift under the tree but this year I went the practical route. I knew her gift would come in handy during holidays.

I got her a top of the line 16 cup capacity food processor. I know for many women that this would be grounds for divorce or perhaps even justifiable homicide, but this is something Glenda really wanted. This thing slice, dices and juliennes; I think it will even wash your delicates if you use the “pulse button.”

Glenda and Kathy figured out how to use the new food processor and it made quick work of the onions and celery for the stuffing. I was smart enough to stay out of the kitchen while they were working but I could hear them talking from my office.

I could hear an echo of earlier days when Glenda was the helper and her mother, Eleanor, was the queen of the kitchen. Even after she was too weak to stand at the stove, Ellie would sit in a kitchen chair and direct the preparation of family meals.

Though Ellie has been gone for six years, she still had a role to play in our 2020 Thanksgiving meal, the cookbook she made for each of her daughters was open on the kitchen counter.

Just like women have done since they were cooking mastodon on a stick over a fire, Glenda and Kathy talked about the family, shared cooking tips and laughed. Glenda got so much needed help, Kathy learned how to make some of the old family favorites and both enjoyed sharing one another’s company.

Working through most of the morning and all of the afternoon, they made Waldorf salad, herb stuffed mushrooms, two kinds of stuffing and stuffing balls before moving on to desserts.

Kathy learned how to make “Ellie’s Utterly Deadly Pecan Pie” and Glenda’s famous Caramel Apple Cheesecake. They also made my kid’s favorite pudding pies, vanilla for Rachael and coconut for Jesse.

Of course, this much culinary activity produces a huge mess. I made a minor contribution to the meal by carrying several bags of garbage to the alley. Kathy was a lifesaver with several sink fulls of dirty dishes and pans.

By the evening much of the prep work for the next day was done. Kathy pledged to return the next morning with my daughter to stuff the bird and finish the side dishes.  Grateful for the help, Glenda collapsed into her recliner at the end of the day, completely exhausted.   

We didn’t talk about it, but I knew Glenda wants this Thanksgiving meal to be especially memorable. With a cancerous tumor on her pancreas, she knows that she might not be here to cook next year’s turkey.

This is why she wanted to pass on her recipes and make a legendary meal for her family. I loved watching her in the kitchen, in spite of cancer and Covid-19, she was a happy woman.

- Jim Busch

November 25, 2020

Today, I was north bound and down, loaded up and truckin. I had a long way to go and a short time to get there, yes I was northbound and down, you should have seen this pie man run.

This song was running through my mind as I ran up the interstate to make a critical delivery today. I wasn’t delivering an illegal load of beer like Burt Reynolds was in Smokey and The Bandit, I was delivering pumpkin pies to my wife’s sister.

Several years ago, my wife and I launched a new holiday tradition. A few days before Thanksgiving we drove north to visit her sister, Sally, and her family. Sally has lived in Hermitage, Pa. a suburb of Sharon for almost half a century but they have remained close.

Since they wouldn’t be together for the holiday, we went there for a pre-holiday visit and to deliver some baked goods my wife had made. Her sister is an excellent cook but doesn’t enjoy baking like my wife does.

In addition to the home baked goods, we took along a Costco pumpkin pie. Like the rest of the country, Sally’s family loved Costco’s version of this holiday favorite. As I said, my wife loves to bake, but she hasn’t baked a pumpkin pie after her first bite of a Costco one.

They may be America’s favorite pie; each year Costco sells over five and a half million pumpkin pies nationwide. Today, I was talking to a Costco employee who was restocking a cooler case full of pumpkin pies. I asked him if he saw pumpkin pies in his sleep after handling so many of them. He laughed and told me that the Waterfront Costco store sells four to five thousand of them every holiday season.

Costco pumpkin pies are not only delicious, but they are also cheap. A generous twelve inch pie is only $5.99. In fact, it has been only $5.99 for years, these pies are a “loss leader” for Costco, a tool they use to draw in holiday shoppers.

My wife is fond of saying, “I couldn’t bake a big pie like that for six bucks.” She is proud of her baking skills and I think this is her way of deflecting the undying shame of actually buying a dessert for her family.

After that first time when we visited Sally, pie in hand, we started doing this every year. We would pick up some pies, collect some other items to take her and then drive to her house for a visit. Normally, we would spend the day, go out for lunch at a local diner and visit her kids and grandkids.

Sally loves holidays and decorating. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, she transforms every inch of her house into a winter wonderland; it looks like the set of one of the Hallmark Christmas movies she loves. A highlight of our visit is a tour of the current year’s holiday display.

This year we had to deal with the “Covid that stole Christmas.” With the pandemic shifting into high gear and my wife’s immune system compromised by her cancer treatments, a visit was out of the question, we had to forgo our annual visit.

The closest Glenda got to seeing her sister Sal this year was a FaceTime tour of this year’s decorations. In the “before times,” Glenda and Sally got together at least once a month. Our kids are close cousins and I have enthusiastically embraced my role as doting uncle.

I staged a comeback with a new generation of great nieces and nephews. They like my storytelling and my ability to make what they consider “cool” stuff.

My wife and Sally talk several times a day on the phone. When I heard how disappointed Sal’s family was when they realized that there would be no Costco pies this year, I came up with a plan. I would do a “drive by pieing.”

I would go to Costco, drive to Hermitage and make a “no contact” delivery, turn around and come back. A hundred miles up, a hundred miles back -“Easy as Pie!”

My wife and Sal both thought I was a bit crazy. This was a long way to go just for some pies. I reminded them that, as a retired salesperson, I’ve spent a large portion of my life staring through a windshield. A full tank of gas, a good audiobook and I’m ready to roll. Finally, pie lust overcame their objections and I got the go ahead.

Glenda assembled a load of things for me to take to Sal, her husband, their kids and their families. I was sent to GFS food to buy blocks of butter sculpted into the shape of tiny turkeys.

She also gave me a list for Costco, in addition to the pies, I needed to buy croissants, and muffins. This morning, I drove to Costco, picked up the items on my list and jumped on the road. I was placing these items on Sally’s back porch before noon.

It felt like a “dead drop” in a spy movie. I dropped my items without touching anyone. I also picked up some things that Sally was sending to my wife. They were actually wrapped in a plain brown paper bag just like in th

I talked to Sally for just a few minutes through the screen door and talked to her husband, Frank, from ten feet away in their driveway. Frank and I were both masked and we both wear hearing aids so I am surprised one of the neighbors didn’t call the police about a loud altercation between two old guys in a driveway.

After a few minutes, I jumped back in the car and left; “Who was that masked man? I don’t know but he left us these yummy pies. Hi Ho! Pumpkin away!”

This was the best I could do to restore some normalcy to Thanksgiving. When my little grandniece Seneca heard that I was coming, she got all excited about seeing her Uncle Jim. When her mother told her that I wasn’t coming to visit but just to drop off some pies, she began to cry.

She asked her mother, “Why doesn’t Uncle Jim like us anymore?” When I heard this, I have to admit I teared up a bit myself. We’re all thoroughly confused about what’s going on, so I can’t expect a little seven year old girl to comprehend what’s going on.

I took her an advent calendar and some books so I hope she realizes that “I still like her” and would love to spend some time with her. I miss spending time with the kids because they recharge my batteries.

We usually use words like peaceful, joyful and festive to describe the holidays. I hope these will still apply this year but we also have to add the word “weird” to our seasonal vocabulary. This is tough because the holidays are all about tradition; we enjoy doing the same things with our kids as our parents did with us.

Repeating our rituals year after year seems to tie our lives together and we find this reassuring. I hope that next year I can sit down with Sally and her family and eat a piece of Costco pie; until that time, we have to do the best we can under the circumstances.

I am betting that sharing pumpkin pie over zoom will be just as delicious as ever.         

- Jim Busch

November 24, 2020

This morning, the biting wind and cold rain left no doubt what month it was. We’ve been lucky so far as November was sleeping on the job. We got to enjoy a few bonus weeks of balmy October weather long after the leaves were laying like a Persian carpet on the ground.

November is winter’s preview of coming attractions. We don’t get to see the whole film, we don’t usually get the thick layers of snow or the ice storms. We just get some selected scenes, a few days with temperatures below freezing and a few snow flurries.

In November. I imagine Mother Nature doing her best Bette Davis imitation and saying, “Fasten your seat belts, folks. It is going to be a bumpy season ahead.”  

This morning I had to be up early so that I could take my wife to her first radiation treatment. The drugs she is taking makes her feel cold all the time so I went out to start the car and warm it up before she got in.

As soon as I stepped out of the door, I felt the wind cut through my jacket like I was wearing a tank top. The damp and the cold seemed to sink right into my bones and my skin erupted with a thousand goose bumps.

Fortunately, November has a very short attention span. By the afternoon, the wind had died down and sun had warmed the air just a little. By 3 p.m. temperatures had risen to the mid 40’s, but I could still sense the coming winter in the air. I don’t know how to put it into words, but the winter air has a different feel to it than the fall.

In fact, each of the seasons has its own unique atmosphere, the spring has an aroma of growing plants and the summer has an energy all of its own. Today, I could feel the winter in my bones and in my soul.

Nature responds to each change of the season in a million ways. When the sun rises higher in the spring sky, crocuses start pushing through the soil and the feathers of male cardinals turn scarlet red.

In summer, the Monarch Butterflies come back to the Mon Valley from Mexico and the milkweeds blossom to meet them. Autumn first causes the leaves to change colors and then to fall. It also somehow tells the buck deer to sprout a fresh set of antlers. At this time of the year, the cooling air tells the groundhogs and almost everything in nature that it is nap time.

Like the bugs, the birds, the bees and the plants, I also respond to the changing of the season. Some of these changes are automatic and I am barely aware of them. For instance at this time of year, my hair seems to grow faster.

Other changes are more obvious, like my friends the woodchucks, I tend to sleep more during the long winter nights. One of the more pronounced changes I experience when winter arrives, is a craving for soup.

To be more precise, when the weather gets colder, I begin craving comfort food. This year with the added stressors of the Coronavirus pandemic and my wife’s cancer this desire for comfort foods is a screaming addiction.

Comfort food is not some old folktale, psychologists who have studied this phenomenon have discovered that these foods evoke not only an emotional but also a physical one. High carbohydrate foods actually trigger a release of endorphins in the brain.

This is very similar to the release of these “pleasure hormones” when the brain detects narcotics in the system. Comfort foods actually give us a pleasant physical high.

Our relationship status has an impact on what we crave and why. For people who feel lonely and isolated, comfort foods help fill a hole they feel in their lives. Psychologists have discovered that comfort foods are not just for lonely people.

Their research has found that a feeling of “relational connectedness” is particularly pronounced in people who are in long term relationships. In plain English, this means that eating comfort food not only makes us feel good, but reinforces our relationships with our loved ones.

There is a plaque that they sell in souvenir shops all over the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. These plaques purportedly bear an authentic Amish proverb that reads, “Kissin don’t last, cookin do.”

My wife and I are very fortunate that after fifty years together we still enjoy both the “Kissin” and the “Cookin” aspects of our marriage. In fact, both of these have actually improved over the years, we have grown closer and my wife has become an amazing cook.

Glenda has developed a sixth sense that tells her exactly what I am craving. I try never to put demands on her and am always pleased with what she puts on the table. I seldom make requests for specific items but she always seems to know what I want.

In the spring it is wilted lettuce, the kind with the thick dressing and the bacon like my mother used to make. Come summer, I start dreaming of fried zucchini squash breaded with cornmeal. The fall is time for her grandfather’s Pennsylvania Dutch style sweet and sour fried green tomatoes topped with caramelized brown sugar on top. Homemade apple dumplings also make fall’s list of most wanted foods.

With the chill in the air this week, my wife has already satisfied two of my winter food cravings. This last weekend she made me a plate of creamed chipped beef on toast. The salty beef in a thick cream sauce poured generously over thick slices of toasted buttered potato bread is the perfect food to drive away the winter blues. I have loved this dish since I was a child, a key component of a true comfort food.

Tonight, Glenda prepared a big bowl of her mother’s potato soup. Not long ago I saw a meme on Facebook which featured a picture of an old woman with her hair in a bun and wearing an apron; the caption read, “Wouldn’t you like to go back to your grandmother’s kitchen?”

Glenda spends every day in her grandmother’s kitchen. Her kitchen was once her grandmother’s and her mother’s before it was Glenda’s. It is where she learned to learned to cook and bake.

After being out in the cold all day, she somehow knew I needed a big bowl of her mother’s cream of potato soup. This soup is so thick and chunky that I could almost make a spoon stand up in it.

Unlike a watery canned version of this soup, it is a real “stick to your ribs,” meal. Served with a slice of homemade rye bread it warms me from the inside out, driving away the cold that I carried in from outdoors. It made me feel warm and happy from my toes to the top of my head.

We live in a culture that extolls excitement and the exotic. I like trying new things and new cuisines. Just before the pandemic my son and grandson turned me onto the delights of Korean food.

As I grow older, I find myself more and more seeking out the familiar and the comfortable. I prefer my work shoes over more stylish footwear and I find my battered chair for reading.

I have eaten in some fancy restaurants where I have enjoyed the meals, but as winter approaches there is nothing that makes me happier than a simple bowl of potato soup and a thick slice of rye bread.  

- Jim Busch

November 23, 2020

The Steelers have won 10 out of 10 games this season, their best record ever, or so I’ve been told.

I may be the only person born and raised within an 100 miles of Pittsburgh who has never seen a Steelers game either live or on television. None of the clothing in my closet has either team names or numbers imprinted on them and I have never owned an oversized foam finger.

I come by his honestly, my family was only interested in sports that resulted in the bloody death of innocent creatures. My grandfather was a great hunter and my dad liked to fish. My dad would watch an occasional baseball game on TV, but he was hardly a fan.

My grandfather liked boxing and I would watch the Friday Night Fights with him. I think boxing and wrestling were acceptable to him because they generated a little blood.

I never played any formal sports growing up. Sometimes, I would play baseball or football in the schoolyard with the neighborhood kids but I never joined any little league teams. I have a foot that turns out in a strange way so I was never a good runner and I wasn’t very good at sports. This didn’t really bother me because my interests lay elsewhere.

Though Western Pennsylvania is a hotbed of high school football, I never went to a single game. I actually used this to my advantage. During high school I worked at Marraccini’s Supermarket in White Oak’s Rainbow Village Shopping Center. I worked with a lot of guys who also went to McKeesport Area or Elizabeth Forward High Schools.

Since Friday was a busy shopping day, it was hard to get a Friday night off. When my turn came to have a Friday night off, I would sell it to a coworker who had a hot date. I got to pick up a few extra hours plus an extra five or ten bucks depending on how desperate my buddy was.

I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school so months in advance, I requested to be off on the nights of the McKeesport and Elizabeth proms. During one of our breaks, I auctioned these valuable time slots off and cleared an hundred bucks which was a lot of money in 1970.

Since I was working full time and carrying a full course load in college, I didn’t have time for sports even if I had an interest in football or basketball. When I got out into the business world, I found I didn’t need to know anything about sports to get by.

Around the photocopier or with a customer, if the subject turned to sports I would just say, “Hey, did you see that play Sunday…” After tossing this out like a paper airplane, I just stood there quietly while the discussion took on a life of its own. I still occasionally use this trick and it has never failed me.

When I advanced into management, my boss wanted me to take up golf. In those days, lot of business deals were still made on the golf course. He even offered to pay for my lessons. Whenever I see a golf course, I see a wasted corn field so I kept putting off the lessons until the winter.

The media companies I worked for had promotional arrangements with some of the local sports teams. After avoiding sitting through a sporting event for most of my life, I finally started attending games at the stadiums. My wife and I even won a road trip to Montreal with the Pirates, even though we only attended one of the games.

I learned to enjoy watching baseball games. I didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on down on the field. I just liked the baseball experience. A warm summer evening with a hot dog, a Coke and a beautiful view of downtown Pittsburgh, what could be better?

The only athletic displays that interested me was the maneuvers of the swallows and later the bats around the stadium lights.

Hockey games at the old Civic Arena did engage me. I liked the simplicity of the game, no obscure rules, no worrying about keeping track of downs and yardage, just knock the little puck into the net. The game was quick with few dead spots. Even so, the highlight of a “Hockey Night in Pittsburgh” were the snacks they served in company box at the “igloo.”

When I began getting a reputation as a sales trainer and traveling around the country, people were surprised at my lack of interest in sports. Once they heard I was from Pittsburgh, “The City of Champions,” they naturally assumed I was a sports fanatic.

Later, I got one of our young managers interested in training. I mentored her and managed to get her a position with the industry training group I belonged to. This made my life easier, when someone asked me about Pittsburgh sports, I’d point to her and she would hold up the honor of our city. A true Pittsburgh girl, Danielle, was a rabid sports fan.

Today, my wife wanted me to pick up a few things for her at Costco. Going to Costco on any Sunday afternoon is crazy, going on the Sunday before Thanksgiving is absolute insanity, but today, I had an ace in the hole.

Before planning my shopping trip, I scanned through the TV listings and found out when the Steelers were playing. I planned my arrival at the store exactly at kickoff time. I sped through Costco like I owned the place. I saw a sight much rarer than an aquamarine unicorn, two open registers at Costco.

I have used this trick before. I once went to Monroeville when the Steelers were playing in a critical playoff game. The game was televised and I knew virtually every eye in the Steel City would be glued to the screen.

Monroeville looked like a scene from the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The usually busy Route 22 was empty with not even a cop in sight. I was tempted to drive 90 mph down the middle of the road like Charlton Heston in Omega Man.

I had to go to Best Buy to pick up something for my computer. When I got to the store, their entire staff, including the security guard were gathered around a TV on the showroom floor.

I think I could have loaded up a buggy with laptops, rolled it to my car and comeback for another load. As it was, I had to coerce a clerk to tear herself away from the screen and ring me out. It is entirely possible if a beer commercial hadn’t come on the tube, she may have encouraged me to shoplift my items.

In his essay, On Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, Whosoever would be a man, must be a nonconformist. If old Ralph was writing in Pittsburgh today, he would probably rephrase this as, “Whosoever isn’t a sports fan in the Burgh, must be a nonconformist.”

If the nonconformist team had an official jersey, that is one I would wear proudly.              

- Jim Busch

November 22, 2020

It rained today, so I decided to clean out some old files in my office; mostly throwing out old tax records. In one old folder, I found a couple of old Pennysavers. I spent the last 18 years of my career at the Pennysaver, so they brought back a flood of memories.

For the first ten years of my time with the Pennysaver, I ran the classified advertising department. I was in charge of a staff of about 30 and they were all women, who worked on the telephone. When I took over the department, I was the first man to work in the classified “phone room.”

Their pay structure had just been reduced at the same time that their workload increased. The fact that I was a man they didn’t know and was brought in from outside of the company to tell them what to do, did not make me the most popular person with my new employees.

The first week or so, I just walked around to look and listen at what was going on in the department. I had a lot of experience running a telephone sales operation, but wanted to know what was going on at the Pennysaver before I started throwing my weight around.

One of the things that I noticed seemed strange, on many of the desks were soapboxes. Many of my sales reps had plastic soapboxes like the ones you would take to the gym or camping on their desks. This sparked my curiosity, so I asked about them.

The call room was located in the same room as our company’s print shop. Printing is one of the dirtiest jobs in the world. Printers are always up to their elbows in ink and machine grease. To wash the crud off their hands, the printers used Lava soap in their washroom.

Using Lava soap is almost like washing your hands with a chunk of stone wrapped in coarse sandpaper. I discovered that in the interest of efficiency, that the company used the same soap in all of the bathrooms in the building. My employees had complained, but nobody listened so they had started bringing their own soap to work.

I saw this as an opportunity to win over my new department. On my lunch hour, I drove to Giant Eagle and bought several packages of Cashmere Bouquet Hand Soap. Cashmere Bouquet is the girliest soap on the market, it is perfumed and has an image of roses embossed on each bar.

Even though it was middle of the day, I asked the janitor to empty the trash can in the ladies room which was located on a wall within easy view of my sales room. This set the stage for the “show” I was planning.

I asked the department clerk if she could check that the ladies room was empty so I “could inspect it”. I said this loud enough to shift the office rumor mill into high gear. I knew the idea of their new male manager “inspecting” the ladies bathroom would raise some eyebrows.

With the clerk guarding the open door, I walked into the bathroom, picked up a bar of Lava soap, rubbed my finger across its rough surface. After shaking my head in disgust, I took the two bars off the sink and threw them violently into the garbage can.

Because the metal can was completely empty they made a noise like a big bass drum. I then walked over to my desk and gave the clerk five packages of Cashmere Bouquet, telling her if we need more to let me know and I will pick some up.

The news went through the department like wild fire. The news that I had bought nice soap that didn’t scrub the skin off their hands helped get me in their good graces, but the fact that I had listened to them and took action to correct the problem sealed the deal.

One of my work responsibilities was to scan the ads that were placed in the paper to quality check them and make sure nothing violating our policies made the Pennysaver. I had to read all real estate and employment ads to make sure they complied with all HUD and EEOC regulations. I would also call customers if an ad seemed to be incorrect or raised a question.

I once read an ad that read, “3 bdrm. Home, new furnace, new roof, free, call for details.” This ad raised all kinds of red flags for me. It sounded very suspicious to me. I called the lady who had placed the ad and asked her about what sounded like a deal that was too good to be true.

I learned that she was widowed and was moving to an assisted living facility. She was rather well off and while packing up her home decided to give away her house. She was remembering all the wonderful times that she and her husband had had raising their children in their home.

She decided to give the home away to a young couple just starting out so that the house, in her words, “would ring with the laughter of children again.”

Touched by her story, I warned her that her phone would ring off the wall. I suggested that she ask people to write a letter explaining why they should have the house. I even gave her a “blind box number” at the Pennysaver at no charge and we literally got boxes of letters. She eventually gave her home to a young couple with a toddler and another child on the way.

On another occasion, I got a call from a customer who asked if she could “borrow” our parking lot after hours. I asked her why and she told me that she wanted to get married at the Pennysaver.

When I asked her why she wanted to get married there, she told me the following story, “After I got divorced from my jerk of a first husband, I ended up with his old truck. I put an ad in the Pennysaver to sell it and this good looking guy came to look at it. We got to talking and one thing led to another and finally we decided to get married.”

Not all of the stories from the classified department had happy endings. Our policy in those days was if a customer was selling a household item for less than $25, the ad was free. We had one older gentleman who would call each week and list an item like a pair of used socks for a dollar.

Each week it was for some small item for a dollar or two and he always called the same person spending a lot of time talking with her. Finally, she asked him why he was doing this. He told her that his wife had died and that their only child had died young.

He was just lonely and liked it when people would call him about his items, adding that calling her to place his ad was one of the high points in his week. She came to my desk with tears flowing down her cheeks to tell me the story.

In 2006, I ran a contest to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Pennysaver. I offered a cash prize for the oldest copy of the Pennysaver presented at our office. Our paper came out weekly and most went into the trash in a day or so.

I thought maybe we’d get one, five or ten years old, but a lady from Penn Hills had one that was 27 years old. She was hands down the winner. When I presented her with a check, I asked why she had kept her copy so long.

Here is what she told me, “My son was planning to get married and move out. I was looking through the Pennysaver searching for a dinette set for his new apartment when I saw an ad from his fiancé. I realized she was selling her dress and when I screamed, my daughter came running,

I told her to make sure her brother didn’t see the Pennysaver. She took it and hid it in the basement. I didn’t say a word to my son but his fiancé broke it off with him a few days later.

I didn’t find that Pennysaver until just a few months ago. By now, my son is happily married to another woman and we thought the whole thing was kind of funny.”

I have been retired for almost five years but I still have a lot of fond memories of my time there. It was just a little advertising magazine but like anything else that brings human beings together it was the catalyst of a lot of stories.

Some of these stories were sad, some were funny and some were sweet, but like the people involved, they were all interesting.                   

 - Jim Busch

November 21, 2020

Today, I cut the grass for the last time. I also planted a few spring blooming bulbs, the final planting for the season.

All of the season’s tender plants have long turned black from multiple frosts and the cold days that we’ve experienced. I cleared these away and put their earthly remains on to the compost pile. All of this means that the garden year has come to an end for me.

I have been making gardens and tending my landscape for six decades. The familiar pattern of the year is burned into my being. I no longer have to think, “Its September, so this needs done” or “its October so it is time to do this.”

I simply know when it is time to dry herbs for the kitchen or to plant perennials, like I know when I need a nap or know I’m catching a cold. I am intimately connected with the turning of the seasons here in Western Pennsylvania.

Normally, this time of year gives me a pleasing sense of accomplishment. Successful or unsuccessful, it felt good to have completed my tasks for another year. I took pride in seeing the neatly mowed grass, the clean garden beds and the herbs drying in the shed.

My grandfather was a woodsman and a gardener, he taught me that the natural year and the calendar year were two separate things. The calendar year is linear and finite; the year starts in January and ends in December. When January 1 rolls around the old calendar gets thrown out and a new one is hung on the wall.

The natural year is a circle, a cycle with no distinct beginning or end. This time of year is less of an ending and more like a time for nature to rest. Like a workman enjoying a well-deserved rest after a hard day’s work. He lays his head down and slips off into his dreams to allow his muscles to rebuild themselves.

When the sun rises the next morning, he awakes refreshed and picks up his tools ready to start another day of work. After a spring and summer of producing a new crop of greenery, new life, fruits and seeds, Mother Nature is ready to lay down and rest. In the fall, she begins to slow down and begins to stretch and yawn before laying her head down.

I am usually happy to play a supporting role in this cycle. This year it has left me feeling a bit down. For almost seven decades, I have seen the world renew itself each spring.

I have no doubt next year that spring will come, the bulbs I just planted will push through the warming soil to unfurl their leaves, send their flower stalks into the sunshine. As I get older, I am not so sure that I will be here to see the spring.

I am in reasonably good health and still maintain an active lifestyle. None of my old man maladies pose an immediate threat to my life, but I know the clock is ticking. I am less than two years away from my biblical “sell by” date of three score and ten.

Since I have been a young man, I’ve had a weird fascination with reading the obituary page in the newspaper. I think this stems from my love of learning people’s stories. I like to read what people have done with their time here on earth and what those they leave behind have to say about them.

Recently, I have noticed that a good many of the people in the obituary pages are younger than I am. This only used to happen when something tragic had happened, a car accident, a suicide or some rare and horrible disease. These days, they often simply keel over and die.

This morbid turn of mind is a bit odd for me. Generally, I am a very upbeat and optimistic person but things are starting to wear on me. I have reached an age where I go to a lot of funerals, at least I did before Covid-19 made gathering to honor the dead too risky.

In the last two years or so, I have lost a dozen friends, some quite close to me. For the last seven or eight months, the daily news has been filled with death. The coronavirus pandemic has taken more than quarter million lives in the United States.

Despite the recent news about the imminent availability of vaccines, health care professionals are predicting tens of thousands of more deaths in the coming months. While I am thankful that no one in my immediate family or close circle of friends had died, I have learned that a number of business associates around the country have succumbed to the disease.

Of course, the biggest thing coloring my world view is my wife’s cancer diagnosis. Though we are still fighting the disease, her prognosis is not so good. This morning, we learned that she will start radiation treatments on Monday.

She has been feeling relatively healthy since she stopped chemotherapy just over a month ago. Her body couldn’t handle the chemicals so the doctors decided to switch over to radiation.

In the last few weeks, our lives have seemed almost normal. The doctors told us that the radiation has all the side effects she experienced with chemo with the addition of peeling skin. We have been told to stock up on lotion.

Radiation is our last ditch in our fight with cancer. The chemotherapy stopped the tumor from growing, but did not shrink it. If the radiation does not work, we are out of options.

My wife’s favorite spring flowers are hyacinths. When I told her that I had planted some hyacinth bulbs where she could see them from the kitchen window, her response was, “I hope I’m here to see them.”

This almost broke my heart. I can’t imagine enjoying a springtime without her. We’ve spent 50 years together and always knew that one or the other of us would be left alone at some point, but I am not ready for things to come to an end yet. I am not sure I ever will be.

I think this lies at the heart of my melancholy, I just can’t bear to see things come to an end any more.  

- Jim Busch

November 20, 2020

Once again, the Coronavirus has thrown a monkey wrench into my plans.

I was planning a drive to Philadelphia to take in an exhibit at The Barnes Foundation. The Barnes is one of my favorite museums; its collection is quirky because it reflects the tastes of its founder Dr. Alfred Barnes.

Every time I visit there, I feel like I am going to fry my brain from sensory overload. Unlike most galleries where the art is spread out, Dr. Barnes liked to display his collection in tight packed “ensembles,” each small room is packed floor to ceiling with paintings, forged ironwork and other art objects.

The current exhibit at the Barnes is Elijah Pierce’s America. Pierce was a self-taught African American woodcarver. He did colorful reliefs of Bible stories and scenes from his life. I like his naive style and his workmanship.

I planned a socially distanced visit to the Barnes to see this show. I was going to drive there stopping only for gas. I planned to pack a lunch so I wouldn’t have to make any other stops. The Barnes was limiting attendance by offering timed tickets. I intended to go during the week to avoid the crowds.

I felt that I could manage this trip without exposing myself to the disease. This was before Covid-19 staged a major comeback in Philadelphia hitting an all-time high number of cases. Yesterday, I learned the Barnes is shutting down at least until the first week of January.

Goodbye, Elijah Pierce.

The pandemic has put a huge damper on the arts and entertainment industries. I have always loved going to a movie theater. Some of my favorite memories are taking the bus to McKeesport to watch westerns and comedies at the old Memorial Theater.

When I got older, my girlfriend and later my wife, and I went to a lot of movies when we were dating. When my kids were young, I saw a lot of animated films before my family matured into Star Wars and Grease.

Now that we are empty nesters, my wife and I resumed going on movie dates together. We considered going to the free “AARP Movies for Grownups” a big event in our lives.

Of course, one of the first things to be shut down during the pandemic were the movie theaters. I haven’t been to the movies in over six months, the longest time I’ve been away from the silver screen since I was eleven.

It has left a big hole in my life; watching videos at home just isn’t the same, I miss sharing the experience with a room full of people. Somehow this makes the movie seem more enjoyable.

My entire family is missing going to the movies. Cinemark Theaters, like the entire industry has been suffering during the shutdown. To help make ends meet, they are offering a special deal to movie fanatics like me. They are renting out their theaters for “Private Parties.” For $99 they will screen a film for up to 20 people.

They are even waiving the cardinal rule of movie theaters, they are allowing guests to bring in their own snacks without having to hide them under their coat. As a gift to our family, we plan to hold a movie party over the holidays; we took a vote and we are going to see Will Ferrell in Elf— not my favorite film, but I’m desperate.

Television has also been changed by the pandemic. Most of the fall shows were going into production when the virus hit the United States. This caused a major delay in the start of the fall 2020 season. Instead of a big premier week, the new programs have been straggling onto our screens.

To fill the holes in their TV schedules, the networks have imported some programs from Canada. My wife greatly enjoys both Transplant and Coroner. These dramas are far more interesting than one more reality show.        

As the production companies figured out how to get back to work in the middle of a pandemic, new programming has begun to hit the airwaves. It is interesting to see how the writers are addressing the coronavirus.

A few shows have completely ignored the current situation. The actors are not wearing masks and the shows make no mention of the pandemic. Other shows have made the impact of Covid-19 a central element.

The two part NCIS New Orleans season opener sought to recreate the early days of the pandemic. The program portrayed the confusion and chaos of the early days of the disease in the U.S. In just two hours, I was shown how families were separated, how people got together to help one another and the tragedy of losing loved ones.

Series television is a good medium for helping people understand the story of this disease. Our minds have trouble comprehending the immensity of the pandemic. Programs like NCIS shrinks that story down to a size we can wrap our heads around. We become invested in the characters and they seem like friends, so seeing them suffer is a powerful tool for understanding the impact of this disease on everyday people.

Future generations should watch this programs when studying the history of 2020. I believe this will help them understand the trauma of Covid-19 far better than studying graphs illustrating the spread of the disease. I learned more about the dust bowl of the 1930’s from watching Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath than I did from my history textbooks.

The pandemic has put serious constraints on the television industry. Anyone who is familiar with the arts knows that constraints often stimulate creativity. For example, the legal drama, All Rise, had not wrapped their 2019 season when the coronavirus hit.

Their last show before going on hiatus was done as a Zoom meeting talking about how the characters were dealing with the disease. It was well written, quite believable and very timely.

Bull, another CBS legal drama, actually had its lead character contract Covid-19. The premise of the show is that Dr. Jason Bull is a psychologist who owns a trial science company that predicts how jurors will vote. This episode deals with how quarantining jurors makes him unable to, as the character says, “do what he does.”

One of the ways he reacts to the loss of his business is to break out into song and dance. This was very out of character for him. At the end of the episode we learn that this nightmare scenario is just that; everything that we had seen occurred in a Covid fever dream. This was not only entertaining but also was a good representation of stress on small business people.

The best art is like one of those magnifying mirrors that people use to shave or put on their makeup. It reflects the reality of what is placed in front of it but enlarges it and makes things clearer.

Throughout history, every major crisis has been followed by a wave of creativity. Artists create art to help themselves better understand what has happened to them. A byproduct of their work is that they help us understand what we’ve all experienced.

I am looking forward to the inevitable post corona burst of creativity and the great art to come out of this crisis.           

           - Jim Busch

November 19, 2020

Like most Americans, I spent today making a tiny Pilgrim costume for a sculpture owl. Isn’t this how most people spend their days? Perhaps not.

I might just be a bit more whimsical than the average person. I have spent most of my life doing practical things; working to be successful in my career, keeping my home in good repair and building things we needed around the house.

When I was working and raising a family, my more creative projects typically got put on the back burner. Now that I’m retired, I can fully embrace my quirky side.

Hooten is our family’s “Loyal Watch Owl.” Hooten is an 18 inch tall ceramic owl who sits on our porch opposite our kitchen door. He is a “rescue.” I acquired Hooten from a coworker some years ago. Hooten was given to him years before as a joke.

in Pittsburghese, Tom was a “nebby” individual, always swiveling his head around to see what his fellow employees were doing. They said he looked like an owl and got him the sculpture as a gag gift one Christmas.

The owl sat on his desk for years until he retired. I saw the poor critter in the garbage can and asked, “You throwing him out?” He said he was unless I wanted him, so I brought the owl home and sat him on our porch. He became like a member of the family and we named him Hooten.

Over the years, Hooten took on a character of his own. One Easter, my wife put a set of pink bunny ears on his head. Everybody got a kick out of his holiday attire and a family tradition was born.

Since that time, we have dressed Hooten up for every holiday. In addition to his bunny outfit, he has dressed as Uncle Sam, worn a hard hat on Labor Day and donned antlers and a red nose for Christmas.

This year he wore a pirate costume for Halloween.  Most of the time, we can find Hooten’s holiday attire at the dollar store. He is big enough to wear items intended for toddlers.

I couldn’t bear to tell the little guy that I couldn’t find anything for him to wear for Thanksgiving. The dollar store just didn’t have anything for him, so I decided to take things in my own hands.

Hooten and I discussed his costume and he decided he wanted to be a pilgrim. I bought some craft foam at Michaels and went to work. I used the foam and a plastic flower pot to make his hat and then made him a white pilgrim collar.

In an hour and a half or so, I had an owl sized pilgrim costume. They don’t call me “The fastest glue gun in the West(ern) Pennsylvania” for nothing. Believe it or not, dressing up an owl is not necessarily the weirdest thing that I do.

For example, I’ve started dressing the pine tree in our front yard for the holidays. Piney was a gnome last Christmas and a witch for Halloween. I know I could spend my time doing more productive things but I enjoy doing whimsical things. I like to make people smile.

I have a really serious reason for doing silly things. Years ago, when I was a young ambitious business person I picked up a copy of Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I fell in love with this book and still reread it every year.

It had a big impact on my life and I often give copies to young people starting out in life. When my kids were in high school my daughter accused me of being a “Covey Pusher.”

The first of Covey’s habits is “Begin with the end in mind.” He recommends doing a thought experiment where one imagines their own funeral and thinks what people might say to eulogize them.

This serves as a reminder to live our life with a purpose. He believed that everyone should create a “mission statement” outlining the purpose of your life. The mission statement is a tool to keep ourselves on track.

Every decision we make in our lives should be measured against our mission statement. If an action is in alignment with our life goals we should proceed with it. If it is not, we should choose another course.

In the “Seven Habits” he gives a detailed description of how to craft your own statement. I gave this a great deal of thought and analyzed what made me happy. Not what is supposed to make me happy; big house, fancy cars, buckets of money, etc., but what truly brings me joy.

It took me several months but I finally came up with something that suited me. I think I did a good job because it has served me for over 40 years without much change.

My mission statement says, “The purpose of my life is to collect information, mix it with experience and hopefully distill it into wisdom. I will share what I have learned and try to bring joy into the lives of others.” A big part of my life’s mission is to amuse the world.

This is why I do things like put silly costumes on inanimate objects, it makes people smile. I am never afraid of looking silly or embarrassing myself. I complement people whenever I can and try to make people laugh. I enjoy giving people small gifts and try to pay attention to them and to their needs.

I have learned that this is the secret to happiness. This is what philosophers call the “Hedonic Paradox.”  The formal definition of this idea, also known as the pleasure paradox, is that if you seek pleasure or happiness for the sole purpose of achieving it for yourself, you will fail.

Instead, you must pursue other goals that will bring you happiness or pleasure as a side effect. My grandfather explained this in a much more succinct manner, “People who are all wrapped up in themselves make a damn small package.”

I believe whimsy and silliness is one of the most important things we can do for one another. Almost every culture had some form of sacred clown. The court jesters helped the king stay sane while leading his nation.

This is especially true in stressful times. Groups like soldiers in battle, doctors in operating rooms and fire crews often engage in dark humor to break the tension.

My daughter found going away to college very stressful. Her mother talked to her almost every day to offer encouragement and to keep her informed about what was going on at home. As a writer, I decided to keep in touch with her through the mail.

Since she already had the news from home, I decided to take a different approach when I wrote to her. I picked up cheap souvenirs at the Goodwill store and then wrote long letters describing the fantastic trips her mother and I took to these places we had never been.

For example, a plastic mug in the shape of a cowboy boot from Branson, Missouri inspired a tale about her mother winning first prize in the female division of the “Boxcar Willie look-a-like and amateur yodeling contest. A small plate with a picture of a castle and German writing was accompanied a description of our trip to the Black Forest.

I told her the story of the castle which was “built by Ludwig, the Incontinent (Ludwig Von Pissenoffen). The castle is unique among the castles of Europe because of its many, many throne rooms.”

My daughter shared these letters with her friends and soon the arrival of my letters became an event. They were easily recognized because they were addressed to Rachael Busch, Clarion State Universe City!” She started reading the letters out loud for the amusement of the kids in her dorm. It turns out that her peers needed something to make them laugh as much as she did.

Humor and whimsy are more important now than ever before. The coronavirus pandemic and the contentious election have us all stressed to the max.

Something that makes us smile and gives us a good belly laugh is every bit as important to our survival as a vaccine. I am not very good at chemistry, so I can’t help much with curing the disease but I still want to help.

I have made it my mission to give people a chuckle and help them deal with these very stressful times.

- Jim Busch    

November 18, 2020

Today, winter gave us a preview of coming attractions. I drove through several snow squalls and a cold wind whipped through my jacket as soon as I stepped outside.

I even noticed a thin coating of snow lying on the mulch under some landscaped plants. If the weatherman is right, and these days they usually are, we’ll be back in the 60s by the end of the week. As my dad used to say, “If you live in Western Pennsylvania and don’t like the weather…wait a few minutes and it will change.”

I have mixed feelings about winter. I like the changing of the seasons; I couldn’t imagine living in Florida or southern California. The most boring job in the world has to be doing the weather reports in San Diego; 365 days of saying, “Tomorrow will be sunny with a lovely breeze off the ocean.”

After living all of my 68 years here, I have grown accustomed to the silhouettes of the trees against a grey winter sky, the explosion of color as the spring wildflowers make their appearance, the green abundance of our summers and of course, the oriental carpet of the fall leaves. All of these things help me measure the progress of my life.

The winter cold doesn’t bother me at all. I find it bracing, it makes me feel alive. I like feeling the winter wind against my cheeks and seeing my breath crystalize as I exhale.

I have an active imagination and somehow the frigid weather makes me feel like I am a character in a Jack London novel about the Yukon. When my kids were young, I would pull them on a sled through the woods singing Johnny Horton’s theme song from North to Alaska:

Sam crossed the Majestic Mountains to the valleys far below
He talked to his team of huskies
As he mushed on through the snow
With the northern lights a-runnin' wild
In the land of the midnight sun

I like the challenge of surviving the winter. The weather in Western Pennsylvania is fairly benign, in the other three seasons about the worse that will happen is that we can get rained on. We get a few scary summer storms, but we seldom see the tornados or hurricanes that plague other sections of the country.

Winter is different, winter can kill us in dozens of ways. Normally, friendly roads become minefields of black ice. Rounding a curve a bit too fast or braking on a bridge can send us spiraling off the road or into oncoming traffic.

Every winter we hear about some out of shape person, who drops over after shoveling the wet snow off of their driveway. That ice even makes walking risky business.

Growing up, my dad told me the story of a drinking buddy of his who slipped on the ice and dropped the bottle he was holding, letting it shatter on his front steps. He then fell forward and sliced his jugular vein and bled out.

He always finished the story by describing how his wife found him surrounded by a patch of scarlet tinted snow. I still think of this story every time I encounter a slippery patch of sidewalk.

It’s not the dangers of winter that bother me the most, it’s the darkness. There is a line that I love in one of my favorite poems Rhymes of a Rolling Stone by one of my favorite poets Robert Service, Sun libertine am I.

This is how I feel about life, if I could, I would live my life in the sunshine. I like being outdoors and feeling the sun on my face. I absolutely hate that it gets dark before six o’clock at this time of year. The winter nights seem so long.

This year, the coronavirus pandemic has added a new level of danger and stress to winter. Public health officials are saying that as we spend more time inside, our risk of contracting the virus is much greater.

Virtually, every culture on the planet has created winter holidays to brighten the darkest time of the year. There is a reason that these are some of the most important days of the year for us, we need to celebrate life when the world, and even the sun, seems to be dying around us. Thanksgiving and Christmas recharge our batteries when we need it most.

This year, honoring our cherished holiday traditions could possibly kill us. While we are sharing a meal and good cheer with our extended family, we may also be sharing the disease. Traveling over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house may not be a good idea in 2020.

This year, we are facing a genuine, “life and death” choice, do we listen to the science and stay away from each other or do we give into our instincts and celebrate with our families.

This is a battle between our rational brains and our hearts. There is a meme circulating on social media that suggests that we should get together with our families because someone we love may not survive to see another holiday. This seems to be a rationalization for ignoring what we should be doing.

Everybody wants to do the things we’ve always done, we’ve had enough of the “new normal.” Just like we always serve turkey on Thanksgiving and hang our great-grandmother’s ornaments on the Christmas tree, we want this holiday season to be just like every other holiday we have ever known. When it comes to seasonal celebrations, we definitely want the “old normal.”

Every year, the Old Farmer’s Almanac makes a prediction about whether we will have an easy winter or a hard winter. I don’t know what the weather will be like this year, even the Almanac folks usually get it wrong, but I do believe we are in for a rough winter.

The number of Covid 19 cases is exploding, overwhelming our hospitals. We are going to have to forgo many of the things that make the winter bearable. We may be tired of the coronavirus, but it is not ready to leave just yet.

The roots of our winter holidays are ancient. Their original purpose was to implore the gods to bring back the sun and bring nature back to life. Bringing evergreens into our houses really doesn’t have much to do with how long the sun will shine.

The thing we need to remember is that the world keeps turning. In a few months, spring will be back and the wildflowers and the birds will return. We need to use our brains and make some short term sacrifices so that we don’t put the people we care about in danger. This won’t be easy but it is the smart thing to do.

This winter, I am going to adopt the following quote by Albert Camus as my personal motto, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”   

- Jim Busch

November 17, 2020

My wife and I had a wonderful treat this evening. My son, Jesse, and our grandson, Max, stopped by after school for a visit.

Normally, we see them on the weekend but they were busy, so they stopped by this evening. Even though both of our kids live in the area, nothing brightens our day like having them come home for a visit. Having them here brings back so many memories of raising them in this old house.

Sometimes, I marvel at how our lives turned out. I wonder what would have happened if one of us would have decided to go to a different college. If I had elected to go to the Penn State main campus instead of the McKeesport campus where we got together.

At age eighteen, long term thinking meant choosing my courses for the next semester. I could not imagine that a chance encounter, there and then, would set the course of my life for the next five decades.

I wasn’t thinking of finding my life partner when I saw Glenda in the first floor hallway of the Main building. I was a healthy 18 year old American boy, so I was really thinking about her long blonde hair and the tight sweater vest she was wearing. Seeing her that afternoon was like the tiny spark that ignites a major forest fire.

I asked her if she would like to go to a concert with me but she turned me down, still I was smitten. When I asked her out a second time, she said, “Yes,” and the rest is history.

Our story is hardly a case of “Love at first sight.” We had known each other since the seventh grade at Francis McClure Junior High. We were in many of the same classes through junior and senior high. We never hung out together and I doubt that she took much notice of me in junior high; it is hard to imagine but I was a rather quiet kid at that time.

Glenda did notice me in high school and she really didn’t like what she saw. By the time I reached 15, I started feeling my oats. I had become a loud smart ass kid who enjoyed stirring up trouble.

I was not a bully, but I didn’t walk away from a fight. I had decent grades, so the teachers let me get away with a lot. During our senior year, Glenda and I both took an Advanced Placement European History class taught by Mr. Albert Doehla.

Mr. Doehla was counting the days to his retirement and was not particularly engaged with teaching us about things like the “defenestration of Prague.” He was a personable guy and we mostly sat around talking about current events with him.

For some reason, he took a liking to me. He liked my oddball adolescent sense of humor and my ability to build bad puns into almost any conversation. Mr. Doehla liked my puns, but Glenda did not and my behavior in our A.P. History class convinced her that I was a reprehensible buffoon. She has always been an excellent judge of character.

Fortunately, Glenda gave me a second chance to get into her good graces once we got to “Renzie U.” I had calmed down a bit after graduation and thought that I should act like a mature “college man.” This change in my behavior plus the fact that I swapped my beat up old Ford for a cool English sports car made her decide to go on a date with me.

It was “Love at first date.” We somehow seemed to click on our first date. We just seemed to suit one another. We discovered that we had a lot in common and started seeing a lot of one another.

I hated to go an entire day without seeing her. She used to pick me up from work and we would have lunch together; on Fridays I worked to 10 or 11 p.m. and she would cook me dinner after I got off work.

That summer, Glenda went to their cabin near Tionesta for vacation. She had only been gone a few days, when I started missing her like I was dying. All I knew was that their place was somewhere near the “Nebraska bridge” and Tionesta Lake.

When my day off came, I headed north with these vague directions to find my girlfriend. Like a male lightning bug being drawn to the female blinking light and pheromones, I actually found her family cabin on one of the thousand dirt roads lined with cabins.

Using detective skills worthy of Columbo, I had asked about a girl with long blonde hair and an electric smile at the crossroads country store and they pointed me in the right direction. This episode convinced Glenda, and her family, that I was insane and a bit of a stalker, and that I was deeply in love with her.

As they said back then, “We had to get married” when I was a junior at Pitt. In our case this was an accurate statement, we “had” to get married not for societal reasons but because neither of us could imagine spending our lives with anyone else.

My parents and many others predicted that we would never last, but after 48 years of marriage, I think we have proved them wrong.

Our son, Jesse, came along the following March and Glenda proved to be a wonderful mother. Our finances were very tight and my English Major proved to be worthless in the midst of a major recession.

Our little family moved to that cabin and lived off the grid to save money while I took work in a machine shop. We were dirt poor, living like pioneers miles from the nearest town and incredibly happy.

When Jesse was about a year and a half old, I broached the subject of having a second child. My wife had grown up in a crowded household with two sisters. My sister was 12 years older than me and left home at 17, so I had grown up as a lonely child.

I didn’t want my son to grow up without a sibling to share his life and my wife couldn’t imagine being able to love another child as much as she loved her firstborn. She was hesitant to have another baby, but I worked hard to convince her. We decided to try for another child and my wife says this was the best thing I ever convinced her to do.

Our daughter, Rachael, was born in 1975 when her brother was two. We decided to return to civilization and with two kids in tow, we moved in with my wife’s parents. Though this was to be a temporary arrangement, we are still here today.

The happiest years of our lives were spent living in a raucous, multigenerational family crammed into a tiny house. Gradually, our kids grew into good hearted and intelligent people. They left us for school and to start their own families. My in-laws grew old and finally passed from the scene leaving us alone in our home

Fourteen years ago, our grandson, Max, was born to my son and his wife. I always thought that my wife was born to be a mother, she was great with our children and she deserves most of the credit for how they turned out.

After seeing Glenda with Max, I realized that being a grandma is her true calling. She spent a lot of time with him as a baby and they have formed an unbreakable bond. He adores his grandmother and she believes the sun rises and sets on him.

For the past six months, my wife has been fighting cancer; she has good days and bad days. When our children come back home for a visit, it seems to recharge her batteries. Nothing brings her more joy than feeding her family. She spent a good part of the day planning a nice Italian dinner complete with a shrimp appetizer and dessert for our son and grandson (I was also lucky enough to be invited).

As we sat eating dinner on our socially distanced TV trays spread out in our living room, I thought back to the fall day at Penn State so long ago.

I listened to my son talk about his work and his friends. My grandson told me about what he was studying in his advanced math classes, realizing that he has already exceeded my capabilities in this area.

Tomorrow, my daughter, Rachael, and her wife, Kathy, are coming for dinner. My children are intelligent, good hearted people who are respected and are making a difference in the world.

I have to smile when I think about all that happened because a girl with a great smile and long blonde hair caught my eye.         

- Jim Busch

November 16, 2020

The last few days I have been working outside and cleaning up the yard and garden before winter sets in. Today, the weatherman decided to give me a day off by providing a windy and rainy day. I decided to take advantage of my “day off” by visiting one of my favorite stores.

Blick Art Materials is located on Walnut Street in the heart of Shadyside’s business district. It is one of my favorite places to spend a Sunday afternoon.

On other days of the week it is almost impossible to find a parking place within reasonable walking distance to the store. Though I am hardly a “starving artist,” shopping Sundays also means that the parking is free; on the seventh day the meter maids rested.

As an amateur artist, Blick is my toy store. They have an amazing selection of tools and materials for artists. They offer two floors of pencils, papers, paints, brushes, canvas, printmaking supplies, drafting tools and tools for sculptors.

The selections of media in hundreds of colors almost puts me into sensory overload. I love wondering the aisles, feeling the texture of the drawing papers and testing some of the technical drawing pens, one of my favorite drawing tools.

Ostensibly, the purpose of my visit was to buy a calligraphy pen as a Christmas gift for a close friend but, to tell the truth, I just wanted to surround myself with the creative tools that bring me joy.

I really don’t need to buy any more art supplies, if Van Gogh would have had my stockpile of pens, pencils, paints and paper, he would have been far too busy to cut his ear off. My current supply far exceeds the time I have available for creative projects.

Today, there are lots of places to purchase art supplies. Large craft stores like Michaels and JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts carry a nice selection of these products. Although most of what they sell is inexpensive “student grade” materials, they also have some quality name brand products.

Of course, there are many online retailers who offer amateur and professional artists everything they need. I get one or two email offers from Blick.com on a daily basis. Many of these offer much better prices than I can find at the Blick in Shadyside.

The promise of low prices and the allure of shopping in my pajamas has never tempted me to do my art supply shopping over the internet. I like the tactile and visual experience of shopping in the store.

I also like the people behind the counter at Blick. Most of them are art students and all of them make some kind of art. When I walk in the door, I am greeted like a long lost uncle. It’s funny because they don’t always remember my name, but they always remember the types of art that I like to make.

I am the old fat guy who likes to draw, do watercolors and make block prints. We always get into a discussion of our current projects; they tell me what they are working on and I tell them about mine. They found my experiments with using a wood burning tool on watercolor paper quite interesting. I find this much more satisfying than clicking a mouse.

I quickly found the pen I was looking for.  One of my Blick friends helped me select the proper nib width and wisely suggested that I also purchase a packet of replacement cartridges for the pen. I found some micron pens on sale and bought some carving knife blades on the clearance shelf.

I splurged and bought myself an electric eraser. This is not quite as lazy as it seems, the advantage of an electric eraser is precision rather than ease of use. When I was done shopping, I left the store with a bag full of art supplies.

As I drove home through the wind driven rain, I thought about why I love spending time at Blick. In addition to the art supply store, I also love hardware stores, office supply stores, garden centers and especially book stores.

These all fit into a category that I like to call “Possibility Shoppes.” They are places that feed my creativity and expand my ability to create. Just wandering through these places and browsing the tools and supplies stimulate my mind.

When I walk through a garden center, I see the possibility of beautiful gardens. When I walk through the office supply store with its pens and reams of blank paper, I imagine the possible stories or essays that I could fill them with.

Book stores are packed with the possibility of learning new things, of becoming a better person. A visit to Blick fills my mind with the images of the artworks I could possibly create with the products on their shelves. Although I know that my meager skills could never realize the visions in my mind, it is still nice to dream.

I didn’t spend a rainy Sunday afternoon in a small shop in an upscale shopping district. I spent my day in the realm of possibility. I spent a few hours imagining the things that I could create with the supplies I purchased.

I was inspired by my conversations with other artists and by the work of local artists hanging on the walls of the store. I spent an hour or so anticipating the joy of bringing something new into being.

In my book, that is almost as good as a week’s vacation. My body may not be able to get away, but my mind and my soul are still able to cruise on an ocean of possibilities.     

    - Jim Busch     

November 15, 2020

This morning when I walked out of my door, I was treated to a wonderful multimedia aerial display. A group, technically a “murder,” of crows were holding a convention in a black cherry tree across from my house.

As soon as I opened my door, I could hear the squawking of several hundred vociferous big black birds. I walked to the front of the yard and watched the proceedings for a good 15 minutes.

It looked like an avian version of one of those old sped up films of people passing through Grand Central Station. Crows would alight on a branch for a few seconds and then take to the air again after letting out a loud cry.

Black birds swirled about like kernels of popcorn in the popper. They formed a loose ball of feathered chaos about 20 feet across.

I have witnessed this behavior before, a lot of crows call our wooded hill home. Our family has been here for almost 200 years and I’m sure the crows were here long before that. Crows are social animals and like a lot of local residents, they leave for work every morning, conduct their business and return to their bedroom community in the evening.

Crows are roosting birds; they gather in large numbers to sleep at night. Naturalists believe that they do this for protection; for birds there is definitely safety in numbers. When approached by a predator, the entire flock raises an uproar that would scare away a grizzly bear.

During the day, they fly off in small groups to explore their territory and to feed. As the sun begins to set, they return to the roosting area to compare notes with their friends.

Recent research has found that crows gather like this to share information with one another. Crows are highly intelligent birds and use a wide range of vocalizations to communicate with one another. Their noisy gatherings are their version of the internet, a sort of “Bird Wide Web.”

This usually takes place in the evening but at this time of the year, they will also gather during the day. No one seems to know why, but I like to think they’re discussing their plans for the winter or comparing their Christmas shopping lists.

It doesn’t really matter what they’re doing, I enjoy watching the show. I know that birds play a major role in nature. They keep the number of insects in check, distribute the seeds of many plants and provide food for numerous predators.

I am sure nature could have accomplished these important tasks through some other less delightful creatures. In addition to filling a vital ecological niche, birds fill an important psychological niche for human beings.

Nothing in nature can lift the human spirit like watching the antics of the birds that surround us. We find a lot of joy in wildflowers and in the autumn leaves, but birds still have the edge. Like the flowers and plants, they are colorful and wonderfully formed, but they are far more interesting to watch because they are animated and love to sing.

I know the birds around me are flitting about in search of mates or food for their families but it always seems that they are actually trying to amuse and entertain me. Even in the heart of the city, they remind us that nature is all around us.

British naturalist and filmmaker, Sir David Attenborough, described our love of birds this way, “Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?”

Later in the afternoon, I was in the parking lot of the Home Depot on Route 30, when I was treated to another spectacular display of bird behavior. I got to observe a large “murmuration” of starlings.

Murmuration has a double meaning, it is the proper name of a gathering of starlings and it also describes the synchronized flying that the birds do as they maneuver through the sky. Each member of the flock is constantly aware of what all of the birds surrounding it are doing.

The entire flock of birds moves as if they were just one animal. Without an obvious leader, a flock of starlings move in unison like a marching band or a highly trained regiment of soldiers. This behavior is said to confound falcons who would otherwise feast on the migrating birds. This is why murmurations are usually seen in the late fall and early winter.

I had a great vantage point from the ridge along Route 30. The sun was relatively low in the sky and was shining on the birds as they would twist and turn in the air. When the birds turned so that the flat tops of their wings were turned to the sun, they flashed like mirrors.

This phenomenon made the gyrating group of birds flash on and off like the signal lanterns used on old ships. It was a stunning sight and I felt bad for my fellow Home Depot shoppers who were so intent on getting the things they needed for their projects, that they didn’t take the time to look up and enjoy the starlings’ ballet.

I believe our species has a strong natural attraction to the birds. In the days before, we managed to climb to the top of the food chains, the birds were one of the few things in the forest or on the plains that wouldn’t kill us.

In a world full of terrifying predators, we learned to love these tiny frail creatures with the colorful plumage and sweet songs. We envied their almost magical ability to take to the air when a hungry beast lunged at them from the undergrowth. All we could do is run or fight for our lives.

After millions of years, birds have found a special place in our hearts. Over 50 million Americans feed wild birds and we spend more than five billion dollars a year on feed, feeders, birdhouses etc.

The coronavirus pandemic has greatly restricted my movements, I have not been more than a few miles from my home all year. Many of the things I used to do are no longer available to me, they are either shut down or too dangerous to pursue.

Fortunately, my feathered neighbors have not let me down. They continue to show me the beauty of the natural world and give me something to take my mind off my troubles. I have to agree with the poet Emily Dickinson who wrote,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all 

- Jim Busch      

November 14, 2020

Today is Friday, the 13th, a day many people believe to be unlucky. I have never been very superstitious, so this day doesn’t worry me at all. In fact, today proved to be quite lucky for me.

I started the day by taking some books I had finished reading to Half-Price Books to sell. I take books there to sell every five or six weeks. I never get very much for them, but I like the idea that someone else will get to enjoy them. 

I only had two small bags today, so I was only expecting to get a few dollars for them. The first bit of luck I got today came when the clerk at the buy counter told me that he could give me a little over ten dollars for my books, several times more than I expected.

After receiving this good news, I set out to browse the shelves of the store. Although I have almost as many books as they do, I always like to browse the shelves for titles that interest me. Most of the time, I don’t buy anything, I just copy down the title and author and request them from the library.

I know the store’s layout like the back of my hand so I made a beeline for the “usual subjects,” my favorite sections of the store. Scanning the drawing and painting books, I spied a copy of Life Drawing Life by Frederick Franck.

I was very pleasantly surprised, Franck is one of my favorite authors, and I had never heard of this title. As I leafed through the book, I discovered that this book offered Franck’s thoughts on figure drawing, a subject that greatly interests me.

I looked at the price sticker and realized that it would be covered by the credit slip I had in my hand. This was a lucky trifecta, finding a new title by a favorite author on a subject of great interest to me paid for by some books I no longer wanted—Jackpot!

Already pleased by finding the Franck book, I continued my shopping. When I got to the magazine section fortune smiled on me again. I found a stack of older woodworking magazines.

Half-Price sells their older magazines for fifty cents and since woodworking plans aren’t particularly topical, this is a great value. I actually like the older magazines and the price certainly beats the five or six bucks for the current editions at the newsstand. The 18 magazines I bought only set me back nine dollars.

This evening, I sat down to look at my new hoard of magazines. Since my storage space is limited, I tear out the articles I like and file them by category in a cabinet in my workshop.

As I was going through a decade old Woodworkers Journal, I discovered a brand new sheet of self-adhesive U. S Postal Service “Forever Stamps.” The face value of the stamps was nine dollars. My book and my eighteen magazines cost me exactly nothing. One of my more fortunate shopping trips.

After my discovery, my wife and I had a discussion about luck and what it means to be lucky. As I said, I am not superstitious, but I have always considered myself to be lucky. Psychologists who have studied the subject have found that people who believe they are lucky actually are.

This has nothing to do with the supernatural, there are not mysterious forces in the universe directing our fate. It is simply a matter of paying attention. People who consider themselves lucky are always on the lookout for good things to happen to them. They see opportunities that less optimistic people miss.

Some successful people discount the role luck has played in their lives. This is not because they reject superstition but because they don’t want to admit that they are not 100% responsible for their own success.

They don’t want to admit that they may have received some lucky breaks that other people didn’t. I have noticed that this is especially true for those who have had the road made easiest for them.

I once worked for a man whose father started the family business from scratch. He worked hard and by the time his son was grown, it was a thriving enterprise. His son left college and became his assistant manager.

After some years, the father stepped down and put him in charge of the company. At every meeting he would tell the staff about the virtues of hard work and positive thinking. He told us that this was how he had risen to the top.

Wiser people acknowledge the role luck plays in their lives. Warren Buffet is the perfect example of this; the ultimate self-made man. Buffet rose from humble beginnings in Omaha, Nebraska to being one of the wealthiest people in the world.

He often tells audiences that he had, “won the genetic lottery” by being born in a white middle class family at the beginning of a period of massive expansion in the U.S. economy. He gladly admits that much of his success is related to being born in the right place at the right time.

Many of the people who have contracted Covid-19 were in the wrong place at the wrong time. With an invisible virus so wide spread, it is hard to predict where it may be hiding. We don’t know exactly how long it may stay airborne.

It is possible that some of the people who died from the disease may not have contracted it if they were at the place where they caught it five minutes earlier or five minutes later. Of course, we can increase our odds by wearing a mask and properly following social distancing guidelines but nothing is full proof. We are all at the mercy of random events.

Since my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we have asked why. The typical sufferers of this disease is over 60, obese, a drinker and male. My wife is over 60, but she is not obese and rarely takes a drink, and I can attest that she is definitely not a male.

The best answer we could come up with for the “why” question is “Stuff Happens!” My wife was just unlucky, when the cards were dealt she got the card with the big “C” on its face. There is simply no reason, cancer is just something that happened to her.

Even with the cancer, we still consider ourselves lucky. Sure, 2020 has been hard to take. Between cancer and Covid it’s been a tough year, but on the whole we’ve had a good life. My wife and I still love each other deeply after being together for 50 years.

We have raised good children and have a terrific grandson. We have traveled and had a lot of fun in our lives. It would be disingenuous to bemoan our fate this late in the game. We would love to have another decade or so but if this is not to be, we will have to accept it.

If I tally everything that has happened to me, I consider myself to be a lucky, lucky man.                   

- Jim Busch

November 13, 2020

Today, I heard a news report about armed militias amassing around Washington D.C. ready to jump into action if the election doesn’t go their way.

Despite what the president has been saying, their guy has already lost the White House and I’m afraid there is going to be violence. Apparently, the United States is now officially a third world nation.

I’m not sure if I know anyone who is an active militia member, but I know a lot of people who identify themselves as “Gun Guys” or in a few cases “Gun Gals.” Their whole lives revolve around their firearms.

Their identity is completely entwined with their gun ownership and their firearm skills. Their self image looks remarkably like a frame from a G.I. Joe comic book.  When they close their eyes and picture themselves, they see a camo clad hero toting multiple weapons standing triumphantly in front of a waving American flag as an eagle circles overhead.

Anytime I suggest that guns have become a problem in the U.S., I am told that I am a “libtard” who wants to take away their guns so that the Godless socialists can take away our freedom.”

This is usually followed by a lecture on the sanctity of the Second Amendment. I also here that I shouldn’t be talking to them about their firearms because I don’t know anything about guns.

The truth is that I grew up around guns. Growing up there was a double barreled shotgun behind the kitchen door. One barrel was loaded with rock salt and the other was loaded with deadly “double ought” buckshot. My grandfather carried an ancient break action Iver Johnson .32 caliber revolver in his pocket. There were deer rifles and shotguns under most of the beds in our house.

I got my first rifle for Christmas when I was just nine years old; a single shot Remington .22. I got my first pistol a couple of years later when my dad bought a used H & R revolver from a work buddy for twenty bucks.

My dad and I would go to the White Oak Gun Club and practice shooting before he went to work on the afternoon shift. I liked to read the gun magazines, and every year I would buy the previous year’s edition of Gun Digest at half price at the discount book store in McKeesport.

My wife also grew up in a shooting family. Her dad also taught her to shoot as a child. I was never much for hunting but she would go out with her dad from an early age. In high school, she beat me out for a position on the rifle team. This is when I learned that I needed glasses.

Back in 1970, she had been dating some “Age of Aquarius” hippie type guys who thought guns were evil. This explains why the first thing her dad asked me when I showed up for our first date was, “You don’t like hunting and fishing do you?”

He was pleasantly surprised when I told him that I had been hunting and loved shooting. We got into a detailed conversation on whether lever or bolt action rifles made the best deer guns.

When my son got old enough, my wife and I taught him the safety rules for firearms and taught him to shoot. My daughter broke with family tradition and didn’t like to shoot, mostly because she didn’t like the noise.

When my son, Jesse, was growing up, we used to attend one or two gun shows at the Monroeville Convention center every year. I haven’t been to a show in years but when I see one is in town, it brings back fond father son memories.

Jesse taught his son Max to shoot and I like nothing better than going to the range with them. I often brag about my grandson’s marksmanship, he is a dead shot and a very responsible shooter.

The thing that separates us from the self-described “Gun Nuts” is that we like guns but we are not nuts. Shooting is something we like to do, like going to a movie or a museum.

We don’t think about guns 24/7/365. My grandfather thought of his guns like he thought about his claw hammer or garden hoe; they were tools that he used to provide food for the table. For me and for my family, hunting is no longer necessary. Our guns are more like tennis racquets or golf clubs; they are sports equipment.  

One of the first things I learned from my dad when I started shooting was that guns are powerful things. They can do a lot of damage. It is this power that makes them attractive to people who feel powerless and threatened.

Most of the guns purchased today are sold for self-defense. I like to watch some of the gun related programs on the Sportsman’s Channel and the commercials play this up.

They feature women alone in their car who are menaced by gangs of thugs until she pulls out her trusty Glock. Another popular theme is a father protecting his family from a home invasion with his handy dandy assault rifle.

Firearms are big business in the United States and they spend a lot of money on marketing their products. Their advertising feeds the fantasies of potential buyers, their ads show rugged men taking charge of a situation.

They tell their customers that it is a dangerous world and that if they don’t own numerous high powered weapons they will not be able to defend themselves.

I have a friend who never leaves her home without carrying a 9mm pistol with a high capacity magazine and a spare magazine hidden under her blouse plus a smaller back-up pistol in an ankle holster. She lives in Robinson Township but is armed like it was Fallujah.

A long time ago, I belonged to the National Rifle Association. I joined the NRA mostly because I enjoyed their magazine which was well written and offered a lot of good information.

Over the years, the NRA became a highly politicized lobbyist for the firearms industry. It repeatedly warns its members that the government is coming to take their guns away from them.

The NRA sees any effort to regulate firearms as the death knell of freedom. They constantly retell the story of the brave minutemen winning America’s independence. They have inspired the modern militia movement by telling them that they need their guns to defend themselves against an increasingly dictatorial government.

In their mind, being told to wear a mask to prevent the spread of a deadly disease is the equivalent of being sent to a concentration camp. They see themselves like the teenage guerilla fighters in the movie Red Dawn.

Playing soldier in the woods with powerful weapons allows militia members to fantasize that they are in control of their own destiny.

Most Americans believe in reasonable regulations on firearms. Even most American gun owners believe in background checks and keeping weapons out of the hands of felons and abusers.

After every mass shooting, the cry goes up for laws restricting assault weapons and high capacity magazines but the NRA cries out “Second Amendment,” a law that was written in an age of flintlock muskets and no standing army.

The NRA conveniently forgets the portion of the Second Amendment that specifies a “well-regulated militia.” The militias who tried to kidnap the governor of Michigan and who are preparing to start a second civil war are anything but well regulated.

I am afraid that they are looking forward to playing out their fantasies and getting to use their weapons against their perceived enemies.

I am afraid that our tradition of ballots rather than bullets may be destroyed by the greed of the gun companies and the fears of some wannabe warriors.  

 - Jim Busch

November 12, 2020

Today is Veteran’s Day and I have been thinking a lot about my father-in-law, John Bereczky. Like many men of his generation, his military service during World War II was the defining event of his life. His wartime experiences stayed with him until his death in January of 2000.

John was born on May 1, in a small Fayette County mining town. His parents had immigrated to this country from Hungary and he was the youngest of his nine brothers and sisters.

His family moved to McKeesport when he was very young. They lived in a tight knit Hungarian community so his exposure to English was limited; he went to a Hungarian church, shopped at Hungarian stores and attended a Hungarian church school.

When he was in the third grade the Hungarian school closed and he was forced to switch to public school. Not knowing the language, he struggled in school and dropped out in the sixth grade and took a job cleaning open hearth furnaces at the Homestead Works.

Over the next few years, he took numerous manual labor jobs becoming an unlicensed long distance truck driver at 14 years old.

John was very close to his mother and sister, Susan. They both contracted spinal meningitis and died within days of one another in 1941. This left John feeling lost with no direction in his life.

I believe this was one of the things that motivated him to enlist in the Navy shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I once asked John why he chose to enlist in the Navy rather than in any of the other branches.

His answer was the perfect example of John’s thought processes. He told me, “I figured if I got injured in the Navy, I would drown in the ocean. I didn’t want to come home as a cripple.”

At just 16, John was too young to enlist. He changed birth certificate from 1925 to 1926, making it look like he was 17. His plan hit a snag when he discovered that to enlist as a seventeen year old required a parent’s signature.

John’s father had been drafted into the Austrian army in WW I where he was seriously wounded. He did not want his son to go to war. One of John’s favorite proverbs was, “Nothing burns a Hungarian mouth, but the truth.”

He gave the enlistment form to his immigrant father and told him he had to sign it or he would have to go to jail. His father, who could not read English, signed the document and John became a member of the United States Navy.

Things weren’t going well for the allies in early 1942 and they desperately needed sailors to counter the German U-boats in the battle of the Atlantic. John was sent for six weeks of basic training near Cleveland. After just a few days there he was sent to gunnery school in Maryland.

After just two weeks into the eight week training course, John was ordered to report for combat. In less than three weeks, he had gone from a 16 year old civilian to a fighting sailor.

John was assigned to one of the naval gun crews placed on merchant marine vessels to defend them from Nazi subs and aircraft. At that time, the Germans were sinking ships at an alarming rate so being stationed anywhere in a convoy was considered hazardous duty. The allies lost over 3700 ships during the battle of the Atlantic.

Of course, John volunteered for ships assigned to the “Coffin Corner” of the convoys. These ships were positioned at the rear of the convoy formation near the outside edge which made them vulnerable to attack.

Typically, this is where oil tankers were placed because when hit, they exploded into huge fireballs. They were positioned on the fringes of the convoy so that they wouldn’t illuminate the other ships when they were torpedoed.

John always swam underwater and made a big splash when he came up for air. This was how he learned to swim in the Navy, staying under water to avoid the burning oil. The splash was intended to make a space to breathe instead of drawing the flames into his lungs.

I once asked John why he repeatedly volunteered for “Coffin Corner” duty. His response was “Well, I was young and didn’t have a wife or a kid. I didn’t even have a girlfriend, so I thought why the hell not.”

During the war, John lost three ships to German torpedoes. Torpedoed in the Mediterranean, John was the only survivor of his ship. He had been in the ship’s crow’s nest on lookout duty. He saw the torpedo coming and when it hit, the ship lurched throwing him clear of the burning oil surrounding the ship.

He was rescued by a British ship and served with them for several months. By the time he was able to report back to the U.S. Navy, they had listed him as killed in action and paid his life insurance.

After losing a ship, the navy gave its sailors a furlough at home. John got off the train in McKeesport and walked to his home in White Oak. When he got home, his father refused to unlock the door.

He was convinced that he was a ghost and taking the Crucifix off the wall knelt down to pray. John had to walk back to McKeesport to get his older brother out of the mill. It was during this trip home, that he met my mother-in-law and they began exchanging letters.

John saw a lot more combat. On one occasion, a damaged German fighter plane crashed into his gun turret. The rest of the gun crew was killed, but John managed to jump clear.

He kept a picture of his buddies until his death. He lost two more ships to the U-boats and the frostbite he received in the frigid North Atlantic bothered him for the rest of his life.

Navy protocol called for any sailor who had lost three ships be given stateside duty. John landed a plum job that allowed him to come home on a regular basis. He served as an honor guard accompanying the bodies of fallen sailors back to Pittsburgh.

John told me, “I decided I would rather face the Germans, than see the faces of the mothers when I brought their sons home in a box.” He volunteered for combat duty with the amphibious forces.

John was a beach master at the Normandy invasion. His job was to direct landing craft on to the beach while the entire German Army was trying to kill him.

For years after the war, John had a recurring nightmare about Normandy, not the battle but its aftermath. His unit was given the task of retrieving the bodies of Americans who had died in the water without ever reaching the beach. John reached down to pull a body into his landing craft when his hand went through the salt water softened flesh to the bone.

John served throughout the rest of the war. He was on his way to the Pacific in 1945 when the train he was on was stopped in the middle of the U.S. They were trapped on the crowded train with very little food, not knowing what was going on.

When the soldiers and sailors on the train heard about the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender, a cheer swept through the length of the train.

After the war, John came home and married Eleanor, my mother-in-law. He was scarred by his experiences in the war. He drank heavily and lost job after job. When my wife’s father got him a job at the Westinghouse, a foreman gave him a hard time. John chased him through the plant on a fork truck and pinned him to the wall with the forks of the truck.

He finally settled down and got a steady job with the school district in the late 1950’s. For the longest time, when he talked about his Navy days he would tell stories about shore leave in Rio De Janeiro or seeing an eruption of Mount Vesuvius from the deck of his ship.

John had a unique habit of putting his clothes on before he went to bed. He would arrange all of the things in his pockets, put his belt on and act like he was getting ready for the day.

He would then take everything back off and carefully place them next to his bed. This was a habit from his Navy days when he had to jump into his clothes when “Battle Stations” sounded.

John was proud of his Navy service. It was the great adventure of his life. Several years before John died, we went to McKeesport’s International Village. I noticed several sailors manning a recruiting table near the gate.

When we got ready to leave, I went on ahead of the family. I approached the Navy Chief who was standing behind the table and gave him a brief synopsis of John’s service.

When John got to the table, the Chief and the two sailors in his detail were standing in a line. He called them to attention and then barked an order. They all snapped John a perfect military salute.

The Chief then gave the “At ease” command and they each approached John, shook his hand and thanked him for his service.

John was the toughest man I have ever met, but that evening at Renzie Park, I detected the glint of a tear in his eye.

- Jim Busch                         

November 11, 2020

We finally received a bit of good news about Covid-19. One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, has reported significant progress toward developing a vaccine. I hope this is the beginning of the end of this nightmare disease.

It has been 11 months since the World Health Organization announced they had discovered a new virus out of China. Since that time, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died and the disease has pulled the rug out from under our economy and turned our world upside down.

In the last ten plus months, we have had nothing but bad news. We have seen aerial shots of mass graves and video of refrigerated trucks full of bodies. Day after day, we heard the stories of the victims of the virus stories, both unknown and famous.

News reports featured tearful family members telling us stories of how their loved ones passed away alone in overworked ICUs. Every day we watched the numbers, the increasing cases and death counts and the decreasing employment and stock market indexes. This year was a very bumpy ride.

Our leaders turned this crisis into a political football. The President keeps telling us not to worry, promising us that a miracle would make it magically disappear.

At the same time that he was telling us everything was okay, he was telling journalist Bob Woodward that it was a serious threat to the nation. Because our scientists had not encountered this disease before, it took them a while to figure out what was going on. We got mixed messages from the medical field about masks, about social distancing and quarantines.

Since this was all new to us and nobody could tell us precisely what to do, we went a little off the rails. We started stockpiling toilet paper and other necessities in our basements.

Those of us who could, began working from home and suddenly people running cash registers became national heroes on a par with police officers and firemen. When we followed all the rules the disease started going away.

When we let our guard down it came back. Tracking the disease on a graph produced a line that looked a lot like the Jackrabbit at Kennywood.

Perhaps, the biggest challenge to getting the disease under control was human nature. People grew tired of protecting their health; weary of wearing masks and staying home.

I wonder if our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan ever say, “I’m tired of wearing this helmet and bulletproof vest. They are hot and I like walking around in a tshirt.” I don’t think they would last very long.

Many of the people who decided that going to a party was more important than protecting oneself from a deadly disease contracted the disease. This kind of wishful thinking put many of these people in the ICU and sent some to the cemetery.

Even worse, some people saw being stupid as a political statement. They decided to listen to a politician who had a vested interest in downplaying the pandemic rather than paying attention to what the medical experts were saying.

The president even mocked his opponent for wearing a mask. This is like chastising someone for wearing a parachute while skydiving. There is a chance that you might land in a big haystack, but your odds are much better with a chute on your back.

Unmasked political rallies became “super spreader” events causing spikes in Covid-19 cases in the cities where they were held.

As the election returns came in, epidemiologists have discovered a frightening pattern. Both infection and death rates are significantly higher in the “red” states where people were more likely to believe that the coronavirus is “no worse than the flu.”

Though they got off to a rough start with this disease, our scientists never lost sight of what they needed to do to fight this disease. Doctors at the CDC focused on developing new treatment protocols for people infected with Covid-19. T

hey have managed to reduce the number of people who die from the disease. New drugs to treat the disease are being announced almost every day. At the same time, the scientists at our universities and pharmaceutical companies has been working on a vaccine. Based on news reports, Pfizer seems to have won this race. We may have finally turned the corner.

While this is good news, we are not out of the woods yet. It will take a while to get the vaccine to everyone who needs it. Our next Covid related shortage is refrigeration. Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit to remain viable.

This is far colder than our home freezers and very few hospitals or medical facilities are equipped with this type of equipment. Deciding who should get the first doses of the vaccine and how to distribute them is a logistical challenge more complex than a moon shot.

Like everything else associated with Covid-19 the biggest obstacle health officials face in administering a vaccine is human stupidity. Surveys indicate that many Americans are planning to refuse the vaccine.

Many of them don’t trust the efficacy of the drugs. Others think it is a plot by the government and still others believe that the vaccines will do more harm than good. This is a problem not only for these “refusniks”, but for all of us. If a significant percentage of the population does not receive the vaccine, it will be very difficult to get control of the pandemic.

For the first time since this pandemic started, I am cautiously hopeful. Our incoming administration seems to be willing to acknowledge the seriousness of the coronavirus and to listen to the medical professionals.

Pfizer has conducted human trials of their new vaccine and early indications are that it provided protection for about 90% of the recipients.

I hope in a few months that the worst of this pandemic will be behind us. It will be nice to go to a restaurant without making sure our affairs are in order first. Maybe then we will be able to look back and think about everything we’ve been through.

I hope when everything is said and done, we will have learned something about responding to emerging diseases. Perhaps, even more important, we will have learned something about ourselves.            

- Jim Busch

November 10, 2020

For decades, my wife and I have sat down and watched Jeopardy together. Normally, the show opens with an upbeat instrumental theme followed by announcer Johnny Gilbert’s exuberant “This is Jeopardy.” 

Tonight, the show opened on a somber note. The show’s executive producer, Mike Richards, walked out on to the Jeopardy set and announced to the television audience that the show’s long time host Alex Trebek had died over the weekend.

Choking back tears, Richards delivered a moving tribute to Trebek. He concluded his message by noting that despite his declining health, Alex Trebek had continued working on the show until less than two weeks before his death. It was Trebek’s final wish that the 35 episodes he had completed be aired as scheduled.

My wife and I learned of Alex Trebek’s death yesterday. She got an alert on her phone saying that the legendary TV host had succumbed to the pancreatic cancer he had been battling for almost two years.

When we heard the news, it felt like we had lost a member of the family. We had never met him or even seen him in the flesh; we had only seen his image on our TV screen. Even so, we felt that we knew him, we had spent a lot of time with Alex over the previous 38 years.

For years, Jeopardy was a family affair for us. Our kids would join us along with their grandmother. My mother-in-law, Eleanor, loved Jeopardy and we used to play along with the contestants. As a sales person, I used game theory to anticipate the answer, actually the question, to “Final Jeopardy” before Alex had asked it.

I made an educated guess on this based on the category. This amazed her and she accused me of somehow watching the show on another channel. These evenings in front of the television hold a special place in our memories.    

Alex Trebek always seemed like the kind of person we would like, a man who was a lifelong learner, a true student of life. He was a polymath, a man that knew a little about a lot of things. He was the perfect host for Jeopardy, the last place on television where intellect was valued over pure silliness.

The contestants on Jeopardy didn’t jump up and down and make fools of themselves when they got a question right. They represented a cross section of America, they were male and female, came from all professions, all races and religions. The only thing Jeopardy players had in common was their love of learning.   

The show had not only made Alex Trebek wise but also made him wealthy. Few show business celebrities have had a career as long or as consistent as he did. Despite this, he never thought of himself as anything but as a “regular guy.”

Though he was the boss of Jeopardy, the many contestants who cycled through the show all said he was a friendly and down to earth man who went out of his way to make them feel comfortable in what was naturally a very stressful situation.

My favorite part of the show came after the first commercial break. This was when Alex got to chat with the contestants and ask them about their lives. This was part of the show’s formula but he truly seemed to enjoy it.

He seemed to have a genuine interest in other people. I suspect that this was why he continued working long after most people would have retired. The show was more than a job and he certainly didn’t need the money. Jeopardy allowed him to meet new people and learn new things.

Several years ago, I saw a 60 Minutes interview with Alex Trebek. I learned that, like me, he enjoyed working with his hands. Most celebrities buy private jets or luxury yachts but I envied Trebek’s vanity purchase far more than these expensive toys.

When he learned that his favorite hardware store was closing, he bought their entire inventory and had it installed in his basement. For us handyman types, the idea of having every nail, bolt or screw you need at one’s fingertips is the definition of “living the good life.”

Recently, we’ve had another connection with Alex Trebek. Twenty months ago he made an announcement on the show that he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. About a year after Alex’s diagnosis, my wife heard the same news from her doctor.

Alex became an inspiration to us. We admired his positive attitude and his determination to fight the deadly disease. Trebek resolved to continue working and enjoying his life, this was something my wife resolved to emulate. If Alex can do it, so could she.

We began paying close attention to every episode. We studied Alex’s skin color and his body language; we listened to his speech patterns and tried to ascertain how he was feeling. In the last several weeks, we saw the usually infallible host make several mistakes during the games.

We were worried about our friend. We knew he was fighting a losing battle but it still came as a surprise when the news appeared on my wife’s phone yesterday. I think we were hoping Alex would beat the odds because we are hoping my wife can beat the odds.

After Mike Richards delivered his tribute to Alex Trebek, he said those familiar words, “This is Jeopardy” and the show aired as it has for decades. My wife and I both commented on how odd it was to be watching a man we knew had just died, walk out on to the stage and start joking with the contestants.

Of course we do this all the time, my wife and I both love old black and white movies some of them starring actors that died before we were born, but somehow this seemed odd. Trebek hosted 35 unaired episodes of Jeopardy before his health forced him to quit.

We will be watching our old friend until Christmas. After that we don’t know what will happen to Jeopardy, we are guessing that Jeopardy star Ken Jennings may replace Alex. Whatever happens we will miss our old friend.

I read that Alex Trebek spent his final hours sitting on his porch swing with his wife at their home. They held hands and stared at the landscape of Southern California. In his biography, written many years ago, Alex Trebek wrote that this is exactly how he would like to go.

The category: Endings.

The answer: Dying peacefully at home, surrounded by your loved ones leaving behind millions of admirers.

What is a good end to a life well lived? Alex!      

 - Jim Busch

November 9, 2020

If I was ever to write the love story of my wife and my life, I think I would call it “Love on Four Wheels.” From our very first date to today, some of our best memories revolve around car rides and road trips.

When people ask how we got together my wife, Glenda, likes to say, “She fell in love with my car first and then decided I wasn’t so bad.” We had known each other since junior high school and she didn’t particularly like me. I was loud and brash, not her type.

We both attended Penn State McKeesport and I asked her out on a date. She told me that she was busy and hoped I would go away. I didn’t go away and asked her out again a week or so later. She didn’t tell me at the time but she agreed to my second request for a date because she had seen me in the college parking lot driving a MGB roadster.

She had never gone out with a guy who drove a British sports car and thought she could endure a few hours with me for a ride in my car. Fortunately for me, we hit it off and the rest is history.

When Glenda and I were dating, I was working part time in a supermarket and going to college, first at Penn State and then at Pitt. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on dates. We would go to the occasional movie or get a pizza at Woody’s on Walnut Street, but mostly we just hung out.

We both lived at home with our families, so privacy was at a premium. Sometimes, we would go for long walks but we really enjoyed car rides. In the early 1970’s, gas was extremely cheap. I could fill my MG’s tiny tank for less than two bucks so Glenda and I would go for long rides.

In those days before cellphones, when we were in the car, no one could interrupt our talks. The close quarters of a two seater roadster was particularly cozy.

Our favorite route was to drive east on Route 30 through Greensburg and Latrobe to Ligonier. We often did this after I got off work at 9 p.m. I would put the top of the MG down, pick Glenda up and we would get on the road. The cool air blowing through our hair and holding one another’s hand was all we needed, we were loving life.

After a while, Glenda would learn by the sound of the engine when we would have to break our grip so that I could shift the gears. She also learned about the vagaries of English car design.

Every once in a while, the engine would cut out and the car would coast to the shoulder, I would jump out, grab the rubber mallet I kept behind the driver’s seat, crawl under the back of the car and give the gas tank a whack. Nothing is so romantic as explaining to your true love the intricacies of restarting a jammed electric fuel pump.

We were young and in love, so we ignored even the weather. Riding with the top down was our special thing to do together. On cold fall evenings, I would crank up the heater and we would sail through the darkness along Loyalhanna Creek.

On several occasion, we would draw stares from other motorists as we went “topless” during snow squalls. We had discovered that if we drove fast enough the snow wouldn’t actually fall in the car because the cars slipstream blew them right past us. Ah, to be young and stupid.

We continued our love of rides and road trips after we were married and had children. Our son didn’t like to sleep. He would lay in his crib and cry until my wife picked him up and walked the floor with him. The only way we could get him to sleep was take him for a ride in the car.

By this time, we had traded in the MGB for a much less romantic 1963 lime green Plymouth Valiant with a push button transmission. Sometimes, we would drive around the neighborhood until he fell asleep.

He would go out like a light in the Valiant with both his parents singing James Taylor’s lullaby Sweet Baby James to him. The moment we stopped the car in front of our apartment, he would wake up and start screaming again.

We would often take our kids on family rides, heading out into the country to share a picnic. As our kids grew older, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, we would leave them with their grandparents and hit the road. We would enjoy our “alone time” by returning to our early days and cruise to Ligonier, often stopping to talk at Linn Run State Park.

Each year around our anniversary in September, we would take a long weekend trip. We are not the cruise or spa type so we would plan long road trips. We drove to Toronto to see the Phantom of the Opera, we drove south to Williamsburg or to the Skyline Drive.

We would stock up with a lot of salty, greasy snacks, fill the cooler with ice and soft drinks and take off. As we look back on our life together, many of these trips made our “Memory Hall of Fame.”

Starting in my 40s, I began taking training assignments around the country. Whenever she could get away, my wife would accompany me. We would fly to assignments on the West Coast but drove whenever we could. If a conference was held within a two days drive of Pittsburgh, I would take a few vacation days before and after and we would use it as an excuse for a road trip.

We drove to Iowa, stopping in Springfield Illinois to eat a corndog at the diner where they were invented and visit Abraham Lincoln’s home. On a trip New Orleans, we ate barbecue in B. B. King’s restaurant while listening to live blues music.

Last year, I was asked to speak in Las Vegas. Glenda and I decided that since I was retired we would realize our ambition of driving cross country. We rented a car, jumped on I-70 and drove off into the sunset. We crossed the Great Plains and drove up in to the Rockies. We saw an avalanche in the mountains and watched Big Horn sheep drink from a mountain stream.

Some of the places we drove through looked like scenes from an old John Wayne cavalry movie. After sightseeing in Las Vegas and stopping at the Hoover Dam, we took a southerly route home. My wife was driving through the desert when a tumbleweed rolled in front of the car.

It exploded like the Death Star in the original Star Wars movie. A cloud of fragments flew past the windshield and it sounded like we had run aground in a ship. I got out and checked the car and found no damage. This was a new and very unexpected road trip memory.

We are very glad we decided to drive to Las Vegas last year. This year we had planned to drive to Orlando for another conference but it was cancelled because of the coronavirus. Between the quarantine and my wife’s cancer, our road trips this year have been limited to doctors’ visits.

Today, we decided to hit the road, one more time. It has been several weeks since my wife ended chemotherapy and she has recovered somewhat from its side effects. This week we learned that she will be starting radiation next Wednesday. We decided to take advantage of the hiatus between therapies and enjoy the day.

This morning, we jumped in the car with no particular destination in mind. Like an old horse, our car instinctively knew where to go. We drove along Lincoln Way until we hit Route 30 when the car took a right turn toward Ligonier.

We cruised through Greensburg, Latrobe and Ligonier before stopping at the Laughlintown Pie Shoppe for breakfast. We drove up the mountain to the Summit Road and followed it down to Linn Run. On the way back, we stopped at the Laurel Nursery to pick up some gourds for Thanksgiving decorations.

Our Subaru Forester has a sunroof, but it’s no convertible. I still had the love of my life beside me. This was a bittersweet experience; it was good to be out enjoying the sunny day and the freedom of the road.

It stirred up a lot of delightful memories, but we both know that with my wife’s cancer that this might be our last road trip. We have been traveling together so long and it’s been a wonderful trip.

Neither one of us is ready to end our journey together.

- Jim Busch

November 8, 2020

Well, it’s all over but the suing!

Today, the major networks announced that Joe Biden has won the 2020 election to become the President Elect of the United States. Donald Trump, the current President of the United States, vows to keep fighting the fight on in the courts.

All over the country, crowds of Biden supporters gathered for impromptu celebrations, literally singing and dancing in the streets. At the same time, Trump supporters, went to the street to protest the results and in support of the president’s claims of rampant voter fraud.

I think most of the country is glad this contentious election was finally winding down. I talked to one person who became increasingly ill after the polls closed on Tuesday. The stress of waiting for the election left her with stomach aches and blinding headaches until she had to take to her bed.

Millions of people kept refreshing their screens to check the counts as the votes were tallied. Despite of the coronavirus roaring out of control, the election was virtually the only story on all of the news channels.

Full disclosure, I am a lifelong Democrat. My parents were old school FDR Democrats and voted straight party tickets until the day they died. I came of age politically during the presidency of Richard Nixon.

is extension of the war in Southeast Asia and later his involvement with the Watergate Affair cast my Democratic leanings into stone. I cast my first vote for George McGovern in 1972 and have voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since that time.

I like to think of myself as open minded. I try to look rationally at every decision in my life. Whether I am buying a new toaster or doing my part to choose the leader of the free world, I try to do so logically rather than emotionally.

I try to do my research and learn as much as I can about both sides of the issue and where both candidates stand. That said, I wonder if I am truly using my conscious brain to make these decisions.

Is it possible in each of the 12 presidential elections, that the Democrats chose a better candidate than the Republicans based on pure logic? Just looking at the odds, you would think that at least once, the GOP would have chosen someone who was superior to the Democratic candidate.

It is entirely possible that my subconscious has taken the steering wheel when it comes to my political decisions. I may be a victim of “confirmation bias.” Confirmation bias is a heuristic, a sort of mental shortcut that the brain uses to save time when making decisions.

Psychologists define confirmation bias as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.” In layman’s terms, this means that we see what we want to see. This is why a Democrat and a Republican can listen to the same speech and take away two different interpretations.

I wonder if when I see an “R” next to a candidate’s name if I am automatically disinclined toward them. It is entirely possible that I don’t truly consider that candidate’s ideas or positions. I tell myself that I am looking at things objectively, but I doubt that is completely accurate.

I cast my first vote against Richard Nixon. I was strongly against his bombing of Cambodia and Laos and his escalation of the Vietnam War. To this day, when I hear his name these are the things that come to mind along with the Watergate scandal.

I think about his disgrace and resignation. I forget the good things that he accomplished. It was Nixon who opened China and his signature was on the endangered species act.

Looking back at the 2020 campaign, I realized that I am not the only person who is letting their emotions take control of their thinking when it comes to politics. For the last few months, the airwaves have been running political ads around the clock.

To steal a line from Shakespeare, these TV ads are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing! If one sat and listened to them for a week on end, they would learn no substantive facts about the issues. They would have their emotions stirred up and their blood pressure would be off the scale.

Television producers are masters at manipulating the emotions. Television commercials are brief, lasting only 30 to 60 seconds. This is not enough time to deliver detailed information but it is enough time to connect with a viewer on an emotional level.

For example, an ad for a new SUV cannot discuss the design of the engine or its fuel efficiency, these concepts are far too complex to cover in a minute or less. This is why these ads feature scenes of the car speeding effortlessly across a beautiful yet rugged desert or mountain landscape.

Only a tiny percentage of the buyers of these vehicles will ever take them off road. All of them want to picture themselves as adventurous souls exploring new horizons. The ads tell them that all they need to do to realize these dreams is to buy this particular SUV.

This is a bad way to choose a new car and a worse way to pick a president. More and more our elections are becoming divorced from the facts and driven by the emotions. We lose the ability to understand nuance.

There are no grey areas in these emotional appeals. There are good guys and bad guys. In the old westerns, the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black ones.

In our current political climate, both sides pull on their white hats and start shooting at their opponents that they see as all wearing black Stetsons. It is as simple as an old fashioned melodrama, and the other party is always the one tying the young woman to the railroad tracks.

The intent of this was to generate votes for partisan candidates. The result of this is to divide the country into warring camps. When the other side is characterized as “pure evil,” it is acceptable to do anything to stamp them out.

This is how we wind up with armed militias in our street, fire-bombing radicals and conspiracy theories like “Qanon” which teaches the government is run by cannibalistic pedophiles.

I am not sure what the solution is to this escalating problem. Somehow, we need to raise the level of our political debates. We need our leaders to begin appealing to the intellect of the voters instead of to their emotions.

Two things separate our species from the wild animals. Our big brains and our opposable thumbs. If we don’t start relying more on using that big brain to think about who and what we are voting for, our thumbs will be ever clenched into a fist.                         

- Jim Busch

November 7, 2020

Today, my house decided that it didn’t want to take any more of my crap—literally.

The sewer line was blocked somewhere between our house and the street. We could not use the toilet or take a shower as anything that went down the drain, backed up into our basement. Fortunately, my wife’s sister lives right down the street, so we had a backup plan for our backed up sewer system.

I made a valiant attempt to remedy the situation myself. First, I attempted some vigorous plunging which was excellent aerobic exercise but didn’t make a dent in the blockage. Then I drove to Home Depot where I made a careful study of their extensive selection of drain opening chemicals.

After considering my options, I chose a gallon of chemicals labeled with a skull and crossbones plus warning labels in multiple languages. My logic was simple, I chose the biggest bottle on the shelf in the hopes that “More is better!”

The fact that it was the most expensive product on the shelf plus  the words, “Professional Grade” contained in a jagged burst on the corner of the label clenched the deal for me. If it is good enough for the pro’s, it’s good enough for me.

I dumped part of the drain cleaner in the basement drain and part in the “clean out” outside the house. I waited several hours as the instructions had instructed! Every now and then, I would peek at the floor drain hoping to see the water spiral miraculously down.

Unlike Moses, the waters didn’t part for me so I tried another round of aerobic plunging to no avail.

Next, I tried to snake out the drain. Stuffed drains were a regular thing at my house when my kids were at home. A bit of digging in my shed produced the long spring steel drain augur, a “snake.” I tried attacking the stoppage from the cellar drain but was unable to reach whatever was blocking the sewer line.

Next, I tried putting the snake down the clean out pipe on the exterior of the house. From this angle, I was able to reach the blockage but was unable to make a dent in it. It was time to throw in the towel and call in the cavalry.

My wife called a local drain cleaning company, like she wanted to do when we first discovered the problem. She doesn’t understand that not attempting to do it myself would be like a soldier surrendering without firing a shot. I had to preserve my honor.

In a few hours, a van pulled up in front of our house. We knew it was the drain guy because a sign on the side of the truck proclaimed, “Here comes the stool bus!” The young man came to the door, we showed him the problem and he went to work.

He shoved his “professional grade” augur down the clean out pipe and a few minutes later we had rejoined the modern world of plumbing. A swipe of the credit card, and our hero was off with a hearty “Hi-Yo Plumber Away!”

That same day, my wife tried to turn on the oven and the knob fell off in her hand. At this point, we were wondering if we had entered “another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone.”

It seemed like our home had come alive and was trying to drive us mad. She tried to replace the knob but couldn’t figure out how to do it. She called for me and I realized that the plastic shaft had broken off. I used to be able to repair our appliances but one look at this problem and realized that this was beyond my ken.

On our previous stoves, the oven control was a simple gas valve. My wife’s current stove is more complicated than an Apollo Moon Lander. The knob had been attached to an electronic control. If I could find the part, I didn’t know if it would need programed or how to do it.

Once again, it was time to call the professionals, after doing some advanced yoga poses to find the stove’s model number we called an appliance repair company and set an appointment for the middle of next week. For the next few days, we would be eating out of a frying pan.

Today, my wife and I had to deal with a relatively small problem, our oven, and a major inconvenience, our clogged sewage system. These issues disrupted our lives and ended up costing us several hundred dollars.

Dealing with these issues had to take precedence and everything we had planned to do during the day had to be set aside. In response to these problems, we discussed possible remedies, we made plans and we took action.

We did not whine, moan or ask, why us? Complaining about our lot would not have been productive; doing so would only cloud the issue and get in the way of making things right.

In some households, these “speed bumps on the road of life,” triggers bursts of profanity, hand wringing and perhaps, even tears. My wife and I were fortunate to grow up in households that saw no value in complaining about something you can’t change.

Neither of us expect things to go smoothly throughout our lives. In our 50 years together and 48 years of marriage, we have faced all sorts of problems. We had to deal with our children being ill, the loss of jobs, accidents on the job and auto accidents.

We’ve lost loved ones and close friends. None of these things were welcomed in our lives, and in most cases they could not have been prevented. Complaining would not have kept any of these terrible things at bay or reduced their impact on our lives.

When we had been dating about a year, Glenda and I were driving down a country road in my Triumph Spitfire sports car when a speeding truck coming from the opposite direction crossed the centerline and forced us off the road.

The Spitfire went up a steep embankment and flipped lengthwise, landing upside down over a ditch. That ditch saved our lives. The car’s windscreen was crushed and the front and rear fenders were lying flat on the ground.

We survived because the depression in the ground kept our bodies from being crushed as well. I blacked out for a second, but quickly woke up and realized what had happened. I could smell leaking gas and knew I had to get us out of the car.

I managed to kick out the side window, squeeze out of the car and then pull Glenda free. Miraculously, a small cut on my hand from the broken glass was the only injury either of us sustained.

I made sure Glenda was okay before I turned to look at the car. One wheel was still spinning a bit and there was nothing left that looked anything like a car but we were alive and unhurt. I turned to Glenda and said, “Well on the bright side, I won’t have to wash it this weekend.”

This was the moment that Glenda decided that I was the man for her; that I was the kind of guy that could face up to any problem and do what was needed to be done.

Ever since that day, we have faced all of our problems together. It is those problems that have strengthened our relationship. A tree that grows on the side of a mountain where it has to withstand the buffeting wind, grows tough and resilient.

We have learned to appreciate the good times. Right now we find the sound of a flushing toilet quite delightful. It’s true that we have had a lot of problems in our lives, but on the whole things have been good.

We have had each other, we have raised our children to be good people, are blessed with a wonderful grandson, and we have always managed to keep a roof over our heads.

Today, we are facing the biggest problem we’ve ever had to face, my wife’s cancer. We both know she may lose this battle but we will face it together. We know that cuss words or complaining won’t change her fate.

Some of our friends and family can not understand how we can face Glenda’s cancer without anger or sadness. We tell them that we refuse to let what may happen, take away our enjoyment of life today.

We just don’t believe in wasting time on an activity, like worrying, that simply does no good.              

- Jim Busch

November 6, 2020

With the election hanging in the balance, I have been spending a lot of time looking at the news. On a typical day, I watch CBS This Morning for two hours, KDKA news at 6 p.m. news, and the CBS Evening News at 7 p.m.

In addition to this, I never miss 60 Minutes and listen to NPR and BBC News on the radio. I read the Mon Valley Independent six days a week and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sundays.  Several times a day, I get an e-mail from the Tribune Review with a few headlines featuring local and national news. 

This doesn’t take as long as it sounds, I DVR everything so I buzz through an amazing number of commercials. On the local news, they run the weather twice but I only watch it once and since I am not a fan. I also skip the sports coverage.

More and more, I don’t watch news that doesn’t impact my life; one more story about an inner city shooting or a fatal accident on the highway is not going to make me a better person.

I do watch the stories about the environment and on political issues. I paid close attention to the coverage of the pandemic in hopes of learning something that might help me keep my family safe.

I have always been an information junkie. I like to know what’s going on in the world. It allows me to converse intelligently about current events and helps me to make decisions regarding my investments and who to support on Election Day.

I come by this honestly. My grandfather used to read the newspaper stories that either intrigued or outraged him out loud. He would comment and offer his views on what was going on in the world.

I remember him saying that the “U.S. had no business messing around in Vietnam.” I have fond memories of him reading the poetry of Edgar A. Guest, whose work was featured in every issue in the McKeesport Daily News.

Guest is completely forgotten today, but when his work was syndicated in newspapers across the country, he may have been the most popular poet in the United States.

I am not alone in my news addiction, the entire country has been sucked into the 24/7/365 endless news cycle. Today, we carry the world around in our pocket; our phones allows us to get the news from anywhere in real time.

When I was a boy, my dad had a small landscaping business. I can remember him checking the morning newspaper to see if it was going to rain that day.

Television news was not a big deal in those days. The noon news with Bill Burns was on for just 15 minutes, just enough time to cover a few headlines, the baseball score and the next day’s weather report.

In the evening, we got another 15 minutes of local news followed by another 15 minutes with Walter Cronkite. In September of 1963, CBS expanded its evening news report to an half hour.

Over the years, local news has gone from a quarter of an hour to several hours each evening. KDKA-TV now runs local news from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. then they run the CBS news and then broadcast another half hour of news from 7:30 to 8 p.m.

This expansion of the local news is more a financial than an editorial decision. When broadcasting network programming, the local station keeps a much smaller share of the advertising revenue than they do when running a locally produced program.

In the early days of television, local stations used to run locally produced children’s shows and locally produced talk shows in addition to the news. These shows were relatively expensive to produce compared to local news. The TV station’s profits grew in direct proportion to their news coverage.   

The challenge was to fill hours of air time. Television news coverage became repetitive, the news in the 4, 5 and 6 o’clock hours only differ if there is a “breaking news” story. They also cover a lot of stories that in the past would have been left to a few lines buried in a newspaper.

Local shootings are covered like they were the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Al Capone’s Chicago. This lead story causes many viewers to believe crime is on the rise, when actually it is the coverage of crime that has increased. Sports coverage used to be limited to the box scores and now includes all the lurid details of the player’s personal lives.

Telegenic news gets far better coverage on the news. The twisted wreckage of an automobile or a house fire make much better TV than a city council meeting.

The TV camera crews have to justify their existence so they show us scenes of a reporter standing in front of a building where something occurred. When a severe storm occurs, they force some young reporter to stand outside when they could be just as effective in the studio telling us that, “it’s raining outside.”

Local stations used to reserve their “Breaking News” announcement for stories that greatly affected their viewers; today it is used for everything from a fender bender on the Parkway to a local business being involved in a lawsuit. 

Things got even crazier when CNN first went on the air in 1980 creating the 24 hour news cycle. They had to fill every minute of every day with content. As other networks came along, they began crowding the cable channels, being the first to break a story became their primary goal.

This meant that putting a story together quickly took precedence over accuracy. This greatly reduced the quality of the information delivered to the public.

The networks desire to attract viewers meant stories about scandals and conflicts got much more coverage than “think pieces” providing important background on the stories. Sound bites from opposing politicians grabbed viewers where in-depth interviews made them reach for the remote control.

This has caused the news looking more and more like a reality show than what Edward R. Murrow would consider proper news coverage.    

Today, I heard a story about Election Stress Syndrome. People are having trouble sleeping and exhibiting other symptoms of mental disease from the constant barrage of stories about the candidates and the issues.  

I fear that this is also true of Covid-19. Yesterday, the number of new cases hit a new high, 103,000 in a single day, yet many people have begun letting down their guard.

I think instead of Election Stress Syndrome, perhaps we are suffering from an overdose of election news coverage. I decided that my listening to the political news is unlikely to change the outcome of the election at this point.

Today in the car, I actually switched off the NPR news and hit my number one preset button, WQED-FM. I found that listening to Bach, Beethoven and Strauss far less stressful and far more pleasant.

- Jim Busch      

November 5, 2020

My wife and I had an adventure today; we actually went grocery shopping together. This does not seem like such a big deal but my wife hasn’t been to the store since “1 BC,” one month before Covid-19. It was a refreshingly “old normal” outing.  

My wife was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer just before the pandemic hit the United States. The doctors told her that left untreated, the disease would likely kill her in six months or so.

Even though it was all over the news and causing widespread panic, the coronavirus never made it to the top of our, “Stuff we need to worry about list.” Catching Covid-19 was a possibility, cancer was a 100% sure thing.

Even though it was terrible, we were concerned about coronavirus, but Glenda’s cancer has occupied our thoughts every waking minute since we received her diagnosis.

Glenda hadn’t been feeling very well for a long time. She had constant indigestion and stomach cramps and was always tired. She is a very determined lady and continued to soldier on taking care of me and the entire family. For a few weeks after receiving the bad news from her doctor, she was still walking 10,000 steps every day.

She consulted with a team of doctors and went through a battery of tests. The doctors told her that the cancer had greatly reduced her blood count which in turn impacted her resistance to disease.

Because of this, she had to be hyper cautious about contracting the Coronavirus. She was essentially a prisoner in our own home. I was the only person she saw in months who was not wearing a long white coat or scrubs. She even asked our children to stay away for several months.

Our first counter attack against the cancer was chemotherapy. Our weekly routine was take her to Quest for blood work on Wednesday followed by a trip to Allegheny General Hospital for a chemotherapy session.

This was followed by several days of her being sick as a dog from the poisons that they had injected into her blood system. As the evil chemicals built up in her system, she grew weaker and weaker. I

noticed that Glenda wasn’t wearing her Fitbit on her wrist. When I asked her about this, she told me, “I had to take it off, I’d look at it at night and realized I had only taken a few hundred steps. It was mocking me!”

After a few weeks, her hair fell out and her legs began swelling. Finally, she experienced such severe stomach cramps that I had to call the ambulance to rush her to the hospital. She was admitted and spent eleven days in Allegheny General fighting a blood infection.

The doctors theorized that it had started in her chemo port and spread from there. When she checked out of the hospital, she had gained 39 pounds of water weight. Her abdomen, legs and feet were so swollen that she needed a walker to move about. Her impaired mobility was as effective as an ankle monitor in enforcing her continuing house arrest.

Eventually, the doctors decided that the chemotherapy was doing more harm than good. My wife’s body simply couldn’t tolerated the drugs. It was time for “Plan B.” Her team of doctors decided to try bombarding her tumor with radiation. They also decided to give her body a rest before starting the new series of treatments.

We are now in the hiatus between chemotherapy and her first radiation treatment. The doctors are planning to use an intensive program of radiation. Glenda will receive a radiation treatment plus six chemo pills a day for five days for six weeks.

We have no idea what this program of treatment will due to her so we’ve been making the best of this break in her treatment. She has seen a lymphedema specialist and we’ve begun using a pneumatic medical device to help reduce the swelling in her body. She is now able to move about with a cane and wear her own shoes.

My wife loves to cook, and she has been able to get back into the kitchen and even to do some light housework. She is not overly impressed with my housekeeping skills. She had me go to the basement and bring up her big box of holiday flags.

Last week, she put up her big Halloween flag and several smaller garden size flags. On Monday, she ran down the Jack ‘O Lantern flags and ran up the turkey banners. It did my heart good to see her standing in the yard, smiling at her decorating handiwork.

Today, we made our weekly pilgrimage to Quest Diagnostics for Glenda’s blood work. I dropped her at the door and waited in the car reading a magazine. I planned to take her home and then return to the shopping center to do our grocery shopping. When my wife came out of the laboratory, she said to me, “I think I’ll go with you to the store.”

“Are you sure, do you feel up to that much walking?”

“Yes, I’m feeling pretty good…let’s go for it.”

I drove to the other end of Oak Park Mall and parked in a handicapped space in front of Giant Eagle. My wife put her mask on and took off the latex gloves she had worn to Quest and put on a new pair for the grocery store. Cane in hand, she walked briskly, for her, to the front of the store. I grabbed a buggy and wiped it down with an antiseptic wipe.

My wife was impressed with the sanitizing station with the wipes, paper towels and hand sanitizer. I forgot she had never seen anything like this in a grocery store. She hadn’t been to the store since the “before times.”

My wife used to hate grocery shopping. She would sprint through the store with the goal of getting in and getting what she needed, so could get out as soon as possible. Today, she was like a kid on their first trip to Disney World.

Her eyes were wide as she looked at the masked shoppers. She carefully chose some navel oranges, and studied the array of bananas picking out the perfect bunch. Usually, she gives me a short list of items to buy, but today we filled a buggy.

We wandered all over the store. Glenda was surprised with the many empty spaces on the store’s shelves, the effect of lingering supply chain issues and latent hoarding. Several times I had to tell her to move to let other shoppers by as she studied the displays.

For once, she seemed to be the only person in the store who wasn’t in a hurry to shop. For most of our marriage, she has accused me of dawdling but today she was the one who was taking her time and looking around.

When she put four bags of Pepperidge Farms stuffing bread into our cart, I realized what we were doing. We were shopping for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Day is one of Glenda’s favorite holidays. She delights in making a big meal for our family and Thanksgiving is her day to shine.

She would start planning the meal weeks ahead of the day and begins baking on the Sunday before the holiday. In our 48 years of marriage, there was only one year that she didn’t cook a big meal on Thanksgiving. That year we took the kids on vacation to Canada and ate barbecue in Toronto. She made a turkey and all the fixings, on the weekend after we got home.  

Tomorrow, Glenda has a meeting with her radiologist. She feels that he will begin her treatments next week. She has researched what the radiation will do to her; radiation produces all the side effects that comes with chemotherapy with the addition of peeling skin. The doctor told her to stock up on lotion.

She doesn’t know when, or if, she will feel as good as she felt today. Radiation is our last ditch effort. If it doesn’t kill her cancer we are out of options. She wanted to enjoy a normal day. She wants to fix a holiday meal for me and for our kids.

For most of the people in Giant Eagle this morning, shopping was no big deal. if they thought anything about going to the store, they probably thought it was an annoying chore.

For my wife, it was a rare chance to enjoy the pleasures of living and caring for the ones you love.  

- Jim Busch

November 3, 2020

Today is Election Day. 

For months, all the media outlets have been telling us that, “This is the most important election in our lifetimes.” One side tells us that if things don’t go their way, the country will become a socialist hell hole like Venezuela.

The other side tells us that if things don’t go their way, we are destined to, “become a fascist dictatorship like the world hasn’t seen since World War II Germany.”

I’m not so sure that either of these scenarios is going to take place. There is a Zen saying that goes, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” In other words, life goes on and we still have to do our work and live our lives.

I voted several weeks ago, mostly to avoid the crowds during the pandemic. Since I had done my duty as a citizen, I could get on with my life. I spent most of the day working in the yard, my version of chopping wood and carrying water.

I took advantage of the warming weather to clean off my flower beds. I pulled up the frost killed plants and cut them up with my hand pruners before putting them into my compost bin. Chopping them facilitates decay and speeds up the process of making compost to feed my future gardens.

I like the process of “putting the garden to bed” as my grandfather called it. By the end of the growing season, things are a bit chaotic and shaggy. Six months ago, I planted seeds and plants in neat little rows. In their plastic nursery packs, the plants were indistinguishable from one another, identical in size and structure.

Once planted in the flower beds, they looked like well drilled soldiers on parade deployed in perfectly straight lines and “dress right, dress spacing”. Once in the ground, they feel free to express their individuality.

They stretched up for the sun and had no problem with imposing on their neighbor’s space. They flowed over the edges of my walls and flopped here and there; relaxing wherever they wanted. By the end of summer, the flower beds looked less like a Marine barracks and more like the recreation room in a fraternity house.

People who study garden design distinguish between French or continental style gardens and English gardens. French gardens are formal, and well organized. The plants are trimmed into simple geometric shapes and the garden uses a limited color palate.

The garden beds are delineated by walkways which organize the garden into a formal grid like pattern. Think, the gardens at Versailles.

English gardens are far less formal. Their paths are curvaceous and meander through explosions of colorful flower plants. The objective is to replicate a wildflower meadow so the plants are given free run of the garden space.

English gardeners work very hard to make it look like they have not done a lick of work. This is the classic English “cottage garden” that is featured on travel brochures enticing tourists to visit rural Britain.

I personally like the rowdy English style garden. They fit with my personality. I know my wife loves me because for almost 50 years she has tried to reform my slobbish ways.

My clothes are always a bit disheveled and I leave things lying about all over the place. My desk is forever buried in stacks of books, papers and other various accoutrements. Like most people, I have a junk drawer in my kitchen, the difference that in my world, it may be the best organized space I own.

This tendency toward disorganization coupled with my love of the natural world inclines me toward English style gardens. I let things get out of hand and am slow to pull out a weed if it looks like it might turn out to be interesting.  I like it when my garden beds remind me of a wildflower meadow, a chaotic mix of green leaves and bright flowers.

Despite this, I do enjoy putting the beds to bed, of bringing order out of chaos. Most of the jobs around my house are repetitive and virtually invisible. I mow the grass and in a few days it looks like I had ignored the job. I pull weeds and by the next morning their children have taken their place.

Cleaning off the garden beds gives me a real sense of satisfaction. In a few hours, I transform them from an ugly mass of blackened leaves and drooping flowers to a neat square of bare ground ready for the next year’s plantings.

The empty beds and the overflowing compost bin are the first steps I take toward next year’s garden. Rather than bare ground and decaying vegetation, in my mind’s eye I see a bed full of flowers nourished with rich black compost from my bins.

Tomorrow, I will plant a bag of daffodils in the back bed where my wife will be able to see them from the kitchen. I will take my grandfather’s trowel and bury the bulbs pointy end up in a hole three times their thickness, just like he taught me to do over 60 years ago. 

I could use a piece of scrap wood to lay out a grid pattern for the bulbs but I prefer to let fate, rather than geometry, decide where they will grow. I will reach into the bag of bulbs and pick up as many as I can in my hand.

Next I will toss them into the flower bed and plant them where they land. I have used this method for years and somehow they always seem to know where they belong.

As I write this, I have no idea who will win the election. I doubt that we will become a socialist worker’s paradise or the Fourth Reich. I know things will change and somehow we will muddle through.

One thing I do know that whoever is president, next spring I will look out my kitchen window and see beautiful teacup shaped flowers nodding their heads and swaying in the breeze.

No matter what happens at the polls, the world will still be a beautiful place.             

 - Jim Busch

November 2, 2020

Being stuck at home during the pandemic has its good points and bad points. I am not sure which category having plenty of time to clean out the basement falls in.

There is a reason I have been putting this off for a long, long time but it is nice to actually be able to move down there. While going through decades worth of old tax returns and other assorted records, I discovered something that brought memories of one of the most enjoyable and weirdest weekends of my life.

My wife and I are both book lovers. From our very first date right up to today, we like to talk about what we are reading and about books we want to read. We have very different tastes in books, I am a nonfiction reader and my wife likes literary fiction.

Our reading lists overlap when it comes to classics and psychology books. My mother-in-law was also a great reader as are both of my children and their spouses. Sometimes, our family gatherings sound like the meeting of a very eclectic book club.

After our children were grown and my wife had some free time, we decided to open a small business. Given our bookish inclinations we decided to open a small secondhand bookstore.

In 1996, we opened Twice Sold Tales in the Swiss Alpine Village shopping center on Route 48 in Elizabeth Township. We started in a small store front and later moved to a larger location in the village before finally moving to our final location on Smithfield Street in Boston, Pa.

Opening a book store is definitely not a “get rich quick” scheme but it proved to be a lot of fun. We got to meet some amazing people. Book lovers are very nice people who are intelligent and often interesting.

In ten years in the retail business, we only encountered one shoplifter. This was a young girl who needed a book for a school report which her family couldn’t afford. My wife caught her, gave her the book she needed plus several other titles for her to read. I told my wife that we should put up a sign reading, “Warning! Shoplifters will be educated.”

When we opened the store we imagined ourselves having in depth discussions about literature and the classics with our customers. We thought our enlightened customers would be looking for titles that were uplifting and which would reflect the human experience.

We soon learned that over seventy-five percent of our sales were mysteries and romantic fiction. We also sold a smattering of western fiction and cookbooks, but our best sellers were “bodice rippers.” It turns out that people didn’t want to be uplifted, they wanted to be entertained.

We discovered that a lot of women in the Mon Valley were looking for a little romance in their lives. To serve our customers we started selling Romantic Times magazine. This magazine had reviews of upcoming titles and interviews with popular authors. We also sold out of Romantic Times before the end of the month.

Each year, the publishers of Romantic Times held a gathering of people who enjoyed reading romantic fiction. In 1999, they pulled out all the stops partnered with Harlequin Books to hold an over the top convention in Toronto, Canada. Harlequin is based in Toronto and in 1999 they were celebrating their 50th anniversary.

Book sellers are important to Harlequins success so they subsidized any bookstore owner who wanted to attend the convention. The convention took place from September 16 to the 19; we were married on September 15th so the convention coincided with our 27th anniversary.

We usually went away for our anniversary and as booksellers they deeply discounted our hotel room and picked up our tickets, including meals, for the convention. We both love Toronto, so we couldn’t resist.

We checked in to the Sheraton Centre Toronto and were handed the convention package I found today. Right away we could sense that we were fish out of water. The convention was sold out and the lobby was filled with excited mostly middle aged women.

My wife was wearing blue jeans and button down blouse, most of the women in the lobby were elegantly dressed with lots of jewelry and make up. I was one of the few men in attendance, the attendees were about 99% female. There was just me and a few husbands that looked like they had just been sentenced to life on Devil’s Island.

We dropped our bags and went in search of the hotel’s coffee shop, we were hungry after the long drive north from Pittsburgh. The hotel consisted of two tall towers separated by a three story convention center. The flat roof of the convention center was landscaped to look like the Canadian Rockies.

As we walked by, a male cover model dressed in a kilt and a fur robe was posing for pictures. He was standing on a rock next to an artificial waterfall as ladies paid ten bucks a pop to snap a picture of him.

As he struck a pose, like the ones on the covers of their favorite books, his foot slipped and he went head first into the water. He crawled out with his long hair and bear skin robe looking like a drowned rat. I am sure that he smelled like a sheepdog that got caught in a rainstorm.

These male models were a big draw at the convention. Later that afternoon, we looked in on a hotel ballroom where some of the attendees were laying down $25 a pop for Scottish Dance Lessons taught by Eileen Ramsey, who was billed as a “Scottish Country Dance Authority.”

I am sure that Ms. Ramsey was good at her job but I think the real attraction was the chance to dance with more hunky male cover models with rippling muscles dressed in kilts. Some of the women were really interested in learning the Highland fling because they signed up for several rounds of lessons.

That evening, we shared a table with several ladies from Wisconsin who were very envious that we owned a bookstore. The dreamed of opening a bookstore that specialized in romantic fiction. I hope they got to do it.

The evening’s entertainment was “Prince Michael and his Brawny Highlanders” but before they took the stage avid readers stepped up to talk about their book collections. One woman shared a slideshow of the wing she added to her home. Its interior looked like a library with row upon row of shelves all filled with romance paperbacks.

The next day, we attended a meeting of booksellers from across the U.S. and Canada. The agenda called for a discussion with an up and coming romance author. We were seated in a circle of chairs when the young woman sat down and introduced herself and started to tell us about her new book when she began to sweat and her body began to shake.

All of a sudden she stood up, and ran from the room. We didn’t know what had happened so we started telling one another about our stores when she came back into the room. She took her seat and apologized to the group, explaining that she had had an anxiety attack, “there is a reason that I chose a career that allows me to sit in a dark room and make up imaginary people.”

Saturday evening’s dinner was the signature event of the convention, “Heather Graham’s Beneath a Blood Red Moon Vampire Ball.” Costumes were encouraged and as the room filled up it looked like the Adam’s Family Reunion.

My wife asked a female cover model to pose with me. She was dressed in a skimpy dark angel cost

ume with six foot black leather wings.  In the photo, I looked as terrified as if she really was going to drink my blood.

It was a very memorable night and I discovered that Midwestern moms get a little bit wild when you dress them up as vampires and put them out on the dance floor.

You never know where life is going to lead you. My wife and I never imagined attending a convention dedicated to romantic novels featuring sexy cowboys and lonely millionaires.

We sold our store when my grandson came along, but we will always have fond memories of our little store, our wonderful customers and one weird weekend in Canada.  

- Jim Busch

November 1, 2020

I had a discussion with a friend today. She maintained that “politicians are the ruination of this country.”

I have heard this sentiment and the related belief that government is ineffective and in Ronald Reagan’s words, “government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.”  I have to admit that I have some problems with some of our elected officials, but I don’t think this is a reason to believe their entire profession should be eliminated.

When I encounter a doctor I don’t like, I don’t condemn the entire medical profession and turn my back on science. I simply find another doctor.    

I think that people have forgotten the meaning of politics. The dictionary defines politics as “the art or science of running a government.” In the modern world, running a country is a complicated business especially in a country as big, powerful and diverse as the United States.

This is not a job for amateurs, getting the work of governing done requires an understanding of the machinery of government and how the various components of the country interact with one another. There is a reason that before becoming a pilot, a trainee spends years serving as the copilot next to an experienced aviator. This allows them to understand how an aircraft handles and how it systems function and what to do in challenging situations.

Politics comes from the word “politic.” Politic means “shrewd or prudent in practical matters; tactful; diplomatic.” True politicians are pragmatists; they work hard to accomplish their goals. To accomplish things in our system of government, it is necessary to work with other people. To be elected, a politician has to gain the support of the majority of voters in their district.

To get things accomplished for their constituents, a politician needs to work with his or her counterparts from the opposing party. This is where the words, “tactful and diplomatic” in the definition of politic comes into play.

Progress in a country where the people hold diverse opinions requires compromise. In a fair compromise, neither party gets 100% of what they want. Both sides get a little of what they hoped to get, but by working together some progress toward a mutual goal can be made.

Sometimes, one side gives in on one issue in return for the opposition’s support of one of their issues. The song in the popular musical Hamilton, The Room Where It Happens is about just this sort of very “politic” negotiation.

Alexander Hamilton wanted the capitol of the new nation to be in New York City, but agreed to locate it along the Potomac, in order to secure that Thomas Jefferson would support his financial plan.  Hamilton got his national bank and Jefferson got a southern seat of government. Neither man got everything they wanted, but the country moved ahead.

By this definition, our country is experiencing a severe shortage of politicians. Many of the people in office today consider “compromise” a dirty word. Their goal is to gain absolute power and ram their program down the throat of their opposition.

This “my way, or the highway” approach to governing gets in the way of moving our country forward. The only time anything gets done for the people is when one party is in control of all branches of government.

The system of checks and balances established by this country’s founders was intended to foster cooperation and compromise. When one or both sides refuse to compromise, the checks and balances becomes a road block.

Everything doesn’t have to be a choice between black and white, we advance when the two sides shake hands and agree on a shade of gray somewhere in between.

This binary approach has caused division and civil unrest in the country. Our leaders used to refer to their adversaries as my “esteemed colleague” or “my worthy opponent.” Today, they decry the opposition as “un-American” or as a criminal and demanding they be “locked up.”

They assume that their opponents have nefarious motives. They characterize those who don’t agree with them as “evil,” and “wanting to destroy America.” Once an officeholder paints their opponent as evil, they eliminate any possibility of coming to a compromise; to do so would be tantamount to “making a deal with the devil.”

Abraham Lincoln is considered one of our greatest presidents and statesmen. He is also one of our greatest politicians in the truest sense of the word. Doris Kearns Goodwins’ book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln speaks to the wisdom of this great man.

Rather than vilifying his political opponents, he brought them into his government avoiding gridlock and setting the stage for a Union victory. He refused to insult the leaders of the southern rebellion, decrying them their methods but never calling them evil. His charity toward those in actual rebellion made reconciliation possible after the conflict.  

This polarization and lack of progress leaves people very frustrated. If one side holds all the power and proceeds with their agenda without any consideration to the opposition’s views, a large percentage of the population is left feeling disenfranchised.

Believing those that disagree with your views are evil and an enemy of the country is dangerous. These attitudes become justifications for harming your enemies, leading to situations like the attempted kidnapping and execution of the governor of Michigan.

The idea that government is a problem rather than a help to the people is a dangerous concept. Many people rail against “big” government, saying that this is not what the founders envisioned.

This is true but men like Jefferson and Washington also could not envision the scope and scale of all of our 21st Century institutions. The rise of corporations and the concentration of wealth during the industrial revolution changed everything.

Every aspect of our lives are impacted by the decisions made in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These companies are focused on one thing, making a profit. They do not have the best interests of the people in mind.

This can be seen in the actions of the “Robber Barons” of the 19th century. These companies are unimaginably large and powerful, no individual can resist their will. Government is the representative of the people, it serves as the counterbalance to the power of accumulated capital.

These corporations don’t like government because government serves as the only limit on their power. They lobby against regulation and wage a constant public relations campaign against our political institutions. The best example of this is the fight the tobacco companies waged against the federal government’s efforts to inform and protect the people from their products.

They tell us that business is more efficient than government agencies. This is true if you measure efficiency by business standards. Our government is not intended to make a profit, its purpose is to make life better for the people.

Would it be fair to judge a business’s success by its impact on all of its stakeholders? Should we call a business a failure if it doesn’t provide the greatest possible good for its customers and employees rather than just for its stock holders?

The founders believed that a large standing military was a danger to liberty. In the Washington administration the U.S. Army was made up of a 1,000 officers and men deployed along the frontier. Should we continue to follow this practice today, when other nations threaten us with their huge military forces?

Our government has grown as the world has become more complex. Only a robust government can properly serve its people and protect our interests in a world that grows more and more complex.

I know that defending politicians is about as popular as recreational root canals. Attacking our elected officials is a great American tradition. If nothing else, politicians give our comedians an unending source of material to talk about.

Every time we drive down a highway; every time when we go to the grocery store or drug store we don’t have to worry about the purity of what we buy there. When we fly in a plane, buckle on a seatbelt or take a breath of clean air we should thank our government for looking out for us.

We should also thank the men and women who serve that government, either as civil servants or as elected officials. They may not be perfect, they are human after all, but the best of them follow in the footsteps of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln and Roosevelts.

They serve us to the best of their ability and try to make the country and the world a better place.    

      - Jim Busch

October 31, 2020

Today is Halloween. Most people think of this as a day to celebrate ghosts and goblins, but to me it is a celebration of creativity. It is a day when the normal rules of practicality and common sense design do not apply.

Think about it, it is a day when perfectly normal people sculpt vegetables into anthropomorphic lanterns and display them on their front porches. 

In past years, most of my creative energy went into producing original costumes for my children. This was a group effort, my kids had an entire costume department supporting their candy collecting efforts. My father-in-law and I provided the mechanical skills and my wife and mother-in-law served as seamstresses.

When they were in grade school, the entire month of October, our house was a blur of activity. We never purchased a pattern, we always created our own designs.

I can’t be sure, but I think that we had an impact on White Oak’s annual Halloween parade. We started when my son was in kindergarten, in those days, store bought costumes consisted of a thin plastic mask and a printed vinyl jumpsuit. These K-Mart costumes were cheap, easy and popular with time pressed parents.

We turned heads with our innovative hand crafted costumes and in a few years we saw more and more families starting to make their kids’ costumes.

We also earned the ire of many of our fellow PTA members. Not to blow our own horn, but we took first prize at the local parade for almost every year for a decade. There were rumors that we had an in with the judges or bribery, but we won fair and square.

Some of our costumes also won prizes the following year, as they frequently got passed down to my wife’s sister’s children in Mercer County.

This started when our son, Jesse, was in kindergarten. He was born with a foot that turned out. We took him to a pediatric orthopedist and he prescribed a special brace that would force Jesse’s foot to turn back in. It consisted of a thick leather belt around his waist to which two stiff steel cables were attached.

The cables were attached to metal plates which extended from the soles of his leather orthopedic shoes. The braces forced his feet into the proper orientation until his young bones began to grow in the right direction. This process was painful and severely limited his already impaired mobility.

As Halloween approached, I realized that my son would not be able to walk from house to house Trick or Treating. I decided I needed to make a costume that would allow him to wear his braces and allow him to ride.

I designed a rolling robot outfit. I made a wooden frame that he could sit on and covered it with cardboard. The head of the robot was an inverted plastic bucket with eye slots lined with black screen cloth. I mounted large casters on the bottom so I could push him along.

To give the robot some pizzazz, I added two six volt lantern batteries and a number of running lights from an old truck. For sound effects, I took the electronics out of a toy ray gun. On the front of the robot I put a “Candy Input Portal” equipped with a micro switch which triggered the ray gun sounds.

He really made out that year. People were so delighted that dropping candy in the slot caused the lights to flash and the robot to come alive that they often repeated the process over and over.

Over the years, we kept coming up with new ideas. When my daughter got old enough for school, we often did family themed costume ensembles. One year, I made a full set of functional armor for my son out of aluminum flashing which required hundreds of pop-rivets.

That year, he was a knight and his sister was a medieval damsel with a beautiful gown sewn by her grandmother and a tall pointed wimple hat and a flowing veil.

Another year, my son went as a samurai warrior with a full suit of armor made from an old bamboo awning, a helmet with an upright crest and a set of swords. Of course, that year his sister was a geisha in a homemade silk kimono, a fan and white face makeup.

One year, my wife and I went to a Bette Midler concert in the city. My wife fell in love with the “Moon Maiden” costumes worn by some of the back-up dancers. I made a sketch on the back of the program and got to work that weekend.

It was made from plastic pipe and the ever useful cardboard. One side represented the dark of the moon and the other the full moon. That year no one knew exactly what she was, but she still won the prize.

Our best costumes not only took a prize at the school, but also at the Century III Mall parade. Our daughter was a mermaid and our son was an octopus setting on a treasure chest. I made a cardboard pirate’s chest which rested over his shoulders with his head poking through the top. On his head he wore the octopus’s body made from green cloth with big green googly eyes.

The creature’s eight legs were more of the green cloth with suckers cut from a bathmat. They were attached to the head with almost invisible monofilament fishing line so that when he moved his head the eight legs wriggled and moved.

The judge of the Century III costume contest was Bill Cardille, host of television’s Chiller Theater. Chilly Billy awarded my son first prize and invited him to appear on his Halloween show. We had a great time and the kids were thrilled to be on television.

Now that my kids are grown, I have retired from the costume business. I’m glad that my son has carried on the tradition. He has made some outstanding costumes for my grandson. He was an art major as an undergrad and has access to far more resources than I ever did. He produced some costumes using professional makeup grade latex that was worthy of any Hollywood movie set.

This year, the pandemic challenged me to get creative once again. We never get any kids at our house but my daughter enjoys treating the kids in her neighborhood. She wanted to give out candy, but in a socially distanced way.

She has a retaining wall in front of her house. To reach the front porch, there is a set of concrete steps with a wrought iron railing. I measured the railing and wandered the aisles of Home Depot looking for ideas. I often do this when I have a creative project.

I go walking around the home or the craft store just looking at everything and asking myself, “How can I use this?” Inspiration struck me when I saw a length of underground drain pipe. I realized that I could use it to make a “candy chute” to attach to my daughter’s railing.

I bought the pipe and stopped at the dollar store on the way home. I bought a rubber bat mask which fit with my daughter’s graveyard themed Halloween decorations. I also picked up a bag of miniature candy bars for a test and also for a snack.

I took the pipe home and tested it with a few Kit Kats before cutting it to length. I then made wooden cradles to affix it to the railing, and attached the rubber mask to its outlet. I then painted a sign reading, “Catch some candy, if your can!” and I was done.

This morning I drove to my daughter’s and set up the chute. She decorated it with “Beware Zombies” crime scene tape and LED lights.

This evening my wife and I drove to my daughter’s house to watch her give out candy. The kids thought it was great fun to catch the candy “straight from the bat’s mouth.” I think my daughter was having as much fun as the kids.

There weren’t too many Trick or Treaters out due to the pandemic, so Rachael was generous to the kids who brave enough to venture out. The look on my daughter’s face is why I love Halloween. This holiday lets me use my creativity to bring joy to the people I care about.

My kids may have grown older, but making them happy will never “get old” for me.  

- Jim Busch

October 30, 2020

Today, we got our first killing frost of the year. As the grandson of a farmer and a gardener, this is a milestone in my year. To me, no matter what the calendar says, this event marks the real beginning of winter. It’s time for the world to take a nap and for me to tidy up the garden and square things away for the winter.

I don’t need to read the scientific journals to know that global warming is not a "hoax” as some politicians on the right have been saying. When I was a young boy, I really enjoyed working in the family garden.

I have always liked seeing things grow and doing chores made me feel like I was doing something important for the family. When I was 10 or 12, the first frost always hit a few weeks after school started. The almanac listed September 15 as the official “First Frost” date for Southwestern Pennsylvania. We usually had the garden cleaned off by the end of the month.

When I was grown and growing a garden for my own family, the frost date was several weeks later. Typically, the first killing frost held off until the end of September. We were still picking tomatoes two or three weeks into the month.

I found that I could buy perennials, trees, shrubs and spring blooming bulbs on clearance and still get them into the ground before it freezes. The longer growing season made our garden much more productive. Global warming may destroy civilization as we know it, but at least we will have lots of tomatoes.

Today, is the next to the last day of October and though we have had some cool nights, last night was our first killing frost. I knew it had finally come first thing this morning. When I stepped out to get my newspaper, I noticed that the leaves on my marigolds, which had been healthy and green yesterday, were shrunken and black.

I have always been impressed with the damage a hard frost can do, overnight it can turn a colorful flower bed into a vegetative graveyard. Surprisingly, the cold covering of ice crystals leaves the tender plants looking like they’ve been attacked with a flamethrower. My front flower beds looked like a diorama of the aftermath of a forest fire.

The process of clearing off the garden will occupy my time, weather permitting, for most of the week. I started today, by salvaging what I could from our tiny vegetable and herb patch.

My first stop was our tomato plants. I took a large bowl and my pruners and collected the last handful of tomatoes remaining on the blackened vines. They came in variety of sizes and coloration.

Some were small, hard and bright green. Others were larger and starting to turn pinkish red. I took the bowl to my wife who decided their fate. One had a bad spot but once this was cut away, it was ready to be sliced and eaten—the last fresh picked tomato we’ll have for a long time.

Others she wrapped tightly in newspaper to trap the gases that will help them gradually ripen. Back before refrigerated trains made tomatoes from Florida and California available year round, this was common practice. It was the proud gardener that could place fresh tomatoes on their Thanksgiving table.

The tomatoes which were beginning to turn red were set aside for a special fall treat, fried green tomatoes. This is one of those meals that was originally created to make use of what was on hand and to avoid wasting one morsel of food during hard times.

Today, they are a family favorite. I have to confess that I actually pick some green tomatoes in the summer sacrificing a big red sliced tomato in order to fry them up.

We use my wife’s grandfather’s recipe for fried green tomatoes. He was originally from rural Western Maryland and descended from Pennsylvania German pioneers. His recipe calls for dipping the slices of tomato in buttermilk before dredging them in flour and cornmeal before frying them in butter.

Once the first side is done and they are flipped, my wife puts a large dollop of brown sugar on top of each slice. When the sugar hits the sizzling butter it caramelizes. The combination of the tart green tomatoes and the sweetness of the sugar gives them a classic sweet and sour flavor so common in Amish cooking.

I have always believed that fried green tomatoes are the universe’s way of compensating us for having to wait nine or ten months before we get to eat another homegrown tomato.

Next, I picked several large butternut squash that had taken over a large section of my backyard. These were a gift from Mother Nature. I didn’t plant them, they just sprouted out of my compost pile last spring. I was not sure what they were at first and let them grow out of curiosity.

Watching the vines grow, I wondered why the old fairy tale was not titled, “Jack and the Squash Stock!” They seemed to grow a foot or more daily and never stopped their ambition to conquer the world until last night’s frost hit them.

The vines finally stretched over 20 feet and covered a large portion of the backyard before they turned black from the cold. I would have had bushels of the big brown squashes if the woodchucks had not developed a taste for them. Still, I got four nice additions to our winter larder.

My next task was to harvest the garden sage. With my pruners, I cut the stalks and put them in the colander. I love the aroma of the thick velvety leaves. One whiff and I can almost taste the stuffing from the Thanksgiving turkey and fresh pork sausage.

Inside, I spread the stalks on a kitchen towel to dry the morning dew and rain off the leaves. After letting them dry for a bit, I took a ball of white kitchen string and tied two or three stalks together before hanging them up in my office to dry. My office is cool and dark, the perfect space for drying herbs.

In a week or two, I will take them down, remove the leaves from the stalks, crush them and seal them up in a recycled jelly jar to flavor our food in the coming year. In the coming days, I will bring the rosemary plant indoors and freeze the remaining parsley and basil.

This will leave the cleanup work. I will pull the tender plants, cut them up with my pruners and put them in the compost. I will trim back the hardy perennials, dress the roses and peonies with manure and do my fall pruning.

My last task will be to plant several dozen daffodils that my sister-in-law bought for my wife from a catalog. This is my favorite fall chore, it makes me happy to think about the spring and the rebirth of the garden.

Next spring, I will wait for the last frost of winter and then start the whole cycle over again.

- Jim Busch

October 29, 2020

I am 68 years old, so I have seen a lot of changes during my lifetime. These include advances in technology; I was born two years before the first transistor radio and now I have a smartphone that connects me with the world. I saw men walking on the moon and major advances in medicine. I have also seen major changes in our culture.

America is much more diverse than when I was a child. I can remember when the only “foreign” food was Chinese and if you wanted a pizza, Vincent’s in Forest Hills was the only game in town. Now we can get a taco, Thai food, Garam Marsala, Vietnamese pho or just about anything we want, even in Pittsburgh.  

We used to have tiny houses and big families, now many people live in “McMansions” with one or maybe two kids. Only the army and forest rangers drove four wheel drive vehicles and the rest of us drove station wagons.

Now the typical suburban family drives an SUV capable of crossing the Serengeti. Phones used to come one per family and they were attached to the wall. Now, toddlers have telephones with more computing power than MIT had back in the 1960’s.

The improvement in the quality of life of one group of Americans has far outstripped every other segment of our population. I am, of course, speaking of America’s pet population. Our furry citizens have gone from oppressed citizens begging for scraps at the table to America’s pampered aristocrats.

I saw the beginning of this change in my youth. To my grandfather, dogs and cats were livestock. They had to earn their keep. Dogs were trained to point out pheasants or chased rabbits out of the brush. Even a dog that wasn’t trained to hunt was expected to keep foxes away from the hen house and serve as a furry burglar alarm to earn leftover scraps from the table.

Cats had one job. They were responsible for keeping rats and mice out of the barn. They worked largely for room and board, a place to sleep in the hayloft and all the rodents they could eat. Sometimes, they would get a saucer of milk as a bonus if they kept the mouse population in check.

My grandfather never had a dog or cat in the house. The hunting dogs lived in a kennel, the farm dog and cats in the barn. Houses were for the humans and the other inhabitants lived in the outbuildings. An animal that got sick or too old to pull their weight, always seemed to disappear. Old time farmers couldn’t afford to be sentimental.

By the time I can along, our dogs had moved indoors. Their job description was streamlined and they were only expected to let us know if anyone tried to break in to our home. Other than that, they were expected to offer some companionship when their human owner wanted it.

My mother was fond of poodles, so we usually had a miniature poodle hanging around the house. I always wanted some more masculine canine companion. I would have preferred a Husky like Yukon King on Sergeant Preston of the Yukon or even a collie like the clever pooch on the Lassie show.

I really didn’t expect a chubby poodle to attack a murderer and stop him from shooting me in the back or even to let anyone know if I fell down a well. It was my job to walk our dog and I found that being seen with a poodle sporting a frilly haircut and a rhinestone collar was more than a little embarrassing.

My dad thought that having a cat in the house was an abomination. My grandmother had an outside cat that she fed. The only time he was allowed in the house was when the weather was frigid and she would leave the cellar door open a crack.

My aunt Fanny had a bevy of cats which came and went through a hole she cut in her sun porch door. They had the full run of her house and after visiting her, my dad would go on an extended rant about how disgusting it was to allow cats in one’s house, especially the kitchen.

Even our relatively pampered poodle, Bobo, lived a dog’s life. He ate whatever canned dog food was on sale at the store supplemented by table scraps. I don’t think my mother ever worried about the nutritional content of my meals let alone Bobo’s.

He slept on the throw rug in front of the kitchen sink. Beside his presence, the only evidence that we owned a dog was a leash hanging on the key rack near the door.

All in all, Bobo’s life wasn’t all that bad, he lived indoors, got a daily can of delicious meat byproducts and I took him for several walks a day where he could sniff the telephone poles to see what the neighbors had been doing. The highlight of his day was barking at the milkman and the mailman.

I was thinking about this today on a trip to Costco. Of course, they have all of their holiday merchandise on display. As I was heading toward the back of the store, one item in particular caught my eye. It was an Advent Calendar for dogs. Instead of candy or toys waiting behind the 24 little doors as in a calendar for children, there was a gourmet dog treat. Further back in the store was a selection of luxury dog beds and a wide variety of dog foods and treats.

Pet stores used to be tiny storefronts that sold a few goldfish and some canaries along with a few dog collars and leashes. Today’s giant pet emporiums have an incredible selection of items for our “fur babies.”

They have aisle upon aisle of toys. Their food selection is mind boggling, as is their collection of pet clothing. The furniture section has all manner of pet beds including electric blankets to keep Rover and Fluffy nice and comfy.

Pet ownership has become a lifestyle. People wear t-shirts emblazoned with their pet’s picture and cover the tailgates of their cars with stickers proclaiming their love of their pets. More and more, I am seeing dogs just about everywhere I go. I see four footed shoppers at Home Depot, and at other retailers.

Communities have set up dog parks where pooches can socialize. I have a friend that has a “cat stroller” so he can take his kitty out to explore the world.

This all seems a bit silly to me but I have to admit that my house isn’t immune to this madness. We have three cats that we inherited when my mother-in-law passed away. We own cat furniture and they have a selection of cat beds to choose from but seem to prefer napping in a clothes basket.

They are spoiled kitties and demand to be petted every time I walk up the steps. I go up a step and they go up a step, look me in the eye and begin to purr, what can I do?

Each evening at precisely 10:30 PM, they gather and start whining for their nightly can of “pate” cat food. This is not a request, it is a demand; they are very entitled cats. I saw a plaque at the pet store that read, “Dogs have owners, cats have staff,” our kitties are in complete agreement with this statement.

Recently, one of our cats was having trouble eating. After a trip to the vet and $600 worth of feline dentistry, she was just fine. I couldn’t help but wonder what my grandfather would have said about this. He was a man who pulled some of his own teeth with a pair of pliers, I am not sure he would understand sinking that much cash in to an alley cat’s mouth.

Surveys about pet ownership has found that these days most people think of their pets as members of the family rather than as a possession. They fill a hole in our lives, when we are tending to our pets we don’t have time to think about our problems.

During the coronavirus quarantine, pet ownership has gone up. Usually overcrowded, animal shelters have now emptied their kennels and cages. This is a good thing, I hate to see any animal suffer.

One thing has changed for sure, in 21st century America, living a “dog’s life” isn’t such a bad thing!   

- Jim Busch

October 28, 2020

I picked up a copy of the Pittsburgh City Paper today. I usually just skim through it to see what’s going on in the city’s arts community. Of course, with most of the city locked down, there isn’t much to skim.

This week I read something I have never seen in this paper, an eulogy. The article was a tribute to Alex Waters Gordon, the paper’s former managing editor. The coronavirus pandemic has been hard on all businesses but it has virtually crushed print publications.

This led to Gordon being furloughed after five years at the paper as they tried to control costs. Hannah Lynn, one of Gordon’s coworkers, wrote the tribute of him because he recently took his own life.

The article in the City Paper didn’t say why he committed suicide. I am not sure that we ever understand why anyone chooses to end their life. Most of us do everything in our power to keep body and soul together. Suicide is incomprehensible to so called normal people, we simply can’t understand how someone can kill themselves.

I doubt that even the people who kill themselves fully understand their actions. Even if a person leaves a suicide note behind, we can’t rely on what it might say. Like everything else we humans do in life, people have an agenda in mind when they pen their final words.

They may want to ease the suffering of their family and friends, trying to be sure they won’t blame themselves for pushing a person to kill themselves. Others might go the other direction, writing a note calculated to inflict guilt and emotional pain on those that tormented them during their lives. We simply have no way of knowing why someone does something so desperate.

There may be a trigger event, but in most cases it’s not just one thing that pushes a person over the edge to oblivion. In recent decades, science has found that genetics have a big influence on our mental state. Just like some of us are born with blue eyes, some of us are born with chemical imbalances in our brains.

John Moe, the author of the Hilarious World of Depression describes this as having “a brain that is trying to kill you.” Brain chemistry is incredibly complex which is why trying to control mental health with pharmaceuticals is so difficult. Those of us who are born with the right chemical cocktail in our heads will never know what this feels like.

External factors are not as much of a predictor of suicide as internal factors. This explains why people who "have everything to live for” often end their lives. People who are successful and who have loving families sometimes fall prey to the demons inside their brains.

Robin Williams was extremely intelligent and one of the most successful entertainers of our time when he hung himself. He had a loving family and close friends but he suffered from mental disease and addictions throughout his life. Williams just couldn’t bear the pain any longer.

Stress is a major trigger to people who have self-destructive urges. The coronavirus pandemic is one of the most stressful events that most of us have experienced. Nothing is more stressful than change, psychologists have found that even happy events in our lives like getting married or having a child raises our stress levels.

The virus has changed just about everything and few, if any, of the changes are good. We are increasingly isolated and many of us like Alex Waters Gordon take a financial hit from the collapsing economy. For many people, losing a job means more than losing a paycheck, we also lose our purpose in life.

According to the piece in the City Paper, he was dedicated to his profession and found great satisfaction in being a journalist. Being engaged in an absorbing task means we have no time to listen to the demons inside us.

I have seen this before. I graduated from McKeesport Area High School in 1970. I went to college and later pursued a white collar career but many of my classmates, like their fathers and grandfathers, went to work in the steel mills.

While I was racking up student loans, they were making good money and getting on with their lives. A couple of months after graduation, they were making a better living than our teachers. It was a good way of life and they were proud of what they did.

The work was hard, but in our community, “mill hunks” got a lot of respect.  They didn’t know it then but they were the last generation who would get to live this blue collar dream and the world they knew was about to disappear.

Within a few years, the steel mills which had lit up the night time sky in the Mon Valley were gone. The gates were locked and the furnaces began to fall. Times were tough in the region, at one point the infant mortality rate in the valley was higher than in most of the third world.

Unemployment checks ran out and you couldn’t buy a job. Guys who had the world by the tail with a boat in the driveway of their suburban houses started wondering how they were going to feed their families.

It didn’t help that everyone they knew was in the same boat, this just added to their sense of hopelessness. From 1979 to 1987, the Pittsburgh region lost 133,000 jobs, half of them were steel workers. The unemployment rate in the Mon Valley pushed 30%, as high as it had been during the Great Depression.

The collapse of the steel industry led many people to leave the region in search of jobs in the South or other parts of the country. Others chose to leave this life all together. Before our 20th reunion, more than a dozen of my high school classmates had committed suicides. Others had overdosed or died in suspicious one car accidents.

This was common all over the steel region. In the early 1980’s, I worked for an industrial valve and fitting company. I was calling on the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill in Aliquippa with my manager. We had arranged to take a buyer out to lunch and were waiting for him to meet us when his assistant came into the office and told us we would have to leave.

His tone was very serious and he quickly showed us to the door. The next day, I called the customer to find out what had happened. He told me a worker who was about to be laid off had committed suicide in the plant and they had to shut the whole place down.

I later learned from some of the guys on the shop floor he had done “a Magarac.” This is a reference to the legend of Joe Magarac, the steel industry’s equivalent to Paul Bunyan. Magarac was a giant of a man who could lift ladles of steel in his big arms and shape white hot iron rails between his fingers.

In the story, Joe met his end by jumping into a hot ladle of steel adding his flesh and blood into the mix to make the best steel ever produced. This is what the despondent steel worker had done, he walked out onto a cat walk above a ladle of white hot molten steel, climbed over the rail and dove headfirst into the cauldron, instantly vaporizing himself.

After an argument over whether doing this would be painful or not, they told me that by killing himself in the mill, his wife and daughter would receive a bigger insurance payment. None of them seemed surprised by his death, they all knew workers who had killed themselves.

We are approaching a quarter of a million deaths from the coronavirus. The doctors tell us if we stay home and close our businesses, we can save lives. I am sure this is true but I am afraid that this shut down may also cost some lives.

For those suffering from clinical depression and other mental diseases, sitting alone in the dark, worrying about one’s finances or if they will ever find meaningful work can be just as dangerous as Covid-19.

Just like wearing a mask can save us from the virus, there are steps we can take to show those we care about, and ourselves, from acting on suicidal thoughts. According to the Center for Disease Control, there are several simple things we can do to try to prevent suicides.

We can ask those close to us if they are having suicidal thoughts. Suicide is a taboo subject and most people shy away from the subject, but openly discussing these feelings can help the depressed person to shake them off.

If you get a sense that someone may be planning to hurt themselves, stay with them and reduce their access to the means of ending their life such as weapons or drugs. Simply being with them can help, don’t try to lecture, it is more important to listen to them.

Encourage them to seek professional help; encourage them to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). It is important to maintain your connection with the depressed person when they try to push you away.

These are tough times for us all. They are especially dangerous for those who have mental health problems. If we are all going to make it through this pandemic, we must look after one another, both physically, mentally and spiritually.

     - Jim Busch

October 27, 2020

This evening I got to hang out with some of my favorite people, at least virtually.

I took part in a ZOOM meeting with the Tube City Writers. Last month we were actually able to get together as my grandson says “IRL,” in real life. If it wasn’t for the masks and the social distancing it was almost like the good old pre-Covid days.

We were able to share stories and chocolate chip cookies on the second floor of the former Daily News building in downtown McKeesport. With the number of coronavirus cases on the rise again, we opted to meet virtually, as we have been hearing far too often, out of an abundance of caution.

The Tube City Writers is made up of local people who have an interest in writing and journalism. I have a background in the newspaper industry, but no experience is necessary to join. The group is sponsored by the McKeesport Community Newsroom which in turn is sponsored by Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation.

Point Park has taken the lead in keeping local journalism alive and well in the age of social media and a changing media environment. The McKeesport Community Newsroom’s mission is to “support citizen journalism and storytelling by residents of the Mon Valley’s largest city and surrounding areas.”  The Tube City Writers brought together two of my favorite things: my fellow Mon Valley folks and storytelling.

I have enjoyed being part of the Tube City Writers since my very first meeting. The first thing that struck me was the diversity of the group. We had both white and black people involved and the ages ranged from a high school student to several of us old retirees.

While most of us have lived in the Valley for our entire lives, several of the writers had moved here from other cities. We all shared two things in common, a love of our region and an interest in telling a good story.

Several members of the writers group also participate in the Mon Valley Photography Collective. The collective is also sponsored by the McKeesport Community Newsroom and like the writers group they are interested in documenting life in the Mon Valley.

The difference is that instead of using words to tell the region’s story, they use photography. Both groups benefit greatly from the guidance of Martha Rial, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who serves as the newsroom’s project manager.

Before the Covid lockdown, the Tube City Writers would gather every few weeks at the former Daily News building. The building, which was built in 1938, played a major role in the history of the Mon Valley for over 71 years.

It is the perfect location to inspire stories about McKeesport and the surrounding areas. Dr. Nicole Peeler, a published author and a professor at Seton Hill University, facilitated the meetings and led the group in writing exercises.

The group worked through the spring and fall to collect and polish their stories of life in the Mon Valley. The Tube City Writer’s first major project was a public reading of their stories. They invited the public to the lobby of the Daily News building in November 2019. The well attended event got rave reviews from all in attendance.

After a brief holiday hiatus, the Tube City Writers began working on their next project early in 2020. Like everything else in the country, the coronavirus put an end to the Tube City Writers’ meetings in person.

Mon Valley people are nothing if not resilient and adaptable. Through the spring and summer we met via ZOOM and when things calmed down a bit, outdoors in McKeesport’s Renziehausen Park. The meetings were enjoyable, interesting, and properly masked and socially distant.

Our gatherings were also productive, in spite of the pandemic we were able to create an anthology of Mon Valley stories to be published this month.

The coronavirus has impacted the Mon Valley like the rest of the country. To document the disease’s impact on our region, the McKeesport Community Newsroom launched this project. These “Corona Diaries” are intended to document the impact of the coronavirus on the Mon Valley.

Reading and writing these daily doses of sanity has helped to keep me from going bonkers during the lockdown. Today’s entry is the 223rd diary published on this website. It is the work of the Tube City Writers with photos from the Mon Valley Photography Collective. It has built a steady readership from people trying to make sense of what is going on in the area during these difficult times.    

Currently the Tube City Writers are working on a collection of profiles of Mon Valley residents. I have enjoyed learning about the fascinating people who are my Mon Valley neighbors. This next project promises to be another success for the McKeesport Community Newsroom.

I feel honored to be a member of the Tube City Writers. They not only have given me a chance to tell my stories but belonging to this group has introduced me to a group of incredibly nice and incredibly creative people.

Spending time with them has not only helped me to improve my writing but it has made me a better person. It has expanded my understanding of life in the Mon Valley where I have lived almost my entire life. I now know what it is like to be a freshman in today’s high school or what it’s like to teach school in the 1970’s.

After being a member of the Tube City Writers for the last year and a half, I have come to believe that the only thing that would make the group better is to have more people sharing their stories.

When I was a child, I remember watching a detective show on TV called the Naked City. The opening of the show featured an opening narration that went, “There are eight million stories in the naked city and this is one of them.”  I don’t know if there are eight million stories in the Mon Valley but I know there are an awful lot of them. It would be a shame to let these stories go untold.

If you live in the Mon Valley area, I suggest you consider sharing your personal story with your neighbors. I know some of you will say to yourself, “No one would be interested in my story.” I will let the great American writer, Mark Twain, answer that one for me. Twain said, “There’s no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility.”

None of the people in our group are celebrities, we have lived ordinary lives, earning a living and raising our families. In our group, we have shared hundreds of stories, each one more interesting than the next.

Some people might say I am not a writer. If you are reading this, you have all the skills you need to be part of the Tube City Writers—a basic understanding of the English language. Years ago, I read something about writing that stuck with me. “What is the difference between a writer and other people? Writers write!”

That’s all there is to being a writer, you just have to pick up a pencil or put your fingers on a keyboard and begin typing. Only a few of us have any writing experience or training. Most of the group never published anything before joining. We are just ordinary people telling ordinary stories in ordinary language.

I am going to finish this post with a shameless plea for you to join the Tube City Writers. It is a great way to meet and become friends with interesting and creative people; a great way to learn more about your hometown and in these quarantined times, you don’t even half to get out of your pajamas.

Most of all, it’s an awful lot of fun. If I have not convinced you yet, it’s time to bring in the big guns, beloved author and poet Dr. Maya Angelou, who said, “There is no greater agony than having an untold story inside you.”

See you on ZOOM at our next meeting on November 10.    

 - Jim Busch

October 26, 2020

I am considering contacting a medium to conduct a séance for me. I want to contact my long dead parents to tell them that they were wrong—my English literature degree finally came in handy.

My parents always told me that I should study something that would possibly be useful in my adult life. Well, it’s been 50 years since I started college, but my choice of major finally paid off today. Since I’m retired, it didn’t help me land a job or a promotion but it did let me help a desperate teenager do his homework.

It started yesterday when my niece, Stacey, sent me a text saying, “Does George kill Lennie in the end of Of Mice and Men? to which I responded, “Shouldn’t you read the book?”

In the series of texts that followed, she explained that she actually didn’t have the book. Her son, Sawyer, had listened to an audiobook of the story and needed to answer some questions about it for his English class.

Sawyer is 14, the same age as my grandson, Max. Due to the coronavirus quarantine, Sawyer is attending school online like Max. My grandson rather enjoys going to school from the comfort of his bedroom. He misses his friends but likes the freedom of studying remotely.

He attends Mt. Lebanon High School. His school district is well funded and has a robust information technology department. Their remote learning system is well designed and well run, minimizing the number of technological glitches Max has encountered.

Max has some other advantages that many other kids who are studying remotely may lack. Both of Max’s parents are well educated and technologically savvy. My son is a bit of a geek and even before the Covid lockdown worked a great deal from home. He has a very good Wi-Fi setup and he bought a good computer setup for my grandson.

He and my grandson spend a lot of time online so Max has become very knowledgeable about computers. Max has a quick mind and is an excellent student so when his school closed last spring, he had no problem adapting to the online format.

Sawyer, on the other hand goes to school in Mercer County. His school lacks the funding and technology that more affluent districts can bring to bear on the problem of educating their students remotely. Also, neither of Sawyer’s parents have worked in positions that required them to use computers on a regular basis. They lack the experience that my son and his wife have acquired in their careers.

My niece’s home also has limited connectivity which can be a problem with two kids simultaneously studying at home. Both Sawyer and his sister, Seneca, are using school district issued Chromebooks which are not as fast as Max’s state of the art laptop.

Sadly, technology is not Sawyer’s biggest challenge with remote learning. In September 2016, Stacey heard Sawyer calling to her in the middle of the night. She stumbled out of bed to meet him in the hallway, he told her he had a “bad headache” before collapsing in her arms.

She rushed him to the local hospital emergency room. The doctors there examined him and immediately called for a Life Flight helicopter to take him to Children’s Hospital 80 miles away in Pittsburgh.

The helicopter only has room for the patient so Stacey and her husband, Scott, left their daughter with her grandmother and sped down I-79 to be with their son. By the morning, they learned that an artery in Sawyer’s brain had burst requiring emergency brain surgery.

The doctors told the distraught parents that Sawyer might not survive the operation and that if he did, he would likely suffer permanent brain damage. They couldn’t predict the outcome of the surgery but that he would not survive without it.

Sawyer spent most of that day in surgery. In the coming weeks, he had several other emergency operations as new problems cropped up. After a few touch and go weeks, the doctors were finally able to stabilize him. As the doctors predicted, he had suffered some permanent brain damage.

They had feared that he might be paralyzed or be unable to speak but he was able to use his limbs and to talk but he lost much of his vision and had trouble processing and recalling information.

Stacey spent over a month sleeping in a chair in his hospital room and then several months in a rehab center. Sawyer finally came home just before Christmas. Sawyer sat out the rest of the school year using the time to regain some of his strength.

He returned to school the following August, almost a year after his attack. My niece worked with the school district to develop a program to help Sawyer learn. The district provided him with an aide to help him navigate the school and to read his lessons.

The teachers took extra time with Sawyer in an attempt to help him retain his information. Even with this assistance, school was stressful for Sawyer and he was having trouble keeping up with his classmates.

When the pandemic hit, Sawyer’s school began using distance learning. Like most districts they struggled to get the program off the ground and they didn’t worry too much about grades. This fall, the school district allowed parents to choose to send their kids to school or to allow them to continue remote learning.

Stacey chose to keep her kids home. After what she had been through, she wasn’t taking any chances with her kids. Unfortunately, Sawyer is missing the personal attention he got when he was in the school building. Staring at a Chromebook all day is straining his already impaired vision. His mother tries to help him as much as she can but his inability to process and recall his lessons is frustrating.

I don’t know what anyone can do to help Sawyer learn his lessons. The difference between his situation and my grandson’s shows why solving the problem of schooling our children during a pandemic is not simple.

Every child is different and no “one size fits all” plan will work for all of our kids. All I know is that I worry about Sawyer’s future and the future of all the kids who are losing so much during this terrible time. 

- Jim Busch

October 25, 2020

My big accomplishment for today was buying a dozen bagels. These weren’t just any bagels, they were “Pink ribbon” bagels from Panera Bread.

They are only available in the month of October and my wife, my daughter, and her wife really like them and of course, I never met a bagel I didn’t like.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month which is why they are only available then. They are rogue bagels, instead of being shaped round like normal bagels, they are shaped like the ribbons people wear to show their support for this worthy cause.

The bagels are made with dried cherries and vanilla which gives them their pink color as well as making them quite yummy. By buying these bagels, I was not only pleasing my family but doing some good for the world. Panera donates a portion of the proceeds to breast cancer research.      

I’ve always loved bagels. I am old enough to remember when most people in this area had never tasted a bagel and probably had no idea what a bagel was. In those days, bagels were only available in Squirrel Hill, which at that time was Pittsburgh’s Jewish enclave.

When my kids were young, I would take them to the main Carnegie Library in Oakland. If they were good and kept the whining to a minimum, I would treat them by stopping at Bageland on the way home.

Bageland was a Pittsburgh institution for decades. Located halfway between the Parkway and Forbes Avenue, they were on Murray Avenue in the heart of Squirrel Hill, it was the only place I knew that sold bagels in the city. Visiting Bageland was a real multi sensory experience.

Most of the store was filled with baking equipment, big ovens and huge silver kettles of water where the bagels were boiled before baking. This process make traditional “water bagels” chewy on the outside and soft in the middle.

Customers had to squeeze in to a tiny area in the front of the store. Bageland was a popular spot and was always crowded, especially on the weekends. The air was filled with the delicious aroma of fresh baked bagels as I twisted and squeezed my way to grab a number from the dispenser on the sales counter.

The place was a flurry of activity, women wearing white dresses, white aprons and hairnets took the customers’ orders and filled big brown paper bags with their selections. The smelly onion bagels went in smaller separate bags. Every so often, they had to stand aside as one of the bakers came from the back of the shop with a metal basket of steaming hot bagels.

Perhaps because of the physical nature of their work, the bakers were all big men. They were dressed all in white with round paper hats on their heads and bulging biceps protruding from the sleeves of their white t-shirts.

The bagels were displayed in rotating circular bins behind the counter. A hand painted sign listing the types of bagels available was posted on the pole above the bins. The selection was much more basic than the bagels available today.

They sold plain, egg, raisin, cinnamon and everything bagels. Asiago cheese or bagels crusted with a thick crust of brown sugar was nowhere to be seen. The bagels were also much smaller and would fit easily in the palm of my hand.

It would take two of them to equal one of today’s monster bagels. Their size changed the ratio of the surface area to their interior volume making Bageland Bagels delightfully chewy.

As the ladies behind the counter called out customer numbers, I pressed my kids to decide what kind of bagel they wanted. The atmosphere of Bageland was a lot like a hospital emergency room on a busy Saturday night.

With wave after wave of customers streaming through the door, the folks behind the counter didn’t have time to dilly dally with indecisive customers. I would place my order and then fight my way through the crowd like a wide receiver trying to reach the end zone without being tackled.

Once in the car, my wife would hand everyone their choice of bagel. Because they were so busy, the bagels were usually warm and they were always delicious. We always talked about bringing a container of butter and a knife but never did. It didn’t matter, it’s hard to imagine anything more delicious than a warm Bageland bagel shared with the people I love.

Like so many small local businesses, Bageland fell prey to national competition. Once the only bagel game in town, starting in the 1990’s they had to compete with chain stores like Breugger’s, Einstein Bros and Panera. Quite frankly, the bagels sold at these places were not as good as a Bageland bagel but they were convenient, and allowed customers to sit down and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

To make matters worse, supermarkets got into the act selling bagels in their bakeries and freezer cases. Bageland tried to compete opening a satellite location in the South Hills but the handwriting was on the wall. Even though they have been gone for decades, I can’t drive down Murray Avenue without lusting after a warm Bageland bagel.

We are very privileged to live in 21st century America. We can have just about anything we want at any time we want. Once, we had to wait until summer to enjoy the taste of watermelon, they are now available year round.

I can remember sitting up late at night to watch a favorite old movie, now I just have to say the name of almost anything I want to watch into my remote control and it appears on my screen. I can find any book or just about anything else I want from Amazon.

I can remember my sister telling me about how delicious Mexican food was when she had gone to Texas to visit her husband’s family. I hoped that someday I might get to try a taco or an enchilada. Now I can get any kind of food I want from Cuban to Vietnamese either in a restaurant or at the grocery store. We are living in a virtual smorgasbord.

I am not complaining, we truly live in an age of marvels, but I am concerned that we are like King Midas who took great pleasure in acquiring golden objects for his collection.

Once he was given the “Midas Touch” and everything he wanted was literally at his fingertips, they lost their appeal. Having to drive to Pittsburgh for a bagel or sitting up for a movie made them special. I am afraid that when everything we want is available to us 24/7/365, they will lose their charm and their appeal.

        - Jim Busch

October 24, 2020

Today, we celebrated my daughter’s 45th birthday, but I feel like I got a gift. She was born on October 25, but she was having a celebration at her home tomorrow so we had her for dinner this evening.

Rachael’s birthday has always been a big event in our family. Somehow everyone else’s birthday celebration was limited to one day. Rachael’s birthday somehow always seemed to expand to a month long “nativity festival.” I

’m not exactly sure how this happened, but Rachael always liked being the center of attention. I think we all decided to play along with this because the joy she expresses when receiving a gift or when celebrating with friends and family is infectious. It bubbles over from her soul and flows into everyone around her.

Rachael’s “festival” usually starts in the beginning of the month. We always got her small gifts and cards throughout the month. Increasing in size and frequency as the big day approached. This started when she was a toddler and I always thought that this tradition would eventually fade away as she grew older.

I was wrong! Rachael is now nearing her half century mark and works as a professional counselor helping people overcome trauma and psychological issues.

I think one of the reasons that everyone loves Rachael is that despite the fact that she is a very responsible adult, she has always managed to remain a child at heart. When she arrived for dinner today, she was wearing sparkly mermaid makeup on her face and had a silver “Birthday Girl” tiara on her head.

My wife, Glenda, has been ill for a little over a year and seven months ago was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. She endured a round of chemotherapy and recently was hospitalized for a severe infection. During her hospitalization she put on 39 pounds of water weight leaving her legs and abdomen painfully swollen.

Glenda is in constant intestinal distress and has lost all of her hair. Perhaps the biggest change I’ve noticed in her is that she is always tired and spends a great deal of her time sleeping. My formerly energetic and inexhaustible wife now spends most of her time dozing in her recliner or on the couch.

I have taken over the laundry, caring for our pets and a good bit of the cooking. This drives my wife absolutely nuts. She has never been overly impressed with my housekeeping skills and feels like she should still be doing these things in spite of her illness.

She simply doesn’t have the strength to keep up with her regular chores. The cancer, the chemotherapy, the infections and all the drugs have stolen her vitality.

Today, Glenda rose with a “Cancer be damned” attitude. She had two things that she wanted to do and nothing was going to stop her from achieving them. Some people like to say, “I’m going to do this or that, even if it kills me.” In Glenda’s case I was afraid this was literally true.

Glenda’s first goal was to cast her vote. Neither of us have ever failed to vote in a single election since we turned 21. The pundits and the politicians keep repeating that 2020 is, “The most important election of our lifetimes.”

Glenda and I are both inclined to agree with this. Given her health and her weakened immune system, we agreed a trip to our regular polling place was not a good idea. In spite of the Covid-19 and the cancer, she had no intention of sitting this one out.

Several weeks ago, I voted at the remote polling site in South Park. At the same time I dropped off Glenda’s application for a mail in ballot. Glenda’s ballot finally arrived this week and she quickly filled it out, she is definitely not an “undecided voter.”

This morning, she got dressed, squeezed her swollen feet into a pair of shoes, pulled a knit cap over her bald head, grabbed her cane and we were off. We drove to the remote polling place at the Boyce Park Ski lodge.

It occurred to us that this was the first time in months that Glenda had been out of the house other than to go to a doctor appointment or a treatment session. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of a line when we arrived so I dropped my wife at the curb.

Glenda approached a county police officer and told her she just wanted to drop off a ballot. Seeing her cane and her missing hair, he personally took her directly to the ballot box. She was in and out of the polling place within minutes. During both our visits to remote polling sites, we were impressed with the dedication and professionalism of the county election board staff. This seemed like a simple task but it required a major effort on her part.

Once we got back home, Glenda started work on her primary objective for the day. Glenda was determined that she was going to make dinner for “her baby girl.” The menu for Rachael’s birthday meal never changes. For over 40 years it has consisted of roast chicken with all the fixings, stuffing and stuffing balls, cranberries, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, homemade applesauce and corn.

It is not a coincidence that this was also Rachael’s grandmother’s favorite meal. When Rachael was a little girl, Eleanor was our family’s primary chef. The roast chicken feast was her idea of the perfect meal so she always made this for “her Rachael.”

My wife planned the meal for days. She ordered two fresh roasters from Lampert’s Market and sent me off in search of fresh whole cranberries for the sauce. She wrote out a full menu with a list of the required ingredients.

I was sent to the store several times until she had all the necessary “fix’ins” for Rachael Fest 2020. The night before the dinner she started preparing the stuffing bread and chopping the vegetables.

After we got back from the polls, Glenda got to work in earnest. She cleaned and stuffed the chickens, made the cranberry sauce and boiled the potatoes. She spent most of the day on her feet in the kitchen.

I saw her wince in pain now and then but she never stopped. She was at it most of the day, only taking a few breaks to put her feet up. By the time Rachael and her wife, Kathy, and their friend Gabe arrived, the meal was in the oven and the kitchen smelled scrumptious.

Normally, we gather around our kitchen table to celebrate Rachael’s birthday. This year we enjoyed our meal at socially distanced TV trays spread out through the living room. After we had eaten and Rachael had opened her presents, it was time for dessert.

When Rachael was young, Eleanor would make her beautiful figurative cakes. The subject was based on what Rachael was into at that point in her life. We had kitten cakes, Holly Hobbie cakes and Cabbage Patch Dolls cakes. All traditions evolve over time and at some point when Rachael was in high school, we switched over to making Baked Alaska for her birthday.

The night before, Glenda had baked a yellow cake for the base. She also softened a half gallon of strawberry ice cream and formed it into a mound in a stainless steel bowl. After dinner, Glenda laid down the cake and placed the ice cream on top before covering the entire dessert with her signature “Italian meringue” and popping it into the oven. It came out golden brown and delicious and was enjoyed by all.

Even though it was her birthday, Rachael had done the dinner dishes. Before going home, she made me promise to clean up the mess from making the dessert, which I did. As soon as she left, Glenda collapsed into her chair completely exhausted. She smiled at me and said, “I think Rachael enjoyed her birthday,” and I agreed.

Glenda protested a bit as I went to the kitchen to clean up but I told her she had done enough. Her legs were horribly swollen and painful.

As I did the dishes, I thought about what a nice day it was. I thought how lucky I was to have found such a good woman to spend my life with. A woman who would push through her pain to make sure her child had a happy birthday.

I delighted in seeing how happy she was to be in the kitchen caring for her “chick.” It took me back to happier times and made me hope that we will be able to do it all over again next year.       

- Jim Busch

October 23, 2020

Well, it finally happened, Covid-19 killed Santa Claus.

It’s not surprising, he was very susceptible to the disease, he was overweight, he was a smoker, his job involved a great deal of travel and public contact plus he was really, really old. Santa is mourned by Mrs. Claus, eight tiny reindeer, several hundred elves and millions of children around the globe.

The paragraph above may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is true that the pandemic has certainly killed off a lot of cherished holiday traditions. Today, the City of Pittsburgh announced that its 60th annual Light Up Night was cancelled. This comes after Macy’s Department store announced that its Thanksgiving Day parade would be severely curtailed.

Instead of winding through the streets of New York, the parade route will cover only two blocks to limit crowd size. They also announced that this year will be the first year in living memory that children won’t be able to sit on Santa’s lap in their stores.

Light Up Night has been a long standing tradition for my family. We would often meet my son and daughter in the city, check out the store windows, and wander through the Christmas Market before capping off the evening by watching the fireworks show.

Given the current circumstances, we would not have attended this year’s holiday kick off even if the city had not cancelled it. Like most Americans, we also probably will be doing very little in person shopping this year. This year a “Merry Covid Christmas” will look very different from how we celebrated in past years.

So far the coronavirus pandemic has had a big impact on Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. Our picnics have been cancelled or if we do get together, they were smaller and more spread out. We’ve stayed closer to home and avoided trips to visit relatives and vacation spots.

Countless community gatherings, parades, picnics, carnivals and other popular events all have been cancelled. On the whole, this has been a pretty boring summer. The loss of these events has hurt many people.

Fireworks companies have lost the lion’s share of their income as have many of the vendors who work the carnival circuit. 2020 may go down in history as the year without a funnel cake.

With no end in sight, the coronavirus pandemic will continue to impact all of our upcoming holidays. Many communities are struggling over how to handle trick or treating on Halloween. Virtually anyone who grew up in America has fond memories of roaming their neighborhood in costume collecting candy in a pillow case.

It would be tragic if this virus doesn’t allow the current generation of kids to experience Halloween. Local officials are struggling to come up with strategies to allow trick or treating in a responsible socially distanced manner.

My daughter, Rachael, loves decorating for the holidays and usually goes all out for Halloween. She has been busy with work this year and was a bit late putting out her “Haunted Graveyard’ in the front yard.

She was getting the mail when a neighbor walked by and asked her if the pandemic meant she was going to decorate this year. He was very pleased when she told him she planned to decorate her yard the following weekend. She said he was afraid of losing another tradition to the disease.

My daughter lives in Versailles Borough and they have decided to allow trick or treating on Halloween night. They caution people to be careful but they didn’t want to disappoint the children. I spent a good part of today building a “Candy Chute.”

Using an eight foot long plastic drain pipe I made a way to deliver candy to the trick or treaters at a safe social distance. I made two cradles to attach it to the hand rail next to her front steps. When the little ghosts and goblins appear, all Rachael will have to do is put a candy bar in the tube and it will slide down the chute until it exits out of a bat’s mouth.

I saw a similar, but much longer set up on  television which used the exhaust of a Shop-Vac to propel the goodies over thirty feet to the waiting children. If nothing else, the pandemic has sparked the creativity of the American people. 

Apparently, the big problem with Thanksgiving is a shortage of anorexic turkeys. For years, Thanksgiving has been the time of the year when families gathered in large groups requiring equally large turkeys. This year people are reticent to travel and/or to gather in large groups.

Our most popular image of Thanksgiving is Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, with a big family gathered around a table as their grandmother presents them with a platter holding a monster turkey. This year we are more likely to FaceTime grandmother while enjoying a tiny bird with the same people we have seen every day for the last eight months.

This has created an unexpected demand for small turkeys. As one farmer told a reporter for Marketplace Radio, “It’s not like I can tell my birds to stop growing.” We all might be eating leftovers until January.

My father-in-law was a bit of a “Grinch.” He used to say, “I don’t know what all the fuss is over Christmas, it’s just another day.” This is true about every holiday, in theory they are just another number on the calendar, but the human heart never paid much attention to theories.

Holidays are milestones; they are how we mark our passage through life. We like the sameness of holidays, we always carve a pumpkin on Halloween, eat turkey on Thanksgiving and put the same decorations on the tree every year.

These traditions help us hold on to a little of our past as we slide inexorably into the future. This year will be different. To protect ourselves and our loved ones from the coronavirus, we will have to let go of some of our traditions.

Hopefully, we can go back to our old holiday ways next year. I think it will take more than a year’s hiatus to force us to give up something so important to our lives.

Maybe Santa is like Tinkerbell, if we really believe we can bring him back to life.    

  - Jim Busch

October 22, 2020

We had a rare midweek treat tonight, my son, Jesse, and my grandson, Max, came to dinner and for a visit. Normally, they stop by on the weekend but my grandson was away at Boy Scout Camp. It was a very pleasant several hours.

Of course, one of the things we discussed was the pandemic which affects each of us in different ways. My son has been working from home and my grandson hasn’t been in a school building since last spring. During the discussion, my son started talking about a long list of dystopian visions of the future.

Jesse started talking about the potential of additional pandemics sweeping over the world. He then moved on to the worst case scenarios stemming from climate change. He talked about how large parts of the U.S. may become uninhabitable due to water shortages and excessive heat.

Jesse went on to describe how changes in the jet stream due to global warming will actually make the Great Plains too cold to support agriculture. If this wasn’t bad enough, he pointed out that the migrations and resource shortages caused by these changes will lead to destructive wars.

The world my son was describing sounded like the plot of some very dark science fiction film; a cross between Dune, Blade Runner, and Brave New World.

I tried to damp down the conversation. My son is an extremely intelligent person. In fact, he is the most intelligent person I’ve ever met but he tends to be very pessimistic. He takes a dark view of life and I worry about the impact this will have on my grandson.

I am very gratified to see the relationship between my son and his son. Max respects his father and recognizes just how smart his dad is. My fear is that he will learn to dread the future from this doom and gloom outlook.

I am no Pollyanna myself, I am a realist. I know the world is a tough place and that we are facing some major challenges in the coming decades. I never thought that complaining about things that have not happened yet is very productive.

I have to admit that as I grow older that it becomes harder and harder to be an optimist. When I was Max’s age, I thought both the world and I had brilliant futures ahead of us. My vision of the future looked a lot like the one that Captain Kirk lived in.

I thought we were on the road to a multicultural world where poverty had been eliminated and science had cured most of the world’s ills. When I got a little bit older, I thought the Age of Aquarius was just around the corner, my generation was going to bring about;

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

In case you have not noticed, my generation pretty much got everything wrong. We are not all living in communes and singing folk songs around the campfire every night. We have trashed the planet and live in a country that is anything but harmonious. Even though I’m still waiting for my Mystic Crystal Revelation, I’m glad I came of age in an optimistic time.

 If one can’t be an optimist when they are very young, I fear for them later in life. Adolescence is all about dreams for the future. It is the time when we begin dreaming about what our lives will be when “we grow up!”  

A teenager should be picturing themselves as being successful, living in a beautiful house or apartment and partnered with the person of their dreams. Very few of us are living in the world that we imagined when we were 14 years old.

We have all discovered that life is not the full time party that we imagined it to be, but those dreams were a comfort during a rough period in anyone’s life. Those dreams are the carrot that help keep us motivated while slogging through high school.

Some of the dreams we conjure up as a teen last well into our adulthood and add spice to our lives. I feel sorry for any kid that has their dreams crushed at any early age.

As I said above, it’s hard to stay optimistic when one is getting close to one’s expiration date. I keep asking my wife if I’m old enough yet to starting acting crotchety. I think I could be a delightful curmudgeon. If the neighbors’ kids weren’t all in their 40’s, I might even tell them to “Get off of my lawn!”

My wife says she will let me know when I can be grumpy so I guess I’ll have to remain at least a bit optimistic. I am also not ready to wear plaid Bermuda shorts with tall black socks and sandals yet, so I guess that is okay.

Actually, having taken nearly 70 trips around the sun does offer some evidence that it doesn’t pay to be too pessimistic. I have faced far too many existential crises to believe every Armageddon story I hear. I can’t recall how young I was when I heard that the Russians were going to blow up the world.

Even in kindergarten, I knew that hiding under my little desk with my hands over my eyes wasn’t going to save me from a hydrogen bomb. When I was growing up, all the grownups said Pittsburgh would be one of the first places to be destroyed because of our defense industries.

Fifty- eight years ago almost to the day, President Kennedy went on TV and told us about the Russian Missiles in Cuba. We expected to be vaporized within the week. One year later JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas and many of the news people on TV mused that perhaps this was the first move in a Russian plot to decapitate the U.S. government before launching an attack.

The year 1968 was one long doomsday scenario filled with assassinations and riots. I can remember my dad and grandfather loading the deer rifles and shotguns to defend our home from the disgruntled masses streaming out of McKeesport. We were not going down without a fight. After the Democratic convention and the ruckus in Chicago, there was no doubt that American civilization had come to an end.

The next end of life as we know it came during the Arab oil boycott of 1973. This was followed by a number of pending environmental disasters. We were waiting for Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” to explode and leave us with no food.

He believed the earth had reached its carrying capacity and the burgeoning population would destroy us all. We were all going to die from smog and then the hole in the ozone layer was going to do us in.

It seemed a shame that after millions of years the earth would finally be destroyed by the excess use of hairspray. The earth would not end with a bang but with an up do.

The list goes on and on, we have faced destruction from inflation, global warming, terrorists, chemical pollution, earthquakes and forest fires. The diseases that were going to wipe the human race off the face of the earth, included AIDS, Ebola, SARS, West Nile, as well as bird, swine and Asian flu. 

Of course, we can’t forget about rogue asteroids crashing into the earth and wiping us out like it did to the dinosaurs or a deadly alien virus brought back from the moon by the Apollo astronauts. I didn’t think the ever present nuclear threat could get worse but then Carl Sagan told us about the impact of nuclear winter.

The new millennium came with a brand new reason to pull the covers over our heads—Y2K. All the computers in the world were going to crash and turn us into medieval serfs.

The year 2000 also introduced the possibility that the apocalypse was just around the corner. A number of Christian groups believed that the biblical end of times was here. They were joined by other spiritual groups like those who believed that the ancient Mayas had said the earth had reached its expiration day.

There were more ways for the earth to end than there were to skin a cat, but in any case, we were going to be just as dead as that proverbial cat.

After preparing myself for total annihilation so many times only to be disappointed (but not very much), I have learned that things are seldom as bad as they look.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated.” Some people enjoy hearing distressing stories about the end of the world, but as for myself, I like stories with a happy ending.

I don’t know how and though things may change, I think the world will stick around for a long, long while.  

 - Jim Busch

October 21, 2020

I came very close to dying today. My entire life passed before my eyes and I realized what a boring life it’s been.

The location of my near demise was the intersection of Route 148 and Westinghouse Avenue. I stopped at the red light on Osborne Street and waited to cross the highway to Westinghouse. When the light turned green I started to cross the road when I caught something in the corner of my eye.

It was a very large four wheel drive Dodge pick-up truck with a chrome push bar on the front, two tall exhaust pipes belching black diesel smoke, and an oversized Trump 2020 flag fluttering from a pole attached to the trailer hitch. I hit the brakes as the truck blew through the red light right in front of my bumper. Had I been a bit quicker on the gas pedal, he would have “t-boned” me.    

I was saved in part by instinct and in part by experience. I pass through this intersection quite often because it sits at the bottom of the hill where I live, it connects my neighborhood to the outside world.

I see people run the light on almost a daily basis.  Very few people actually drive across Route 148, most of the traffic comes down the hill and makes a right turn toward McKeesport. Cars coming from my neighborhood are hidden by a commercial building on the corner so drivers coming from town can’t see us.

Fortunately, only a few cars use Osborne Street reducing the odds of a collision when someone runs the light. None the less I have seen dozens of accidents, including some serious ones, at this crossroads over the years.

I have read the statistics about how most accidents happen within a half mile of home. In my case, I’m absolutely sure this is true; this intersection scares the devil out of me.

There is no doubt that I am a recovering English Major. After a brief flurry of choice words passed through mind, I got to thinking about the deeper meaning of my near death experience. First, I thought about the main character in the very short story I had just lived through.

What was his motivation? (I didn’t see the driver but I assume it was a man driving the truck because it was the type of vehicle designed and accessorized to enhance the male ego.) Where was he going in such a hurry?

I imagined that his wife was giving birth at that very moment and he didn’t want to miss that special moment. Perhaps, he was the only one who knew how to stop a nuclear meltdown at a power plant and he was in a hurry to save Western Pennsylvania from being wiped off the map. It was more likely that he was in a hurry to get a Big Gulp at 7-11 or was rushing home to watch Dr. Phil.

Like so many things in life, I am sure that if I had been able to catch up to him and actually ask him why he ran the light, the answer would have been some variant of “because I felt like it!” Running red lights, littering, refusing to where a mask and other similar antisocial behaviors are all rooted in poor impulse control.

People who do these kind of things are just plain old selfish. They are only interested in what feeds their ego and don’t care how their actions impact others.

The cars we drive say a lot about our personalities. I was not surprised that I was almost run over by a monster truck, the people who choose to drive a vehicle that sucks down gas like an aircraft carrier and requires a stepladder to enter do so because they want to tell the world that they are alpha males.

This image is enhanced by “God, guns and guts made America great” or blatantly chauvinistic bumper stickers. Nothing says “Hey ladies, I’m a real catch” like mud flaps featuring the chrome silhouette of a naked woman in a provocative pose.

The other frequent offenders are luxury and sports cars. The late singer/songwriter Bill Morrissey wrote about this in his song Car and Driver:

“I'll bet you a ten, even a fiver / You find the car, I'll find the driver…

My BMW draws applause / I am not bound by traffic laws”

While I have been cut off by Toyota and Hondas, I have noticed that this is the exception to the rule. I am mostly blown off the road by high performance vehicles or expensive luxury sedans. There seems to a direct relationship between the price of a car and the aggressiveness of its driver. Perhaps, they have to hustle to make the payments.

The University of California Berkley has actually done research on this phenomenon. By reviewing traffic camera footage they discovered that expensive cars were four times more likely to enter an intersection when they didn’t have the right of way. This number actually increased when they were supposed to yield the right of way to a pedestrian.

Follow up studies found that the wealthier people were, the more likely they were to cheat on contests where there was a prize, keep the money when they were given too much change and, believe it or not, take candy from children.

The researchers postulated that wealthy people felt more entitled than less successful individuals. There is also a possibility that this behavior is one of the reasons that they become successful, that they have no problem cheating and stepping on their competition. 

This tracks with a study conducted by Dr. Tomas Chaamorro-Premuzic that found that as many as one in five corporate CEO’s demonstrate psychopathic tendencies.

I think that one no longer needs to be wealthy to feel entitled. We live in a “wanna be” age. Many people identify with the people they see in media. When leaders tell them that they are special because of their race, their political beliefs or some other cultural marker, they tend to believe them.

The traditional link between freedom and responsibility has been shattered. It is against the law to run a red light but the chance of getting a ticket for doing so is very slim. The police can’t be expected to sit at every traffic signal 24/7.

There are two reasons good people stop on red, first they don’t want to be in an accident but also they feel it is only fair to take ones turn. It is this simple courtesy that makes our highway system and our entire society function.

When saving a few minutes becomes more important than obeying societal rules, things begin to unravel. On tonight’s news, I saw a video of a man punching an airline employee who asked him to put on a mask.

Individual rights are important, having agency over our lives makes living far more satisfying but it is also important that we respect the rights of others.

We will all be happier in a world where everyone stops on red and wears a mask to protect others.   

  - Jim Busch

October 20, 2020

With Halloween less than two weeks away, I was thinking about the meaning of the word mask. Twelve months ago if I had asked you to close your eyes and picture a mask, the first thing that would have come to your mind is a Halloween mask. Today, when you do this exercise, chances are that you pictured some sort of medical mask.

Language is constantly evolving, the words we use today vary greatly from those used by our parents or grandparents. Any major event changes our language. World War II introduced words like “Blitz,” “Snafu” and “Spam.”

The turbulent 1960’s gave us terms like “the heat” for police, “drop out” for people who rejected normal society and “bummer” to describe an unpleasant experience. The coronavirus pandemic has already changed almost every aspect of our society and especially our language. Many new words have been coined or old words have taken on new meanings.

Of course, the two words that have dominated our conversations are “coronavirus” and “Covid 19”. The term coronavirus was first used in 1968 and referred to a group of viruses that cause a number of different diseases in humans. Though the term is over 50 years old, its use was limited to the scientific community until the pandemic struck the U.S. earlier this year.

The word went from being virtually unknown to dominating our language in a matter of weeks. Once any word becomes so common, it spawns new slang terms. I have heard people say, “I’m wearing a mask because I don’t want to catch the rona,” and in some areas catching the disease is known as “meeting Miss Rona.”

The name of the disease is actually a form of scientific slang. It is a made up word, Co is short for Corona, Vi for virus, d for disease and 19 for the year when the disease was first identified. The name came from the World Health Organization.

I’ve noticed that many people refer to the disease as “the Covid.” Again, this is an esoteric scientific term that has entered the vernacular. Of course some people have called Covid by other names. In nationally broadcast speeches, the president had called it the “China Virus” or even the “Kung Flu” referencing the suspected origin of the virus.

In one online post, I saw Covid called the “Boomer Remover” because older people are far more likely to die from the disease.

One of the strangest new terms to come out of the pandemic is “Covid Party.” A Covid party is an unmasked social gathering where some of the guests have tested positive for Covid-19. The idea is that the guests, who are usually young and relatively healthy, will contract a mild case of the disease which will pass quickly.

They believe that this will give them immunity to the disease so they can go on with their lives. The people who attend these parties are worthy of my favorite new term to come out of the pandemic. People who don’t take the coronavirus pandemic seriously are definitely “Covidiots.” 

Measures taken to protect us from the pandemic have also entered the language. Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) is not only a part of our vocabulary, it is part of our regular wardrobe. At the beginning of the year, no one knew what PPE was.

It is likely if you said you had personal protective equipment, many people would assume you were carrying a concealed firearm. A “N95” could have been a type of military aircraft or a new experimental drug.

Prior to this spring, “quarantine” conjured images of small pox epidemics with people locked in their homes dying of a deadly fever. Self-quarantining is a totally new concept entirely.

Another term that is new to us is “Social Distancing.” The term was first used in a sociology textbook to describe an attitude rather than an actual physical distance. A socially distant person was aloof and disliked interacting with someone they considered their social inferiors.

Not so long ago, a person who refused to allow anyone within six feet of them would have been thought to suffer from a mental disease. Social distancing sounded like some paranoid, obsessive compulsive disorder.  Now, it is how we live our lives.

The word “Zoom” had been completely transformed. It used to mean to go quickly. It was the sound that little kids playing with their Matchbox cars made while pushing them on the carpet. It certainly didn’t mean a way to conduct a business meeting from home while wearing sweatpants. One thing for sure, “Zoom” no longer means to go fast, it is now associated with frozen screens and technical glitches.

The pandemic has certainly expanded the meaning of “essential” or “frontline” workers. To be on the “front line” used to be reserved for military personnel in a war zone. Now, the “front lines” include a supermarket stock clerk putting tomato soup cans on a shelf.

The pandemic has taught us that the people who make sure we have toilet paper or who mop the floors in a hospital are just as important to the functioning of our society as a stock broker.

Perhaps, the most important change in our language is our new way of defining “heroes.” We used to think of heroes as the people who go to a war zone, run into a burning building or face armed criminals. With a deadly virus running rampant through our country, anyone who exposes themselves to the public is putting their life on the line.

Today, it takes as much courage to change the sheets on a hospital bed or to work the checkout counter at Rite Aid as it does to respond to a fire call. The new threat is frightening because it is invisible and we can never be sure when the danger is present.

We have had to rethink how we define who is a hero or a heroine, because there are a lot more people who are risking their lives every day for others, often for people they don’t even know. This is the definition of a hero before, during and after the global pandemic.

  - Jim Busch

October 19, 2020

About once a month, I go to Barnes and Noble to check out their magazine selection. Magazines are about the only thing I buy there anymore.

Even though I don’t intend to make a purchase, I always browse the sections where the types of books I like. I jot down the titles that interest me or take a picture of the cover with my phone.

When I get home I get on the computer to see if the library has these titles in their collection. If it isn’t available in the Carnegie Library system, I will place an interlibrary loan request. If it is a title I want to add to my collection or give away as a gift, I will look it up on Amazon to compare prices.

I feel guilty about treating Barnes and Noble this way: it is just short of shoplifting.

I have been a lover of bookstores since I have learned to read. When I travel to another city, I always check out their art museums and their used and independently owned bookstores.

When most people go to San Francisco the highlight of their trip is usually Fisherman’s Wharf or Chinatown; I remember a wonderful bookstore in Ghirardelli Square that specialized in art and architecture books. On a trip to Philadelphia, I found a delightful store that sold nothing but new and vintage cookbooks.

My first bookstore was located across the railroad tracks from Balsamo’s market in downtown McKeesport.  Book Sale had an eclectic collection of books on all subjects at deeply discounted prices. It was crammed into a tiny space but every square inch of the store was crammed with books.

I didn’t know it then but Book Sales was a remainder store. They sold the books that other stores had returned to the publishers because they had not sold. This is why they didn’t carry the latest best sellers but had a lot of the history and how-to titles that I liked.

This book store taught me how to live beyond my means, I would spend my allowance and then beg my mother and dad to buy me a book or two which I could not afford.

By my teenage years, downtown McKeesport was in decline and people had begun shopping at the mall. I could jump into my $75 1959 Ford Fairlane and drive to Monroeville and hang out at the mall.

I thought Walden books was absolutely beautiful. It was brightly lit and the books were neatly shelved and well organized. They also had a much better selection of magazines than the local drug store. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven.

When I started dating my wife, I was dead broke but we could afford to walk around the mall and maybe buy a cookie or some ice cream. I knew I had found a perfect mate when I discovered that she liked to browse the shelves of Walden Books as much as I did.

I spent my first two years of college at Penn State McKeesport. The campus was much smaller in those days so the campus bookstore was a glorified closet filled with textbooks and a couple of notebooks. I transferred to Pitt for my junior year and discovered their well-stocked university bookstore.

I was married and working full time when I was a Pitt student so I don’t have happy memories of spending time with my friends at the “Dirty O” or going to football games.

My fondest college memories revolve around spending time in the bookstore when I had time between classes. While Walden’s collection was made up of popular titles that would sell, the Pitt bookstore had titles that appealed to the diverse interests of the academic community. As a wanna be intellectual, I loved the place.

After leaving college, I moved to rural northern Pennsylvania. I found myself in a bookstore desert. The closest thing to a good bookstore was a newsstand located in Titusville. It featured a lot of magazines with fish or buck deer on the covers, but occasionally I found something worth reading. Whenever we came home to Pittsburgh to visit the family, I would slip away and revisit my old love, Walden Books.

We returned to McKeesport to raise our kids. As they grew older, we would take them to the mall and allow them to pick out a book every payday. We taught them by example to love books and bookstores. By this time, Walden’s was joined by B. Dalton Books. I took a job downtown Pittsburgh and would spend a couple of lunch hours every week browsing at Atlantic Books. Life was good.

When my children were in Middle School “Super Book Stores” reached Pittsburgh. Our big Friday or Saturday night family outing was a pilgrimage to the new Border’s Books near South Hills Village. My wife and I, my two kids, my mother-in- law and even my father-in-law would join us for a fast food dinner.

Eleanor, my mother- in- law was also a book lover but my wife’s father was not. We would convince John to join us because he liked the Birds Unlimited store in the same strip mall. While we shopped for books, he would sit and thumb through a hunting magazine.

The Border’s store was a palace. It was two floors of books with comfy reading chairs and an in store coffee shop. It featured a big wood burning fireplace and an incredibly large selection of books. We would occasionally go to Borders to listen to an author read their works. Within a few months, another Borders opened in Monroeville. It was not as cool as the South Hills store, it lacked a fireplace, but it was far more convenient.

Our favorite bookstore of all time was Twice Sold Tales. My wife and I opened our store in Swiss Alpine Village in Elizabeth Township. It was a small used book shop but it was all ours. The owner of the village had built it on the property where he grew up.

His family home was located in the middle of the u shaped shopping center. Our landlord offered us a deal on the house so we moved our store there. My wife turned it into a very friendly store. We had couches and comfortable chairs. The old kitchen was filled with cookbooks.

It was the bookstore of our dreams. We had story hours and other events and made great friends with our customers.

After a number of years, we moved the store to Smithfield Street in Boston, Pa. The store wasn’t as cute as our previous shop but it was an efficient space and a much better location. We never made a fortune but we loved the store.

When my father-in-law died, my mother- in-law started coming to the store with my wife. She loved working in the store, especially reading to our little customers while their mothers took a few minutes to browse the shelves. She would have long conversations with other widows which was therapeutic for her and her new friends. There is no nicer group of people in the world than book worms.

We eventually sold the store when my son and his wife told us that they were going to have a child. My wife liked selling books but thought the Grandmother business would be even more enjoyable.

The people who bought our store didn’t realize how much work was involved in running a store. They kept cutting back hours until eventually they closed for good. Fourteen years later, we occasionally run into our old customers who still lament the demise of Twice Sold Tales.

The last 15 years have been hard on the bookstore industry. Amazon has taken away most of the business and they have found it hard to cover their overhead. Most of the super stores have closed and Borders, B. Daltons, and Walden’s have all closed.

Barnes & Noble has managed to hold on but only as a shadow of their former glory. I don’t really consider them a bookstore, but a toy and gift store that happens to sell books as well. They sell stuffed animals, collectibles and games.

Once crowded, today I saw one other customer during my visit. Even the magazine selection is much smaller. I noticed that the magazines were spread out to fill the space and make the selection appear greater than it actually was.

In the last few years, a new generation of independent bookstores like Amazing Books in Pittsburgh have started to reappear. They are fighting the Amazon empire by offering outstanding service and interesting events.

I wish them well. I can’t imagine living in a world without a bookstore to while away the hours.

 - Jim Busch

October 18, 2020

I have a confession to make, I am addicted to Coke. Not the powdery kind from South America, but the sweet syrupy kind from Atlanta, Georgia. Since I have been a teenager, there have been few days in my life that I have not had one or two Coca-Colas.

I come from a long line of addicts. Many of my ancestors, on both sides of my family, were alcoholics. Drinking was a big part of our working class culture. From the time I was 12 or 13, my dad tried to get me to have a beer with him.

I am not sure if my dad would be considered an alcoholic or not. He didn’t touch a drop of liquor from Monday through Friday. He never let drinking interfere with work. His first drink of the weekend came shortly after midnight on Friday.

He would stop by the White Oak American Legion on his way home from his second shift job at Westinghouse. A cold beer and something to eat was his way of celebrating the end of another work week.

Saturday night was my parents date night. They would go to either the Legion or to the White Elephant, a legendary nightclub on Lincoln Way in White Oak. My dad would polish his dress shoes and put on a sport coat and a tie; my mother would doll herself up spending an hour doing her hair and make-up.

She put on a pretty dress, her best jewelry, and high heels. Her most prized possession was her mink stole and I think she always hoped that weather would turn cool so she could justify wearing, “her wrap.”

They would leave me with my grandfather as a babysitter. We would watch studio wrestling together; my grandfather was a big fan of Chief White Eagle. I can still hear him telling me, “This can’t be real, if a fella jumped down on another fella like that, it would kill him,” but nonetheless he never missed an episode.

My grandfather went to bed after we watched Gunsmoke and left the TV to me. I would stay up to watch Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille’s Chiller Theater. I was never a fan of scary movies but I liked his cast of characters and bad jokes.

I was usually up when my parents came home. My dad was usually “five sheets to the wind” as he described it and my mother was a bit tipsy. In those days, drunk driving didn’t carry the same stigma as it does now. I often wondered how he managed to get home with our big Pontiac in one piece.

On Sunday afternoons, it was my grandfather’s turn to go drinking. After church, we would stop at Feig’s Bakery for sweet rolls and donuts for breakfast. While my mother cooked our Sunday dinner, my dad would take my grandfather to the Coultersville Fireman’s Club. This was where a bunch of my grandfather’s old cronies hung out.

They would spend the afternoon drinking and “shooting the bull.” When they came home, dinner was ready and both my dad and grandfather were a bit cooked as well. My mother was not the best cook so maybe there was an advantage to deadening their taste buds.

There was no doubt that my Uncle Tommy, my mother’s brother, was a full on alcoholic. He lived with my grandmother after his divorce and I liked spending time with him. He had traveled all over the country and had even been to jail a time or two.

He seemed more adventurous and interesting than most of the men I knew when I was growing up. My mother didn’t like her brother and worried that he was a bad influence on me. It turned out that Tommy did have a big influence on me and it was far from bad.

Tommy more or less lived on alcohol. The only nutrition he got was the lunch my grandmother fixed for him to take to his job as a mechanic at Mooney Volkswagen in McKeesport. When he got up, he was too hung over to even consider eating breakfast. He would just gulp down a couple of cups of black coffee and leave for work.

On his way home, he would stop at Henry’s Tavern for his usual, a double shot of Corby’s whiskey with two Stoney’s beers for a chaser. For dessert, he would drink several glasses of muscatel wine. Sometimes he would repeat this performance a couple of times before staggering home to my grandmother’s house to fall into bed without his supper.

Eventually, my uncle’s abuse of his digestive system caught up with him. He developed stomach cancer and died a horrible and painful death. Tommy had no money for a hospital and his dishonorable discharge kept him out of the VA. My mother nursed him at my grandmother’s house and I can remember him screaming in pain in the upstairs bedroom. It made a big impression on me.

I think Tommy is why I never accepted my dad’s offer to drink with him. This might have been supplemented with a touch of youthful rebellion as well. In my entire life, I may have had two glasses of wine, neither of which I enjoyed.

I also rejected my parent’s other vices, I never liked coffee or tea and I find smoking to be a disgusting habit. Every flat surface in my childhood home held an ashtray. From the windowsill in the bathroom to the kitchen table, there was a foul smelling metal or ceramic ashtray that required emptying several times a day. In the kitchen, where my grandfather smoked his Marsh Wheeling Stogie cigars, an empty three pound Maxwell House coffee can served as a spittoon.

Avoiding these addictions may have saved my life. Smoking killed both of my parents. I always enjoyed a Coca-Cola, when I was a kid I was allowed to have one on Friday night when I was watching Star Trek. I liked its acidic bite and its syrupy formula satisfied my sweet tooth.

Sometimes when I got my allowance, I would ride my bike to Aaron’s Pharmacy and buy a 35 cent Popular Mechanics magazine and read it while sipping a 15 cent Coke at the soda fountain.

My addiction to colas kicked into high gear when I was in high school and college. I was working almost full time while going to school and seldom managed to get enough sleep. Since I didn’t drink coffee or tea, Coca-Cola was my only source of energy boosting caffeine.

This coupled with the sugar rush helped me get everything I needed to get done accomplished. I didn’t realize at the time that caffeine is a highly addictive substance; some doctors say it is even more addictive than heroin. I spent my career working long hours in a high stress business so caffeine remained a big part of my lifestyle.

I could get away with this when I was young and constantly on the go. As I got older, all the sodas started to show on my ever expanding waistline. I never liked the taste of diet sodas and I told myself that the chemicals in the low calorie drinks were harmful, without thinking about what was in “The Real Thing.” When I tried to go “Cola Turkey” and stopped drinking pop, my caffeine starved brain punished me with severe headaches.

I have come to think that maybe I would have been better off drinking gin after all. My body is not as resilient as it once was. I have to mend my ways and I am trying to cut back on my soda intake. This has taught me that though my body is telling me that I have to quit drinking pop, my addicted brain responds, “You’ll take my Coke when you pry my cold dead fingers off this red and white can.”

Addiction or no addiction, I am resolved. I am done with the demon cola. Get thee behind me, caffeine and sugar. I am done with you!

Well, maybe after just one more little sip. 

- Jim Busch      

October 17, 2020

For the last few days, there has been a nip in the air that told me that winter was on its way. It was time to get ready for the winter. The first item on the agenda was getting our furnace ready for winter.

For many years our house lacked central heating. It was originally heated by a wood fired kitchen range and a “Warm Morning” coal fired stove. My mother- in -law remembers waking up to freezing temperatures in the house until her mother and father got the fires burning.

By the time I came along, the house was heated by a gas heater supplemented with portable kerosene heaters. We did not have to deal with freezing temperatures in the morning but this solution was less than ideal.

Some years back, I purchased a gas furnace from a plumbing supplier along with a supply of galvanized sheet metal. I put in a gas line, installed the furnace and a thermostat. I put in some floor registers and turned the sheet metal into ductwork. To demonstrate her absolute faith in my ability as a plumber, my mother-in-law went to visit her other daughter for a week when I first fired it up.

Today’s tasks were much simpler. I removed the furnace’s access panel vacuumed the heat exchanger and replaced the furnace filter. I then cleaned out the floor registers and changed the batteries in the thermostat.

I turned up the thermostat to force the furnace to come on as a test. It started right up and we were ready for winter—bring on the snow. This was much easier than the work we needed to do to get our heating system ready for the winter when I was a boy.    

Growing up getting ready for the winter made me feel like I was an important member of the family. It made me feel almost grown up to do some of the jobs that I had seen my dad and grandfather do when I was younger.

I liked how physical labor made me feel manly. Jobs like raking leaves where it is easy to see that you are making progression can provide a real sense of satisfaction.

We did not get a gas furnace until I was a junior in high school. Prior to that time, we had a monstrous coal furnace in our basement. It was about six feet in diameter with four big heating ducts and a chimney flue protruding from the top.

It looked like it belonged in the boiler room of the Titanic. It was big and grey and made a dull roaring noise. Two heavy cast iron doors provided access to the firebox and to the ash pit near the floor. The fire door had a sliding grate that let us check the flames without fully opening the door. Most of the time, my grandfather took care of the fire. When he opened the door to throw in a log or a shovel of coal, a blast of heat hit you in the face and a beam of flickering yellow light would flash into the murky basement.

My grandfather would fiddle with the damper on the flue and the vents on the ash door to keep the fire burning vigorously. The furnace was equipped with a collection of long handled pokers and a hoe shaped ash rake. One of my jobs during the fall and winter was to carry the coal scuttles of ashes up the basement steps and to the back of our yard.

Of course, the big furnace needed a steady supply of fuel. Several times a year, my dad would order a load of coal to be dumped in our side yard near the steel door that led to our coal cellar. To save money, my dad bought “run of the mine coal.”

This meant that the coal hadn’t been sorted into chunks of a uniform size. Most of the coal was shovel size lumps but there were always some big pieces too big even to pick up. It was my job to load the coal into coal cellar in our basement. I loaded the smaller pieces with a short handled “Paddy” shovel.

The big blocks of coal I had to break up with a 12 pound sledge hammer. It may sound strange but I loved doing this. Most young boys like smashing things with a hammer and I was no different. I delighted in seeing the blue black blocks shatter under the force of my blows. It was sweaty, dirty and glorious work. When I was done, my face was streaked black with coal dust. .

My dad worked part time for a landscaping company. During those years, the Dutch Elm disease was killing many of the elm trees that had been planted for shade trees in local yards and to line the streets. The company my dad worked for was paid to cut down many of these trees.

My dad “did his boss a favor” and let him dump the logs in our yard. Of course, my dad used the wood to supplement our coal supply through the winter. He knew that elm was a cleaning burning wood that burned hot and left very little ash.

When I got old enough, the job of splitting and stacking the elm logs fell to me. Another thing I learned about elm logs is that they are devilishly hard to split. Elm has a tight, straight grain that resists being separated. These days most people who burn wood for heat have a hydraulic log splitter powered by a gasoline or electric motor.

I had a set of wedges and my trusty sledge hammer. This job gave me a real appreciation for Abraham Lincoln, our rail splitting president. The tools I used were not much different than the ones old Abe used on the frontier.

The process was simple. I’d hold a big forged steel wedge upright on the end grain of a log and tap it in with the sledge. I would “choke up” on the sledge, holding my hand close to its metal head. I would gently tap the wedge until it was stuck firmly in the log like a nail. Swinging the sledge over my head, I would drive it deeper and deeper into the log until a crack opened up.

Many woods would burst apart at this point, but not the tenacious Elm logs I was battling. I had to keep adding more wedges into the cracks until the first wedge had opened up. Sometimes, I had to chop away the fibers of the log with a hatchet to complete the job.

Once I had the logs split, I tossed them through the coal chute door into the basement. Once they were inside, I had to go into the coal cellar and stack them on the wall opposite the coal pile. If we had too much firewood to fit in the basement, I stacked it outside. My dad showed me how to stack the wood bark side up so that the water would run off instead of soaking into our fuel supply.

I have told my grandson about what it took to heat my house when I was his age. His reaction was pretty much the same as if I told him that I rode a pterodactyl to school.

I am glad I had this experience because it was good exercise and taught me how to stick to a job until it’s done. It came in handy when my wife and I lived off the grid when we were first married.

To tell the truth, at this point in my life I am quite glad that when the house gets chilly, all I need to do is push a button on my digital thermostat to make things toasty warm again.       

 - Jim Busch

October 16, 2020

Like most suburbanites, my backyard is fully furnished. We have a metal picnic table complete with four chairs and protected by a large umbrella. Several other chairs grace our patio and there are three more in a second patio near my garden.

These all get regular use when we have friends or family over for a cookout. In the cool of the evening, I like to sit on the back patio and read or just listen to the birds in the tree above my head.

There is one more chair in my yard which no one has sat in for over 20 years. It is an outdoor rocking chair made of heavy duty aluminum tubing and green plastic webbing.

These days it might be considered a retro design as its design shouts that it dates from the 1960’s. Though it is more than five decades old, the chair is still in good condition and quite sturdy. A long time ago I use to sit in it occasionally and if I remember right, the chair was very comfortable. I keep the chair clean and cover it over every winter, but I never sit in it.

I don’t sit in the chair because it is “John’s chair.” John was my father-in-law, he died in January of 2000, just four months short of his 75th birthday. He last sat in the chair the summer before and the chair has been empty ever since. Somehow, I have never been able to bring myself to sit in that chair in the 20 years that he has been gone.

The story of how the chair came to be in my backyard is a typical John Bereczky story. John was a frugal and resourceful man. He was always busy, staying productive even after he retired. If he saw something of value alongside the road, he would toss it in the back of his truck and bring it home. This is how he acquired his chair. John’s original intention was to cut it up and add the frame to his aluminum scrap pile.

When John took the chair out of the truck he looked it over and he liked the way it was made. Its aluminum was sturdy and solid and its rockers were long and graceful. Only a few of the blue plastic straps that formed the chair’s seat were intact. The others were broken and frayed making the chair useless in its present state. Rather than take a hacksaw to the frame, he set it aside for a while to consider its fate. It just seemed too good to throw away.

John had worked as a building superintendent for the McKeesport Area School District. He had become good friends with Ronnie Burns, the school’s wood shop teacher. Like many teachers, Mr. Burns had a side hustle to supplement his teacher’s pay. He worked at Levine Brother’s Hardware store in Homestead and always gave John his employee discount.

John went to see Ronnie about some plumbing supplies that he needed and somehow the subject of the aluminum rocker came up. Mr. Burns showed him a repair kit designed for these old chairs.

John bought the repair kit and brought it home. He carefully removed the remnants of the old webbing and then cleaned the framework of the chair. John was meticulous in everything he did; a habit instilled in him by his immigrant father and reinforced by his time in the Navy during World War II.

He then replaced the straps one by one securing them to the frame with sheet metal screws and special metal clips. Once the long straps were stretched tight he carefully wove in the cross pieces over and under the long straps.

The old chair was good as new, it became John’s favorite place to sit on those rare occasions when he actually sat down. He was usually busy, even when he was sitting in the rocker. I can still see him sitting in the chair sharpening his pocketknife on an oil stone or stripping the insulation off of scrap copper wire.

Even when John appeared to be sitting and relaxing with a cup of black coffee in one hand and an unfiltered camel in the other, the “wheels” inside his head were spinning furiously. John was not an educated man; he had left school, lied about his age and took a job in the Homestead steelworks at the age of 12.

He always told my kids about how his job was to shovel out the open hearth furnaces after a pour, while they were still hot. They never believed him when he told them about the wooden shoes he had to wear to protect his feet from being burned by the furnace floor. They gained a new respect for their grandfather when they saw a pair of these protective clogs on display at the Heinz History Center.

John was an incredibly thorough planner. He never put anything down on paper; he did it all in his head. If he had a project coming up, he would build it over and over in his head until he had every detail in his head. Once John and I built an 8 x 20 foot addition on a building and had it under roof over a three day weekend.

During the entire project, John never hesitated, he never paused between steps and knew exactly where every piece of wood and nail went. He had built this building dozens of times before in his head. When I saw him in his chair, I knew the next project was coming together in his fertile mind.

I am not sure why I keep the old chair around or why I don’t use it. Rocking chairs are an American invention and I think they are one of our best. I think we hold on to the things that belonged to our lost loved ones because fate doesn’t allow us to hold on to them.

Our memories are self-sufficient, they don’t actually need any props to help them do their job. Chair or no chair, I could never forget John. He meant too much to me, but still I hold on to the chair.

Somehow it seems to keep me connected to him. It allows me to fantasize that he will be back to sit in it. Somehow, I just can’t bring myself to sit in it.

It is John’s chair after all.

- Jim Busch

October 15, 2020

Today was a tough day. My wife started the second phase of her cancer treatment.

For the last few months she was part of an “investigational study” of a new chemotherapy drug. It was a blind study so we actually don’t know if she got “the real thing” or a placebo. The new drug was mixed in with a group of other standard chemo drugs so we don’t know if it was the experimental compound, the placebo or one of the drugs in the chemo cocktail which made her sick.

All we know is that my wife’s body couldn’t tolerate something the doctors were giving her. She experienced continual nausea and body weakness. To add insult to injury, the port the doctors installed in her chest to inject the medications became infected.

The infection spread to Glenda’s blood stream putting her in the hospital for eleven days. Either the infection or the treatment caused her to retain gallons of fluid. The skin on her arms and legs was stretched as tight as a fully inflated birthday balloon which makes it hard and painful for her to move about.

Glenda’s abdomen swelled to the point that her stomach was blown up larger than during either of her pregnancies.  Since she came home from the hospital, I have been administering regular IV antibiotics into a line in her arm and wrapping her legs to try to control the swelling.

After Glenda left the hospital, her doctors reviewed her case. A scan showed that while her tumor had not shrunk, at least it had not grown. They felt that the chemotherapy program was doing more harm than good. The doctor’s plan B was a round of targeted radiation.

We’ve put this on hold for the last month using the time to fight the infection allowing my wife to regain some of her strength. She has lost nineteen pounds of fluid but is still swollen and she is still very weak, but we can’t afford to wait any longer. This morning we got up at 6:30 a.m. and drove to see her oncologist and radiologist at Allegheny General Hospital.

With Covid-19 restrictions still in place, my wife had to go to her appointments alone. I dropped her off at the hospital entrance, stopped to buy a bagel for my breakfast and then drove to North Park to wait for my wife’s call.

I found a nice spot near the lake and ate my bagels. I had come prepared with a stack of reading material, so I sat in the park reading about Egyptian art and watching clouds of orange and yellow leaves float down after every little breath of wind.

I had hoped the beauty of the fall leaves and the reflection of the colorful trees on the shimmering surface of the lake would distract me from thinking about what was happening to my wife. I had only about three and a half hours of sleep so I reclined my car seat and closed my eyes for a brief nap.

After about 25 minutes the ringing of my phone jarred me awake. At first, I was afraid I had slept past the time that I should move closer to the hospital but a quick glance at the screen told me both the time and that it was my friend Ralph calling.

As soon as I answered the phone, I knew something was wrong. Ralph is a very enthusiastic person and his voice is very animated. Today, he was subdued and I had to listen closely to hear what he was saying. He and his wife had sent my wife a lovely flower arrangement and I responded by sending them a thank you card.

Ralph was calling me to thank me for the thank you. I asked him if he was feeling “OK.” It was obvious from his voice that he wasn’t “OK,” but it was the best question I could come up with in my drowsy state.

Ralph told me that he hadn’t been feeling himself for a few days. He was light headed and felt weak in the legs. I have known Ralph for a long time and I did not remember him sounding this bad when he was fighting colon cancer 15 years before.

I asked him if he had called the doctor and he said he was planning to do so later that day. He sounded concerned which is natural because Ralph has a number of risk factors for Covid-19. He is very careful because he is in his 70’s and has survived cancer on several occasions.

As retired salespeople, both Ralph and I are talkative people. If I call him just to set up a lunch date, our call usually lasts about an hour, sometimes longer. The fact that I was off the phone in five minutes is indicative of how bad he was feeling.

Ralph’s call hit me hard. It’s been a rough year for me. Even if the coronavirus would not have come to the U.S., 2020 has given me one sucker punch after another. For the last six month’s I have been dealing with my wife’s cancer diagnosis. This has taken a toll on me, both physically and emotionally. I think in many ways my wife has been handling her disease better than me. Nothing terrifies me more than the thought that I might lose her.

I got another body blow when my next door neighbor died. I had been friends with Karl for over 40 years and I always found him a fascinating person. He was a true eccentric in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac.

I miss our conversations, but most of all I can’t shake the thought of how he died. Karl died in his sleep listening to the radio on his back porch. I couldn’t see him because he was surrounded with wisteria vines. I smelled something dead and assumed it was a raccoon or some other animal. I was shocked to learn it was my friend. I feel terrible that he died alone.

Today’s news about Ralph hit me hard. He is my best friend and we share many things in common. We are both mill town kids that grew up to love art, history and culture. We were both proud of our work and love our families.

Ralph is a few years older than I am and has had a number of health problems. I have noticed his health decline a bit in the past year and I worry about him. His call today amplified my concern for him. I don’t want to lose another friend.

The things I have been experiencing this year are inevitable as one gets older, that doesn’t mean I have to like them… or accept them. I saw a t-shirt not long ago that read, “I thought getting old would take longer,” I wholeheartedly agree. I am not sure that I have the strength I need to get through what fate holds in store for me.

One of my very favorite movies is The Grapes of Wrath staring Henry Fonda. Based on the novel by John Steinbeck, the movie tells the story of the Joad family as they crossed the country from Oklahoma to California in an attempt to escape the depression era dust bowl.

In one scene, the family stop their dilapidated and overloaded old truck at a gas station to fill up their tank before crossing a wide expanse of desert. The gas station attendant tells Fonda’s character Tom Joad, “It takes a lot of nerve to cross the desert in a jalopy like that.”

Tom turns to the attendant, smiles, and says, “It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do.”

I have come to realize that I am at a “Joad Moment” in my life and whether I like it or not, I have got to cross the desert.

- Jim Busch

October 14, 2020

I am a nocturnal animal. I have always been a creature of the night. Most of these diary posts are written between midnight and 3 a.m.

Even in the days when I had to get up early for work, I had trouble getting to sleep before midnight. For many years, I got by on five or six hours of sleep during the week, going to bed at 1 a.m. and getting up at 6 or 6:30 a.m. Fortunately, I never needed much sleep, I would wake up before the alarm and hit the floor running.

I come by this honestly, my dad always worked the night shift. He did this by choice, although he had plenty of seniority, so he could have bid on a day shift job but he liked working nights.

He always said he did this because there were fewer bosses around at night to bug him and he liked the 50 or 75 cent per hour shift premium. I think he was just naturally a night person. I had to be in bed by 9 p.m. on school nights, although I could stay up and read as long as I wanted. This made me a nerdy little child.

On Fridays, I would stay up late watching old black and white movies on TV while waiting for my dad to come home. I would hear him come in the door between 1 and 1:30 a.m. He always had a big brown paper bag spotted with dark grease stains.

On Fridays, he would stop at the American Legion and order food to bring home. While waiting for the food, he would have a beer to celebrate the end of another work week and talk with his buddies. My mother would be asleep on the couch and we would share a feast at our kitchen table.

He would give me a bite of his burger or fish sandwich. Every once and a while he would bring home a basket of breaded shrimp, each one as big as my little boy hands. There was always a side dish or two fresh from the deep fryer which accounted for the brown spots on the brown Kraft paper bag.

They were hand cut French fries with lots of salt, onion rings that looked like my mother’s bracelets or, my personal favorite, fried mushrooms. I didn’t see my dad much through the week because he usually left for work before I got home from school. I enjoyed sharing a meal with him when the rest of the house was asleep.

Now that I am retired, I go to bed about 2 or 3 a.m. and get up at 9:30 or after 10 in the morning. I find that I am very focused and creative in the wee hours of the morning. I find that I can grasp complicated reading material after midnight and this is when I am at my most creative.

I often sketch out a design for a project or write while my wife is sleeping. I think that these nocturnal tendencies may be hard wired in my family’s genes. My son and grandson are both night owls. When Max, my grandson, stays over on a weekend I delight in sharing a late night snack with him and watching episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Perhaps because I am naturally nocturnal myself that I am so curious about what goes on in my backyard in the dark. My house is located on the edge of a large wooded area. I live in the Bryn Mawr section of White Oak. The woods that begin beyond my back fence extend almost unbroken to Route 30 in North Versailles. Over the years, this area had developed an active and diverse ecosystem.

Like me, our woodland “neighbors” like to sleep in the day time and to go about their business at night. I have a motion activated spotlight on my workshop building in my backyard. Through my picture window, I can see it come on and off many times when I am sitting at my desk in the early hours of the new day.

The light is responding to a steady stream of wildlife either traveling through my property or stopping there for a meal. I’ll notice that some of my flowers have been pruned back by the deer who stroll through every night. They are active in the early evening shortly before or after sunset. In the twilight, I have gotten to know them and sometimes after dinner, I walk the kitchen garbage to the cans in the alley that runs behind our yard.

I try to be quiet and watch the edge of the tree line. My neighbor mows the grass under the trees around her house to keep the brush down. This makes for ideal deer habitat and I often see them stepping out of the trees and grazing on the lush green grass.

Because they are well fed, the does are almost as big as milk cows and the eight point buck could land a job modeling for the cover of Field & Stream magazine. I have seen their droppings in my yard and the results of their snacking, so I am sure that their nightly routine includes passing through our yard as they explore their territory.

In addition to putting the trash in the alley, my nightly chores include throwing our vegetable peeling and other kitchen leavings into the compost pile. We use two cylindrical black plastic compost bins.

To our local scavengers, raccoons, possums and the occasional skunk these bins are the animal equivalent of a fast food restaurant. They climb up the side of the bin and then rummage about for something that suits their tastes.

Even if I bury the day’s fresh goodies, they use their nose to make their selection and their claws to get at them. I don’t mind this so much, everybody’s got to eat and I don’t appreciate them digging up my flowers in search of grubs and earth worms to supplement their diet.

I have another motion activated light on my side porch. Sometimes when I am up writing at night I will see it come on. I will sneak out to where I can see through our glass side door to see a big raccoon waddling by.

I have often though that I would like to have a night vision camera in my backyard to record the antics going on while the human world is slumbering. I imagine it looks a bit like a Disney movie with all kinds of animals singing, dancing and enjoying each other’s company.

In the winter when the snow is on the ground, I love trying to read the tracks to see what went on the previous night. I have seen fox, coyote and weasel tracks as well as those left by the regular visitors.

Last night I saw signs of a new visitor, a black bear. There is a narrow path between my workshop and my neighbor’s fence line. He is not too fussy about maintaining his yard so it is a bit overgrown. Several of the plants poked through the fence and extended into my walk. There was a big poke weed with several big bunches of Pokeberries or “Ink berries.”

These jet black berries are about the size of blueberries and grow in tight bunches six to eight inches long. They are poisonous to humans but many animals enjoy them. Birds will pick at the berries and deer will nibble at the bunches, but this morning the bunches were completely gone, stems and all.

Only one animal eats them like this, black bears. Once, in the Allegheny National Forest, I saw a bear eat dozens of these bunches like we would down a bag of chips.

I looked around for more evidence of my theory and found a small tuff of coarse black hair stuck on the rough siding of my garage. I also noticed a number of plants broken down as a big animal moved through.

I have never been afraid of black bears. Unless they are protecting their young, they are generally docile creatures. My guess was probably an adolescent male wandering around looking for a place to hibernate for the winter. This behavior helps them maintain genetic diversity by shifting the male’s territories around.

I only wished that I had caught a glimpse of him. I find them to be magnificent animals. I like the idea of sharing my property with so many wild creatures. It is like my yard is magically transformed into a natural wonderland when night falls.

My nocturnal menagerie makes me feel like my yard is part of a natural environment that existed long before we came here. In a world where the glaciers are melting and the rainforests are disappearing, it’s nice to think at least in my backyard that the earth is fighting back.

We nocturnal animals know that all the good stuff happens after dark!     

- Jim Busch

October 13, 2020

I spent a few hours today in my workshop. Some people would say I wasted several hours in my shop. My shop is a reflection of my character, it is both practical and whimsical.

It is a repository of useful tools and a stockpile of parts and materials that let me do household repairs and make many of the things we need around the house. If the vacuum cleaner conks out or my wife needs a shelf somewhere in the house, I can usually have the project done within a few hours.

Between what I learned from my dad and grandfathers, plus what I can glean from books and YouTube videos, I can handle, or at least attempt most jobs. I often like to repeat my grandfather’s words, “I can make anything but enough money, grow anything but younger and fix anything but a broken heart.”

My shop has saved us a good deal of money over the years. Long before “curbside pickup” became a thing during the coronavirus quarantine, I was practicing it during trash day. Many of our appliances and some of our furniture have been rescued from the landfill and repaired.

Other items came from secondhand stores or flea markets. I have found many older items when properly repaired are actually superior to some shoddily constructed and far more expensive items available in the stores today.

When I want to add a new item to my arsenal of tools, I justify it to my wife by reminding her of all the money the shop has saved us over the years. This is much like the old joke about the woman who comes home from the mall with a car load of boxes and bags and tells her husband, “You won’t believe how much money I saved you today!”

The truth is that I love tools. I love the heft and the feel of tools, the straightforward practicality of their design, the way a well-balanced hammer becomes an extension of my arm.

Most of all, I love how tools empower me to reshape my environment, to set things right or, even better, to bring something new into existence. I feel the same way about books. Both good books and well-made tools make me a better, more capable person.

My current workshop is my “Retirement plan.” Some people dream of moving to a warmer climate or seeing the country in an RV when they retire, but not me. Instead of fantasizing about cruise ships and golf greens, I daydreamed about belt sanders and wood lathes.

I spent the first two years of my retirement planning and building my dream workshop. Over the years, I have had a number of slapdash workspaces ranging from an old rabbit shed to a repurposed greenhouse. In anticipation of building my dream shop, I began collecting tools and machinery which my daughter graciously allowed me to store in her garage.

From a Pennysaver ad, I found a wonderful vintage pattern maker’s workbench complete with a huge vise. Sometimes when I was working at her house, I would go down to the garage and run my hand over the bench top and imagine the projects I would build on it. I think my daughter was as happy as I was when my shop was done.

I have been thinking about building a workshop for at least 50 years. As a ten year old, my shop was an old oak schoolteacher’s desk with a cheap clamp on vise. I can remember sitting on my bench and drooling over the annual “Dream Shop” edition of Popular Mechanics magazine.

The shop pictured in my head has evolved over the years. It has gone from pure workshop to a hybrid workshop/studio. In addition to machine tools and rows of hanging wrenches, my workspace includes a large drawing table and an easel. There is an artist’s taboret filled with paints and brushes.

To provide inspiration, the walls are hung with prints of works by some of my favorite artists. My favorite is my Van Gogh, a professionally mounted poster from an exhibition of Vincent’s work I bought for $1.99 with my senior discount at Goodwill.

When I was a young man, I was focused on practical things. As a husband and the father of two children, I carried a lot of responsibilities. I was very goal oriented and tried to make efficient use of my time.

The parabola of my life looked like Kennywood’s Jack Rabbit. I clanked up the steep incline acquiring more and more responsibilities. My kids grew older and they needed more things and took on new, and more costly, interests.

As I progressed in my career, I earned promotions which required more time and a totally focused effort. Just when my head was about to explode from stress, the roller coaster topped the hill and began coasting down the other side. My kids got through college and grad school and began their own lives.

Eventually, I reached a point in my career where I was in a senior position that allowed me to delegate some of my responsibilities. Finally, the car came to a stop at the retirement station and I could unbuckle my seatbelt and stretch a bit.

As I have gotten older, I have dedicated more and more of my time to useless, impractical things. Since this makes me sound like a bit of a sluggard, I like to tell people that now a days I have dedicated myself to whimsy.

I feel after 50 years of working to put myself through school and then raise a family, that I have earned the right to do things for no other reason than they bring me joy. I didn’t go full on Paul Gaugin and head off to Polynesia to paint bare breasted women in grass skirts.

I still keep up my home and help my family whenever I can. I still take writing assignments and continue to volunteer to teach advertising, but much of my time is spent drawing, painting, sculpting and doing craft projects.

Today, I spent the afternoon turning the pine tree next to my sidewalk into “Sprucilla, the Green Witch.” The inspiration for this project was a witch’s hat I found at a secondhand store. Its pointy shape set me in mind of the tree and the idea for “Sprucilla” was born.

I sat down and sketched out the idea, gathered together the scrap wood and paint I would need and then set to work. I traced my design on the wood, sawed them out on my band saw, sanded them to shape and painted them. Once all the components were dry, I assembled the pieces with carpenter glue and mounted them on the tree.

My workshop is equipped with an old boom box radio tape player. While I worked I listened to an unabridged audiobook of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit on cassette tape that I bought for 50 cents at the Saint Vincent DePaul store. I keep the old tape machine working because I find wonderful books for next to nothing in this obsolete format.

Today as I worked, I only thought either of the work I was doing or, if I was engaged in a relatively boring task like sanding, of Orcs and Goblins. It was a vacation for my mind that took me away from thinking about viruses, cancer antigens and politics.

What I produced is pure whimsy, it has no practical purpose or monetary value. It makes my family and neighbors smile and that is sufficient compensation for me. At this point in my life, I find more joy in the process than in the product of my labor.

In my shop, there is a Post-it note bearing a quotation from the English writer James Boswell that reads, “The pleasure of gratifying whim is very great. It is known only by those who are whimsical.”

I enjoyed wasting this afternoon, my only regret is that I did not take Boswell’s advice to heart when I was much younger.

- Jim Busch   

October 12, 2020

I had a doctor’s appointment this morning, sort of.

I have been seeing my endocrinologist every three months for the last six years. I drive to her office, hand over my medical cards, give them a credit card for the copayment and then settle down to read an old magazine.

After I scan a couple of out of date Cosmopolitan magazines in the waiting room, a nurse comes and weighs me before leading me to a treatment room to take my temperature and blood pressure. The nurse quizzes me on my recent health before telling me, “The doctor will be with you shortly” and leaves me alone.

After what seems like an eternity, the doctor comes in and we chat about my blood work and my general health. Dr. Matthews then scolds me about my weight before asking me to get on to the examination table.

Plugging her stethoscope into her ears and listens to my heart and lungs. She peeks into my eyes, ears and mouth. Just for good measure, she squeezes my ankles and checks my legs. After I get down and we discuss any changes, if any, she wants to make to my medications.

Dr. Matthews and general practitioners always have their staff schedule extended sessions with me. This is not because my medical conditions are especially interesting but because I tend to draw them into long conversations.

They just like to talk to me and we get into subjects like philosophy, psychology and history. It is in their power to cut these conversations short, but I think they enjoy exercising another part of their brains as much as I do.

My regular visits to Dr. Matthews came to a screeching halt six months ago. After several cancellations, she decided to “see” me via FaceTime on my iPhone. A nurse called me to set up a virtual appointment. Over the phone, she conducted the interview that normally takes place in the examination room.

Obviously, she could not reach through the phone to take my blood pressure and she had to take my word about my weight. Finally, she told me when to expect the doctor’s call the next morning. I spoke to the doctor the next day at the appointed time and when we were done, she said that she hoped to see me in her office as usual for our next visit.

That was a nice thought but today’s appointment also took place on FaceTime. It is now well over six months since I actually saw my doctor. It has also been six months since she has listened to the functioning of the moving parts inside my body.

She hasn’t touched her stethoscope to me in a long time, in fact the only part of my body she has seen is a tiny image of my face on her phone. Because the lighting in my living room is not ideal for filming, I doubt that the good doctor can even see my skin tone. This is hardly an ideal diagnostic environment.

I can understand why Dr. Matthews has been using FaceTime to do her routine appointments. With the coronavirus still lurking everywhere, this is safer for both her patients and her office staff. These frontline workers face enough danger from patients who require hands on care.

I don’t relish sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of sick strangers myself. Remote visits also relieve the doctor’s staff of the need to sanitize the treatment room after my visit. Current Covid protocols would require them to scrub down the equipment and all surfaces in the office after each patient. I certainly don’t complain about not having to make a payment before each office visit.

The problem of doing remote doctor visits is that they rob a physician of their most valuable diagnostic tool—their observational skills. One of the forgotten founders of the modern world is William Osler.

Osler’s name should be honored like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Marie Curie and the Wright brothers. Instead of inventing a useful machine, Osler was one of the founders of modern medicine.

Born in 1849, Osler earned a reputation among his peers as “the finest diagnostician to ever wield a stethoscope.”  He was one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and developed what has become the standard curriculum for educating new doctors.

Prior to Osler’s time, young doctors attended lectures, studied anatomy texts and dissected cadavers. Osler required young doctors to serve residencies overseen by experienced physicians.

Osler’s goal was to teach his students how to work with live patients and learn from them. During rounds with his residents, he strove to teach them how to use their eyes and ears to diagnose their patients. In his memoir, William Osler wrote, “The whole of medicine is in observation… but to educate the eye to see, the ear to hear and the finger to feel takes time, and to make a beginning to start the man on the right path, is all that you can do.”

I wonder what William Osler would think about a FaceTime visit with a patient. The doctor’s eye can only see a very limited view of the patient. The doctor’s ear cannot be pressed to the patient’s chest or to their heart. Even conversations with patients are a bit strained because they are conducted at a distance.

Of course, it is impossible for the physician to reach out and touch their patient through a screen. They can’t place a hand on a forehead to check for a fever or press a finger to the flesh to learn if a leg is retaining fluid.

Even more important, the doctor can’t hold a patient’s hand when comforting them or when delivering bad news. In a remote format, the physician is not only prevented from touching the patient’s body but it sorely limits their ability to touch their soul and offer comfort.

My concern is that as the coronavirus drags on, the time between face to face meetings with our doctors will grow longer and longer. I am afraid that this will allow serious conditions to develop undiagnosed.

Diseases that may be treated easily in their early stages may become life threatening if left unnoticed. These people could become collateral casualties in our war against Covid. By trying to protect ourselves from the coronavirus, we may allow cancer, heart disease or some other condition to sneak up on us.     

I am not sure what the solution is to this problem. I hope some very clever software engineer is out there working on a stethoscope app or other remote body scanners. I hope science comes up with a vaccine so we can get back to some semblance of normal.

It would be nice to sit down and watch a movie or enjoy a nice meal at a restaurant, but it is crucial that we are able to once again go to see the healthcare professionals who help keep us alive.       

 - Jim Busch

October 11, 2020

Today, was a red letter day for me. I exercised my right as an American citizen to vote. I have been voting since I was 21 (the youngest you could vote before 1970), but like everything else in the Covid era, this year was very different from any trip I have ever taken to the polls.

Up until this year, the biggest change in my voting behavior occurred when the county moved my local polling place from the local volunteer fire hall to the American Legion Post about a block away. Every election I would report to the poll on the appointed day, exchange pleasantries with the poll workers, the same people worked the polls for years, and then vote.

The primary election this year came at the height of the coronavirus outbreak so things were different. My wife’s cancer had severely compromised her immune system so we decided to vote by mail. We contacted the county, filled out our application for an absentee ballot and waited. In a few weeks our ballots came in the mail, we carefully read the instructions, filled them out and put them back in the mail.

In the interim between the primaries and now, there have been attacks on the postal system and on how states manage the absentee voting process. We didn’t know what to do, the virus’s hold on the country showed no sign of letting up and we wanted to make sure our votes counted in this critical year.

We weren’t sure if we went back to our normal polling place how long we would have to wait. Many of the poll workers were older people so many of them resigned rather than put themselves at risk of contracting Covid-19.

This short staffing, plus the expected high voter turnout, made long waits at the polls very likely. Because we didn’t want our votes to get lost in the shuffle, we reluctantly decided to vote in person.

Last week, I was watching the news when I saw a story about Allegheny County opening remote voting sites at several locations. I went online to research the program and discovered the centers were open on the weekends. The closest election site to our home was located at the South Park Skating Rink.

Election officials designed a “one stop shop,” where a registered voter could request an absentee ballot, have it printed out, and then cast their vote before leaving the building. Butta boom -butta bing, democracy in action.

My wife and I decided to go vote on Sunday morning. We had already received our absentee ballot request forms so we filled them out at home. This morning my wife wasn’t feeling strong enough to make the trip to South Park. She decided to mail in her ballot request. I told her I would take it with me to the skating rink which might expedite the process. This morning I drove to the park to do my patriotic duty.

When I arrived at the skating rink, the parking lot was filled so I braced for a long, long process. I parked my car and walked toward the building. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many of the cars in the lot belonged to people who came to walk or bike the park’s trails rather than to vote.

The sidewalk leading into the rink was marked with social distancing stickers spaced precisely six feet apart, but no one was standing in line. Several people were walking into the building and a like number were coming out. A yellow caution banner blocked the wide walk forcing visitors to the side where a county employee was waiting to greet them.

The gentleman at the entrance greeted me and asked what I was there to do. I told him that I had my ballot application filled out and wanted to see if I could vote. After he told me that would be no problem, I added that my wife was unable to come but I also had her completed ballot application. I asked if I was allowed to submit it so she could receive a ballot in the mail. He told me that while completed ballots had to be delivered by the voter, I could submit her ballot application.

He directed me to follow the yellow dots on the ground into the building. I made a joke about following “The Yellow Brick Road.” He gave me a smile that said this was not the first time he had heard this reference and said “Yep!”

I walked into the building and was greeted by yet another masked election official who also asked what I wanted to accomplish.  With a reassuring, “We can take care of that for you” he led me to an eight foot table with two young woman sitting at either end. The length of the table allowed the two masked women to maintain a proper social distance while they completed their tasks.

My guide told the women what I needed done and had me hand my wife’s application to the woman to my left and mine to her partner on the right. Both of them were wearing surgical gloves as well as masks. They both set their fingers flying on the keys of their computers.

In just a few seconds, the young woman on the left said, “Your wife is checked in” and handed an envelope to the man who had brought me to the table. He told me he would take care of my wife’s application and that it would be delivered to the county election office the next morning.

He passed the table where people who did not have an absentee ballot application could give their information and receive one. He placed my wife’s application into a slot in a big heavy chest with a padlock and a numbered seal on the front. It reminded me of the strongboxes filled with gold and loaded on a stagecoach in an old western movie. I was told I didn’t have to worry about “Black Bart” stealing the chest because the documents were guarded 24/7 by armed county police.

I turned my attention to the other computer as the woman clerk finished entering my information. She wrote “White Oak District 1” on the top of my application and pointed to another table about 30 feet away.

This table was equipped with another PC plus a printer. I handed the operator my application and she circled the hand written note on the top before hitting print. In just a few seconds, the printer sprang to life and she handed me a big paper ballot for the election plus two white envelopes.

Another election official seeing I was ready to vote led me to a set of long tables equipped with several privacy screens. He asked if I had a pen and I nodded as he assigned me to one of the voting stations.

The inside of the privacy screen was printed with step by step instructions on how to complete and prepare my ballot. When I was handed the envelopes, I thought, “I’m going to have to pull down my mask to lick the flaps,” but the voting booth was equipped with a moistener with a ball on the top like a roll on deodorant bottle.

I completed my ballot, double checked my selections, folded it up and slide it into the “Security Envelope.” Even though I had seen the process demonstrated numerous times on television, I read each step on the poster before moving on to the next one. This election was too important to screw up.

I then placed it in the second envelope and filled out the requested information. If I had won the Powerball lottery I would not have been nearly as careful with my signature on the check as I was with my signature on the envelope. I had heard some ballots had been rejected because of a sloppy signature.

When I stepped away from the table, yet another helpful county staffer walked me to another “Wells Fargo” strongbox and showed me where to deposit my ballot. After I dropped the envelope in the box, he awarded me a paper “I Voted” sticker.

I felt like I had just earned the French military decoration Croix de Guerre and wondered if in the pre Covid days if he would have kissed me on both cheeks before saluting me, I have to admit that after years of machine voting, filling out a paper ballot felt very satisfying.

I am glad that the coronavirus hadn’t prevented me from voting. I was very impressed with the remote voting system the county election bureau had implemented to overcome the obstacles to voting.

The helpfulness and the courtesy shown me by the county employees was truly impressive. They are truly an example of the kind of creativity that will help our country get through this crisis.          

          - Jim Busch

October 10, 2020

In yesterday’s Corona Diaries post, I talked about how I enjoyed the novels of Jules Verne when I was a child. I loved From Earth to the Moon, Master of the World and, of course, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

My favorite Verne book was The Mysterious Island. It told the story of several Union officers who escaped from a Confederate prison by stealing an observation balloon. A rebel soldier who tries to stop them also becomes an unwilling passenger as the balloon is caught up in a terrible hurricane. They are drifting over the ocean, losing altitude when they land on the title island.

What makes their island so mysterious is that they seem to have a benefactor who leaves them the tools and weapons they need for survival in the dark of the night. By the end of the story, we learn that the supplies were a gift from Captain Nemo, the hero of 20,000 Leagues.

My favorite part of the book revolves around the castaways’ longing for bread. Their island home has plenty of fruit, vegetables and game but no source of grain. The problem is solved when one of the party finds a single kernel of corn in the corner of a jacket pocket.

The men joke about splitting it before one officer explained how if they planted it and then planted the seed from that first plant and so on, they would soon have enough grain to make plenty of cornbread.

I am sure that most kids would not have found this their favorite chapter of the book. In fact I am sure most glossed over it, but it connected with me. I spent a lot of time working with my grandfather in his greenhouse and in the family garden.

Every fall, my grandfather would harvest the seeds for the next year’s plants. As he worked, he pointed out how just one tomato or zinnia flower produced enough seeds to plant a whole garden full of new plants. He saw this as a sort of miracle not unlike the loaves and the fishes, a sign of God’s blessings on earth.

With the chill in the air, I decided it was time to gather my seeds for next year. I started with the “Heavenly Blue” morning glories. These were originally planted by my father-in-law over 35 years ago. He loved their sky blue flowers and twining stems.

Their flowers only bloom for a few hours early in the day which is how they got their name. After blooming, they form tiny spherical seed pods which become brittle and brown when ripe. To collect the seeds I take a small plastic bowl and follow the vines and when I come to a seed pod I squeeze it and four hard seeds pop out.

I am not sure why I still collect morning glory seeds, I have never had to plant them. The seeds I collect are a sort of insurance policy. Each spring I watch the ground for young vines to sprout in the bed along my sidewalk. So far, they have never failed me, but just in case I have new seeds to plant.

My efforts haven’t been completely in vain as I have shared some of the seeds with my wife’s nieces and nephews so they could enjoy their grandfather’s favorite blue flowers.

Next, I took my pruners and cut the seed pods off my hardy hibiscus plant letting them fall into a brown paper lunch bag. I repeated the process with my mother-in-law’s prized hollyhocks and some old fashioned red canna plants. I set my bags of seeds on my workbench next to a couple of big pink tomatoes and some plastic pill bottles I had saved to hold my harvest.

The first thing I did was pour the morning glory seeds into a plastic tray I use to process my seeds. I gently blew on the tray to winnow them. The brown seed pod fragments are much lighter than the seeds and fly away with the light puffs of my breath. I then poured the cleaned seeds into one of the bottles and labeled them with the variety and the date.

I wiped out the tray and then crushed the hibiscus pods between my fingers. Using a piece of wire I picked out the tiny banana shaped seeds. It is amazing to me that each of these seeds which are no bigger than an ant, has the potential of growing into a big bush with leaves as big as my hands and flowers the size of dinner plates. I plan to start some in the spring as gifts for a few family members.

The hollyhocks were next. These old time favorites have become a rarity in today’s gardens. Today, most people want modern hybrid flowers that bloom all summer long. Hollyhocks only bloom for a few weeks in August and September so they have fallen from grace with gardeners.

After their flowers drop off, hollyhocks form donut shaped rings of seeds. The seeds are packed tightly together so after crushing the ripe buds I had to separate the seeds with the tip of a knife. This was exacting work and as I gathered the seeds, I pictured a row of five foot tall hollyhocks growing along the new fence I’m building along the edge of my property.

I saved collecting the tomato seeds for last as this is a messy job. I had to dissect the tomato by cutting it into thin slices and squeezing out the pulp containing the seeds. Some people repeatedly rinse the seeds to wash away the goo surrounding them. I prefer squeezing it onto layers of paper towels and letting it dry.

After a week or so, I pick the seeds off with my fingernail. This is time consuming but I have had good success with this method. The tomato I extracted the seeds from is a vegetable miracle.

In the spring I wrote about finding some tomato seeds I had saved for my mother-in-law over ten years ago. They are only supposed to be viable for a couple of years, but I got a number of plants to sprout and was able to nurse two to maturity.

These heirloom tomatoes were Eleanor’s favorites and I was glad to bring them back from the grave. I will save seeds from several more tomatoes but I already have many more than I started out with. This is the lesson I read about in Jules Verne a long time ago. Next spring I will start a flat of these tomatoes and share them around the family.

Fall is my favorite season. I delight in the autumn leaves, the cool air and the hearty foods. I find saving seeds very satisfying, it allows me to participate in the cycle of nature.

As the natural world shuts down and goes to sleep, seeds hold the dream of the coming spring. Saving seeds is a way for me to express my hope for the future, to be part of the miracle of life.           

 - Jim Busch

October 9, 2020

Today, for the first time since April, I was able to visit my happy place.” This week after a long closure the Penn Hills Library opened with limited hours and offering limited services.

For months after the Covid lockdown was announced, the library was locked up tighter than the vault in Fort Knox. They shut down their website and they would not even allow anyone to return the books they had checked out before the quarantine. I am a “frequent shopper” at the library so this punched a big hole in my “social calendar.”

The Penn Hills Library was my home away from home. I grew up with the Carnegie Library in McKeesport. My dad would take my grandfather and me to the library on the hill in town. I loved the old building and the stacks full of old books.

I remember going to the children’s library to check out any book I wanted. During summer vacations from school I loved to lay in the back yard under a big butternut tree and read all afternoon.

With the exception of the 19th century science fiction stories of Jules Verne, I read mostly nonfiction. I think I read every title in the Landmarks for Children series. I can still see the yellow hardbacks with the tan paper pages and the hand drawn illustrations.

The Landmark books included biographies of historical figures like Daniel Boone and Theodore Roosevelt as well as brief histories like The Battle of Gettysburg and Building the Panama Canal. I devoured these books sometimes reading several a week. They set a pattern for my life and to this day, biographies and histories make up a big part of my reading.

Being addicted to books, I am physically incapable of passing up a used book store or a library sale, my internal GPS system always steers me toward the dusty, musty smell of vintage volumes.

Every time I am browsing a sale, I search in vain for a yellow bound Landmarks for Children book. They were cheaply bound and the tan paper they were printed on was highly acidic. I didn’t realize it at the time but these books were slowly disintegrating in my hands as I was reading them.

As I grew older, my reading skills improved and I graduated to the “Grown-up library.” I can still remember the first book I read from the adult stacks, it was a biography of Henry Ford, Father of Modern America.

This book extolled the many virtues of Ford and somehow skipped over his antisemitism and horrible relations with his son Edsel. I was so proud to have read an adult book, I didn’t know the connotation of the term at the time, that I missed no opportunity to bring up Henry Ford’s life in conversation.

When I went to the University of Pittsburgh, I fell in love with the main Carnegie Library across the street from the Cathedral of Learning. I was carrying a full course load and working full time so I didn’t have as much time to laze about the library as I would have liked while doing research there.

Later, when my kids were just toddlers, my wife and I started taking them to the “big library” almost every Saturday morning. While their friends were watching cartoons in their jammies, our kids were listening to a librarian read stories. Until the coronavirus hit, I would visit the Oakland library two or three times a month.

In 1995, I took a job with the Pennysaver. My office was located on Rodi Road in Penn Hills just a few miles from the Penn Hills library. Because it was so convenient, I started going there on my lunch hour or after work. I viewed my proximity to this wonderful library as a major job perk.

For a suburban library, the Penn Hills Library is a showplace. The two story modern building was a gift of William C. Anderson, a local property developer. It’s bright and airy, has a large selection of books and is well equipped with computers. Originally, it was the William C. Anderson Library but after his death his family challenged the endowment he left for maintaining the building so the family name was dropped.

Even though I have been retired for nearly five years, I still went to the Penn Hills library several times a week. It was my designated pick up point for books from other branches and interlibrary loans. I have formed a good relationship with their staff and have even taught some classes for them.

The librarians know me by name and on several occasions they have asked me to recommend books to other patrons. For a non-drinker it was my replacement for the neighborhood bar, everyone knows my name and what I like. It hit me hard when the library was shut down.

A month or so ago, I got an e-mail from the library saying the outdoor book drops would be open so I drove there and dropped off the books I had finished reading. Several weeks later another e-mail announced that they were doing no contact book pickups.

The many books I had on my request list suddenly were waiting for me at the library. I drove to the library and parked in one of the numbered spots. Signs instructed me to dial a number to let the librarians know I was there for a pickup. I dialed the phone and as soon as I started speaking the librarian recognized my voice and said, “We’ll have your books out to you in a few minutes.”

It was a tiny thing, but I was happy that “my people” hadn’t forgotten me. In the intervening weeks, I repeated this process a number of times and was happy to have access to recently published books again.

To facilitate no contact book delivery the library gave me my books in small paper shopping bags. Last week a flyer was enclosed in the bag announcing that the library would be open this week. I was excited with the prospect of once again browsing the stacks of the library. Today, I had several books to return and one to pick up, so I planned a triumphant return to the physical library.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I expected things at the library to be just like they were back in April. Nothing is like it was in April. I know a library is supposed to be quiet but the library was like a tomb, no hushed conversations, no one dropping a book, no clatter of the computer keyboards.

I was the only patron in the entire building. The only chairs in the entire building were the ones at the socially distanced computer terminals. There was no place to sit and thumb through a book or a magazine.

In fact, there were no magazines or newspapers on display to read. A small placard advised library patrons that magazines were available by request at the front desk. It was a little like going to Disney World and learning that Mickey Mouse had the flu and would be on sick leave for the next month.

My very favorite spot in the library is the New Nonfiction Shelf. In normal pre-Covid times there were dozens of books in this section. Today, there were eight books there. Perhaps the publishing industry switched over to producing toilet paper for the good of the nation. I did find an audio book that looked interesting. I hope that as things go back to normal the shelf will fill up again.

After more than a half a year of dealing with the coronavirus, we are all anxious to get back to our normal routines. The library is a big part of my life and has been since I was a child. I found my going to the library relaxing and enjoyable. It was a social experience for me as I often engaged others in discussions of the books we have been reading and enjoyed.

Today’s library experience was much less satisfying than ones that I was accustomed to, but it is a step in the right direction. If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it is that we have to be patient and take things one step at a time.

Perhaps I need to check out a book on learning to be more patient.

               - Jim Busch

October 8, 2020

Today, I was thinking about Tuesday evening’s Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. I was not thinking about the issues discussed by the two participants; they had very little to say that was new or even clarified their positions.

I was thinking about the behavior of the VP hopefuls and the appalling manners shown on both sides. At the risk of sounding older than dirt, I find the erosion of manners within our society very disturbing.

I was raised to say please and thank you; to open doors and to respect elderly people. I still follow these practices today, though I have to confess it is getting harder and harder to find anyone who is actually older than me these days.

I still hold doors for others and say “Good Morning” or “Good Afternoon” when I encounter people as I go through my day. I respond to even the smallest of kindnesses done for me with a thank you and the smallest request is prefaced with a “Please.”

Today, I needed help finding an item at Giant Eagle. I spotted a very young man stocking shelves and approached him saying, “Excuse me sir, could you please tell me where I might find the salsa.”

“Aisle 11… on the end.”  That was his response, he never looked up from his work or even looked at me, much less made eye contact.

“Thank you.  You’ve been quite helpful. Have a good day.” And I was off to find the salsa. From a practical standpoint, this was a successful conversation. I received the information I needed to complete my task. It was somewhat less than satisfying emotionally. I know this young man did not realize that he was being rude; he felt he was doing exactly what he was paid to do.

Human interactions should be about more than simply conveying information, they are an opportunity to show our respect to our fellow passengers on Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth.

I have to admit that I can’t quote chapter and verse from Emily Post’s “Etiquette.” When it comes to knowing where the fish knife goes in a formal table setting, I am in trouble and I really don’t know the proper forms of address for European royalty.

Many people today view manners as stodgy and antiquated; as an archaic holdover from the age of bowler hats and bustles. There is a reason that every society in the history of mankind developed a set of rules for social behavior.

Manners and common courtesies are the glue that hold a society together. Back in the 19th century, Social Darwinists coined the phrase “Survival of the Fittest.” They said that as in nature, the humans who could overcome their fellows would be the ones who were able to breed and become the dominant members of their tribe.

Even a cursory look at the history of mankind proves that this viewpoint is completely false. Early humans were surrounded by a large number of big animals that were stronger and faster than these weak little hairless apes.

These hungry critters all sported sharp teeth and massive claws which could transform even the fittest human into a tasty morsel. The thing that helped humans survive and thrive was not their ability to outdo their fellow hunter gatherers, but their ability to get along with one another.

Only by cooperating with one another could mankind protect themselves from wild beasts and find enough food to feed their group. Our very survival depended on our relationships with the people in our tribal group.

Manners evolved as a way to build these bonds and maintain them. It was important that we care about those around us and avoid slighting them in any way. Our individual survival was dependent upon the cohesiveness of the group.

The importance of manners to the survival of a group which is threatened by outside forces can be observed in any military unit. The military is the last bastion of rigid etiquette in our society. Soldiers salute their officers and they are required to return the gesture.

Military members always greet one another and always make eye contact. They do this because they know that when confronting the enemy, it is vital that they function as a cohesive unit.

During my business career, I often referenced the work of Peter Drucker. The business consultant wrote that, “Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization. ... If analysis shows that someone's brilliant work fails again and again as soon as cooperation from others is required, it probably indicates a lack of courtesy – that is, a lack of manners.”  

As a manager, I always made a point of treating my employees and my coworkers with respect and courtesy. I insisted that my employees treat each other and our clients in the same way. I feel that Drucker’s advice is applicable far beyond the world of business. Being polite greases the wheels of life in general.

I am not sure why our society has become less courteous and coarser. I am not quite old enough to say “Back in my day… ” I think there are a number of factors involved.

The pace of life has increased and we find ourselves constantly forced to multitask. It is possible that we lack both the time and the bandwidth for simple courtesies. Perhaps, the fact that so much of our communications is done electronically has affected how we interact with others.

Maybe manners ran away with our use of punctuation and proper grammar as texting became more popular. Almost every aspect of our culture has grown less formal, suits and ties have been replaced with polo shirts. This may be the fault of baby boomers like me who insisted on wearing our bell bottoms and sandals to college.

I fear that the decline of manners, like the refusal to wear a mask, is emblematic of our growing selfishness. With Christmas coming, we have been inundated with catalogs. Many of them feature imprinted tee shirts with messages that are insulting, rude or actually obscene.

Once upon a time we were careful to avoid offending others. Today, this seems to have become a goal. Wearing a shirt that is designed to shock others is saying look at me, I’m important and don’t care a bit about what you think. Notoriety is now more important than earning the respect of those around us.

Respect is a gift we give each other. The world is a mirror, if we are kind and courteous to others, they will be more inclined to be kind and courteous to us in return.

This isn’t always the case, as my encounter at the grocery store today proves, but I will continue to be as courteous as possible. My goal is to be a gentleman and be worthy of the respect of those around me.

I cannot control how others behave, but I can control how I act. No matter how I’m feeling, no matter what kind of a mood I’m in, I try to make any interaction with me to be as pleasant as possible.

I agree with playwright George Bernard Shaw who said, “A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”

 - Jim Busch

October 7, 2020

My wife and I are solidly working class. I have always considered myself a hard worker, both on the job and on projects for my family. To be quite honest, my wife has always been able to work me under the table.

She has always been a blur of activity in a never ending quest to make life better for her family. Lately, her battle with pancreatic cancer has consumed all of her energy and forced her to spend most of her time resting.

I have had to pick up some of the slack around the house. In the past couple of months, I have spent more time in the kitchen and laundry room than I have in my entire life. I have become my wife’s driver, ferrying her to doctor’s visits and treatments.

I have made so many runs to the pharmacy that I no longer have to give my name. The pharmacy clerk still goes through the motions of asking for my wife’s birthdate, but types it in before I answer the question. I now do all of our shopping and run all of the household errands. Lately, I have been a busy little bee.

This drives my wife absolutely nuts. She has a very self-reliant nature. From the time she was a small child, she has been a caregiver, helping to take care of her ailing grandmother. Later, she took care of her grandfather and eventually her parents. My sister never had a daughter, so when she was fighting cancer, my wife was there by her side every step of the way.

Being the person who needs cared for, rather than the one doing the care giving is very hard on her. It runs against her grain not to be in charge of things.

At least a hundred times a day, my wife apologizes to me for having to do things for her. She apologizes to me when I have to go to the store or to the pharmacy. She apologizes when she asks me to get her something from the kitchen or when I have to do something around the house. She even apologizes to me when I have to do something for myself. She feels that taking care of me is her job.

I have not uttered a word of complaint about the additional responsibilities that I have had to take on. I certainly do not expect an apology for doing what, I wholeheartedly believe, is my job. A little over 48 years ago I stood in the front of St. Angela’s Church with our friends and family there as witnesses and promised to care for my wife “in sickness and in health.”

I still stand by what I said that day and I believe that this sacred promise extends to the product of our union. I have pledged my life to the support of my children and to their families. I don’t need or deserve an apology for simply doing my job.

Today, I reminded my wife of a conversation I had with a coworker when our children were young. We had an open office plan, our workstations were islands of four desks pushed together. The desk to the right of mine belonged to a divorced dad named Jake. In those days before direct deposit, we got our paychecks on every other Friday. On one particular payday, Jake was writing out checks at his desk and complaining about paying child support. He was muttering about his ex-wife using some very offensive language.

It had been a long week and the needle on my patience meter was on “E.” I had heard enough from him and I said, “Would you quit your whining. I have to pay “child support” every payday. I don’t need to listen to you complain.” Jake responded, “You don’t pay child support. You’re still married.”

“Yes, I’m still married and plan to be for the rest of my life but that doesn’t mean I don’t pay child support. Where the hell do you think my paycheck goes? Most of my dough goes to taking care of my wife and my kids and it makes me happy to do so. I consider it a privilege to work for my family.”

That shut him up. I don’t think I changed his mind, but at least he didn’t do his complaining out loud any more. I considered that a victory. In the intervening years, I haven’t changed my mind. My kids no longer need my financial support but I’m still there with my tool box if they need help around their homes. If they need my advice or a sounding board I’m there for them.

When it comes to taking care of my wife, I could do this for the next century and never pay off the debt that I owe her. I owe my entire life to my wife. She has cared for me for almost five decades. She has supported me in everything that I have ever done. (Even in her current condition she still proof reads these essays) She has kept an immaculate house and made a million delicious meals.

Glenda gave birth to our two children and was an extraordinary mother. Though I tried to be a good father, my wife deserves most of the credit for raising our children. They both turned out to be highly intelligent and compassionate adults.

Our grandson, Max, believes that the sun rises and sets on his grandmother, a sign that she was just as good at being a grandmother as she was a mother. Since word of her diagnosis got out, she has received flowers, gifts and well wishes from our children’s friends. Now fully grown, they have fond memories of Jesse’s or Rachael’s mom who was so nice to them when they were young.

I never imagined myself as a caregiver. To be honest, I find it very stressful as it is an important job and not exactly in my wheelhouse. I will try to do my best and I think I’m getting better at it. Though I would not have chosen to take on the tasks that have been thrust on me,

I still consider it a privilege to care for the people I love. I am proud to do so and will continue as long as I am able. One thing I don’t need is an apology.

- Jim Busch

October 6, 2020

Giant Eagle put some arrows on the floor    

To maintain social distance in their store

People didn’t like being told which way to go

So the arrows aren’t there any mo!

I keep hearing about the “new normal” brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. I keep hearing how it has turned everything upside down and how we are living in a completely different world than the one we knew at the beginning of the year. Lately, I noticed that much of the “new normal” looks a lot like the old fashioned normal.

Today, my wife sent me to Giant Eagle to pick up some groceries. A few weeks ago when I went to the store, I was greeted at the door by an employee who presented me with a freshly disinfected buggy. As soon as a customer took one of the carts into the store, he would scrub down another.

For those who only needed a few items, a supply of disinfected shopping baskets were available as well.  Sometimes, too many customers showed up at the same time and they had to wait so the buggy cleaner could catch up. People patiently queued up in a socially distanced line and waited for the next cart.

A couple of weeks ago the buggy wiper disappeared. He was replaced by a do-it-yourself cleaning station equipped with disinfectant wipes, a spray bottle and paper towels. People would continue to line up to choose a buggy and scrub it down like a scalpel in an operating room.

Today, I noticed that most people skip the buggy cleansing station. They simply grab a buggy and head off to do their shopping like it was way back in the good old days of six or seven months ago. 

I have noticed other changes in how people behave in the store. First off, there are a lot more people out shopping. A couple of months ago there was barely any traffic on Lincoln Way or Route 30. The foot traffic in the store was light as well. People seemed to be avoiding going to the store, putting it off until they ran low on necessities.

The lines stretched toward the back of the store with big six foot gaps between the shoppers. The buggies they were pushing were loaded to the max. Some people were pushing one loaded buggy and pulling another. They looked like trappers laying in supplies before heading into the mountains for the winter.

Today, I saw a few buggies loaded like a prairie schooner heading west but most people had just enough groceries for a day or so. Some people had just a few items, perhaps just something to make for that night’s supper. It was obvious that they no longer saw shopping as a life threatening mission only to be attempted in desperate situations. Shopping has become normal again.

When the state published the initial Covid protocols, the rules called for stores to control the flow of people through their facilities. Store aisles were turned into one way streets.  The idea was that this would facilitate social distancing; if everyone was moving in the same direction without passing others going in the opposite direction none would come closer than six feet to anyone else. Giant Eagle and many other stores put up signs or put stickers on the floor indicating the path shoppers should follow to navigate the store.

This “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” approach to shopping was doomed to fail from the start. People have deeply ingrained shopping habits. They know where their favorite products are located and head straight for them. If they are a few feet from an item they want, they are not going to walk all the way down the next aisle, make a left turn at the end, and then walk the length of the next aisle just so that they don’t have to step past a “Do not enter” sign.

When I was a student at Pitt many years ago, most of the students would step off the sidewalks and take a shortcut across the grass on the Cathedral of Learning lawn. Within a week after the start of the term, the grass would be gone and a path was worn into the lawn. The maintenance staff would replant the grass several times each year.

They put up “Keep off the grass” signs and the kids ignored them. The planted hedges as a barrier and soon a hole was worn through them like a doorway. The put up poles with chains between them along the proper sidewalks. The more athletic students vaulted them and most of us ducked under. Since University policy strictly forbade the planting of land mines on the quad, they eventually put in new concrete walks which followed the natural flow of student traffic.

The lesson here is that it is virtually impossible to get people to follow rules that make no sense to them. The store could not afford to assign someone to act as a “traffic cop” at the end of every aisle.  It is questionable if even this would have been effective, I think people would have blown by them saying, “I just want to grab this one item. What could it hurt?”

Eventually, Giant Eagle’s management had to admit defeat and, like Pitt, started letting people do exactly what they wanted to do in the first place.

People will only obey rules that make sense to them and which either protect them or offer them some other personal benefit. Most people are wearing masks when they are out in public. Some people do this to protect themselves and others from the disease.

We’ve all heard the warnings from the CDC and other experts. In addition to wearing a mask to avoid the coronavirus, people wear masks to avoid being socially ostracized. They don’t want to face the disapproving looks of their peers. They want to avoid the embarrassment of being asked to leave a store. It simply is not worth the hassle. We are social animals, and we are motivated by peer pressure.

The videos of the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota support this view. When a peer group doesn’t support mask wearing, think bikers or MAGA supporters, people feel at liberty not to wear them. These people face the same medical risks as everyone else, but mask wearing is discouraged in their social group.

Not wearing a mask becomes a badge of courage and a sign of an independent spirit. Even though the Sturgis rally proved to be a “super spreader event,” it is unlikely than this will change the behavior at the next biker gathering.

Adopting the “new normal” requires discarding old ways of behaving. We humans are resistant to change. We like things to stay exactly the same, we know how to behave in familiar situations. It takes more than posting a rule to secure compliance. We have to make change socially and psychologically acceptable.

To effect change we have to answer that age old question, “What’s in it for me?”        

- Jim Busch

October 5, 2020

Tomorrow is garbage day. I went through our house and gathered the trash from all of our waste baskets and trash cans. I also had to sort out our recycling, cutting up cardboard boxes and putting the paper and plastic in the appropriate bins. For some reason, I thought about how different this was than garbage day when I was young.

When I was young, most of our garbage did not get much farther than our backyard burn ring. The burn ring was a tall cylinder of wire bent from a piece of mesh intended to reinforce concrete. This was long before the county banned outdoor burning and anyone had ever heard of recycling.  

My mother would line our kitchen garbage can with the brown paper bags that we got from the A & P or Loblaw’s grocery store.  She was careful to wrap any wet garbage in newspapers so that it didn’t soak through the bottom of the bag.

Even so, sometimes the bottoms of the bags gave way before they made it to the foot of the garden where they would go into the ring. Potato peelings and other kitchen scraps went into an old galvanized scrub bucket on the back porch ready for the next trip to our compost pile.

My dad worked second shift, so he ate his big meal of the day at 12:30 or 1 p.m. After his meal, my dad would carry the kitchen garbage back to the garden and put it in the ring along with any other trash that had accumulated. This included cardboard boxes, scraps of wood, broken furniture and old clothes. My dad would take the red and yellow metal gas can from the shed and dump some on the content of the wire ring.

He would twist a piece of newspaper into a torch and light one end with his cigarette lighter. My dad favored the kind of lighters that had a clear plastic reservoir for the lighter fluid in its base. In addition to the fluid, the clear plastic held a fishing fly or a tiny pair of dice. My dad lit the newspaper and tossed it into the base of the ring causing it to instantly erupt into a column of flame.

A couple of times a month, my dad would take an old square shovel and clean out the burn ring. He shoveled the ashes into a heavy galvanized garbage can. Every so often he would use the flat backside of the shovel to smash a burned out tin can flat. I was always warned to not play near the burn ring because of the fragments of metal and the broken glass that mixed in with the grey ash.

We had the biggest yard in the neighborhood. It stretched the length of the block from Lincoln Way to Ohio Street. Before my grandfather sold off part of our ground to build the Sampson’s Mill Church, it was four full lots. This allowed us room for a big garden, a detached garage and a big shed. Our neighbor’s yard was only a quarter of the size of ours. Because they didn’t have room for one of their own, my dad let them use our burn ring. This led to an exciting time and a fireworks show in our backyard one afternoon.

People like to think of suburbia in the 1950’s and 60’s as an idyllic time of peace and family harmony. I lived through this period and it was not all Fun with Dick and Jane. Not every family was made up of a happy couple raising two and half happy children.

Our next door neighbors were much more like Frazier and Ali than Ozzie and Harriet. They both drank heavily and a couple of times a year the police would bring their high school drop-out son home in a police cruiser. The neighborhood rumor mill said that the woman was willing to go home with any guy who was willing to buy her a few drinks.

Late one summer Saturday night, we awoke to a clatter in our backyard. My dad threw up the blind in my parent’s bedroom to see what was causing the commotion. In disbelief, he saw our neighbors yelling and swearing at one another at the top of their lungs. He was wearing a tie and a sports coat, but she was barefoot and had on a skimpy black lace nighty. They were in our backyard beating on one another with our aluminum lawn furniture.

My dad yelled down from the second floor window, “Hey, knock it off. People are trying to sleep. If you’re going to fight do it in your own damn yard with your own damn furniture!” Without a word, they put down our chairs and retreated across Kelly Street to their own house. I am not sure what happened when they got there but I highly doubt that it involved kissing and making up. A few years later, they were divorced and their ne’er do well son was doing time in Florida for writing bad checks.

On the afternoon in question, our combative neighbors must have come to some sort of détente. She was in the kitchen and he crossed the street with several grocery bags of trash to burn. The fact that he had about twice as many bags than he usually did didn’t seem to bother him.

He thought that his wife was just doing some housecleaning. He put the bags in the ring and doused the bottom bag with the little can of lighter fluid he had in his back pocket. He struck a match and lit the corner of the paper bag. He backed up to watch the fire as it was a windy fall day and he didn’t want loose sparks to set the fallen leaves on fire.

In a few minutes, he heard a loud pop and a jagged piece of metal flew past his head. Our neighbor dove behind my dad’s wheelbarrow as the flames reached six feet in the air and more explosions launched more shrapnel in every direction.

I was in the kitchen with my mother as she made dinner and like her, I ran to the screen door when we heard the roar of flames and a steady stream of profanity coming from our backyard. I loved to watch war movies and the scene I was watching now looked a lot like John Wayne in the Sands of Iwo Jima. The flames, the explosions and gunfire were right, had our neighbor been hiding behind a Sherman tank instead of a garden wheelbarrow, he could have very easily been confused with Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker.

Once the flames burned down and a ceasefire was declared, an examination of the burn ring showed what had happened. Our neighbor’s loving wife had hidden every inflammable liquid and every aerosol can in their house into the paper bags with the garbage.

It was a fire marshal’s nightmare and contained about as much explosive power as a bomb in the belly of a B-17 bomber. She had tried to blow her husband up in our backyard. I am sure they had some serious discussion that night. But they remained married for a while after the “Battle of the Burn Ring.”

The way we deal with our household trash these days is much more eco-friendly than burning the trash in the backyard. I hope that the time I spend sorting out our recyclables is not wasted. I hope my paper and plastic will be reincarnated into new useful products.

One thing I can be sure of is that when I put them in my green recycle bin I won’t have to run for cover.     

- Jim Busch

October 4, 2020

This post marks another milestone for The Corona Diaries. This is my 200th entry for this blog. We have been going through this mess for well over six months and we still don’t quite know exactly what’s going on or what to do next. It seems each day this disease throws us a new curveball and tempts us to take a swing at it.

Today’s news is that the president is still hospitalized with Covid-19. The president has for months resisted wearing a mask in public. He even mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for avoiding crowds and wearing a mask whenever he interacted with other people.

The president recently attended a large rally where only a handful of the thousands of people in attendance were properly masked. He was even seen boarding a helicopter and his airplane with members of his staff none of whom were wearing any sort of facial covering.

Growing up, the president’s family attended Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s church in New York City. Famous for authoring the Power of Positive Thinking, Dr. Peale famously said, “Change your thoughts and change your world.” He taught a form of magical thinking and he believed that attitude was everything and that our beliefs somehow would change the physical world.

He found a following among the rich and powerful families of New York and eventually the United States. They liked the way Peale taught the gospel, rather than teaching the “meek shall inherit the earth,” he said “God doesn’t want his people to be poor.”

Peale’s “prosperity gospel” said anyone who believed in God and maintained a positive attitude was able to unleash the power of the universe to become wealthy. His sermon combined the teachings of Jesus with anecdotes from the lives of successful businessmen. He believed that the enormous wealth of men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller was a sign that they had pleased God and he had blessed them.

By currying the favor of the rich and powerful, Peale became America’s most famous and successful preachers. His church became wealthy and he became quite wealthy in his own right from his best-selling books and lecture fees. He spawned an entire industry of “your attitude determines your altitude” gurus.

Go to any bookstore and you will find entire sections on using your mind to change the trajectory of your life. Just a few years ago Rhonda Byrne’s book, The Secret, sold over 30 million copies and was translated into 50 languages. This book describes how to engage the “law of attraction.” Byrne’s taught a three step process, “Ask-Believe-Receive.”

She told her readers that all one had to do is ask for something, truly believe they would receive it and the universe would align itself to fill the request. Like Peale, Byrne used the bible to support her assertion pointing to a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” This is a rather self-serving interpretation of the gospel. It is doubtful that Saint Matthew was talking about acquiring a new Lexus when he penned this verse.

I am a big believer in being an optimist. I think that it is important for a person to believe in themselves. These attributes can help us overcome many of the obstacles we face in our lives. Maintaining a positive mental attitude does have a limited impact on our surroundings.

Our attitude won’t change the physical world, but it can have an impact on the people who live in it. An upbeat person is popular and will be perceived as a leader, so it can help us succeed in the social and business world. It is important to know the limits of how our attitude can impact our lives.

It is doubtful that Dr. Peale ever shared an anecdote about George Armstrong Custer in any of his sermons. Custer was the ultimate positive thinker. He had immense self-esteem, he was convinced of his own courage and military genius. There was no doubt in his mind that he and his 200 troopers could ride over the tribes of the plains. Someone must have forgot to tell Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse about Custer’s confidence and strong belief he would win the battle of the Little Bighorn.

A positive attitude is no more effective at turning away the coronavirus than it was at stopping Sioux arrows. When confronted by the pandemic, our president and many other “positive thinkers” thought they could ignore the coronavirus. That if they refused to acknowledge its power if would simply go away.

My wife and I have encountered this outlook during her fight with cancer. On numerous occasions, friends, family and random strangers have told us how important “Staying positive” is to her recovery. They often support this with uplifting stories of people whose attitude helped them survive. Of course they never bothered to give any credit to modern medicine in these cases.

The idea of the Power of Positive Thinking permeates our culture. It is part of the way Americans look at the world. I think it is time that we consider the “Dangers of Positive Thinking.” If we believe we cannot fail, we won’t prepare for all contingencies. If we are confident that we know where we are going we may not pay attention to where we are stepping.

People who are convinced that they are not at risk for contracting Covid-19 are the ones who resist wearing a mask and taking other precautions. There have been cases of young people who believed that their youth protected them from the dire consequences of virus and actually held Covid parties.

At a Covid party, guests are invited to closely interact with people who have tested positive for the virus with the idea that they would get a mild case of the disease and then be done with it. A number of these people ended up in the ICU and some have died, their attitudes didn’t save them.

Many of the people who believe this disease is a hoax, or that it has been blown out of proportion needlessly expose themselves to the disease. They are positive that they will not contract the disease or if they do, it will be a minor case, “like the flu.”

The danger is that their positive attitude may not only kill them but might also harm the ones around them. We have to remember that a positive attitude in not an effective way to ensure a negative Covid test.

- Jim Busch

October 3, 2020

Today was an ordinary day for me. That is what made it so special. Lately, I’ve had to put my normal life on hold to take up the role of caregiver to my wife. The chemotherapy treatments she has undergone for pancreatic cancer has hit her very hard.

She has contracted a severe infection that requires regular IV injections of antibiotics and she is retaining literally gallons of fluid. The swelling caused by this fluid has greatly impaired her mobility.

I am Glenda’s “Gopher.”  Whatever she needs I “go-fer” it. She can’t eat much at any one time, so I fix her tiny bowls of Lipton’s Noodle soup and small bowls of sherbet. Despite the reservoir of water stored in her extremities, there is a real danger that she will become dehydrated, so I try to get her to take in enough fluids.

Her legs are so filled with fluid that I have to help her get up and down. When she lies down, I have to lift her legs into the bed. Her legs are as hard as baseball bats and she winces when I touch them. I hate the idea that I am hurting her which is absolutely the last thing I want to do.

Because of the pain she is in, it is virtually impossible for my wife to get into a comfortable position. When she does get comfortable it doesn’t last long and she soon has to shift her weight. I am constantly rearranging multiple pillows to try to create a comfortable nest for her.

Since my wife is laid up, I have also been promoted to chief cook and bottle washer. I do the laundry, the dishes and try to keep the house in reasonably good order. We have three cats, an aquarium full of fish in our house plus a freeloading band of songbirds, woodchucks, chipmunks and squirrels in our backyard.

So far, I have managed to keep all these hungry critters fed and the litter boxes clean. I sometimes feel like a zookeeper in training.

Since I am a terrible cook, it is fortunate that I have help feeding myself. My wife’s sister, Sue, lives just down the street and always cooks more than her family can consume. She gladly shares the leftovers with me. All I need to do is trot down the road and pick up a stack of Tupperware containers holding my supper.

If I am prompt, the meal is still hot eliminating the possibility that I might incinerate them in the microwave. I just pop the lids off and dig in which reduces the number of dishes that I have to do. My daughter Rachael and her wife Kathy also bring me meals and goodies from the farmers’ market.   

Sue also helps me out with my medical chores. Three times a day, my wife receives a syringe of IV antibiotics in the picc line in her arm. This is a multistep procedure which involves disinfecting all the supplies and flushing the line with a saline solution before and after the antibiotic is injected.

The antibiotic itself has to be administered slowly over a three minute period so that her body is able to absorb it properly. I am so afraid of screwing this up or hurting my wife that I find doing this very stressful. Sue is kind enough to do Glenda’s morning and evening treatments, so that I am only responsible for the injection at night.

I am not complaining about my new duties, words can’t express how glad I am to have my wife home from the hospital. I would happily do anything I could to keep her near me. I see this as my responsibility, this is the “in sickness and health” part of marriage that I volunteered for way back when. It does wear on me a bit. I am not very good at either housework or caregiving, so I find both of these jobs somewhat stressful.

Today, my daughter came to spend her day off with her mother. This allowed me to get out of the house and run some errands. I spent a big part of my life behind a steering wheel. As a salesman and a sales manager, I was always out and about in the car visiting customers and meeting new people.

I loved this peripatetic lifestyle and ever since I have spent several days a week driving here and there. Sometimes, I would go to a gallery or a museum or shopping at out of the way secondhand shops. I just like wandering about. With my wife in my daughter’s capable hands, I was free to roam.

My first stop was the library where I had some requested books to pick up. I was delighted to find out that next week they would be open for browsing on a limited basis. Of all the things that I have missed because of the coronavirus outbreak, wandering the stacks of the library is right at the top.

Next, since I didn’t have to hurry home, I went to the Friends Thrift Shop. This store which is run cooperatively by a group of churches in the town of Export is one of my favorite places. They always have a wonderful selection of books which they sell for only 25 cents each. I bought five books, one for myself and four titles to give away to friends and family members. I sometimes buy books there to restock the “Little Libraries” in my area. Buying books for a quarter allows me to be a philanthropist on a very small budget.

My next stop was the Goodwill store in Murrysville where I found an over the door coat hanger I have been looking for. I am a modern hunter gatherer. When I decide I need something, I don’t run out to the store and buy one. I make a mental note of what I need and wait until I find one cheap at a secondhand store. I have done this for years and not only has it saved me a lot of money, but it has evolved into a challenge for me.

My final stop was Lowes Home Improvement store. I needed a few items for the house and wanted to check out kitchen faucets for my daughter. I found a few that I believed she would like and took pictures of them. Being a tool junkie, I browsed through their selection and perused their clearance section.

For a few hours, I forgot about everything that has been stressing me out. I pushed Covid and my wife’s illness to the back burner for a little while. I got into the car and headed home. I was grateful to my daughter for giving me a break. I felt refreshed and ready to take up my duties again.             

   - Jim Busch

October 2, 2020

For the first time in months, we had visitors to our home. My wife’s sister, Sally, and her husband, Frank, came to see my wife and I. Sally grew up in our house alongside her twin sister, Sue, and my wife.

Sally lives about 100 miles north in Hermitage, Pennsylvania just over the state line from Youngstown, Ohio. Before Covid and her illness, Glenda used to visit her sister’s family about once a month, but Sally has not been home for about six years.

The last time Sally was home, she was here for “Ellie’s Teapot Party.” Ellie was Glenda, Sue and Sally’s mother. She passed away in July 2014 after a long battle with congestive heart failure. Sally had trouble visiting her family home with both of her parents gone. Eleanor was a remarkable woman who lived up to the title the family gave her, the “Queen.” She was a woman with a strong spirit, a quick mind and a loving heart.

Eleanor grew up on the hill where my wife and I still live. She had wonderful stories of the old farmstead that my sister-in-law Sue lives in today. Eleanor played in the loft of the barn that used to stand behind the house and remembered drawing water from the “bucket a day” well. The idyllic childhood Eleanor described to us would have made Laura Ingalls Wilder jealous with her tales of happy times with her cousins and listening to the stories of her kindly Uncle Sam. She remembered playing baseball and finding arrowheads in the pasture on top of the hill.

As a teenager, Eleanor had a quarter horse named Daisy and an army surplus McClelland cavalry saddle.  She would spend her free time riding Daisy across the fields and across the hilltops that are now covered with housing plans and suburban streets.

Eleanor always wanted to be a nurse when she grew up and I think she would have made a good one. After graduating high school in 1943, Eleanor wanted to join the military; with the war raging the services were being offering to train young women to be nurses. Eleanor’s mother didn’t want her daughter enlisting, so her parents refused to sign her enlistment papers. At that time, women under the age of 21 could not join the service without their parent’s written permission.

Since she couldn’t join the military, Eleanor became a “Rosie,” taking a war job at the Westinghouse Airbrake plant in Wilmerding. I asked her what she did there and she didn’t know, all she knew was she had to glue 26 pins of different lengths into a Bakelite disc. She said the best part of the job was seeing the handsome young naval officers in their dress white uniforms that would walk through her department to inspect their work.

Years later, I was watching an episode of Nova on PBS. The subject of the show was the code breakers of World War Two. It featured archival film of the “Ultra” machine, the supposedly unbreakable encryption machine. The film showed the heart of the machine, which was a Bakelite disc holding twenty six metal pins.

I rushed into Eleanor’s room where she was watching QVC, grabbed the controller out of her hand and turned on NOVA. I asked her if that was what she had built in the Westinghouse. She looked at the screen and said, “Yes, that’s what we made.” That was how I learned that my kid’s cookie baking grandmother had been part of one of Second World War most secret projects.

During one of her rare days off, Eleanor was galloping Daisy through an uncut hayfield when the horse suddenly leapt into the air. She pulled the horse to a halt and turned her around to see what had spooked the horse. She saw my future father–in-law sit up in the grass.

He had been sleeping in the tall grass and the horse saw him before Eleanor had. She dismounted and walked over to see if he was okay. Even though they lived in the same area for years, they barely knew one another. John had dropped out of school to work in the mill, later he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy. He had been given two weeks leave because he just had a ship torpedoed out from under him. They started corresponding and married when John got out of the service in 1946.

Eleanor never did become a nurse. She became a wife and a mother. John had trouble adjusting to peacetime, so they moved in with her parents in the home that my wife and I live in today. Eleanor dedicated her life to her children and later her grandchildren. She became the center of our family’s universe helping her daughters and taking every opportunity to spoil her grandchildren.

My relationship with Eleanor flew in the face of the millions of mother-in-law jokes told by comedians. She was kinder to me than my own mother and we became great friends. Despite only having a high school education, she was exceptionally well read; her reading list ranged from novels to astrophysics.

Over the years, I developed a knack for finding books that she loved at the library or book sales. She also enjoyed my sense of humor and my love of her cooking, though she sometimes felt I was too hard on my children.

Once very meek, Eleanor grew more and more assertive as she grew older. Her “super power” was her understanding of human nature. She always seemed to know what to say to make people feel better, her extended family grew quite dependent on her wise counsel and advice. As Eleanor’s health declined, she began to plan for her sendoff. She told us that she wanted no viewing and opted for direct cremation of her remains.

Eleanor also made plans for the disposition of her most prized possessions, her teapot collection. For years, she had collected figural teapots and eventually had dozens of them. In the last year or so of her life, Eleanor put notes in each pot directing who should receive it and why. She wrote out detailed instructions for their distribution at a “Teapot Party.”

She wanted the family to gather to receive their pots. Everyone was to read the notes she left for them and to take the time to talk about what Eleanor meant to them. In addition to teapots, she left her beloved harmonica to her daughter, Sue.

The note that accompanied the instrument read, “Dear Sue, I am leaving you my harmonica because I am dead and won’t have to hear how bad you play it.” Following the distribution of the teapots, we all enjoyed a meal consisting of Eleanor’s favorite recipes. The event was a great sendoff full of laughter, tears and sweet memories.

In addition to leaving instructions for the disposal of her teapots, Eleanor left detailed instructions for what she wanted done with her ashes. Her husband, John, had died 14 years before and his ashes had sat on her book shelf waiting for hers to join him.

She wanted her daughters to mix their ashes together with the ashes of “Sweet Annie,” a mixed breed terrier they both loved.  I had to take care of this task, because John’s ashes were sealed in a metal box that I had to cut open with a chisel.

Eleanor had also left money to cover a week’s car rental, hotel rooms and meals for her three “girls.” She wanted them to travel together to scatter a bit of their ashes in a number of places that were special to her and her husband. They were to go to our family cabin in Forest County, at several points along the Blue Ridge Parkway where they liked to camp and in the ocean, because her sailor husband said he should have been buried at sea.

The trip was Eleanor’s last gift to her daughters. She knew that grieving together would help them process the loss of their mother. Eleanor knew sharing their grief would help them bond and hold the family together when she was gone. It was a brilliant psychological move that had a positive impact on the whole family.   

Sally’s visit today was hard on her, she still misses her mother and father. Being back home stirred up strong feelings of grief and loss for her. It is a tribute to her love for her sister that she overcame her grief to come home for a visit.

Seeing Glenda suffering made this visit even harder, but her sacrifice had a positive impact on my wife and I am grateful to her.    

- Jim Busch

October 1, 2020

For the last six months, my wife has been engaged in a battle with pancreatic cancer. We started out fighting like Doughboys in World War I, we attacked the enemy with chemical weapons.

Just like in the Battle of the Somme, this warfare left the battleground a decimated wasteland. In this war, my wife’s body is the battleground. Her doctors are the generals who in search of winning a decisive victory have launched wave after wave of attacks. As professionals, they can’t afford to worry about the collateral damage their assaults have on the ecology of the battlefield or the mental health of the warrior.

The constant warfare has reduced my wife to the status of walking wounded. The first casualty was Glenda’s beautiful head of hair. Her locks fell to the first shots of the war. This was not only a blow to her body, but also to her morale. Each round of chemo was like a heated engagement.

At first, she was knocked out of action for a few days after the skirmish with the IV bags. It upset her stomach and left her listless and sore. Between encounters with the chemical warfare agents, Glenda was able to maintain some semblance of prewar normalcy. During periods of “R & R” she was able to continue baking and doing the other things she enjoyed.

As the war dragged on, Glenda grew weary of the fight. Her digestive system rebelled against her body’s regime and caused her a great deal of trouble. She had to spend most of her time in fitful sleep. The ongoing war began to deplete her resources. She continued to lose weight and her strategic blood reserves fell to dangerously low levels.

Intelligence reports indicated that both her red and white cell ranks were thinning with no replacements on the way. The doctors had to call up reinforcements importing multiple units of blood to hold the line. Glenda’s weakened defenses allowed various microbes to infiltrate her system.

These foreign agents sabotaged important parts of Glenda’s infrastructure sending pain shooting through her body. To fight this new threat, Glenda had to retreat to the hospital on several occasions where her medical team could bring the big guns in their arsenal to bear on the attackers.

The battle had a devastating impact on Glenda’s ability to maneuver. Fluid filled her legs, arms and torso. During one stint in the hospital, she put on 28 pounds of water weight. Her arms and legs inflated like balloons stretching her skin to the point where at some points sores started to open up. She first had to rely on a cane to steady herself and she now requires a walker to move about.

Just like on the western front, the chemical weapons didn’t secure the decisive victory medical generals had hoped for. A reconnaissance scan discovered that the warring powers were locked in a stalemate. The tumor had not advance beyond the point where it had been first discovered.

Cancer’s blitzkrieg had been stopped, but not forced to retreat. It still surrounded a vital artery on the pancreas front. The tumor was so well entrenched that the doctors had no way to launch a surgical attack on it.

Today, my wife and her doctors met to discuss a new strategy to end the stalemate and move toward an end to the war. Looking at the maps of the battlefield and new intelligence reports on the status of Glenda’s blood, everyone agreed that the current course of action was doing more harm than good. The chemicals had limited impact on the tumor, but they were killing my wife.

Glenda’s medical team decided to go to “Med Con 1” and adopt the nuclear option. They ordered an immediate stop to all chemical attacks for now. They notified the nuclear forces to begin planning a full on nuclear attack against the tumor that has invaded my wife’s body. Soon she will meet with a radiologist to discuss her treatment options.

There are two different modes of attack she and her doctor could adopt. The first is a series of strategic attacks spread out over five weeks and supplemented by smaller doses of chemotherapy. Option two is a full on “shock and awe” assault on the tumor. This would involve five doses of radiation, delivered on five consecutive days.

Whatever plan the doctors choose to pursue, the ultimate goal is to shrink the cancerous tumor to the point that it could be removed without fatally cutting into an artery. We should know within the next two weeks which way we will go. It is a slim chance, but we are hoping that the nuclear attack will force the cancer to surrender its hold on my wife’s body.

By definition a “nuclear option” is a last ditch attempt to win a war. If the radiation fails to shrink the tumor we have no next step. Our bag of tricks will be empty. The only thing left to us is palliative care, to keep my wife as comfortable as possible while we wait for the inevitable to happen.

We are not at that point yet and when we reach that point we will fight it like Davey Crockett at the Alamo. I am hoping that we are not defending the Alamo, I am hoping we are Churchill fighting the Battle of Britain. The odds are against us, many well-meaning people have predicted our defeat but we are determined to fight on until victory is ours.

What else can we do? Defeat is unthinkable, failure is not an option. I don’t want to lose my wife. No matter what happens I have never seen a braver soldier. Glenda has endured defeat after defeat without any loss of resolve. She is fighting a cruel enemy, but she continues to march forward ignoring every obstacle placed in her way.

If courage can win this battle, Glenda’s victory is assured.  I hope that we will look back at this time and say, “this was her finest hour.”           

- Jim Busch  

September 30, 2020

The news today is full of stories about white supremacy groups like the Proud Boys and the Ku Klux Klan. These groups seem to be coming out of the woodwork as racial tensions mount across the country.

I detest these groups and their evil ideology but I can understand them because I am descended from a long line of bigots and racists. I am not proud of this part of my family history but I am proud that we’ve finally risen above this archaic way of thinking.

My maternal grandfather’s family came from Scots-Irish pioneer stock. These people came to Pennsylvania in the late 18th century and settled on the frontier. Their racist roots of the Scots-Irish run deep in this country. In Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, his history of the Scots-Irish in America, Senator James Webb wrote about why the British government encouraged them to immigrate to this continent.

The British considered the Scots-Irish clannish and violent. The colonial governments settled the Scots-Irish along the frontier where they would serve as a buffer protecting the coastal settlements from marauding native tribes. Essentially they came to this country to facilitate the genocide of Native Americans.

My family settled in what is now Centre County and remained there until the late 1800’s when they moved to the Mon Valley to take work in the mills. These English speaking Protestant people didn’t welcome the waves of immigrants coming to our shores from Europe. They saw them as competition for jobs and as “polluting the purity” of the American race. In the early twentieth century, African Americans moved north looking to escape the southern share cropping system which was little better than slavery.

As the population of the region grew more diverse, the Ku Klux Klan began actively recruiting new members in the north. The Pittsburgh area became a hotbed of Klan activity and my great uncles happily put on white hoods and robes. They liked to burn crosses on the hilltops above the valley’s mill towns to intimidate their new unwanted neighbors. In the Mon Valley, the Klan’s hatred extended beyond the newly arrived Black people to Catholics and Jewish people.

I never met any of my great uncles or my mother’s cousins because my grandfather was disowned from the family. He committed the sin of falling in love with an Irish Catholic girl. My grandmother insisted that he adopt her Catholic faith, so his brothers never spoke to him again. My grandfather’s sister Fannie was the only one of his siblings who refused to turn her back on him.

My great Aunt Fannie was a free thinker, a flapper in the 1920’s who got pregnant out of wedlock. In those days most girls hid their pregnancy and gave their child away, Fannie kept her son and raised him as an unapologetic single mother. My grandfather never talked about his brothers, I think it was too painful for him. It was my Great Aunt Fannie that filled me in on the family’s deep dark secrets and her “idiot brothers.”

My dad’s family came from one of the groups that my great uncles welcomed with burning crosses. They came to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century from Catholic southern Germany. Working first in the mines and then in the Westinghouse works, my grandfather worked hard to make a place for his family in his new homeland. My dad spent his early years in Turtle Creek before moving to a farm in what is now White Oak. His older brothers taught my dad who to hate, so he grew up to be stridently racist and anti-Semitic.

Growing up, I heard my dad use every known racial slur for Black people. He characterized them as lazy, untrustworthy and stupid. He loved telling racist jokes supporting these beliefs. What puzzled me was his relationship to Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson lived on a farm not far from my dad’s family. The Johnsons had been there since their ancestor had settled there after serving in the USCT (United States Colored Troops) during the Civil War.

My dad was always nice to Mr. Johnson and would inquire about his family when they bumped into one another at the store. I asked my dad about his family and he told me a story how after his dad, my grandfather had died, the Johnsons were the only ones who showed up regularly with baskets of food from their garden and maybe a few chickens to help out. My dad said, “The Johnsons are good folks, they ain’t like the rest of the (insert nasty word here).”

My dad was always talking about the Jews. If he was bargaining for something, he’d tell us how he was able to get the seller to lower the price by “Jewing them down.” If a local business burned down, he would say it was struck by “Jewish lightning,” his term for arson. My dad was convinced that a cabal of Jewish bankers were responsible for all the ills of the world. He bought into all the lies spread by prominent anti-Semites like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.

Again my dad’s choice of friends confused me. One of his closest friends was Abe Simon. Though he was Jewish, Mr. Simon was not an international banker but worked as a machinist at Westinghouse with my dad. They often car pooled to work together.

Like my dad, Mr. Simon worked steady second shift. About once a month he would come to our house for lunch. Mr. Simon grew up in a reform synagogue while Mrs. Simon was a strict Orthodox Jew. She assiduously followed the strictures outlined in the Torah and kept a kosher home.

Mr. Simon loved her, but he also loved bacon and eggs. Every so often he would show up at our home with a paper grocery bag filled with a dozen of eggs, a pound of bacon, a loaf of bread, a clean shirt and Binaca, an aerosol breath freshener. My mother would cook the bacon and fry the eggs in the grease. My dad and Mr. Simon would sit at our kitchen table eating bacon and eggs and talking about sports, politics and work.

After lunch Mr. Simon would wash up, change his shirt, give the dirty one to my mother to wash and then spray his mouth with the Binaca, so no telltale aroma of bacon lingered on his person. I remember him telling my mother, “I’d be in less trouble with my missus, if I came home with lipstick on my collar than bacon on my breath.”

I asked my dad how he could be friends with Mr. Simon, I got an answer much like the one I got when I asked about Mr. Johnson. “Oh, Abe is not like the rest of the (insert nasty epithet for Jewish people). He’s a working guy like me. You can trust him, he’s one of the good ones.”

I was lucky to have a mother who didn’t have a racist bone in her body. She was constantly correcting my dad when he said something especially offensive. This often led to some serious arguments. My mother told me to ignore my dad’s bigoted remarks and told me “People are people, the color of their skin has nothing to do with what kind of person they are.”

We watched Martin Luther King on TV and she talked to me about what was going on in the south. As a baby boomer growing up in the “Age of Aquarius,” my mother’s lesson were reinforced by the messages coming from the counter culture. By the time I was an adult, I saw racism as not only evil but as a cancer that was eating at our country.

My dad was basically a good guy. He worked hard and was good to people. Racism was just baked into him as a child by his older brothers. He simply didn’t know any better, he adopted the belief system of the people around him. He grew up in a largely segregated world and didn’t actually know many people who came from different races or beliefs. My dad had to convince himself that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Simon were outliers otherwise my dad’s friendships would have challenged his entire belief system.

The truth is that prejudices are hard to maintain when you get to know the people you’re “supposed to hate.” It is much easier to hate a faceless group of people than a person who is looking you in the eye.

I think this is why despite the efforts of groups like the Proud Boys racism is gradually disappearing. Our culture is changing and more and more, we are more likely to come into regular contact with people of different races and backgrounds.

Racism may be able to survive a civil war and it may be able to resist well-meaning legislation but as my dad found out, bigotry can not survive simply getting to know one another.       

- Jim Busch    

September 29, 2020

My mother was very strict about bedtime when I was a kid. During the school year I had to be bathed, in my pajamas and under the covers by the appointed hour.

Only on very rare occasions did I get to stay up late. Several of these occasions occurred when I was eight years old in September and October of 1960. My mother thought that staying up to watch the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates was far more important than getting into bed on a school night.

My family was very politically engaged. As a child, I listened to some serious discussions of the issues over the dinner table. My parents grew up in the depression and came of age during World War II, so they were committed Roosevelt Democrats.

As a young man my dad served a year in FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. He was able to send the bulk of his paycheck home to his widowed mother during a particularly hard time. My parents both credited the Democratic Party for helping their families to survive the depression and for winning what they called “the War.”

In my family, voting was more than a right, it was a duty. My parents and grandparents never missed an election. They voted in every primary and every local election. They read every newspaper story about the issues and did their research.

In our small community, my parents knew most of the candidates and didn’t hesitate to stop them at the supermarket or the gas station to ask them where they stood on various issues. When Election Day came, my dad put on a tie and a jacket, my mother dressed like she was going to church in a nice dress and make-up.

They wanted to look good and show their pride in being American citizens exercising the privilege of voting. I loved seeing my grandfather on Election Day, in his old fashioned pinstriped suit, a wide silk tie and black felt fedora, he looked like one of the gangsters on television show The Untouchables.

My dad was best friends with our next door neighbor, Mr. Rollason. Like my dad, he was a working guy, a truck driver for the Potter McCune wholesale grocery company. When they were both working late shift they would often get together for a late night sandwich in our kitchen. They would talk about a lot of things but in the weeks leading up to the election, politics dominated their conversations.

They never raised their voices and as far as I know never accused one another of being either a socialist or a fascist. My dad and Mr. Rollason never talked over one another or fired off any insults. They actually listened to one another and discovered that they agreed on many issues.

Tonight, I sat down with my wife to watch the first presidential debate of the 2020 election. We have certainly come a long way from the Kennedy Nixon debates in the fall of 1960, and we seem to be going in the wrong direction. If I had been an eight year old child during this election year, I think that I would have put him or her to bed early with cotton stuffed in their ears.

I would not want my child seeing what I witnessed on my TV screen tonight. I am not going to make a statement on which candidate was right or wrong or on who “Won” the debate. I will say who I think lost; the American people.

When my mother let me sit up to watch the debates, I am sure she had several motives. She considered elections important historical events and just like letting me watch the early rocket launches from Cape Canaveral a few years later, she didn’t want me to miss them. My mom also wanted me to learn about the American political system.

She considered it her sacred duty as a Patriotic American Mother to raise her children to be ready to vote when the time came. Throughout the debate she would give me background information on the issues being discussed. By the end of the event I was one well informed eight year old.

The only thing that an eight year old would have learned from watching tonight’s debate is how to be a bully and shout down your opponent. Kennedy and Nixon engaged in civil debate. Trump and Biden engaged in an exercise in incivility. I kept waiting for the debate part to start.

The dictionary defines a “debate” as a “formal discussion on a particular topic in which opposing arguments are put forward.” As I have noted, whatever happened tonight was far from formal. Abraham Lincoln referred to Stephen Douglas as, “my esteemed opponent” rather than calling him a “clown.”

The moderator, Chris Wallace, repeatedly put out particular topics for discussion, but both parties kept veering off on tangents to score points on their opponent. In a proper debate, both sides put forward opposing arguments.

Tonight I saw a lot of things put forth, but both participants talked more about what their opponent has done or hadn’t done rather than describing their own plans. I can’t say that I was better informed about what either candidate would do if and when they are elected.

I found tonight’s debate very disturbing. It made me fear for my country. It made me wonder what the future holds for my grandson. I consider myself a patriot, I love this country. I am a believer in American exceptionalism. I don’t think it is our powerful military, our steamroller of an economy or our inventiveness that sets us apart from the rest of the world.

I believe what sets us apart is our ability to work together to resolve our differences and come together to solve our nation’s problems. Few other countries have enjoyed two centuries of peaceful transfer of power from one government to the next. Most nations have flirted with dictatorships or totalitarianism in their histories.

I see this process beginning to break down. We used to see ourselves as a people who shared mutual goals even if we differed on how we should go about achieving them. Lately we have begun to see ourselves as divided into two warring camps.

The prevailing attitude is that other side is the embodiment of evil, intent on destroying America. The last time this happened, the United States was torn in half by a vicious civil war. I pray that it does not come to that. I hope that our leaders can learn to work together again.

The next presidential debate takes place in just over two weeks. I think that would be an excellent time to begin the healing.   

- Jim Busch

 September 28, 2020

I’m feeling much better today. After 11 days, I was finally able to bring my wife home from the hospital. She let me know that she might be released today. I told her I was like a fighter pilot ready to scramble when I got her call.

At one this afternoon, I received a text from her that read, “Maverick, start your engines—mission is a go.”  I jumped in the car and drove to the Northside and parked a few blocks from the hospital. I sent a text to let her know I was there and waited for her call. That call came about an half hour later and I went to get her.

I pulled into the pick-up lane and an orderly wheeled her out. Glenda’s arms, hands, legs, and abdomen were horribly swollen. She had trouble taking the three steps from the wheelchair to the car. I had to help her lift her feet into the car. She had put on thirty seven pounds of water weight.

My first thought was, “If this is how she looks when she’s ‘much better,’ how bad was she a couple of days ago?” I was just glad to have her next to me again.

Despite her mobility issues, I was pleased to hear her speak. Her voice was strong, she sounded like her old self. Before I had left our house, I got a phone call from the Allegheny Health Network’s home care unit. They wanted to set up an appointment so a nurse could administer her first in home IV treatment. I told them she was not home as yet, but set up an appointment later that afternoon. I hoped she would be home by then.

I discovered that “You can take the girl out of the hospital but you can’t take the hospital out of the girl’s life.” She was told that at least for the next few weeks she would need to continue the IV medications she had been receiving in Allegheny General. We pictured having an IV bag hanging above her 24/7. This would be a pain, but she was willing to endure anything if she could just come home. Before leaving the hospital she had a picc line inserted in her arm to facilitate the IVs.

I got my wife home about 3 p.m. I helped her up the three steps at the end of our sidewalk and into the house. As soon as she stepped into the kitchen I could see her eyes scanning the kitchen appraising my domestic skills. She reminded me of Sergeant Hall, my old drill instructor, inspecting the barracks.

She hobbled to the sink, lifted up the dish pan and shook her head. I had neglected to remove the pan and wash out the sink after I had done my breakfast dishes. She grabbed the dish cloth and with the water running wiped out both sides of the sink. I had failed to meet her house cleaning standards.

She turned and looked at me and said, “Well, at least you tried.” Which sounded remarkably like, “What an idiot!” to me. She then looked at the cats and our aquarium, she was both happy and somewhat surprised that I hadn’t killed any of our pets in her absence. Her only comment was, “You’ve been feeding the fish too much food.”

It is at moments like this that an Oscar Wilde quote pops into my head, “No woman ever loves a man so much that she doesn’t consider him somewhat of an ass.” Wiser words were never spoken.

At 4:30 p.m., we received a call that my wife’s meds were waiting in a van out in our street. I walked out and signed several forms and received a big paper shopping bag filled with medical equipment and a large silver foil insulated bag with a sticker reading “Refrigerate Immediately.” I brought the bag in, and after rearranging the fridge a bit, shoved it in between the milk and a head of cabbage. We were ready for the nurse.

A young woman dressed in a dark blue nurse’s uniform with a matching blue medical bag over her shoulder arrived at our door. She said her name was Dolly and she was here to show us how to inject my wife’s medications. We were happy to learn that we would only have to do this every eight hours. Our image of Glenda dragging an IV bag around our house was wrong. That was the good news, that bad news was that I would have to administer the drugs.

I am definitely not a Doctor Dreamy, I am not even a Doogie Howser. I don’t even like to watch medical shows on TV. I felt terrible about overfeeding the fish, how bad would I feel if I killed my wife.

This was a distinct possibility, one of the first things Dolly taught me was how to administer NARCAN. “Only use the inhaler if the patient is still breathing, hold one nostril closed, insert the nozzle into the other nostril and press the plunger. Immediately call 911, if she doesn’t start to come around repeat the process in the other nostril.”

This was scary stuff! Dolly explained that one of the drugs my wife would be receiving for pain was a long lasting opioid and there was a danger of an overdose.   

Next, Dolly showed me how to administer the IV antibiotics. I learned how prepare the syringes and clean the picc line. First I had to carefully disinfect the end of the tiny hose sticking out of Glenda’s left arm. I felt a bit silly wiping it with an alcohol wipe while singing Happy Birthday three time in a row.

Once this was done I had to attach a syringe of saline solution to flush out the line. Next came the antibiotic itself. I had to slowly depress the plunger, so that it took at least three minutes to empty its contents into my wife’s arm.

Next came two more syringes full of the saline solution followed by another Happy Birthday disinfection and capping of the tube. Easy peasy, no big deal for anyone with an advanced medical degree, a bit more challenging for a 68-year-old literature major.

Tonight at midnight, I had to do my first solo IV injection. Where was Dolly when I needed her? She was more than welcome to crash on our couch for the next few months. I felt a bit like a rookie skydiver stepping to the plane’s door for the first time.

Of course, I ran into a problem, the fitting on the end of one of the tubes broke, perhaps because I screwed it on too tight. I had to replace the tube in the middle of the process but my wife and I survived our first visit with Doctor Jim.

I just need to do this three times a day for the next to six eight weeks. Playing doctor is not exactly my cup of tea, but if it keeps my wife out of the hospital, I am willing to do so.

The things we do for love.

- Jim Busch

September 27, 2020

I got up this morning hoping that I would be able to bring my wife home from the hospital. I got my first clue that she might be coming home when I received a call yesterday from an Allegheny General Hospital staffer.

She called to inform me of my wife’s right under law to file a complaint if she felt she was being discharged from the hospital prematurely. I thanked her for the call, but I told her that my wife was more than anxious to be home.

Last evening my wife called me and told me that there was a good chance she would be coming home. The doctors had disconnected her from the “pain pump.” Every time I hear the term “pain pump,” it conjures an image of a device from a futuristic dystopian novel, “Those who disobey the glorious leader will be connected to the pain pump.”

I learned that the purpose of this device was to control, rather than inflict, pain. It allowed my wife to control the level of narcotics she was receiving to deaden her pain. The doctors were experimenting with various meds to determine the proper combination of oral narcotics to keep her pain under control. She told me that planned to draw blood in the morning to ensure that the new drug cocktail was not disrupting her blood chemistry. After the tests results came back she was hoping to come home.

My wife has been in the hospital for the last 11 days. Because of the Covid restrictions I have not been able to visit her in the hospital. During much of this time she was either extremely ill or heavily sedated, so I couldn’t even speak to her.

On a few days we only exchanged a brief text message. In the last 50 years, we have never spent more than a few days apart. Even when I was on a business trip or if she was visiting family, we had long phone conversations. The past 11 days has been a shock to my emotional well-being. Her fight with cancer has taken a lot out of her and in the last few months she has spent much of her time sleeping in our bed or in her recliner.

Even though she spent much of her time asleep, it was good to be near her. At one point I was so lonely that I considered buying a set of scrubs, counterfeiting an ID badge, filling a stack of manila folders with blank paper and infiltrating AGH.

I got up this morning and fixed an educational breakfast. It was education because learned that making French toast is not nearly as easy as my wife makes it look. It tasted vaguely like French toast, but the shape of what I cooked looked more like two mounds of egg spattered dough than two slices of toast.

I did my dishes and straightened up the house. I even ran the vacuum I wanted the house to look as nice as possible when my wife got home. I knew I could not keep the house up to her standards, but I wanted to do the best I could. After finishing my chores, I got dressed, even putting on a nice shirt, and sat down to read the Sunday paper while I waited for her call.

I needed a few things from the store, so I drove to Giant Eagle around noon, I had made sure the ringer on my phone was on, but I still kept repeatedly looking at it as I roamed the aisles of the store. I was like a fighter pilot ready to scramble and take off on my mission at the drop of a hat. I could not wait to see my wife and bring her back where she belongs.

 About 1 p.m, my phone finally rang and I was happy to see “Emergency” pop up on my screen. Instead of my wife’s name I put “Emergency” into the contacts on my phone so that if I get run down by a bus, anyone who finds me will realize that she is my emergency contact. I told my wife that I did this because any time she calls and needs something it is my number one priority.

I answered the phone and headed toward the door. As soon as I heard her voice, I sat back down. Glenda’s voice was weak and gravelly. The new meds her doctors had given her upset her stomach and caused her to throw them up. This was why her voice sounded so rough.

Since they didn’t make it past her stomach, the pain medications didn’t have a chance to do their job. My wife was in a lot of pain. Glenda told me her legs and stomach was swollen. She joked that she looked like she was pregnant again. The bottom line was she wouldn’t be coming home that day.

Glenda said she hoped that the doctors would get things straightened up so that she could come home on Monday. By the sound of her voice, I doubted that she could improve enough in just 24 hours to be able to come home. The news that my wife would not be coming home took the wind out of my sails. After I sent out a text updating my kids and my wife’s sisters, I sat on the couch and stared at the ceiling. The TV was on, but I could not tell you what was on the screen.

I should be used to this by now. Our experience with hospital visits and treatments is always one step forward and 47 steps back. Every time we get a glimmer of hope it is snatched away and crushed like a bug. I should have known better than to get my hopes up that I would be able to see my wife today. This is simply not my nature. I always hope for the best, even when logic tells me that it foolish to do so.

The news left me with nothing to do with my day. I had lots of things that I could be doing, but I didn’t feel like doing any of them. I shut off the TV, put a pillow behind my head and went to sleep on the couch. While I have not been sleeping well lately and I was a bit tired, it was not the primary reason I decided to nap.

Since I don’t drink, napping is just about the only means I have to “drown my sorrows.” When I am sleeping I don’t have to think about my wife being in pain, I don’t have to think about how much I miss her and how lonely I am feeling.

Perhaps I should adopt a new personal motto, “When the going gets tough, it’s time for a nap!” If I had access to a crystal ball, I think I would see a lot of napping in my future.    

- Jim Busch 

September 26, 2020

One of the hardest things I have had to endure during the coronavirus quarantine is being separated from my family.  Since my wife’s immune system is seriously compromised by the chemotherapy treatments she has been given for her pancreatic cancer, we have tried to be very strict about observing the proper coronavirus protocols.

We’ve only seen our children and our grandson a few times since the lockdown began. During these visits we kept our masks on and tried to do our best with social distancing in our tiny living room.

When we did get together with our kids, they were either special events like a birthday or our anniversary or formal visits where we sat and talked for several hours. What I miss is getting together with them more informally.

Before Covid and before my wife’s cancer weakened her, we used to get together to go to the farmer’s market or for shopping trips to Target. Sometimes we would visit our kids to help them with some task around their homes or to drop off some home cooked goodies.

I enjoy these informal get togethers. They made me feel like I was sharing a part of their lives and I was happy to help them. Growing up I delighted in riding along as my dad ran errands. I would be his co-pilot as he drove to the hardware store, the grocery store or the feed store. I didn’t see a lot of my dad, he always worked second shift and often took on extra day jobs as well.

Some of the best conversations I ever had with my dad took place in the front seat of our old station wagon. He would tell me about growing up on the farm with his brothers and sisters, about his time in the Civilian Conservation Corp and when he traveled around the country doing odd jobs during the depression. I feel I got a chance to know my dad on errand days.

I tried to do the same with my kids and we had a lot of good talks in the car or on walks. I told them about my life which was not nearly as interesting as my dad’s. In recent years I come to really look forward to any opportunity to spend time alone with my grandson.

I think he also enjoys the time we get to spend together. He will put away his phone, something he rarely does, and say “Tell me some random stories.” We talk about my life and about his.

He actually tells me about his interactions with his friends and his parents and what he worries about. I never preach to him, but I share my thoughts on life. It is one of the most satisfying relationships I have had in my life. It reminds me of the relationships I had with my grandfathers when I was a young boy.

Today I was the one in the market for wisdom. With my wife still in the hospital and unlikely to take up her usual workload when she gets home, I have been trying to domesticate myself. I have made good use of YouTube to hone my cooking skills with mixed success. I think that I will eventually be able to feed myself.

I have found a great ally in the American frozen food industry. As a child I thought a TV dinner was a great treat. Today’s frozen foods have come a long way from the divided aluminum foil trays holding a piece of tough fried chicken, peas and carrots, a lump of mashed potatoes and an inch and half square block of mystery cobbler. Today’s frozen food case holds hundreds of entrees representing every imaginable type of cuisine and taste.

I found doing laundry to be a much more daunting task. A few years ago my wife and I upgraded our washing machine and dryer with state of the art front loading high efficiency machines. I went to the basement and looked at the controls on these big machines. I was intimately familiar with our old washer and dryer.

We bought two Maytag machines in the late 1970’s and I kept them running for decades. I replaced the belts, the pump and even replaced and rewired the washer’s rotary control switch. After more than two decades, parts were getting hard to find and besides my wife rightly felt she deserved some state of the art laundry equipment.

I looked at the many buttons and settings on the new machines and could not picture what to do with them. I went on the web and downloaded the operating manual for the washer. It was slightly more complex than the flight manual for the new F-35 Strike Fighter.

After reading it several times over I still didn’t know how to turn the darn thing on, let alone do a load of towels. It was clear that I needed to call in back up. I sent a text to my daughter, “Not sure what you’re doing this weekend but I could use a ‘Laundry 101 for Dummies’ tutorial.” She responded that she would stop by this afternoon.

Today my daughter, Rachael, showed up bearing gifts. She had been to the farmer’s market and brought me a half gallon of apple cider, some fresh olive bread, an heirloom apple and some concord grapes. I put the produce in the fridge and we headed to the basement for my lesson.

We started with the fundamentals, sorting laundry, Rachael showed me how to sort the light and darks and the heavy and light items. Once this was accomplished, I was shown how to load the washer and put in the detergent and fabric softener.

All of this information was recorded on a yellow legal pad for future reference.  Rachael is trained as a psychologist and works as a counselor. She is an excellent communicator. She carefully explained how to use the buttons on the washer and told me to ignore most of them.  She showed me the two primary setting that I would need to accomplish most of my laundry needs. We started the machine and returned upstairs.

While the clothes were washing we watched a craft show on television. Rachael’s personality is very much like mine, while our son shares many of his mother’s traits. Rachael shares my interest in art and like me enjoys making things with her hands. We enjoyed the program and talked about different projects we were working on. We talked about her mother and she expressed concern for me. We had a good conversation and I enjoyed spending some time with her

When the time arrived we returned to the basement and Rachael taught me how to use the dryer. She supervised as I did the next load of laundry and I got a gold star for being a good pupil. We waited until the dryer stopped and she taught me the proper folding of towels. (The fact that I needed this lesson is an indication of how unskilled I am at household chores.) After this was accomplished, Rachael left to go home to have dinner with her wife.

As Rachael prepared to leave, I thanked her for helping me out. Of all of the things I have accomplished in my life, I am most proud of my children. They are both well respected in their careers but what pleases me most is that they are good people. They both go out of their way to help other people.

Although the lion’s share of the credit for this goes to their mother, I like to feel I had some influence on them. It was a good day for me. I learned how to do laundry and I got to spend part of my day with an amazing young woman, my daughter Rachael.  

  - Jim Busch

September 25, 2020

I spent a good bit of today building a fence. Back in the spring, I tore out the old fence that I had built years ago. It was my intention to replace it a few weeks later, but the sizzler of a summer made me decide to wait for the fall to complete the job.

Once upon a time, I could work all day in 80 or 90 degree weather and it did not bother me. I am not sure if I have grown more sensitive to the heat or if I just got smarter as I got older, but these days I stay inside when the mercury rises. With temperatures in the 60s, I had no excuse to not finish what I had started back in May.

The old fence had metal poles fashioned from gas pipe and galvanized fence wire. The poles had rusted through and the wire was broken in places, so it was time to replace it. The original fence was put up to keep critters out of our vegetable garden.

These days, the garden is gone and we have so many critters around that the Great Wall of China wouldn’t keep them out. Still the space looked empty without something there. After I took down the old fence I strung a length of blue nylon rope to mark the boundary line.

This time I opted for a wooden fence, less practical but more aesthetically pleasing.  I am not sure whether I should call it a short board fence or a wide picket fence. I bought a number of six-foot palings for a privacy fence.

I cut them in half and trimmed the corners of the cut off pieces to match the factory milled tops of the palings. My plan was to set a number of posts at seven-foot intervals, mount rails between them and then attach the palings.

I started at the corner of my lot and dug the first post hole. Maybe it’s because I am descended from a thousand generations of farmers, but I actually like using a clam shell posthole digger. It is a simple device, essentially two small shovels fastened together with a hinge.

I held it up in front of me, lifted it up high and them using gravity and muscle power plunged it into the ground. I gave the twin handles a twist, spread them apart and lifted out the first scoop of dirt. I followed this procedure over and over until I had a perfectly round hole that reached 24-inches into the ground.

The hole was just big enough to hold a four by four post. In the clay soil of Western Pennsylvania it is not necessary to set a post in concrete, all that is necessary is to backfill the hole and tamp the clay back down with an iron tamping bar.

As I was digging postholes, my neighbor’s son walked over and offered to help me. I’ve known him since he was a toddler and watched him grow into a nice young man. His mother had to have a double lung transplant several years ago and he turned his back on a promising career to come home and take care of his mom. His offer to help was quite sincere, he would have dug the holes if I had asked him to do so.  I declined his offer and we talked for about a half an hour.

After over 40 years of living in the same house this is not the first job I have had to redo. I had to repair and replace many things that I either built or installed decades or so. In my yard there are trees that I planted which now stand taller than the roofline of my house. One is a contorted willow that I brought home from a May Market plant sale in a three pound coffee can that is over 35-feet tall.

A tall blue spruce was a giveaway at the 25th anniversary of Earth Day in 1995. It was given to a friend of my daughter and was no bigger than a pencil. She didn’t know what to do with it so she gave it to me. She is now a marketing executive for a Washington D.C. law firm with a family of her own, but she stops by every time she is home to see “her tree.”

Over the years I done numerous home improvement projects on our house and added many plantings in the yard. I know every nail, wire and pipe in the old place. My wife’s grandfather built our home 93 years ago and my father in law keep the place together for decades before handing it off to me.

Though my name is on the deed, I don’t feel like I own it. I feel like I am just the caretaker for the family home. It saddens me that my wife and I will probably be the last members of the family to live here. Both of my children already own homes that are much nicer than ours.

I have never looked upon our home as an investment or as an asset. I think of our home as just that it is our home, it is where we live, where we have spent our lives. Our home is where my wife was raised and where her parents and grandparents died. It is where we raised our children, where we’ve celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.

I have never quite understood the concept of a “starter home.” To me, a home is a place where you put down roots. I have no plans to leave my home until they carry me out the door feet first. None of the improvements I have done to our home were intended to improve its resale value or add curb appeal. Everything I have done to our home was done to make it more comfortable for my family and to make our home more homey.

I am using quality materials to build my fence, treated lumber, galvanized hardware and construction grade screws.  It is built to last, in fact it will probably outlast me.

I don’t know who will the next owner of my home will be. They may tear down my fence and undo everything I have done over the decades. That will be their right. I hope that they make this place their home and I hope they will stay here until they become a part of this home and this home becomes part of them.

It is a good old house and deserves to be treated with the respect it deserves.       

- Jim Busch

September 24, 2020

I reached a major milestone in my life today. I am extremely pleased and proud of my significant accomplishment. Though many said I could not do it and that I was sure to fail, but I proved them all wrong.

Victory is mine! Yes, I, Jim Busch, cooked an egg! In fact I cooked several eggs. Look upon me ye mighty and be scrambled!

Cooking an egg may not seem like a big deal for most people, but in my 68 years it is something I had never done. I felt like Tom Hanks in Castaway when he first figured out to make fire.

I wanted to dance around celebrating like Hanks, but I didn’t even have a blood stained beach ball like “Wilson” for an audience. Prior to this morning, my culinary experience was limited to toaster based cuisine. My cuisine was limited to a peanut butter sandwich on toast, frozen waffles and Pop-tarts. Occasionally my wife would trust me to reheat leftovers in the microwave, but only if I followed her detailed written instructions.         

How does a man live almost 70 years without even cracking an egg into a skillet? In many ways I am like one of those costumed interpreters at a living history museum. When you go to Williamsburg, you will meet ladies in hoop skirts and gentlemen in waistcoats and tricorn hats that deny that they have ever heard of such a thing as preposterous as a “horseless carriage.” Their goal is to create the illusion that you have traveled back in time to a simpler time.

My wife and I may have missed a money making opportunity. We could have raked in big bucks inviting paying customers into our home to observe our quaint old fashioned life style. We could have advertised it as 1950s sitcom. People would bring their kids to see what it was like back in the olden days.

They could see a wife kiss her husband and send him off to work before starting the housework. They could see the husband and kids come home in the evening to a home cooked meal enjoyed around a multigenerational table.  The little visitors would look up at their parents with wide eyes and ask, “Mama, Papa, did people really live like this?” They would look down and smile saying, “Yes, dear, but it was a long, long time ago.”

My kid’s friends used to love visiting our home. They were not used to visiting homes where fresh baked cookies or other homemade goodies were constantly available. Instead of ordering a pizza, they were invited to sit down to a plate of chicken and dumplings.

Almost all of their parents adhered to the standard baby boomer playbook where both parents worked and most dinners were served from paper bags and Styrofoam takeout containers. We shared our home with my wife’s parents so our kids’ friends often told us, “You guys are just like The Waltons.”, the TV show about a multigenerational family in depression era Virginia was their only point of reference for our traditional family structure.

Our archaic lifestyle was not an accident. My wife and I both knew that we wanted to spend our lives together from about our second date. We also both knew that we wanted kids and raise a family. I think this is the secret of our successful marriage, we shared a common goal and purpose in life. Although we were both have strong personalities, together we formed a team whose mission was to advance the family into the future.

We were only 20 when we got married. We were so anxious to start a family that we had our first child only six months later. We always knew that this child would be the focus of our marriage. My wife and I discussed our dreams and our vision of what married life should look like.

Glenda’s mother was an amazing woman and an incredible role model for my wife. She was always there for her children and that was the kind of mom Glenda wanted to be. We decided that we were going to go old school in our marriage, she would stay home with the kids and I would be the bread winner. This ran counter to the prevailing feminist view of marriage, but Glenda didn’t see raising kids and keeping house as demeaning. She saw being a mom as the most important job in the world.

We were only able to pull this off because neither one of us were very materialistic. We never thought having a big house or fancy clothes was very important. For several years we lived in a cabin with no plumbing and heated by a wood stove and loved it. In 50 years of marriage, we have purchased exactly one new car and many of our vacations involved sleeping in a tent.

When our daughter Rachael was born we were having trouble making ends meet so we moved in with my in-laws. This temporary arrangement lasted decades until they both passed away and we still live in the house we purchased from them for $1000.

This arrangement greatly reduced our expenses and gave our kids a set of wise adults to teach them about life. Like our kids friends had noted, our lifestyle was very much like television’s Walton clan.

For many years I worked several jobs and did other odd jobs to help pay the bills. My wife and I did take a nighttime janitorial contract, but she insisted that we did not leave for work until the kids were in bed. For the most part we maintained a strict division of labor. I went to work plus I took care of the yard and the car while she took care of the cooking and the cleaning. Theoretically we shared the job of parenting, but in actuality most of that also fell to my wife because I was usually at work.

As our kids grew older and starting having lives of their own, my wife decided it was time to contribute to our finances. The day after we put our daughter on a plane to South Africa for a year as an exchange student, my wife started her job at a local pet store. Later, she and I started a used book store that Glenda managed with her mother. When we learned our son’s wife was pregnant, Glenda decided to sell the store to go into the grandma business.

In the last decade or so my workload lightened considerably and I spent much more time at home, so I suggested that we revise our job descriptions. I was more than willing to help around the house to give my wife a break. She would not hear of doing this. If I tried to do the dishes she would hit me like a Steelers lineman.

I asked her why I shouldn’t do the dishes and she gave me two reasons. I was too slow and I probably would not do them right. My lack of skill was a big sticking point when I suggesting taking on any household chore. I told her she could teach me which only made her laugh.

My wife has been in the hospital for a week and I am left to my own devices. I have been cooking for myself. Going from my wife’s cooking to my own is a bit like going from a restaurant with a Michelin four star rating to the mess hall in a third world prison. 

I’m managing with the help of Giant Eagle’s frozen food case. I don’t know how long my wife will be in the hospital. She is determined to get home and keep doing the things she sees as her “job,” Her battle with cancer is taking more and more out of her so it is time for me to step up, whether she wants me to or not.

I went from my mother’s home to living with my wife. I have never done a load of laundry, stripped a bed or, until today, cooked an egg. This is how I wound up in the kitchen watching a YouTube video on scrambling an egg.

It is a brave new world for me to conquer. Today I scrambled an egg, tomorrow its googling “Do a load of towels for dummies.” Who says life isn’t an adventure!

- Jim Busch

September 23, 2020

According to my calendar, today is the first full day of fall. The autumnal equinox occurred yesterday at precisely 9:31 a.m.

The term equinox comes from the Latin words for equal and night. In theory on this day the length of the day and the night are exactly the same. This is not exactly true in our latitude but why quibble over a few minutes one way or the other. The clockwork mechanism of the solar system is so precise that the exact moment of the equinox can be plotted thousands of years in the future.

Seldom does the coming of autumn down here on earth sync up with what is going up in the sky. This is why I was surprised to see the first hint of fall color in the trees today. Apparently this year the local trees got the memo and changed into their fall outfits in time to celebrate the equinox.

In the sky, the change of the seasons is like flipping a switch. It was still summer at 9:30 a.m. and suddenly it was fall at 9:31 a.m. It is an orderly and planned event like relay runners passing a baton. Down here on earth the change of the seasons is more gradual and a bit more chaotic. It is more like slowly turning a dial than flipping a switch.

For the most part the woods around my home look pretty much like they did last week or last month. The bulk of the trees are still sporting a beautiful cloak of verdant green foliage. If shown a picture of the same plot of forest taken in July and another taken today, I would be hard pressed to tell them apart.

Fall slips in slowly and stealthily like a reluctant swimmer dipping a toe into the pool. They are just not ready to plunge into the cold water all at once. It was one of these toe dips that told me that fall was coming, I noted a single branch on a single tree that had turned a muted red. The color contrast made that red branch standout like it was on fire.

Renaissance artists like Leonardo Da Vinci called this trick of the eye, chiaroscuro. They understood that when a bright color was placed adjacent to a darker shade it seemed even more vivid than it did on its own. I’m never quite sure if the brilliant impression the early fall leaves make on me is a result of chiaroscuro or of my impatience for my favorite season to arrive,

This little tease of color made me hungry for more. I drove to the White Oak County Park and wandered around a bit. I guessed that there had to be more trees that were as impatient as me for the fall to come.

My theory proved to be spot on. Here and there the park’s thick woods were splashed with spots of red, orange and pale pastel yellow. Old Leonardo would be envious of how these scattered swatches of color stood out against the green leaves of their slowpoke neighbors.

The hillside was like a bit of polka dot cloth printed on a dark background. In some places it was a single tree or even a lone branch like the first one I had seen. In other places were small groves of trees showing off their colored finery.

There is a long list of reasons to thank our lucky stars that we live in the Mon Valley. The show nature puts on for us every fall ranks very high on that list. People travel to New England or New York to take in the leaves, but I think our local leaves compare very favorably with these leaf peeping destinations.

Our local leaves have a definite edge over the competition in staying power. We sit on the boundary between the cold north and the warmer climate of Virginia. Western Pennsylvania’s woods are a melting pot of trees from the south and trees from the north. We are surrounded by the most diverse woodlands in North America. Because different trees change color at different times, we get to enjoy our fall color longer than any other state.

It’s impossible to predict when the leaves will change, there are just too many variables involved in this transformation. The biggest factor is the shortening of the days as the year comes to a close. This signals the trees that it’s time to call it quits for another growing season. Other factors include the weather, the leaves will change earlier in cool years and later in a warm fall. I think the cold snap we experienced over the last few days is what caused the leaves I saw today to change.

I have always liked the idea that the colors we see in the fall in the fall have been there since the spring. The reds, oranges and yellows were hiding behind the chlorophyll that give leaves their green color.

Chlorophyll is the tree’s factory floor using the sun’s energy to produce the sugars that feed the tree and allow it to grow. When the shortening of the days shuts off the tree’s energy supply, it lays off the chlorophyll until production resumes in the spring. The chlorophyll begins to degrade revealing the other colors hidden in the leaves.

Once the green pigment is gone, the sun starts acting on the other colors. Trees in the sunniest locations often turn bright scarlet as the sun causes build ups of anthocyanin which gives the trees their red cast.

My grandfather would not have known a simile from a metaphor if his life depended in it. He did understand signs. He knew how to read the natural world and listen to what it had to say. A bit of hair on a blackberry bush or a place on a tree where the bark was rubbed away would tell him where to find deer. He saw lessons and parables everywhere he looked.

I was thinking about this while I walked around and looked at the first leaves of the season. I am in the autumn of my life, the road behind me is much longer than the one before me. This gives me a perspective I lacked in my youth.

Only after we have seen the trees change color for a few decades do we begin to understand just how beautiful life can be. The brilliant colorful parts of our lives often lie hidden behind the mundane tasks and responsibilities that fill our daily existence. We are so focused on making a living that we sometimes forget to live.

This is why I dropped everything today and went off in search of a few colored trees. There is no time like the present moment to bring a little color and beauty into our lives.

- Jim Busch

September 22, 2020

This evening I witnessed a total Covid meltdown. I had not had dinner and was due at the Tube City Writers meeting at 6 p.m. In my mailbox was a coupon flyer from Burger King, so I decided to do a quick run to the drive-thru on my way to the meeting.

When I got to the restaurant I found about 20 cars lined up, waiting to place their orders. I pulled in at the end of the parade hoping that it would move along quickly. I sat there for about ten minutes, several cars pulled in behind me but the cars in front of me had only moved ahead four feet or so.

I was considering aborting my mission to get dinner. I had to decide soon because once I advanced another car length, I would be trapped in line by a concrete curb with no way to leave. Just then I saw a family walk through the parking lot and into the restaurant.

I did not realized that they were open for counter service. I decided that this might be quicker than the drive thru, so I parked and went inside. I was pleased to see only two people in line ahead of me. I also saw a large group of people milling about in the store’s dining room. It took about ten minutes for me to reach the register where I presented my coupon and ordered two chicken sandwiches.

Soon I was one of the people milling about in the dining room looking at our watches and shifting our weight from one foot to another. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the activity going on behind the counter, looking for any sign that our orders might be ready soon. The restaurant was obviously short staffed with crowds of people waiting inside and outside the restaurant for their food.

When the paper jammed in the small receipt printer, the young woman at the register opened it up and quickly replaced the tape which quickly jammed again. She repeated this three more times before she snapped and began pounding the innocent device with both fists. The problem was resolved by a time consuming switch to another register.

After resolving the printer issue the manager turned to survey what was going on the back counter. She saw that the store’s french fry bin was running dangerously low. Only a handful of golden brown fries were sitting in the stainless steel rack under a bank of heat lamps, barely enough to fill one small order.

She barked at the person responsible for keeping the bin filled. The young man countered that he was going as fast as he could. Her volume increased several decibels as she told him, “Get a move on. You’ve got to hustle.”

When I walked into the restaurant I noticed a Burger King recruiting poster in the window featuring photos of a smiling young man and a woman looking drop dead sexy in their crisply pressed Burger King uniforms. The poster promised, “As a team member you will become an important member of a fast-paced team that serves up America’s favorite burger and have a great time doing it!” I was sure that the guy sweating over the fryer was certainly feeling the “fast-pace,” but I’m not so certain that he was “having a great time doing it.”    

Just at that moment a tall young man who was putting customer’s orders into bags said to the manager, “I have to take a break.” The tone of his voice implied a desperate need to step away from the counter. I was sure he either desperately needed to use the bathroom or he was about to snap and start lobbing Whoppers at the customers in the dining room. His desperation probably accounted for the extremely poor timing of his request.

I doubt that the manager’s response to his plea came from the BK leadership handbook. She glared at him for a minute before shouting “You’ve got to be #@%^@&*# kidding me!” He pulled down his mask, got in her face and shouting at the top of his lungs said, “I HAVE to take a break.”

She pulled down her mask, (apparently this is the Covid version of rolling up your sleeves before a fight) and starting yelling about firing him. His retort was a true classic, “Is that a threat or a promise?”

Finally she stomped away and surprisingly he stayed at his post bagging orders. Apparently the shouting match had allowed him to vent his stress. The only trace of his rebellion was he neglected to pull up his mask choosing to wear it around his neck like a cowboy on a cattle drive.

After spending 40 minutes at Burger King, I was finally on the road with my chicken sandwiches. Perhaps in the post Covid world we should retire the phrase “Fast Food.” My dinner was not very fast and it barely qualified as food.

I am sure that Ray Kroc, Harlan Sanders and Dave Thomas were rolling over in their graves like rotisserie chickens. The fast food industry was once a model of efficiency and fast service. Unfortunately the decline and fall of the burger empires came when our limited dining options forces us to do crazy things like waiting 40 minutes for a bad chicken sandwich.

Once upon a time, my wife and I would go to Burger King as often as three times a day. For six months she had a job with a “Secret Shopper Service.” Her job was to visit Burger King Restaurants throughout the area and report on their performance. She was given a stopwatch, thermometer and a standard checklist to complete.

I often accompanied her on these secret missions. Her job required her to order a Whopper meal through the drive up window. We would record how long it took to reach the order screen after getting in line, and how long it took to get our food. In the parking lot, we shoved the instant reading thermometer into the burger and then the fries to record how hot they were before doing a condiment inspection.

We then went inside and repeated the process along with making observations on the cleanliness of the dining area and restrooms. My wife always tried to surreptitiously time the lines with her stopwatch.

She reminded me of a CIA agent trying to collect intelligence from an informant in a Moscow park. I told her that that fact that we had purchased the exact same meal from the drive thru and over the counter in the span of ten minutes was a dead giveaway.

This job had its perks. In addition to her salary, she got mileage, burger money and free food. On some days we would buy six Whopper meals in a single day. We got to the point where we couldn’t look at a Whopper. We were both raised to not waste food so our fridge was packed with hamburgers wrapped in paper.

When people would come to visit, we would always offer them a dozen or so Whoppers to take home. We’d offer Whoppers to our mail man and delivery people. We were very impressed with how quickly the various restaurants would fill our orders and how consistently they met corporate performance standards. Eventually my wife’s employer lost the Burger King contract so our burger glut came to an end.

Having to wait a while for a chicken sandwich is not much of a hardship. My experience at Burger King did offer a window into just how much the coronavirus has disrupted our lives and our economy. We hear a lot about front line workers and the sacrifices they are asked to make.

I definitely felt a great deal of compassion for the Burger King employees I observed this evening. They were working hard and were stressed to the limit for minimal wages. From where I sat they didn’t look like they were “having a great time while doing it.”              

 - Jim Busch

September 21, 2020

Today when I went to the mailbox, I found the September 2020 edition of the McKeesport/White Oak Yellow Pages. I’m sure most of my neighbors took little note of this event. In fact, I’m sure most of the directories ended up in the recycling bin unopened.

The phone book has gone the way of buggy whips and button hooks, the world has moved on and left them behind. Since I spent 12 years of life selling Yellow Pages advertising, the arrival of the new phone book triggers a lot of memories, both happy and traumatic, for me.

I worked with a lot of interesting people during my time selling ads in the phonebook. One of the most unique was John Figlar. John was our “spec” artist, he designed “speculative” ad layouts to give potential advertisers an idea of how their ad would look.

Before I started, he had managed a large art department cranking out ad layouts for our customers. At some point, the company decided that they could save money by outsourcing the bulk of the artwork. When I was hired in the early 1980’s, the Pittsburgh art department had been reduced to John and one part-time assistant.       

John was a great artist. He had always liked to draw as a child, but during World War II he joined the Merchant Marines right out of high school. He served in the North Atlantic when German U-boats were taking a heavy toll on allied shipping. After the war he took his back pay and studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He did well in art school but couldn’t find a job in the field. He wanted to get married and move on with his life, so he renewed his seaman’s papers and found a berth on a Great Lakes ore boat.

The night before he was to ship out he got a call from the Yellow Pages. John spent the rest of his life designing ads and promotional materials for the Pittsburgh office of the Reuben H. Donnelley Company who published the phone books for the phone company.

Most of my fellow sales reps were afraid of John. He was a curmudgeon and liked to give sales people a hard time. The Merchant Marines provided John with a graduate level education in the use of scorching profanity. In those days our office was almost all male, so any sales rep who brought John with a request for a rush art work was treated to a torrent of blue language that threatened to strip the paint off the desks and filing cabinets.

No one dared enter John’s office on a Monday morning without checking the sports pages. He was a passionate Steelers fan, if the Black and Gold had done well on Sunday he was a pleasant as Fred Rogers on Valium. If the Steelers lost, it was much wiser to wait a few days before approaching him.

Even John’s wife knew to avoid him on game days, she would retire to the kitchen while he yelled and cursed at the TV. Years after he had retired, John was watching a playoff game while his wife sought shelter in their kitchen. She grew concerned when the house grew quiet. She went to check on her husband and found him dead in his recliner with the game still playing on the TV.

She called 911 and then called their son in Washington D. C. Her son had also been watching the game and realized that his father had suffered a heart attack when a referee had made a questionable decision against the Steelers. No one who knew John Figlar was surprised about the details of his demise.

I always liked John despite his crusty demeanor and colorful language. John had grown up in Hazelwood and his dad worked at J & L Steel. He reminded of me of the dads in the neighborhood where I grew up. They were as rough as a cast iron ingot on the outside but basically good guys once you got to know them.

Like John, a lot of these guys had served in the war and it left them with a thick shell protecting their emotions. This was long before men like John had been assigned the title of “The Greatest Generation” but I was well aware of what they had accomplished. I think John sensed the respect I had for him.

It also helped that I was interested in art. This led me to take an interest in the skills that John used to layout an ad. When most of my peers picked up a layout, they would look it over to check for typos, give him a meaningless, “Looks good, thanks” and they were out the door.  

I took the time to look the ad over and would give him detailed feedback on what I liked about his work. I would also ask him about his thought process and how he decide how to arrange the elements in an ad.

John worked with technical pens and markers instead of wearing a hardhat in the mill, but at his core, John was a blue collar guy like me. I understood that he took a lot of pride in his work. When a customer praised his work I always stopped by his office to share their feedback with him. This is why I may have been the only person in the office who believed that John was capable of smiling.

Because of his reputation, most of my fellow salespeople treated John’s office like the principal’s office at school—they only went there when they absolutely had to. In addition to stopping by to tell him what my customers had to say about his work I made a point of stopping by to say “Good morning.” I persisted in doing this even though he usually responded with a “What the (Expletive deleted) is good about it.”

I also knew John had a sweet tooth so I would bring him coconut pillows from Candyrama downtown or cookies from McKeesport’s Minerva bakery. These high calorie bribes plus my refusal to let him chase me away eventually allowed me to build a good relationship with John.

I wanted to get close to John because I liked him and admired his artistic skills. He was my kind of guy. Although I didn’t have any ulterior motives being nice to John did pay dividends. My ad requests always seemed to find their way to the top of the stack and instead of just getting the standard one layout in my packet, I would often several concepts.  John was taking care of me.

As the holidays draw closer, I think of John Figlar every time I see one of those “Only (fill in the blank number) days to Christmas” countdown calendars. Every year around Thanksgiving, John would display his own hand drawn count down calendar on his desk. John’s take on his calendar was a bit different from the ones they sell at the Hallmark store.

John’s calendar was a drawing of Chester the Molester. Chester was a comic strip drawn by Dwaine Tinsley than ran in Hustler magazine in the 1970’s and 80’s. John’s cartoon showed him with a lurid grin on his face holding open a trench coat. You could see Chester’s bare legs and chest but his midsection was covered by a pad of Post-it notes marked with the countdown numbers.

I can’t imagine something like this being tolerated in an office in these politically correct days. When John removed the final sticky note the only thing it revealed was a display of holly leaves which looked like the fig leaves on a demure Renaissance sculpture of Adam and Eve.

I think John’s Chester calendar was a good metaphor for him. He was a bit coarse and wanted to project an alpha male vibe, but at his core he was a good guy. He was a man that loved his family and worked hard to provide for them. He was proud of his work and of his skills. He liked to hear that people liked his work but he didn’t need or seek out praise.

He had seen unspeakable things in the Battle of the Atlantic, so he never spoke about them. He loved his Steelers and he loved Christmas. Although he didn’t mean any harm, few people would put up with John’s ways today. He belonged to a smoky, gritty, hard edged Pittsburgh that no longer exists.

We live in a much more polite time where companies teach their people how to use emotional intelligence but I miss guys like John Figlar. Men like John always told you exactly what they were thinking and you always knew where you stood with them.      

- Jim Busch     

September 19 & 20, 2020

There is a great old movie starring Ray Milland titled The Lost Weekend. The movie is one of the first times that popular culture focused its attention on the problem of alcoholism.

In the movie, Milland’s character is supposed to spend the weekend drying out with his brother. On the way to the train, he stops for “just one more drink” and due to his addiction ends up spending the entire evening in the bar. He misses his train which leads to going on a three day bender with his girlfriend.

He ends up destroying his life, begging for money to buy more alcohol and blacking out. If you’re not familiar with the movies, which won a number of Oscars including Best Picture, I recommend that you check it out. I don’t drink but I was thinking of this movies because the last several days feel like a “lost weekend” to me.

I have been lost since Friday morning when I saw my wife taken away to Allegheny General Hospital in an ambulance. She was in excruciating pain related to her pancreatic cancer, crying out as waves of stomach cramps sucker punched her over and over. I can’t get this image of her out of my mind. If we weren’t living in this bizarro post-Covid world, I’d be there by her side.

I would be sleeping in an uncomfortable chair and eating out of a vending machine, but I’d be there. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the reception desk to check Glenda into the hospital, she had to do all of the paperwork and answer all the questions herself despite all of the pain she was in.

I now know how the NASA mission control crew felt when the shuttle blew up. All they could do is watch as things fell apart while someone I love suffers. I feel like a spectator at one of the most important and distressing events in my life

In the last three days I have had maybe five very brief phone conversations with my wife. She has also been updating me on what the doctors have said by text, which I pass on to the rest of the family, also by text.

Performing my duties as the family’s “Communications Officer” was the most productive thing I did in the last two days. Normally I keep myself very busy, I always have a long “to do” list full of things I have to do around the house or projects I want to do. I am always in the middle of some creative art, craft or writing project.

This weekend I mostly read and watched television. I simply didn’t feel motivated to do anything else. I looked at the FitBit on my wrist at four on Sunday afternoon. Scrolling to the second screen on my device, I saw that I had taken a total of 473 steps for the entire day. I wasn’t exactly training for the marathon. I simply couldn’t muster the energy to leave the couch.

The most adventurous thing I did all weekend was drive to the Penn Hills Library to pick up some books on Saturday morning. They have a rather efficient curbside pickup system. They have designated a row of parking spots as pick up points and numbered them one through ten.

In theory, patrons are supposed to park in a spot and call the library to announce their arrival. In practice the phone call is seldom necessary as they are quite busy. Usually there is a librarian delivering books to another car who asks your name and then brings out the requested books.

This is what happened today. One of the young librarians walked up to my car and I rolled down the window, she said, “You are Mr. Busch, right?”

I responded, “Yes, Busch with a ‘c’ like the beer, not the president.”

She was back at in a few minutes with a paper shopping bag containing the books I had requested saying, “Here you go!” as she passed them through the window. I said, “Thanks.”

She gave me an obligatory “You’re welcome.” As she turned to walk away the pleasant young woman added, “Have a nice day.” Upon hearing this pleasantry, my first thought was, “That ship has already left the harbor and she’s on her way to hit an iceberg,” but I decided to play nice and said “same to you.”

This was the sum total of my human interactions for the weekend. I felt like I was auditioning for the next A Quiet Place film. I have a well-deserved reputation for being a copious talker. For once in my life, I didn’t feel like talking.

I could not get the image of my wife in so much pain out of my head. Since her diagnosis I have been trying to stay positive. I have been hoping for the best but the events of this weekend smashed my hopes like an aluminum beer can tossed on the highway. It put me in touch with a reality that I do not want to face.

My wife and I live in a tiny house jam packed with way too much stuff. We have gone way beyond cozy to quite cramped. Somehow for the last few days my house has felt empty. Like standing in the middle of a sports stadium when the home team is on the road my home is a very lonely place to be when my wife is not there.

In the movie Lost Weekend, Ray Milland lost several days of his life when he succumbed to his addiction. I have lost this weekend because I could not indulge in my the object of my desire. I am going through withdrawal from sharing my life with my wife.

After almost 50 years together she has become as important to me as oxygen. The thought of possibly losing her knocks me flat on my back. It is like one of those “Making the movies” specials you see on TV. They show a clip of a film without the background music to make the viewer realize how important the background music is to the story.

Without dramatic music a chase scene doesn’t seem dramatic and a love scene doesn’t seem so romantic without the violins and piano playing softly on the soundtrack. The music adds meaning to what’s going on, without it the action on screen falls flat.

This is how I feel when my wife is gone, everything seems flat and I have trouble figuring out what is supposed to be going on.

Without her, there is no music in my life.      

- Jim Busch        

September 18, 2020

On a scale of one to ten, I’d rank this day about a negative 173. I awoke this morning to the sound of my wife moaning in pain. Glenda had not been feeling well yesterday and during the night she woke up with severe stomach cramps. Not wanting to wake me she moved to the living room where the pain continued to get worse and worse through the night. By the time I woke up, she was almost doubled over in pain.

I walked drowsily to the living room where my wife was leaning back in her recliner not quite sitting or lying down. Glenda’s pain was so intense that she could not sit up and she was too weak from the pain and exhaustion to stand.

She told me that she needed to go to the emergency room. I said I would call the ambulance service and she said, “No you take me. We didn’t subscribe to the service.”

I asked, “Are you sure” and she nodded yes.

I pulled the car in front of the house and grabbed the bag Glenda keeps packed for just such occasions. When I tried to help her to her feet, she cried out in pain fell back into her chair. My wife is the definition of tough. When she was just 12 years old, she went bow hunting with her dad.

Walking through the woods she accidentally stabbed herself in the calf with a broad head hunting arrow. The arrow had four razor sharp blades intended to pierce the tough hide of a Whitetail deer. The arrowhead penetrated an inch and a half into the muscle in the back of her leg. She stifled a cry because she didn’t want to ruin her father’s hunting trip.

Glenda pulled out the arrow and hurried to keep up. Her father only learned about her injury when they got back to the truck at the end of the day and he discovered her high top rubber boot was full of blood. He dressed her wound and took her to the hospital for stitches. She has a three inch scar on the back of her leg to this day as a souvenir of that hunting trip.

I was present when our daughter was born. I did not get this privilege with our son, the hospital policy at that time did not allow fathers in the delivery room. When the nurse came to tell me that I had a son, she made a point of telling my “how brave” my wife had been for a new mother.

I got to see this for myself when my Rachael came along. It was a long labor but my wife endured the entire experience without crying out or offering a word of complaint. In fact, her obstetrician was the only one in the room who yelled out in pain that day.

My daughter was born just after 11 p.m. which was when the nurse’s shift changed. The nurses that had been with her all evening stuck around to see the results of their hard work. This meant that there were twice as many people in the room as normal.

Perhaps this surplus of nurses led to someone moving the stainless steel stool at the foot of the delivery table. The doctor went to sit down to help deliver my daughter and unexpectedly discovered the missing seat. The doctor who was well into his 60s, went crashing to the floor as Rachael came crashing into the world.

As his backside hit the hard tile floor the doctor had to reach his arms up to catch Rachael as the critical moment came. The doctor looked like an NBA player making a jump shot. The first words my daughter heard as she entered the world was a string of profanities that would have shocked a Marine Corps drill sergeant. I have always attributed my daughter’s tendency to resort to blue language when she is angry to that early experience in the delivery room.

Hearing my wife’s cries of pain this morning shook me to my core. I knew how intense her pain had to be, I wished I could take her pain and make it my own. I felt helpless and incredibly sad.

I tried to help Glenda to her feet and she let out a piercing cry. She could not straighten up and didn’t have the strength to stand. I reached into my pocket and took out my phone. “I’m calling EMS, I don’t care what it costs. We need an ambulance.”

I quickly herded our cats to the basement and cleared a path wide enough for a gurney. Within a few moments, the White Oak EMS ambulance pulled up in front of our house. The paramedics quickly assessed the situation and agreed that she needed to go to the ER. T

hey asked where she was receiving cancer treatments and I told them “Allegheny General.” They told me that they would take her there. I was not allowed to go with her, so I followed them to the hospital. My wife had been hospitalized a few weeks before so I knew that under Covid-19 rules I couldn’t be with her. The best thing I could do was leave my phone number and wait for someone to call me.    

I had to wait several hours before I heard anything. My wife called me and told me that the doctors thought perhaps the tumor on her pancreas was pushing against the artery that supplied blood to her appendix simulating the effects of appendicitis.

They were giving her pain medications and planned to admit her. I knew that was the best course of action, I knew that the rules keeping me from being by her side made good sense but I couldn’t help from being angry.

I was angry. I was sad and I was lonely, I felt useless and had no idea of what to do. I sent out a group text to my son and daughter, plus my wife’s sisters and nieces. I answered the numerous replies and tried to answer questions without any knowledge of what was really going on.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around and running aimless errands. It seemed the most productive thing I could do was to pick up cat food. I was an old dog and this threat to my wife, this threat to my life, was a horrible new trick. I didn’t know what to do, what to think or what to feel.

When I have gone through tough times before in my life, I always tell myself, “You’ve been through harder stuff than this and you have come out okay.” This time that just doesn’t work, I’ve never gone through anything like this before, this is absolutely rock bottom.

Without my guiding light beside me, I need to draw some new maps for these unexplored territories.    

- Jim Busch

September 17, 2020

Although I have been retired for almost five years, I still keep in touch with some of my old coworkers. These conversations make me very happy that I am no longer “in the trenches.” I worked in newspaper advertising, an industry that was already suffering when the coronavirus lockdown delivered what could be a fatal blow to print advertising.

I thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t have to try to make a living when the economy was going down the drain. When everyone’s income is shrinking, being on a fixed income suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

 I started thinking about retirement when I was in my early 30s, at least that is when I started saving for the day when I would be able to quit working. In 1983, I took a job as a Yellow Pages advertising salesperson with the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation. This was the first time I had worked for a large company with a clearly defined retirement plan.

The D & B human resources department gave me a thick packet of forms to fill out and sign. I plowed through the paperwork, but stopped dead in my tracks when I read the pension form. Right there was my name, my social security number and a line reading, “Retirement Date: June 19, 2017,” my 65th birthday.

I was a young father living paycheck to paycheck. At that point in my life, long term planning was wondering how I was going to make a car payment at the end of the month. This date, 34 years in the future, sounded like something out of science fiction, in fact, it was 16 years after the time frame for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

I filled out the paperwork and promptly forgot about it. I was focused on surviving the training program and impressing my new bosses. I would review the annual statements and put them into my file cabinet. After 12 years, I was recruited by another company and this time I paid much more attention to the retirement program.

That 2017 date didn’t seem so far away this time. Though I paid attention to my financial planning for retirement, I didn’t start thinking about what I would do when that time actually came. Some guys constantly fantasize about retirement, but I liked my job and could not imagine doing anything else.

In my 50s, I started giving retirement some serious thought, I considered starting my own small consulting and training company and planned to build a workspace to pursue my hobbies. My plan was to work until I was 67, two years after that once futuristic sounding 2017 date.

This plan fell apart when I was part of a mass layoff at my employer in January 2015. I found myself taking early retirement at just 62. Fortunately, I had been frugal and had saved enough to allow me to make the transition earlier than expected. In retrospect, this was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I have greatly enjoyed the last several years and consider them a precious gift from my former employer.

One of the lessons I have learned in retirement is that it is nothing like young people imagine it to be. Like most people, I pictured retirement as being very much like a seven day weekend. I could do all the things I enjoyed doing without worrying about Monday morning. They imagine retirement as a never ending vacation.

In some ways this is true. I have enjoyed having the freedom to do what I want with my days. I am by nature a “night owl,” I like to stay up late and sleep in. For 50 years, I was forced to get up early and was usually the first person in the office. I also enjoy having the freedom to go to the museum during the middle of the week when it isn’t so crowded.

My wife and I have even been able to travel as I am still receiving invitations to speak at conferences all around the United States. I did build my workshop/studio, so I can pursue my interests in woodworking and art. This allows me to exercise the creative muscles I developed working in advertising.

There are aspects of retirement that very few people include in their retirement plan. During our work years, we are constantly meeting new people and sometimes long for some alone time to get our work done. Retirement flips this on its head, where once we met people at work, after retirement, we have to work to meet people. It is easy to become isolated.

Many people don’t realize how many of their relationships revolve around the workplace. In retirement, we need to reach out to others to form new relationships.

During our working years, we long for some time to just sit down, put up our feet for a while and relax. It is nice to do this every now and then but we tire very quickly of inactivity. We were built to be active and just sitting around soon dulls the brain and weakens the body. This current situation has made this an even bigger problem as people are kept locked up in their homes.

It is a shame we can’t retire when we are young and work when we are old. The one thing young people don’t realize is that by the time we get to retire, we are like an old-fashioned pocket watch that is about to run down. We still have things we want to do, but eventually we simply don’t have the energy to do them. Even if we have taken good care of ourselves, every day our bodies grow closer to our “sell by” date.

Our blood pressure and our weight goes up and our joints grow stiff and we develop new aches and pains. One of the hardest things we have to face is the loss of those near to us. We all have a group of friends that we have known for years. Like us, they slowly grow older and infirm and inevitably some of them will pass away leaving a hole in our lives.

This morning I got up early to take my wife for her cancer treatment. We had to be at Allegheny General Hospital at 8 a.m. I dropped her off, got some breakfast and ran some errands before picking her up at 1 p.m. When I got home, I had a number of things I wanted to do, but ended up going to bed for a nap.

I am not sure that this was because of the disruption in my sleep schedule, my age or the stress from dealing with my wife’s cancer. I planned to rest for an hour, but slept for almost 4 p.m. I do know that no one misses me when I choose to lie down for a while in the middle of the day. I also know that when I am sleeping I do not have to think about the pandemic or cancer.

When I was young, I never pictured myself in retirement hiding from my life under the covers on a sunny afternoon. Back in those days, Art Linkletter was a major television celebrity, maybe I should have listened to him when he said, “Old age isn’t for sissies.”          

- Jim Busch      

September 16, 2020

One of the advantages of being quarantined is that it frees up a lot more time for reading. For a while, I felt like the bookworm character Henry Bemis played by Burgess Meredith in the old Twilight Zone television series.

In that episode titled Time Enough at Last, Bemis was a man who loved to read but he could never find the time to pick up a book. At work his boss chastised him for reading when he was supposed to be working. At home his nagging wife complained that he wasted too much time reading and destroyed his book.

One day at lunch Bemis slips into the vault at the bank where he worked to read a few pages. While he was in there, the ground shook and he emerged to discover the world had been destroyed in a war. Instead of being terrified, Henry Bemis was overjoyed. He found plenty of food in the ruins of a grocery store and millions of books to read at the library. He chooses a stack of books and as he leaves, he trips and breaks his irreplaceable glasses.

I didn’t break my glasses, but for months the library was closed and I could not get any newly published books to read. I am a power user of the Carnegie Library’s computer system. I have a long list of books on my request list. This list was frozen like a Wooly Mammoth in the Siberian Tundra. The library wasn’t filling requests and I could not even add books to the list.

I had plenty of books to read stashed away at home, but I lusted after the new titles that interested me. I would read about an interesting book in the Sunday New York Times or see an interesting author talk on C-SPAN’s Book TV and want to get my hands on a copy. I suppose I could have ordered them from Amazon, but I am far too frugal for this.

I am addicted to reading—the fact that I watch C-SPAN Book TV should have been a dead giveaway on this point! If I bought every book that I thought was interesting, I would have wound up in a dirty overcoat on a park bench next to a shopping bag full of books long ago. The library is where I got my “fix” until Covid-19 shut me off.

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail message from the library’s automated system saying I had a book to pick-up at the Penn Hills branch. At first I thought it was a cruel joke or a computer glitch. I went to the Penn Hills Library website and learned that they were offering curbside pick-up of requested books. The service was limited to Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.

I also learned that their drop boxes were accepting book returns. Even better, the Carnegie Library system was once again accepting patron requests for books. I still would not be able to browse the stacks but this was almost as good. That e-mail suddenly made my world a much brighter place.

I drove to the library the next morning and parked in one of the designated spots. I was dialing the number as instructed to announce my arrival when a masked library employee delivering books to another car walked over to my car. I wound down the window and he gave me an enthusiastic “Welcome back!”  I started to tell him my name and he said, “I haven’t forgot you Mr. Busch. I’ll bring your books right out.” This was most gratifying, the library is my Cheers. It’s the place where everybody knows my name.

Over the next couple of weeks, I received a steady stream of books. I picked up some books on art techniques and some woodworking manuals plus a set of The Great Courses on the history of the Celts that I had originally requested around St Patrick’s Day.

I love well written books because they open up a window into the minds of another human being. A good writer pours the content of their soul onto the page for all to see. I have seen a lot during my 68 orbits of the sun and I have met a lot of interesting people. Still my experiences would be limited to those available to a white male, who has spent most of his life within a hundred miles of Pittsburgh.

Books have expanded my world and my experiences exponentially. They have allowed me to see life through the eyes of people of different genders, races, and life situations. I have been able to visit different times and travel the globe. Books have not only made my world much larger but they have made it much richer.

This is also true of movies and music, but these technological marvels don’t alter our brains like the printed page. Books kick our imaginations into high gear and this work burns the lessons of books indelibly on to our psyches.

I read a lot of books in the course of the year. A lot of them are entertaining or educational but only a few make me sit back and go “Wow!” Two of the books in my recent library haul did just that. About two years ago I read Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, a story of how she dealt with her father’s sudden death by training a goshawk for falconry. I found her use of words extraordinary and found her insights very wise.

When I learned that she had published a new book I immediately put it on my library request list. Vesper Flights did not disappoint, I found it to be even better than her previous book. It is ostensibly a collection of nature essays, but it is so much more than that.

MacDonald’s seamless blending of her observations of the natural world and the human condition bring both into sharp focus. She is the rare writer who teaches us to see the world in new ways. He essay on the nocturnal bird migrations high above New York City inspired me to think about how we interact with the natural world in a whole new light.

Helen MacDonald speaks with the voice of a well-educated, well-adjusted English woman. John Moe, the author of The Hilarious World of Depression, is as different from MacDonald as two people could be. Moe grew up in a Norwegian immigrant family in Seattle, Washington. He writes in the vernacular language of a working class American family.

He is anything but well-adjusted having suffered from clinical depression, which he calls “Clinny D,” comes from a family with addiction and mental health problems. While his language is not as polished as Helen MacDonald’s, it is powerful and evocative. He writes of his struggle with the disease with a clarity that only someone who has experienced it himself.

I have friends and family who suffer from mental disease and while I try to be empathetic, I have never been able to fully understand what they are going through. John Moe’s book brought me much closer to this understanding.

I am happy to have my library back even on a limited basis. I may have to keep my body at home until we figure out a way to beat the coronavirus, but now that I have access to the world of books, my mind can roam the world at will.

I hope that people take advantage of this “national time out” to do some reading. One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

Now that my library is open, I plan to take full advantage of it and, as odd as it sounds, of the pandemic to get some more reading done.   

- Jim Busch

September 15, 2020

Today, is my 48th wedding anniversary. My wife, Glenda, and I had just turned 20 when we tied the knot back in 1972. That day was a busy one for me. I was leading a double life in those days, carrying a full load of courses at Pitt and working full time.

On my wedding day, I attended an Iconography class in the morning and worked for a few hours in the afternoon before leaving early to get married. I went home, took a quick bath, put on a nice shirt, a good pair of polyester slacks, a gray sports jacket and a wide red tie. A black cowboy hat with a gold band and a pair of western boots completed my outfit.

I made it to the church just in time. Glenda and I had discussed a hippie wedding in a field somewhere, but my parents insisted on a church wedding. I was waiting near the altar of Saint Angela’s Church in White Oak when the Wedding March began to play.

I couldn’t help myself and turned around with everyone else to watch my future wife walk up the aisle with her father. Glenda was absolutely radiant in a short red and white dress with her long blonde hair shimmering down to her waist.

We had chosen to be married by the church’s young assistant pastor. He was bearded and looked a lot like the comedian George Carlin.  He was a very liberal Jesuit and we preferred him over the older stern and serious senior priest. We had second thoughts about our decision when we realized that our priest had gotten stoned before the ceremony.

He ad libbed his way through the ceremony skipping around the traditional text, but we think he managed to hit all the important bits, the in sickness and in health and especially the “do you takes.” He smelled like he had just returned from blessing the crowd at Woodstock and his body weaved back and forth as he talked.

The good father got a little confused during the ring ceremony. He gave us the wrong rings. My hands are significantly bigger than my wife’s, so when I tried to put on her ring it wouldn’t fit. I managed to stick it on the tip of my little finger. Obviously, my wife had the opposite problem and my ring dropped on her finger like a quoit in a ring toss game.

After the traditional shower of rice, my new wife and I jumped in our lime green 1963 Plymouth Valiant and drove off. Our potluck reception was held in my wife’s sister’s backyard with a simple wedding cake baked and decorated by my mother-in-law. We stayed long enough to grab a bite to eat and thank everyone for coming and then we were on our honeymoon.

The Bahamas, a cruse or even a trip to Niagara Falls didn’t fit in my starving student’s budget, so we went to romantic and exotic East Pittsburgh. For a wedding gift, we received a two night stay at a hotel on Route 30 near the Westinghouse Bridge. A few years later, that hotel became a senior living facility. We spent Saturday in the Valiant visiting the Compass Inn in Ligonier and going to an arts and crafts show in Somerset.

My wife and I have dedicated the past 48 years to our family. There were many occasions when we put our own interests aside to give our children what they wanted and needed. We did what we could for our in- laws and for our nieces and nephews. We reserved two days on the calendar for ourselves, Valentine’s Day and our anniversary.

After we had been married about five years, we got in the habit of going away for a long weekend in February and September. One of the sacrifices we made was deciding to move in with my in-laws. This allowed my wife to be a stay at home mom and concentrate on our kids. Living in a tiny house with six people is not conducive to either romance or even conversation for a young couple.

Fortunately, this arrangement also came with its own built in babysitting service, so we left the kids with my mother-in-law and got away for some “us time” on Valentine’s Day and our anniversary.

We would go cross country skiing in February, stay in a hotel and have some nice dinners. In September, we would take a short road trip. We would go to places like Lancaster, Virginia or Niagara Falls. Where we went was less important than just spending time together and having a chance to talk. In those glorious days before cell phones, we could actually get away from our family and work responsibilities for several precious uninterrupted days.

Now that our kids are grown and my in-laws are gone finding time to be by ourselves is no longer a problem. In recent years, we have continued to celebrate “our days,” but closer to home. We would take in a show or visit a local attraction. We would enjoy a meal at a nice restaurant and often buy something for our home. We both looked forward to those “special days” as a time to celebrate our love.

Our big plans for our anniversary this year were much simpler. My wife’s cancer and the continuing Covid restrictions ruled out a lot of our usual activities. We planned to take a ride, Glenda seldom gets to go anywhere except to medical appointments, and a take-out lunch from our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Even these humble plans proved too much for my wife. Today was a bad day for her, Glenda was very sick to her stomach and her disease and the meds she is taking to fight it sapped all of her energy.

We spent the day in the living room with Glenda sleeping in her recliner and me watching TV. I did go out to pick up some Chinese, she tried some plain white rice and an egg roll which unfortunately didn’t sit well with her.

It was a quiet day, but I am glad after all of these years that I still have her. Sitting watching her sleep I thought about our wedding day 48 years ago. She keeps apologizing to me for not being able to do all the things we had always done. I reminded her about the part of the ceremony that goes, “in sickness and in health.” Our stoned hippie priest remembered that part of the speech and I’m still proud to stand by that sacred vow.

I remember that evening so long ago when we arrived at the East Pittsburgh Days Inn. It was the first time I had ever checked in to a hotel. When asked “How many in your party, sir?” It caught me off guard. I didn’t quite understand the question and I had never been called “Sir” before.

It hit me that somehow I had suddenly become one of the grown-ups. I straightened up and answered, “Just my wife and myself." That was the first time I had ever said the words, “my wife.” To this day, just saying those two words makes me feel good.

She is the love of my life and my partner in everything, she is my best friend. It doesn’t matter what we do together, there’s nothing I’d rather do than spend time with, “my wife.”       

- Jim Busch

September 14, 2020

Today’s Corona Diary entry is the 180th one that I have written. This means that I have been writing these daily essays for the last six months. A lot of things have happened since I wrote the first of these essays on March 19th. I thought this would be a good time to look back at the last six months to reflect on everything that has taken place.

When Martha Rial asked the Tube City Writers group to contribute to this project, I thought that it would go on for a month, maybe two at the most. I never dreamed that I would still be doing this in the summertime, much less now that fall is approaching.

This is not unusual, we human beings are constantly making predictions about what is going to happen and we are almost always wrong. This is because we base our predictions on flawed data. We picture the future as a rerun of what has already happened.

This worked for our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors. They were careful observers of their environment. They noticed that the herds of animals they hunted for their food always went north when certain stars appeared in the sky.

They knew if they waited until the maple leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear to plant their corn, it would not freeze out. These natural patterns were regular and reliable and they learned that they could use this information to predict where and when they could find game and the other things they needed to sustain life.

This system worked splendidly while Mother Nature was in charge of things. The ancient Egyptians built an entire civilization on predicting when the River Nile would flood and make the land fertile. The trouble started when we got behind the steering wheel.

Change has always been a part of living, life has been evolving since the day an amoeba evolved into the first paramecium. In nature, change is so slow that it is imperceptible. This was also true of human beings who lived close to nature. Until they were discovered by Europeans, the Bushmen of Africa and the Australian Aborigines lived lives that were no different than their ancestors had lived a million years before.

This all started to change about 12,000 years ago. Our species developed agriculture and started to settle down in villages. When the first farmer put the first seed in the ground everything changed. We started to alter the environment to suit our needs. Villages led to cities, tribes led to empires and wheels led to eighteen wheelers spewing clouds of diesel exhaust into the air.

The speed of this transformation gained speed as we gained knowledge. It started spinning out of control during the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Suddenly, the skies grew grey and the rivers where we used to drink became toxic and fetid.

The only thing that hasn’t changed over the last 12,000 years is the human mind. We have packed it with lots of facts and have invented many new words to describe our newly created surroundings, but our minds are still driven by the same needs and desires as our hunter gatherer forebears.

A little excess fat was a good thing for hunter gatherers, it helped them survive periodic famines. This is why they evolved a taste for fatty foods and sweets. They did not get them often, only on rare occasions did they find a bee tree full of honey, so when they found these things they gorged themselves. Today, our problem is not too little fat around our middles, but too much. We still possess our caveman cravings for goodies.

Our ancient brains are why we are having trouble adapting to the Coronavirus pandemic. We are conditioned to live out of our memories and not out of our imaginations. We were used to the way things were in our old lives. I am 68 years old so I have seen a number of epidemics come and go. When I was very young science conquered polio. When the AIDS epidemic came, it was scary for a while, but it seemed only to effect people who embraced certain lifestyles, so it did not really change things for me.

We heard about swine flu, SARS and Ebola, but none of these touched anyone I knew and they were brought quickly under control. My brain told me that science brought all of these threats quickly under control, so why not this “Corona thing.”

Our cave brains have trouble grasping the immensity of the current pandemic. Research conducted by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990’s found that the human brain is only capable of maintaining relationships with about 150 people. While we deal with huge numbers intellectually, we really can only picture groups of people which exceed “Dunbar’s Number.”

This is why a fund raising appeal showing one starving child is so much more effective than one citing large numbers. Since I started writing these diaries, more than 180,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, but this number is beyond our ken. We are simply not able to wrap our head around how many lives have been lost to this disease.

I have seen a lot of big events in my life. I can remember the Vietnam War and the protests against it. I watched the moon landing on television and the shuttle explosions. Nineteen years ago I lived through the 911 attacks and the wars that followed them. I saw my employer struggle through the great recession and the collapse of our economy.

All of these were major events, that can’t be denied, but none of them have had the impact of the tiny coronavirus imported from China. As terrible as the attacks on the World Trade Center were, the coronavirus has killed more than 60 times as many Americans as terrorists did on that terrible day.

The recession cost many people their jobs, but not nearly so many as lost their jobs during the pandemic lockdown. None of these other events overburdened our health care system or shut down our schools.

Unlike any of the events listed above, the Coronavirus pandemic is a sea change event. It is a moment in history that changes everything. It is the first event since World War II that has directly touched every home in America. We have all been forced to make radical changes in the ways we live our lives. It has made us all change the way we dress. Masks are now part of our regular wardrobe.

Many of us are working from home and we are either keeping our children home or we are afraid they will contract the disease. The confusion over how to deal with the disease has eroded our confidence in medical science and the misinformation we have been given makes us doubt our leaders.

I think even if we could eradicate the coronavirus from the world today, we will never go back to what we once called “Normal.” I am sure children growing up in the midst of this pandemic will always be worried about another disease cropping up to threaten their lives.

We will no longer believe that our technology can deal with any threat to our way of life. I think the post Covid world will be a much scarier place to live. We have been shaken to our core and those of us alive today may live the rest of our lives waiting for another virus to come out of nowhere to threaten all that we all hold dear.

I hope we can extract some good out of this terrible time. Perhaps, after all we’ve been through, we will have learned to treasure our friends and families more. Sometimes, it takes a life changing event to teach us what is really important. 

- Jim Busch

September 13, 2020

My wife and I had a real treat today. My son and grandson Jesse and Max, came to celebrate Grandparent’s Day with us. This is one of those made up Hallmark holidays created to sell more greeting cards, but if it give us a chance to visit with our progeny, we are all for it. After discussing what is going on at Jesse’s job, we moved on to Max’s school year.

This is Max’s first year in high school. In a normal school year, he would be trying to find his way around Mt. Lebanon’s massive high school complex. He spent the last few months of middle school studying online from home. Max found this less than satisfying. He is a good student and very competitive.

He was on his way to earning straight As for the year and was quite angry when he learned that due to the lockdown, a pass/fail system would be used in the lieu of letter grades. The simplification of the grading system was just one of the many adaptations the school district made to deal with the sudden and unexpected shut down of their schools. Max’s final months of school was a seat of the pants, figure it out as we go along affair.

The Mt. Lebanon School District spent the summer planning for the coming school year. This was especially challenging because they had no way of knowing what they would face in September. They could not be sure if the country would still be in lockdown or if the disease would be waning. The administration could not be sure if they would be able to allow their students back in the classroom or what adjustments they would have to make.

Because of this uncertainty, they had to develop a plan to deliver a good education remotely to everyone from kindergarteners to high school seniors. This involved not only working out the technical issues, but also revamping lesson plans to suit the new delivery methods. If this was not already complicated enough, the school had to come up with a third alternative, a hybrid plan that assumed some students would choose to come to school, while others chose to study remotely.

The Mt. Lebanon School District is fortunate to be situated in an affluent area which gave them significant resources to apply to the problem of educating children during a pandemic. By mid-August, they announced a multifaceted plan for the school year. Students would be given the option of attending school or working from home for the first half of the year.

My son described the in-school option as putting a “refrigerator box around each desk with a hole cut in the front and a piece of Plexiglas duct taped over the hole to form a protective window.” Even in this protective cubicle, students would be required to wear a face mask.

My son, his wife and Max talked things over and decided to opt for the remote learning option. Jesse said that the experience of the district’s sports teams influenced this decision. He said every attempt to maintain a somewhat normal sports schedule while social distancing had failed. He told me that the Cheerleaders had to be quarantined after a student tested positive for Covid-19.

“Give me a C. give me an O. Give me a V. Give me an I. Give me a D. What do you get — A potentially fatal disease!” The band, the football team and several other groups had similar experiences. The school’s track record of containing the disease in public gatherings didn’t inspire confidence in the district’s ability to protect the kids attending school.

My grandson logs on to his computer at 7:15 a.m. and logs off at 3:03 p.m. The school even came up with a way to provide students with lunch. Mt. Lebanon has several elementary schools spaced out throughout the district. This means that most students live within walking distance of a school building.

At lunchtime, Max walks to his old grade school where he picks up a “Garb and Go” bag lunch. This not only provides a bit of nutrition, but gives him a bit of exercise and a break in the routine. Fortunately, Max is a good student and a self-directed learner so he has no problem with distance learning.

While Jesse and Max were visiting I received a FaceTime call from my niece, Stacey, and her daughter, Seneca. I have been acting as a consultant to them on an art project Seneca is doing for school. She is making a “treasure map” from an old gas station roadmap. She was having trouble antiquing the map with tea as the teacher had suggested.

Within a few minutes, my son took the phone out of my hand and took over the call. Jesse and Stacey have always been close cousins and he studied art as an undergrad before turning to the dark side and becoming an attorney. They talked for about half an hour and he showed her how to antique the map using olive oil and baking it in the oven.

While listening to their conversation, I thought about why it is so hard for schools to come up with a way to develop an educational program that suits every student. My son is a successful attorney and lives in an affluent area.

He is also very familiar with computers and technology. In college, he purchased and installed his art department’s first computer system and was its first webmaster. Stacey is a stay at home mom and her husband is a machine operator at an aluminum can factory.

Her web access could be described as marginal at best. She has a daughter in second grade and a son in ninth grade. Her daughter, Seneca, is a bright child who misses her friends, but enjoys her online schooling. Her son, Sawyer, had a blood vessel burst in his head several years ago and a life flight to Children’s Hospital saved his life.

He spent six months in the hospital, but he suffered irreparable brain damage which impaired his vision and his ability to retain memories. He has difficulty learning under the best circumstance and gets nothing out of remote learning. The coronavirus has hampered his access to the little support their cash strapped school district provides to their special needs students.

Stacey has been struggling with both the technological and educational challenges she is facing during the pandemic. She lacks the financial resources and technical expertise that my son uses to support his son’s education. My grandson attends school in one of the state’s top ranked and most affluent districts, Stacey’s children attend a school district that struggles to serve a much poorer demographic. Her son’s physical and mental problems would be challenging in any situation, the Covid restrictions make them insurmountable.

Just looking at how different my grandson’s situation is from his second cousins is an illustration of how impossible it is to develop a “one size - fits all” solution to the challenge of educating our children during this pandemic.

There are millions of school aged children in America. This means that there are millions of unique situations and challenges facing our educational system. I worry about the current generation of American school children and my heart goes out to the professional educators and parents trying to help them get through this trying time.

Challenges often bring about big changes for the better and my hope is that the challenges of this pandemic will lead to a rethinking of how we educate our children. Perhaps, we will learn how to use our technology to address the individual needs of all the children living in our diverse society.

- Jim Busch

September 12, 2020

Early this afternoon, I got a call from my daughter, Rachael. As soon as I answered she said, “Hey Dad, where are you at?” This is code for “HELP!”

It is the parental version of the “Bat Signal.” Instead of sliding down the Bat poll, strapping on the Bat belt and jumping in the Batmobile, a “where you at” call sends me to the Dad cave, my workshop, to grab the Dad gear, my tool box and ends with me speeding off in the Dad mobile, my Subaru.

My daughter knows that I am not much for idle chit chat on the phone. When she wants to talk, she calls her mother, when something breaks, she calls me. Today, was no exception, her water heater was leaking.

I asked Rachael a few preliminary questions, where was it leaking, and how bad was the leak. Once I got some basic information, I went to my workshop and grabbed my Go Bag. This is a small tool bag holding all the basic tools that are necessary for general repairs. I added a pipe wrench and several other plumbing tools and I was off.

When Rachael told me that she had noticed the water heater was leaking from the top of the tank, my first thought was the pressure relief valve had failed.  This would be an easy fix. Just unscrew the bad valve from the tank and replace it with a new one.

Of course, I should have known better, an easy fix would be a blatant violation of Murphy’s Law. One look at the water heater told me that it would need replaced—a not so easy fix. This would require disconnecting the gas line, both water lines, draining the tank, removing it and then reversing the entire process with the new tank. I shut off the water flowing into the tank to stop the leak and considered my options. 

Changing out a water heater is a big job, but it’s one I have done a number of times in the past. The difference with this job is that I am old. I have not replaced a water heater in probably 10 years and even then I had help. The plumbing part of the job is not that complex, I have the requisite skills and the necessary tools. Water tanks are heavy and awkward to handle. I wondered if I could drag the old tank out of the basement and then replace it with a new one.

I stood their pondering what to do. When I was young, I remember working with my grandfather and my dad. I remember seeing them stop and look at a job for a long time. I was sure that they were deep in thought, planning out the most efficient way to manage the job at hand. These pauses marked them as wise old craftsmen.

Now that I am old myself, I have come to realize that they were thinking, “what the hell is an old man like me still doing this kind of work? This is a job for a young man.” At least that was what I was thinking when my daughter asked me, “Should I call a plumber?”

No one knows that I am an old man better than Rachael’s mother. As I left the house to go to Rachael’s, my wife gave me the name and number of a plumber who had done some work for us. Her final words as I walked toward the door were, “Remember, you’re not as young as you used to be.”

“It’s the weekend, you might have trouble finding a plumber… and if you do it’s going to cost a bucket of money.”

“Well, I’ll wait to Monday. We can get along without hot water for a couple of days.”

The thought of my daughter going without a shower for two days made up my mind for me. “I guess I have another water heater job in me. I have done it before and I’m sure I can do another one.”

I told my daughter to clean a path for the water heater and I was off to Home Depot. Another aspect of getting old is that at some point in the aging process the prices of everything we buy becomes fixed in our brain. This seems to happen about the age of 40. After that age we find ourselves saying, “When did these get so expensive, I remember when I paid X for one of these.”

This happened today in the plumbing supply section of Home Depot. I expected the price of a water heater to be about $125 or $150 at most. My eyes almost popped out of my head when I discovered the 2020 price of a 40-gallon Rheem hot water heater was a whopping $439. Somehow, I managed to avoid saying, “When I was a boy.”

I could not find any Home Depot employees, so I managed to wrestle a big box holding a water heater onto a flat cart. I grabbed some fittings I needed to complete the job and headed to the checkout. The young woman, knowing that no one was working the sales floor asked, “Did you load that yourself?”

I told her that I had and was very pleased to see that she was visibly impressed. “Maybe I’m not that old after all.” I almost wanted to go back into the store and tell her that I had singlehandedly loaded the ungainly box into the back of my car.

After a quick stop home to grab my hand truck, I drove back to my daughter’s house. I shut off the gas and cut the copper hot and cold water pipes before disconnecting the gas line. After detaching the vent pipe, I dragged the tank out to where I could load it on my hand truck.

The first part of the job was done. I slid the new tank out of my car and cut away the cardboard box that protected it. I installed the new hardware while the tank was still sitting in Rachael’s driveway. Once everything was in place, I rolled it into the basement, moved it into position and leveled it. I cut the supply tubes to size and connected them before reattaching the gas line. I checked the gas connection with soapy water which produces bubbles if there is even a small leak. After checking the other plumbing connections for telltale drips, I attached the vent pipe.

Finally, the pilot light was lit. Success!

I have always found completing a repair job very satisfying. I like making things right, especially when it helps out my family. I sometimes wonder who will do these things when I am no longer able to do them. At least for today, that day is still somewhere in the future.

This realization put a smile on this old man’s face.      

      - Jim Busch

September 11, 2020

Like anyone who was out of diapers when the planes hit the World Trade Center, I know exactly where I was on September 11, 2001. I was in a conference room discussing Teddy Bears.

At that time, I worked for Trinity Holdings, the parent company of the Pennysaver and the Gateway Newspaper Group. Every Tuesday our entire advertising management team would meet to review our performance and plan future promotions.

On that particular Tuesday, we were discussing a “Santa Bear” promotion for the coming holiday season. The idea was we would purchase and supply a number of big white teddy bears to our advertisers to raffle off as part of a holiday advertising package. Those who have not worked in advertising would be surprised how competitive and argumentative “Ad guys” can be. Our heated discussion about the big bears lasted until 10:15 a.m. when our meeting adjourned.

The conference room was located inside my department. I ran the telephone sales division which employed about 35 employees situated in low cubicles in a large room. My department was a hub of activity with phones ringing, keyboards clacking and everyone talking at once. I could predict the day’s sales by the decibel level in the phone room.

I knew something was wrong, the moment the conference room door swung open. It was dead quiet. No phones were ringing. No one was talking. It was deathly quiet. The first thought that ran through my mind was, “It’s like the O.J. trial, all over again.”

The only time my department had gone quiet was the day the verdict was handed down in the O.J. Simpson trial almost six years before. On that day in 1995, the phones stopped ringing for about an hour when the country waited for the decision in the “Trial of the Century.” Even the traffic on the busy road in front of our office ground to a halt.

My salespeople were gathered around the department secretary’s desk. I walked over to find out what was keeping my employees from their work. I asked Kaaren, my top sales person what was going on. She turned to face me and I immediately saw she had been crying. She couldn’t quite get the words out, “New York…planes…World Trade Center.”

Some of my other people joined in but no one seemed to be able to form a complete sentence. It took me a few minutes to find out what was going on. It would be a little over another five years before the first smart phone hit the market, so no one in the conference room knew what was going on. I was amazed that no one in the entire company had thought to knock on the door and tell us that the United States was under attack.

Our CEO was checking his phone messages when I tried to tell him what was going on. As soon as I saw his face, I knew he already knew what had happened, his wife had left him a voicemail on his office phone. He quickly told all the mangers to see to their people and let them go home.

I called my team together in the conference room. The tables were arranged in a big circle with additional chairs along the wall. My department was predominately female, but even our one male team member was in tears. I went to the janitor’s closet and grabbed an armful of toilet paper rolls to serve as tissues. I immediately told them that anyone who wanted to should go home to be with their families. Several people thanked me then got up and left.

These were my younger team members, they were working mothers and went to pick up their children at school. Most of my staff just sat there sobbing. The majority of my team were middle-aged, or older, women. Their children were grown, some were widowed and others had no way to reach their husbands.

My department was a cohesive group, many of them had worked together for a decade or more. They were more like a family or a sorority than coworkers. They did not want to be alone, so they decided to stay at work with their friends.  We had an old black and white TV hooked to a VCR we used to screen training tapes. I rolled it into the conference room and managed to fashion a crude antenna out of a wire coat hanger. I managed to get a signal from WTAE and we watched the planes hit the towers over and over.

After things settled down, I was finally able to get through to my wife. At that time we owned a small used book store on Smithfield Street in Boston, Pa. My wife was filling our birdfeeders in the backyard when her mother came to the door and said, “Glenda come here.”

By the tone of her voice, Glenda knew something was wrong. She was concerned that something was wrong with her mom but soon learned about the attacks. They discussed whether they should open the store or not. My wife decided that it would make little difference where they spent the day so she packed up a portable TV and went to the store. They spent the day on the couch in the store and did not see a single customer all day.

Watching the memorials on television today made me think about that day. I thought about how the 9/11 attacks spurred the country to action leading us into two wars. I wonder if 20 years from now, if we will remember the Coronavirus pandemic like we do the attacks on that day.

At this point, Covid-19 has killed 63 times more Americans that the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 190,000 Covid deaths versus just under 3,000 total in New York, Washington D.C. and Shanksville, Pa. Despite this disparity in numbers, the pandemic losses has not been burned into the American consciousness like the 9/11 attacks.

I think it is the image of two big airliners flying into the twin towers that made this event so real to us. On that day, and on the days to follow, we saw this terrible spectacle played over and over on our televisions. We saw bodies falling from the burning buildings and clouds of smoke and dust rising over Manhattan. Though other Americans died at the Pentagon and in the crash of Flight 93, this is the image of the collapsing towers that comes to mind when 9/11 is mentioned.

For the last six months, we have been exposed to nearly constant coverage of the spread of coronavirus. We have seen the death tolls rise and listened to interviews of Covid’s victims and their grieving families. Our lives have been turned upside down, the coronavirus lockdown has impacted our lifestyles far more directly than any of the changes made after the attacks. One event made us take our shoes off at the airport and the other kept us locked in our homes for months on end.

Despite the massive scale of the coronavirus epidemic and its direct impact on our lives, it somehow doesn’t seem as real to us as the 911 attacks. The attacks were like a meteor striking the earth. A quick, violent incident that could be contained within the boundaries of our television screens. A tragedy wrapped up in a neat little, easily grasped package.

The pandemic is more like a glacier, slowly advancing over the globe. Its progress measured in weeks, not in minutes like the attacks. Although on some days, Covid took a 100 or more Americans, their deaths were very private. They died alone, hidden away behind the walls of hospitals, no one saw them plummet to their deaths.

It sounds strange, perhaps even crass, to say so but the 9/11 attacks were a made for TV event. Like the dramas we watch every night, the main action took place within an hour. It produced strong images that attracted our attention and had a strong emotional impact on the viewer. The events of September 11, 2001 produced heroes right out of central casting facing physical danger. They even had a catchy title, 911 like the telephone number we call when we are in trouble.  All of these things spurred us to take action and to come together for the common good.

Though the coronavirus presents a bigger threat than the attacks of 9/11. It has killed so many more people and has directly impacted ever corner of the country, yet we were slow to move to action. Rather than coming together to fight the disease, it has torn us apart. People argue over wearing masks and politicize our response to the threat.

I have wondered why our response to these two events has been so different. It is sad, but the only reason I could come up with to explain this is that the Coronavirus Pandemic is simply not telegenic.   

- Jim Busch

September 10, 2020

One of the many places to be shut down during the pandemic was my local junkyard. I have been selling scrap metal to Josh Metals for over 40 years. Originally, I did this because I needed the money, nowadays I do it because it is good for the planet. If I am being completely honest, I also continue to haul scrap because I love junkyards.

I learned the “Tao of Junk” from my father-in-law, John Bereczky. I doubt that John ever spoke the word ecology, but he probably did more recycling in his life than an entire Sierra Club Chapter. He told me about junking cars back before World War II. In the run up to the war, scrap steel was bringing premium prices.

When cars quit running in those days, many people just took the plates off and abandoned their old Flivver. There were junk cars parked behind barns and at old mine sites. John did not have access to a tow truck so he would disassemble those old cars right where he found them.

He would knock them apart using an old ax, a sledge hammer and a crow bar. He would use a block and tackle and a heavy plank to drag the heavy engine blocks into his old pickup truck. I often wondered if any of the ships he served on in the Navy contained any steel from the cars he battered to pieces a few years before.

From John I learned how to sort scrap metals. I learned to separate steel from cast iron, brass from copper and mild steel from stainless. He taught me how to process metals to get the best prices from the junkyard. Labor is the biggest expense for a junk yard, so they pay a higher rate for metals that have been cleaned and sorted beforehand.

John had an arrangement with a local electrician, who would bring him all the old wiring he would tear out of houses he was rewiring. He could have taken it to the junkyard himself, but he did not have the time to clean the metal and strip the insulation off. John did the cleaning and would take the scrap to the junkyard. They split the money from the scrap copper 50/50. Even after splitting the cash, the electrician made more because of John’s efforts so the arrangement benefitted both men.

John was meticulous in everything he did. His scrap metal stockpile was better organized than most people’s sock draws. He kept it in a small shed packed in cardboard boxes from the grocery store. With a magic marker he labeled each box with the type of metal it contained and the weight.

John weighed each lot of metal on an old hanging scale. Every now and then, he checked the accuracy of his scale with a five pound bag of sugar borrowed from his wife’s pantry. Junkyards are known to occasionally have a bit of trouble with their scales. For some reason, these problems always seem to make the scales underestimate the weight of the metals their customers bring in to sell. They never got away with this with John, if the scales were reading a little light, he would start loading his stuff back on his truck. When this happened, the junkyard staff somehow managed to quickly find and correct the problem.

In those days, our local governments did not have curbside recycling programs. Most of the neighbors did not want to bother taking their aluminum cans to the junkyard so they would put them out for John. Every few days, he would take a walk around the neighborhood and would come home with bags of pop and beer cans. These were crushed and packed in big black garbage bags waiting for the next trip to the junkyard. John continued his scraping business until his health failed. I am sure that in his life he recycled tons of metal.

These days I don’t accumulate much scrap metal. I usually have some aluminum pop and cat food cans plus some scrap copper, brass and aluminum from projects around the house. I can’t resist grabbing an aluminum lawn chair or storm window when my neighbors put them out on trash day. The iron and steel I set aside for a friend of my daughter, who has both a strong young back and a pickup truck. Today, I had some cans, a couple of aluminum radiators and a bit of brass from a plumbing project.

I drove to Braddock and crossed the railroad tracks to Josh Scrap Metals. The place has a gritty industrial feel like the factory scenes in Flashdance. I pulled up to the dock and waited my turn. The worker who met me at the dock looked as shabby as his workplace. He was a short middle aged man with three days of stubble on his face.

A thought crossed my mind that he only shaved when the weekend came. I imagined him exchanging his dirty blue jeans, the kind with the hammer loop on the side, and his tee shirt with the burn holes left by a cutting torch for a designer outfit on Friday night.

I unloaded my bags of cans on the dock and he smoked a Camel cigarette while he weighed my cans and loaded them in the conveyor that carried them to the shredder. He then turned his attention to my weighing and sorting my other scrap. After each item, he would write the weight, the type of metal and the price in a tiny receipt book. When he was all done he tore out the top sheet and the carbon copy and gave both of them to me.

My next stop was the yard office. It was located next to the truck scale where pickups and dump trucks loaded with scrap steel would pull up and stop. When the scale operator waved them off from a window in the cement block wall they would drive into the yard and unload.

After dropping their load, they would return to the scale to be weighed again. Then they were paid according to the difference between the loaded and empty weight of their truck. I walked up to the pay window and passed my slips through the tiny hole in the glass. Behind the desk was a big sign saying, “To receive your payment you MUST show I.D.” I reached for my wallet and started to take out my driver’s license when the woman behind the glass said, “That’s OK, I know you.”

In a few minutes, I was walking back to my car with my yellow pay slip and my cash. I thought about John’s last trip to the junkyard. John died from lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain in the first weeks of the new millennium.

A few weeks before, I was at work when he called my wife into his bedroom. He told her, I need you to take me to the junkyard. At this point, John was almost blind and could barely stand but it was more of a command than a request. My wife drove him to the alley in the back of our yard and loaded his boxes of scrap into our station wagon. She drove him to Josh’s where he talked for a while with the guys he knew there.

They weighed his scrap and he took his slip to the office. When he collapsed into the car, he carefully folded the yellow slip and put it in his wallet. He gave my wife the bills and said, “Take this and buy something nice for your mother for Christmas.” It was the last time he ever left our home.

John had always used his scrap money to do nice things for his family and this last trip wasn’t any different.   

- Jim Busch

September 9, 2020

Many people have taken on special projects during the coronavirus quarantine. They provide a valuable distraction from the stress and worry that comes from the global pandemic. I read a story in the newspaper that home centers are running out of lumber and other home improvement and gardening supplies.

Some people are fixing up their homes, while others are taking up new hobbies or trying to learn new skills. My “Covid Project” is writing a book. I am writing a book for a very small audience, it is intended just for my family.

The genesis of this idea came from a discussion with my wife’s great nephew several years ago. He had just enlisted in the Army and was visiting his grandmother, my wife’s sister, before he left for boot camp. I took him to get a sandwich and we were talking in the car when he said, “I guess I’m the first person from the family to join the military.”

I was struck by his statement. I realized that he knew absolutely nothing about his family history. I corrected him on the family’s military record, both his great grandfathers had served in World War II and his great great grandfather had been severely injured in the World War I. Our conversation convinced me that I needed to write down the family stories for future generations.

I am by nature a collector of stories. As long as I can remember, I enjoyed listening to the stories of my grandparents and other older relatives. I was fascinated by their tales of the old days and old ways. Listening to these stories helped me to develop my memory and stimulated my imagination.

I come from a family of gifted storytellers. The way they talked about the past I felt like I had been transported back to a time long before I had been born. I hung on every word and their stories were embedded in my brain like I had actually experienced them.  Growing up listening to people tell their stories served me well during my business career. I got very good at listening to people and at asking questions to draw them out.

When my wife and I got together, I not only got a new girlfriend but a new set of family stories to add to my collection. The first time I met my future wife’s grandfather he told me all about the time he met Eugene V. Debs, the socialist party’s candidate for president.

When I showed interest, he told me about the hardships he faced as a diehard socialist and a supporter of the radical International Workers of the World. He was proud to be a “Wobbly” as they were called by their enemies. Later, he told me about his life growing up along the C & O Canal in Western Maryland and working in the “Brake,” the Westinghouse Airbrake Company.

Over the years, I became very close with my wife’s parents and collected their memories and stories. My mother-in-law, Eleanor, also loved collecting family lore and she shared the family stories she had collected as a child with me. She gave me a vivid description of the old farm, the big barn and the uncles and aunts she got to know as a child.

She told me the story her mother told her about the members of the Seneca Nation who walked down from the Cornplanter Reservation in New York State to conduct a ceremony at a spring that bubbled up from the ground behind the farm house. I even learned about a curse placed upon the family by a woman who had been spurned by a male member of the family. These stories were far too interesting to allow them to disappear into the mists of time.

While my mother-in-law’s family was on our property for some two hundred years, my father-in-law’s story was an example of the immigrant experience. He was the last of four children born in the United States, the other six were born in Hungary. The story of John’s birth reads like something from a gothic novel.

His father was a Magyar, a horseman of the Hungarian plains and a saddle maker. He was confident that the child his wife was carrying would be a boy, so he bought him a pony and made him a saddle. The night my father-in-law was born, lightning struck the barn killing the pony and burning up the saddle.

When our great nephew told me that no one in the family had served in the military, I shared John’s story with him. He had lied about his age, joined the Navy in the early days of the war and served with distinction. John lost four ships to German torpedoes and served on a landing craft during the Normandy invasion.

After the war, he suffered from what we now call PTSD and had trouble adjusting to civilian life. The only other place I have encountered men like my father-in-law are in the pages of a Hemingway or Steinbeck novel. He was the kind of brave, rugged and resilient man that one seldom meets in real life.

My book will even include some romance, the story of how my in-laws fell in love. They had grown up near one another, but ran in different circles. One day Eleanor was riding her horse Daisy. She was galloping across an overgrown field when Daisy leapt into the air. At the last minute, Daisy had seen John sleeping in the tall grass and jumped into the air to avoid trampling him.

John had been granted home leave after losing his ship and was catching up on some much needed sleep. Eleanor fell for the handsome young sailor and they married shortly after the war. John and Eleanor’s story was a classic Greatest Generation love story.

I like to write, but never had a desire to write a book, I generally like short form pieces, essays, newspaper pieces, and short stories, but this is a story that needs to be told. I know the stories I want to tell, all I need to do is organize them.

Our family home is located on Sally Street, named for my wife’s great, great, great Aunt Sarah. Since most of our family’s history has happened right here, I plan to call my book, Sally Street Stories. I have begun working on a chapter outline and have been writing a few chapter drafts. It is big project, but as I get into this project it grows more and more interesting.

Sally Street is an ordinary suburban street and our ordinary family lives in an ordinary house. As I have gone through life, I have found that the extraordinary and interesting often lies just below the surface of the ordinary. By asking a few questions and truly listening, we will find that everyone’s story is absolutely fascinating.

I can’t bear to let these wonderful stories die, I hope I am up to the task of preserving the memory of our family for future generations.     

- Jim Busch

September 8, 2020

It has been exactly one year since my wife Glenda and I reached peripeteia in our life’s story. Peripeteia is a term from Aristotle’s poetics. It describes the precise point in a story where the hero’s fortunes take a sudden turn for the worse such as when Oedipus unknowingly kills his father or when Wile E. Coyote decides to chase the Roadrunner. From this point forward, everything starts going bad for the protagonist.

A year ago, we enjoyed a delightful Labor Day picnic at our son’s home. Our daughter and her wife joined us there and we got to spend time with our grandson. The festivities included all the traditional holiday foods, hot dogs, hamburgers, baked beans and potato salad.

At first we blamed the potato salad for the troubles we were to face in the coming year. The day after Labor Day, my wife became sick to her stomach. We believed that she was suffering from food poisoning. Under the circumstances, we simply thought that she had consumed some bad potato salad and that her discomfort would pass in a few days.

When after a week, Glenda’s stomach was not feeling better she called her PCP for an appointment. Her doctor prescribed some antacids and a sedative to ease the pain. These remedies offered no relief so Glenda decided to go back to her physician who ordered some tests. Her doctor suspected that my wife had developed an ulcer and prescribed some new drugs.

My wife felt that her condition was rapidly getting worse, so she started to do some research. Glenda has always been interested in medical science. She went online and typed in her medical history and symptoms. What she found was very disconcerting. On her next visit to the doctor, Glenda shared what she had found, she feared that she was suffering from pancreatic cancer. Her doctor’s response was, “My sound medical opinion is that you stay away from the internet. Let me handle diagnosing your condition.”

All through the fall and winter, my wife’s condition continued to get worse and worse. She experienced severe stomach pain and though she tried to eat a very bland diet. Everything she ate upset her. She went through a battery of tests and scans. She had multiple endoscopes and colonoscopies. She had CAT scans and MRIs, but they could not find anything that would cause her problems. My wife’s PCP referred her to a gastrointestinal specialist.

The specialist ordered more tests and scopes. The scopes ruled out the ulcer theory so the doctors decided on another tack, they believed that there was a problem with my wife’s intestinal biome. They thought that the bacteria in her gut wasn’t helping her properly digest her food. They prescribed some probiotics to remedy the situation but to no avail.

When the probiotics didn’t make any difference, the doctors started investigating another potential cause of her stomach problems. They thought the problem was neurological in nature. My wife had suffered spinal problems in the past and had endured several surgeries to alleviate her back pain.  They felt that perhaps her stomach was not getting the right signals from her brain which caused her difficulties. Again, they ordered more tests and scans.

Finally on April 17th, the doctors found the cause of my wife’s stomach problems. Glenda received a phone call from a doctor at Allegheny General Hospital telling her that she had stage four pancreatic cancer. This was the worst day in our 50 years together.

Neither of us knew how to process this terrible news. I felt like I had been hit in the gut with a sledge hammer. We cried and hugged and wondered what we should do next. A few weeks later, my wife had a regular appointment with her PCP who had received my wife’s file from AGH. She felt terrible about dismissing my wife’s early diagnosis of her disease. She wrapped her arms around Glenda and they cried together.

This started a whole new round of tests and meetings. Because of the coronavirus restrictions, I could not go with my wife to meet with her doctors. I had to sit and wait and wonder what was going on. When my wife came out of the hospital she told me the doctor had given her two options, she could go through regular chemotherapy or she could take part in a test of an experimental drug which would be administered along with a regular chemo drug.

The drug had showed promise, but because it was a blind trial there was a chance she would get a placebo. She asked me what I thought she should do. I was reluctant to give my opinion, it was not my pancreas that was cancerous after all. When she pressed me, I said that I would go with the experimental drug. My wife smiled and said that was exactly what she had told the doctor.

For the last five months, we have made multiple trips to Allegheny General Hospital for chemotherapy. My wife had a port installed in her chest and she regularly reports to have poison pumped into her system. In addition to causing her hair to fall out, the chemo drugs have played hell with her blood system, her white and red blood cell counts are way down. She has low level of iron, phosphorus and magnesium and her immune system is virtually non-existent.

This is not a good situation at any time, but lacking an immune system during a global pandemic is terrifying. She has only been out of the house for medical appointments since her diagnosis.

Glenda’s screwy blood chemistry caused her legs to swell to the point where she could not walk. This led to a week’s stay at Allegheny General, the longest time we have been apart in decades. At this point, she is taking 28 different medications every day. Many of these drugs sap her energy which is running on empty due to the disease anyway. She still insists on making my meals and doing the laundry, but spends much of the rest of the day sleeping. It has been a hard time for both of us.

We have had one tiny sliver of good news in the last six months, the cancer antigens in her bloodstream have declined by almost 90 percent. This means we might be winning the battle against cancer. In the next week or so, she will get a scan that will tell us if the tumor wrapped around her pancreas is shrinking.

If this is true, we can move on to a new form of torture, radiation therapy. Our hope is that if the chemo does its job, the tumor will shrink enough that precision doses of radiation can shrink it further so that she might have a slim chance of surviving surgery to remove it. If this was a child’s game, it would be all chutes and no ladders.

Despite the fact that we have a good chance of losing, we are not ready to give up the fight yet. On that day a year ago, the hero, more precisely the heroine, of my life’s story’s fortunes made a turn for the worse.  Up until our peripeteia moment we have lived a charmed life.

Sure we have had our troubles and faced some hard times, but Glenda and I have lived a life of love and laughter. I am still hoping that our story is not going to end in doom, gloom and death like a Russian novel.

I want an ending like an old time western movie where Roy and Dale ride off into the sunset happy, healthy and hand in hand.    

- Jim Busch

September 7, 2020

Today is Labor Day, a holiday dedicated to honoring America’s working men and women. In a normal year, it is the one day out of the year where ordinary working people are honored for their contributions to society.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed just about everything and this includes our attitude toward working people. The disease has focused our attention on how much we need people to clean our hospitals and stock the shelves in our grocery stores.

These people who are often overworked and underpaid suddenly were recognized as essential workers. I am glad to see these people finally getting the recognition, if not the pay, they deserve.

I grew up in a blue collar household, nestled in the midst of a blue collar neighborhood located in a blue collar city. We had one neighbor who was a retired engineer and another who was a reporter for the McKeesport Daily News, but just about everyone else worked with their hands.

My dad was a machinist, one neighbor next door drove a truck and the one on the other side worked on the shop floor at the Copperweld. My dad’s friends worked construction, repaired cars and many worked in U. S. Steel’s National Tube Works. Our area had more calluses per capita than just about anywhere in the country.        

My dad was a union shop steward responsible for collecting dues and listening to the grievances of the men who worked the night shift with him. He was a proud member of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). He took the brotherhood part very seriously.

My dad considered anyone who worked with his hands to be his brother. He tended to call other working men, “Buddy.” This was not just a meaningless form of address, he really did consider them his friends, even if he had not met them before.

Like in every culture, there is a hierarchy of who deserves respect and who does not. Educated people were on the top of the heap. This was not because they made a lot of money, in those days they didn’t make that much more than the top men in the mills. They were respected for what they knew and their ability to help people in the community.

Doctors and teachers were especially valued. My parents dreamed that I would become a teacher. I don’t think they could imagine a member of our family becoming a doctor and they admired teachers. My dad always told me, “Teachers get to wear a tie, never get their hands dirty and get every summer off.”

He thought that this was the height of luxury even though most teachers made less than he did. I rejected this career path, but somehow I was fated to make my parents’ dream come true. I pursued a business career, but ended up as a sales and management trainer.

In my childhood, people didn’t earn respect for what they owned. Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon. If people had a few extra bucks they put them in a bank account or into savings bonds. The men that got the most respect were the ones who “could do anything.”

These were the guys who built their own homes and fixed their own cars. They usually had the best jobs in the mills, they were tool and die makers, the men who made the tools everyone else used or they were millwrights, the men who kept the machinery running.

Millwrights knew every nut and bolt in a twenty ton machine and could take it apart and put it back together blindfolded. My dad was a “Master Machinist,” so he was fairly high up on the pecking order. He was skilled labor. At the other end of the spectrum were the guys on the labor gang, the pick and shovel guys who worked hard hoping for a chance to move up the ladder.

Leroy Prytz was the most admired man in my dad’s circle. Mr. Prytz could do just about anything. He was in charge of the Babbitt pots at Westinghouse’s East Pittsburgh Works. Babbitt is a special metal alloy that was used to mold bearings for machinery and he could do things with it that no one else could do.

Even the foremen and engineers at the plant treated him with respect. He was invaluable to the company, Westinghouse made large bearings for the propeller shafts of Navy ships. Mr. Prytz was the only man who could repair an imperfect bearing unit so seamlessly that it would pass the rigorous Navy inspection. This saved the company thousands of dollars.

Of course, Leroy Prytz had built his own beautiful home and all the furniture in it. He had also picked up a burned up trailer at a junkyard and used the frame to build a luxurious trailer he took on vacation to Shawnee Lake every year.

What impressed me most was his car. When he retired in the early 1980’s he was still driving a 1958 Chevrolet Belair that he had bought new and kept in mint condition. To save his car, Mr. Prytz drove his pickup truck to work. His truck was a 1936 GMC half ton truck he had bought for $400 before he went to the war. Every two years he took it apart and painted the under carriage with roofing tar to rustproof it. It ran like a top and he was constantly turning away offers to sell it.

The collapse of the industries in the Mon Valley hit these guys hard. The lucky ones like my dad got to retire before their jobs evaporated. The younger guys were caught in the lurch. I remember hearing sad stories of men who had just weeks to go before they were eligible for a pension when their plant shut down. The closing of the mills took away more than a paycheck, it took away the pride of an entire generation of men.

For a long time, the only thing that mattered was how much money someone made. People who worked with their hands were looked down upon. The loss of manufacturing and union jobs made earning a living through manual labor nearly impossible. My dad was proud that he and his buddies built huge dynamos that lit the world, it is hard to find that kind of pride working in a fast food restaurant.

In the last few years, skilled labor has started to be respected again. Young people are being encouraged to consider a career as a carpenter, electrician or in another skilled trade. The pandemic has shown that even jobs which require little training, like being a janitor or working in retail are vital if our society is to continue to function.

Maybe this is a shred of good that can come out of the pandemic that once again people who work with their hands will get the respect they deserve.

- Jim Busch  

September 6, 2020

I spent the day trying to convince my neighbors that I am a wealthy English Lord with lots and lots of sheep to nibble the grass on my estate. Why else would I mow my lawn and trim my hedges. I actually prefer the look of a natural meadow over that of a perfectly manicured lawn, but I’ve been mowing lawns since I was just eight years old.

I started thinking about this after listening to a TV news report about how some people have been fanatical about their lawns during the coronavirus lockdown.

Two hundred years ago, only wealthy land owning aristocrats could afford to have a neatly trimmed lawn. The homes of poor people were surrounded by vegetable gardens. Even those who had more land than they needed to grow food did not have the time to maintain a grassy lawn.

Grass had to be mowed by hand with sickles, a very time consuming chore or kept in check by large flocks of sheep. Only lords who not only had expansive properties, but also the staff to keep them neatly trimmed could afford the luxury of a lawn.

The industrial revolution brought the rise of the middle class and invention of the lawn mower. The social climbing nouveau riche wanted to emulate their aristocratic neighbors. While they did not own great estates, they could create a mini version of the great lawns in front of their humble homes.

Maintaining a postage stamp sized patch of turf grass became a source of pride. On this side of the pond, great landowners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson established large lawns on their estates and their less affluent neighbors followed suit. This is why as the Laird of Tumbledown Manor, I feel compelled to keep my lawn neatly trimmed and verdantly green.

I actually like cutting grass. I think this feeling comes from my childhood. My grandfather suffered from kidney problems causing his legs to swell and eventually causing his death. When he could no longer cut his grass, I took over the job, using an ancient push mower.

I liked being able to help my grandparents and cutting the grass like my dad and the other men of the neighborhood made me feel very grown up. I learned to love the click click sound of the push mower’s spiral blades as I muscled it through the grass, its canvas catcher bag filling with the sweet smelling clippings. After my grandfather’s passing, my grandmother gave me the old mower and I used it to pick up a few dollars mowing the lawns of some of the older people in the neighborhood.

By the time I was 12, I graduated to power mowers. My dad started working 12 hour shifts at the Westinghouse plant and the responsibility of mowing our large lawn fell to me. My dad owned two mowers. A two cycle red Sears Craftsman rotary mower with a big bell shaped flywheel on top of the engine.

This mower used a mix of oil and gasoline which made it smoke like an old paddlewheel steam boat. Looped around the handle of the mower was a starter rope with a wooden grip made out of a piece of broom handle with a hole drilled in it. To start the mower, I had to carefully wrap the rope around the flywheel, place my foot on the mower’s deck and yank with all my strength. The mower would roar to life and I was off.

I never told my dad, but that old Sears mower scared me to death. It had a slotted grill on the front of its deck that looked like the gnashing teeth of some cartoon monster. It was noisy and one had to be careful of its spinning flywheel.

My dad was a certified safety trainer at work and he gave me a very graphic description of what would happen if I got a hand or a foot near the mower’s rapidly spinning steel blade. A few years later, I actually saw this happen to a neighbor and my dad’s description was spot on. The Sears mower was light and maneuverable so it was used around the flower beds and along the edge of our property. I cut most of the lawn with my dad’s Toro Power Handle.

I went with my dad when he bought the Toro at Mr. Jeffries’ feed store in downtown McKeesport. The idea behind the Power Handle concept was that one motor could be used on a number of tools. The big red motor and attached handle could be used on pumps, shredders and other devices.

My dad bought the engine pull for the rototiller and reel mower attachments. To switch from one to the other, all my dad had to do was loosen one bolt and detach the drive belt, reversing the process on the second device. It was an impressive piece of machinery.

The Toro mower was self-propelled, the red motor not only spun the blades but also powered the two rubber tired drive wheels on the sides of the mower. These wheels are why this mower was not able to trim along the fence or other obstacles, it was designed for wide open spaces.

Starting the Toro was much more complicated than the rotary mower. The Toro had a clutch which had to be disengaged before starting, after doing this I had to open the valve on its gas tank before wrapping the starting rope around the side mounted flywheel. Because its engine was so much larger, the Toro required a lot more strength to pull its rope. On more than one occasion I landed on my butt in the grass as the mower roared to life.

The Toro had two handles that looped inward so that they looked like the horns on a “Toro”” in a Mexican bull ring. Between these were two levers, the throttle and the clutch. I would adjust the throttle, hold on for dear life and engage the clutch. I thought the Toro name might refer to the way a bucking bull jumps out of the chute at a rodeo. Once I pulled the clutch lever back, the powerful machine leapt forward pulling me behind it. Quite literally I had the “bull” by the horns.

I had to walk fast to keep up with it and struggled to keep it going in a straight line. The Toro’s spinning blades were two feet wide, so it made quick work of our big yard. As I neared the end of the yard I had to muscle the big mower into a wide turn and line it up for the next pass. I could only manage this because of the wide margin strips I had cut along the edge of the yard with the Sears mower.

Once I got the hang of it, I learned to love the red Toro mower. It gave me a foretaste of what it was like to drive a car. Sometimes, I fanaticized that I was driving one of General Patton’s troopers tank through France. The rumbling of the mower provided the sound effects I needed to make this daydream very realistic. Instead of cutting grass, I was mowing down Nazis.

Today, I use a lightweight electric lawnmower. It is easy to use and doesn’t require me to keep a supply of explosive liquids on hand. I only have to sharpen the blade once a year and no muss, no fuss, I have a neatly trimmed lawn. It may lack the character and the fear factor of the old mowers, but it gets the job done.

After I finished my work, I realized why so many people have become obsessed with lawn care during the pandemic. Looking over my work gave me a sense of accomplishment. In a complicated time, this simple, one foot in front of the other task is a great way to handle the stress we are all feeling.

It is a relatively inexpensive activity and naturally social distanced. It feels good to be out in the fresh air and sunshine. In addition to all of these benefits, we must not forget the ego boost that comes from fooling one’s neighbors into thinking I’m an English aristocrat.        

- Jim Busch

September 5, 2020

For the last 48 years, I have been married to a human dynamo. I have always considered myself to be a hard worker, but my wife Glenda has always put me to shame. The past year has been hard on my wife, her struggle with cancer has slowed her down and she has taken it very hard. I am seldom at a loss for words, but I can’t seem to lift her spirits these days.

My wife was very close to her parents. Her father was the hardest working man I ever knew. Well into his 70’s he was immensely strong and could get more done in a day than three average men. Her mother was always busy, she kept her home neat and clean and loved to cook for big family gatherings. Sometimes, after days spent in the kitchen she brush the hair from her eyes and say, “I love cooking for a gang.”

My wife grew up working beside her parents. They always had animals and my wife never complained about cleaning rabbit cages or feeding the family pets. They sometimes raised a beef cow and for some years my wife had a horse. It should have been my wife’s sister’s horse, because it did not like my wife riding it, but loved my wife’s sister.

My wife’s first experience behind the wheel was driving an old Dodge truck through a meadow while her father tossed hay bales onto its flatbed.

When her parents bought a plot of forested land for a summer home, my wife and her parents worked together to clear the land for a cabin. She swung an ax, cut logs with a bow saw and cleared brush like she was Paul Bunyan’s granddaughter. Glenda was the youngest of three girls. Her father never had a son, so she became his companion. He taught her how to jack up a car and change a tire. By the time Glenda learned to drive, she knew how to do an oil change and install a new set of spark plugs.

Though she is too tender hearted to actually kill anything, Glenda became her father’s hunting buddy until his eldest grandson grew old enough to join him. One time while bow hunting for deer, Glenda stabbed a razor sharp broad head arrow into the back of her calf.

She pulled the arrow out and did not tell her father. She didn’t want to ruin his hunt. When they finally got back to the truck, Glenda’s boot was full of blood. She still has an ugly scar on the back of her leg. How many guys can say their wife has an arrow wound, makes me feel like a pioneer.

I like the fact that my wife is a bit of a Tomboy. She has always been a loving wife and a wonderful mother, a real woman in all the ways that really matter. She just never was into frilly things or fancy jewelry—a fact that has saved me a lot of money over the years. My wife’s standard uniform has always been a pair of jeans, a simple blouse and a pair of sensible shoes. Glenda always looked nice, but chose her attire for its practicality rather than to please the Gods of Fashion.

One of the things that set us apart from most couples is our ability to work together. Over the years, we have tackled all sorts of building and repair projects. We have built sheds together and planted gardens. We have done insulation and rebuilt carburetors. For several years, we lived in an isolated cabin in the woods without plumbing or other amenities. Glenda and I carried water and packed in supplies together.

Once on a Sunday afternoon, we went to a ranger program at a nearby state park. The program was “Old time lumberjacks.” The rangers gave a talk about the tough lumberjacks who worked in the woods with no power tools before floating the logs down the river to market. The next part of the program was a demonstration of an old fashioned two man saw.

It soon became apparent that the rangers were more accustomed to using a gasoline powered chainsaw than an eight foot hand saw. They pushed and pulled and all they managed to do was to exhaust themselves and make the saw bend and buck. Glenda and I stepped up and asked, “Mind if we give it a try.” We heated our cabin with a wood stove and were used to cutting wood.

We soon had the saw flying through the log that had given the rangers so much trouble. We cut off a slice of log and after a round of applause from the crowd, we cut off another for our encore. The rangers didn’t know the two secrets of using a crosscut saw, one: let the saw do the work and second: you have to know when to push and when to pull. This second point is also good advice for a successful marriage.

Over the years, my wife has done more than her share of work. When I worked away from home she cut the grass and did the hedges. When the holidays were coming I saw her go three days without sleep, baking, cooking and wrapping, operating on just a 10 minute catnap now and then. She took care of her parents and her aunt when they got old and their health began to fail. For years, she did all of this while owning and operating a neighborhood bookstore.

The last few months have been tough on my wife. The cancer and the drugs her doctors have been using to fight it have sapped all her energy. She tried as hard as she could to maintain her routine. For a few months she kept up a good front, baking and cooking all of my favorite dishes. Glenda tried to continue walking every evening, but soon her strength failed her. The last few days, Glenda has been very sleepy. The nurses in the oncology department told her that at this point in her chemotherapy, she would be very weak. She has been sleeping at least 22 or 23 hours of out of each day.

My wife keeps apologizing to me for sleeping so much and leaving me to fend for myself. I am happy to see her getting so much sleep, when she is asleep, she is not in pain. I also think that sleeping gives her body a chance to heal. My primary concern is doing anything that gives her a fighting chance at beating the cancer.

Glenda is torn between her body’s natural desire to sleep and her mind’s desire to be up and doing the things she has always done. She feels guilty when I have to fix my own meals, do the shopping or take on some other chore she used to do.

My wife’s battle with cancer has been going on for close to a year. It has been about four months since her diagnosis. She is like a city surrounded by the enemy, as long as the siege drags on, the people in the city grow weary as their situation grows more and more desperate.

Eventually, the people lose hope and are defeated. I fear that my wife is weary from her battle and is on the verge of losing hope. She feels worthless. I try to convince her that I did not fall in love with her because of the work she could do. I love her because of who she is.

She worries about me being lonely when she spends so much time sleeping. Just knowing she is near is enough for me. My wife has taken very good care of me for almost five decades. She has done more work in her lifetime than should be expected of any three women.

I wish I could make her understand that I am proud to take my turn at taking care of her. I wish I could make her understand that she will never be a burden to me.

Like I told her a long, long time ago, I love her in sickness and in health.     

- Jim Busch

September 4, 2020

Today, even though it was still quite warm, I got a taste of fall. I had this year’s first piece of pumpkin pie. My wife gave me a list of items to pick up at Costco. I asked her if she wanted me to pick up a pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin pies are a signature item at the big warehouse store. Every fall they bake and sell over six million of these delicious pies. Costco sells 2.5 million pies in the week before Thanksgiving alone.  My wife is an accomplished baker, but she has not made a pumpkin pie in years. Costco’s pies are quite good and at just $5.99 for an 11-inch pie, my wife has decided that it would cost her more to make one from scratch.

In response to my question my wife said, “It’s not even Labor Day yet, they won’t have them in stock for at least a month.” I assured my wife that I was well aware of the date. By my calculation, Thanksgiving is just about 80 days away, but I was sure that Costco would have the yummy, spicy pies.

I told my wife it is always a mistake to under estimate the impatience and greed of good old fashioned American capitalism. When I got to the store’s bakery section, I not only found a cooler case full of pumpkin pies, but I also saw a line of shoppers joyfully snapping them up.

Actually, Costco showed admirable restraint holding the pies back until September. Over three weeks ago, I saw massive displays of Halloween candy at my local Giant Eagle. These were accompanied by other fall delights like “Pumpkin Spice Twinkies” and holiday themed boxes of Count Chocula and Frankenberry cereals.

Every year it seems that the holiday selling seasons get farther and farther out of sync with the actual calendar date of the event. This year, the calendar creep became a major leap forward due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

When I was walking through Costco, I saw racks of Halloween costumes next to a display of artificial Christmas trees and other yuletide decorations. Just beyond these displays were winter coats, boots and sweaters. Procrastinating shoppers who defer buying their winter gear until they actually feel a chill in the air may be out of luck.

When they finally go to the store in November, they will find an extensive selection of bathing suits and Bermuda shorts. Flip flops are comfy on the beach, but leave much to be desired when shoveling snow off your sidewalks.

Though retired, I still follow the business news. This year many marketers were concerned that coronavirus could put a major damper on traditional Halloween celebrations. On any other day of the year, sending your children out to beg candy from strangers would be considered child abuse, but on Halloween it’s just fine and dandy. Now, that we are wearing masks as part of our everyday attire and we are facing a disease that is far more frightening than make believe ghosts, Halloween will be very different this year.

In an age of social distancing, many people aren’t anxious to have hordes of children at their door. Candy manufacturers are concerned that this year people will turn their porch lights off and won’t keep the big orange bowl of fun sized candy bars in their front hall. The big wheels at Hershey and M & M Mars have reason to be concerned, in a typical year Halloween candy sales total more than eight million dollars.

To minimize the damage to their bottom line, the Willie Wonka’s of the business world rushed their products to the stores much earlier this year. They hoped to gain some small advantage by getting their products into the stores before the competition. This proved futile as all the candy companies adopted the early bird strategy.

Good marketing people earn their keep by understanding human nature. The candy companies know what will happen if they get us to buy a bag of candy. We may intend to put it away and hold it until the holiday, but they know us.

They know we have been cooped up in our homes for months. They know we are bored and they know we have the munchies. We may buy a bag of candy for the “Trick or Treaters” or our grandchildren, but they know where it will end up.

A side effect of the pandemic is that it has weakened our collective will power. Health officials have expressed concern about the “Covid 15.” This refers to the 15 pounds people have put on while quarantined. Stuck in the house with a fully stocked pantry and barred from going to the gym, we’ve started packing on the pounds.

That bag of “fun size” candy bars or peanut butter cups won’t sit there unmolested for long. They are so tiny and there are so many of them in a half pound bag, it would not hurt to try one or maybe two of them. Before we know it the bag will be empty requiring another trip to the store. This time we will know better, we will buy two bags.'

• Jim Busch

September 3, 2020

A good deal of my life has been driven by numbers. All through grade school, my goal was to see the coveted “100” written on top of my school papers. In high school, I was concerned with class ranking. In my college years, my attention was divided between two very important numbers, my QPA and my selective service number.  

The war in Southeast Asia was raging and my birthdate was the 17th number drawn in the free trip to Vietnam courtesy of the lottery. Another obscure number exempted me from the draft, the number of a selective service regulation that stated that a man with a large facial scar or birthmark was ineligible for induction into the U.S. military.

When I left college and joined the working world, numbers continued to be a big part of my life. My 3.8 QPA didn’t matter much in the midst of a recession. It turns out my mechanical skills were much more marketable than my English literature degree, so I took a job in a machine shop. For a few years, I focused on some very tiny numbers.

I ran a grinder and a milling machine producing metal parts to tolerances measured in thousands of an inch. I became skilled in reading the minuscule lines on the barrel of a micrometer precisely measuring pieces on the metal bed of my machine.

When I became a sales manager, I became a generator of numbers. I was responsible for calculating sales projections and formulating plans for achieving them. Since my employer never supplied me with a functioning crystal ball, this was largely an exercise in creating a work of mathematical fiction.

As an entry level sales manager for a division of Dun & Bradstreet, I was required to prepare a detailed business plan for my department. This was a huge task which took up the better part of a month to complete. The fact that this was all busy work made it all the more onerous.

All we accomplished by our labor was to produce a beautiful document that was completely ignored by upper management. Each manager’s report was combined with all the other reports from the region and published in a hard bound volume.

One of the items included in the report was the manager’s request for capital investments in their department. I ran the telephone sales room, so just for fun I included a line item requesting a theater organ for my department.

I even called an organ company and got the price of an organ similar to the one used during Pittsburgh Penguin’s games at the Civic Arena. I described how I would use it to motivate my sales people. When someone made a sale, we would play the charge, just like they did when the Pens scored a goal.

I thought that my boss would catch my “Organ Request” and would edit it out of our office’s report. It turned out that my boss, also knew that no one paid attention to this report, he didn’t even bother to read it. When we received the final document for corporate headquarters, I laughed and asked him if I, “was getting my organ?” He looked perplexed and I reminded him of my joke.

He got a stricken look on his face and desperately paged through the book on his desk. He held it up and pointed to the section where my request had been typeset and printed. Apparently, no one in the chain of command ever read the numbers in the document, they just ignored it. Somewhere, buried in the archives of the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation is a document requesting a theater organ for a phone room in Pittsburgh.

When I retired, my wife and I went through another set of numbers with our investment advisor and the Social Security Administration. After this, we did more calculations with Medicare and with a supplemental insurance company. Since we were now on a fixed income, we thought we were finally done with numbers for good.

Today, we are dealing with numbers even more vital than dollars and cents. Every Wednesday, my wife goes to Quest Diagnostics and has several vials of blood drawn. On Thursdays, she meets with her team of doctors to discuss her numbers before receiving her weekly chemotherapy treatment.

Today, the numbers were disconcerting, her red and white blood cell counts were way down. Her magnesium was good, but the rest of her blood chemistry was far below where it was supposed to be. The doctors discussed whether she was strong enough to endure today’s treatment or not. It seems that the treatments that are designed to kill the cancer are also killing my wife. The question is will they be able to kill the cancer before they finish her off.

We did receive one good number from my wife’s blood work. Her cancer antigens are way down. These are the markers of the cancer that float through her blood stream. These are down almost ninety percent from where they were when she was first diagnosed. This could be an indication that her cancer is shrinking giving her a fighting chance. We will not know for sure until she has a CT scan in a week or so.

I am hoping for a positive scan. I have one more numerical goal I would like to achieve. My wife and I will soon celebrate our 48th wedding anniversary. I really want to celebrate our 50th. Fifty is such a nice round number and I like the idea of hitting our Golden wedding anniversary.

In my head, I can picture our friends and family gathered to help us mark the date and giving us gifts we will never use emblazoned with the number “50” in fancy gold script.

This will also be a chance to celebrate the most important number in my life, the number two. Like it says in the marriage ceremony, “Two shall be as one.” I like being part of a two and have no desire to live as a one.

- Jim Busch

September 2, 2020

I did something today I have not done since last February, I had lunch with my good friend, Ralph. The Covid-19 quarantine has kept us apart. I have been limiting my contact with the world outside my home so I don’t bring the virus home to my wife.

Ralph has had health problems of his own and his wife did her best to keep him at home. In happier times, we would get together about once a month to have lunch and talk, something that we have both missed.

We met this afternoon at the Acapulco Mexican Restaurant in North Huntingdon. It’s a restaurant we both like and close to our homes. We chose our meeting time strategically, we wanted to miss the lunch rush. There were two reasons for this, we did not want to be there with a lot of people and also we did not want to tie up one of their tables during the lunch rush. We tend to plant ourselves at a table and talk away the afternoon.

We met in the parking lot about quarter till one. We are both retired salespeople, so we both stepped toward one another instinctively raising a hand to handshake position before “Covid Consciousness” stopped us both in our tracks. We commented on each other’s choice of mask before heading into the restaurant. We were directed to a table near the window where we took seats at opposite corners of a long table.  

Before we could begin the day’s conversation, we had to clear up some old business. Ralph had a belated birthday card for me. We had not been able to get together in June when I turned over another year. The card also held a gift certificate for another of our favorite spots, the China Jade restaurant in Olympia Shopping Center.

I had a shopping bag of books for Ralph. We share many interests so when I finish a book I think he’d enjoy, I put it into the “Ralph Bag” in my office. When we would get together, I would take him a fresh supply of reading material. Since we have not been able to see one another for a while, the bag was bursting at the seams. His local library has not opened yet, so he was happy to have some fresh reading material,

The waiter arrived with a bowl of salsa, a basket of chips and two menus. We took a few minutes to consider our options. Ralph ordered a burrito and I ordered a vegetarian plate. A sign on the front counter said that they were offering Elote today. Elote is Mexican street corn, an ear of roasted corn on the cob slathered in mayonnaise, dusted with chili powder and rolled in grated cotija cheese.

I first tasted Elote in the Mercado, market square, in San Antonio, Texas and it was love at first bite. Served on a wooden skewer, Elote is sweet, spicy and delicious, so I suggested that Ralph also give it a try. Ralph thanked me for introducing him to this new culinary delight.    

As usual, our conversation opened with inquiries about one another’s families. I asked about Ralph’s wife, his son and his daughter-in-law. Ralph asked about my family and especially my grandson, Max. Though a few years older than me, Ralph married late in life, so his son is younger than my children. His son does not have any children as yet. I think he envies my title of Grandfather just a little bit.

Once we talked about the kids, we moved on to discussing the “elephant in the room” subject—cancer. About a decade ago, Ralph survived a serious case of colon cancer. I always liked Ralph, but the courage he showed fighting the disease earned my undying respect. A little over a year ago, Ralph told me he had what he described to me as “a little touch of cancer.” He had good news for me, he had seen his doctor yesterday and received a clean bill of health. Our luncheon had become a celebratory feast.

We then turned to discussing my wife’s battle with cancer. We got into an involved discussion of antigens and blood counts, for obvious reasons, Ralph has an in depth understanding of these things. My news was not as encouraging as his, but it was good to have a friend to talk things over with. A week hasn’t gone by that Ralph hasn’t called me to see if there is anything he can do to help us in any way. He is a good friend.

We were “rightsized” out of our jobs and forced into retirement four years ago. When we first left our jobs, we spent a lot of time talking about business and our former coworkers. As time has gone by, these discussions have slowly faded into the background. Now we only talk about these things if we happen to run into someone we used to work with or hear that one of them has passed away. After decades working in advertising, the subject simply holds no interest for us any longer.

These days we are more inclined to talk about history, art or movies we have seen. Sometimes, we talk about politics. Our political views are almost identical so there is no friction here, but we quickly tire of the subject. I’m not sure why, but we have avoided the tendency of old men to “solve all the problems of the world” when we get together.

Lately, our discussions have turned to the subject of loneliness. Ralph’s wife supervises a team of people who service greeting card displays in chain stores. Her job keeps her away from home for long periods of time. Ralph is a confirmed extrovert, he is a real people person. After retirement, he took a part time job at a local restaurant until the coronavirus and his health prevented him from working. Because of his cancer treatment, his wife did not want him leaving the house. Today’s excursion was the first time he’d be out with people in months. He told me that this left him feeling depressed and a little stir crazy.

The coronavirus has also restricted my contacts with the outside world. I do get out to do some shopping and I have visited some of the local museums, but I miss the crowds. I miss interacting with other people. My wife also has a job, her job is fighting cancer. This battle leaves her exhausted. My wife has always been an energetic woman, she was always in motion. I have always considered her to be my best friend. After forty eight years of marriage, we still enjoy one another’s company.

These days I spend much of my time tiptoeing around the house trying not to wake her. I am normally as noisy as a Fourth of July parade and being quiet is not my natural operating mode. Though she is here in the house with me, I get lonely for my wife. I miss the woman I’ve known for all these years. I miss our old life.

The state used to put signs up in turnpike construction zones reading, “Temporary inconvenience—permanent improvement.” I am hoping this is the case for us, I am hoping that the drugs, the chemotherapy, and the doctors will bring my wife back to me.

I have always known that growing older would change things. I knew that I would turn grey and my health would slip away. I expected aches and pains, but I did not expect to be so lonely. It was good to spend a few hours with my old friend. I think it was good for us both.     

- Jim Busch

September 1, 2020

There is an old story about a shady business man who is looking to hire an accountant. He calls the first candidate into his office and says I have only one question to ask, “How much is two plus two?” The applicant squinted his eyes and tilted his head and then said, “The sum of 2 plus 2 is 4, of course!”

He was immediately shown the door. The business man asked the second candidate the same question and received the exact same answer. The second applicant was also rushed out into the street. When he asked the 2 plus 2 question to the third applicant, the applicant looked around, got up, checked to make sure the door was locked and shut the window blinds. He then walked around the business man’s desk and whispered in his ear, “What do you want it to be?” The third man was hired on the spot.

I spent three decades working in marketing and advertising. Some of that time was spent doing research to support my company’s products. I also was tasked with rebutting our competition’s research and claims. There is a saying about using numbers that has been variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and Mark Twain. It goes, “There are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies and statistics.”

I have seen the wisdom of this statement many times during my business career. On one occasion, one of my salespeople brought a competitor’s brochure to me. He was upset because it included market research that showed that absolutely no one was reading our publication while many people read our competitor’s paper.

I was perplexed by this until I did a little digging. Reading the fine print, I discovered the research was conveniently conducted in areas where my company did not have any publications. People were not reading our publications because they had not seen them.  This was a masterful application of the third type of falsehood—lying with statistics.

Today, the government miraculously resurrected over a 170,000 Americans, or so it seemed. On Friday, the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19 was slightly over a 180,000, over the weekend the Covid death toll dropped to a mere 9300.

I pictured Dr. Anthony Fauci in a white lab coat in a secret lab in the dome of the Capitol with thick cables attached to a lightning rod shocking corpses back to life. With each flash of lightning Faucistein would cry out, “It is alive! Next.” It takes a long time to shock tens of thousands of bodies back to life with bolts of lightning, it seems that it can be done much quicker with a laptop, a spreadsheet program and a bit of creative thinking.

Over the weekend, the White House announced that the Covid death toll had been grossly over estimated. They explained that most of the people who contracted the coronavirus had actually succumbed to some other malady. It seems that many of these people died from heart conditions or pulmonary problems. They made it sound like the fact that these people had Covid-19 was just a coincidence.

This struck me as a bit disingenuous. This is like saying that a person shot through the heart didn’t die from a bullet wound, but from a completely unrelated loss of blood that just happened to occur at the same precise moment.

Technically, none of us ever die from old age. This is not what is written on the death certificate. Cause of death is listed as congestive heart disease or COPD. The fact that the patient is 97 years-old is never listed as the primary reason for their demise.

During the AIDs epidemic, patients weren’t killed by the human immunodeficiency virus, they died from pneumonia or some other infection that their weakened immune system could not fight off. This is also what happens with Covid-19 patients, the coronavirus weakens the person’s defenses so that they pass away from something that they would normally be able to fight off.

The White House spin was essentially, “They were going to die anyway!” This is true, a majority of the people who died from the coronavirus did have underlying conditions. They had heart problems, breathing difficulties, or other chronic diseases which compromised their resistance to the disease.

This is a vicious circle, people with underlying conditions are more susceptible to the coronavirus; once they contract the coronavirus they are more susceptible to dying from the underlying condition. While it is true that the official cause of death is not the immediate cause of death, it is certainly a major contributing factor. It is likely that many of the 180,000 people on Friday’s list would have gone on to live for years, perhaps decades longer, if they hadn’t encountered the coronavirus.

I am wondering if the fact that this disease hit our nation during a highly contentious election year has not made things worse. Dealing with a global pandemic is a major challenge that requires clear thinking and a careful examination of the facts as they become known to us.

Once this greatly reduced number of deaths was reported, the pundits jumped on board saying, “We knew it all the time.” Social media lit up with people saying their opponents were trying to pull the wool over their eyes and generating brand new conspiracy theories, “Did anyone really see any bodies in those mass graves?”

Trying to deny that this disease is a serious threat to our country or manipulating the data surrounding it only delays finding a cure or a vaccine. Denying the importance of taking proper precautions means that more of our fellow citizens will get sick and possibly die or be permanently disabled. Playing games with the numbers in business is unethical, doing so when it puts lives at risk is criminal!  

The best way to face any problem is to accept the facts before us and then act accordingly. If we are to beat this disease, we need to set politics and game playing aside. In all the research conducted on the coronavirus thus far, our scientists have not been able to identify its party affiliation.

It doesn’t seem to be either a Republican or Democratic disease, in fact it seems to follow a decidedly independent course. If we are going to beat this disease, we need to work together.   

  - Jim Busch

August 31, 2020

Today, I upgraded my wardrobe, I bought a new mask. This is the first mask I have purchased specifically to protect myself from the coronavirus.

At the beginning of April when the CDC first recommended that everyone wear a face covering, I went to my workshop where I had a supply of painter’s masks. I kept these on hand to use when I was using my electric sander or spray painting. I had two brand new boxes of these dome shaped paper masks with two thin elastic straps.

Confident that this crisis would only last a few weeks, I was sure that I was set for the duration. Now, five months later, even with careful rationing, my supply is running low. I was raised by depression era parents who lived by the code of, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

I made the most of my mask supply, continuing to wear them even after they were soiled from sweat where they contacted my skin. I kept a mask in my car, so that I would have it when I had to go into a store. The 90 degree weather we have had this summer weakened the rubber straps that held the paper mask against my face causing them to break. Even then, I managed to get a few more days of service from them by carefully tying the elastic with a Boy Scout’s square knot.

I was so fanatical about preserving my supply of paper masks because I do not like wearing the standard issue fabric mask. I simply cannot abide the cloth touching my lips. It is not painful, simply aggravating. This is why I had to make the paper masks do, because with the coronavirus claiming new victims every day, doing without was definitely not an option.

A few months ago, I could have replenished my supply of masks at any hardware or paint store for a few dollars. These days I couldn’t find them anywhere, online or off, at any price.

Today, I stopped at what my wife calls my “Toy Store,” Harbor Freight Tools. I needed some hardware for an upcoming project. While there, I decided to see if they had any of my masks back in stock. Harbor Freight is to be commended for donating their entire supply of personal protective equipment to frontline health care workers at the beginning of the crisis. They have not had my masks in stock since, but I thought I would look anyway.

Harbor Freight did not have any of my paper masks, but for the first time since April, their PPE shelf was not completely empty. Today, they had just four boxes holding elaborate “Multipurpose Dust Masks with Activated Charcoal Filters.” They were priced at $24.99 but were washable and came with a supply of extra filters.

The masks even came with an attached set of earplugs to be used when operating noisy sandblasting equipment. I thought these might come in handy as we approached the election. From the picture on the box, it appeared that the shape of the mask would keep it away from my lips. I quickly snapped one up and took it home with me.

When I got home, I opened the package and examined my jaunty new mask. It had two Velcro straps that were designed to hold it tightly against my face. The package offered detailed instructions on how to create an airtight seal around one’s face. I fiddled with the straps until it was comfortable and made an adequate, if not completely airtight, seal. I have to admit that I did walk into my bedroom to check myself out in the mirror.

I liked the look of my new protective gear. I have the kind of face that can be only improved by wearing a mask. If I had it to do all over again, I might have chosen a career as a train robber because I looked so good in their work uniform.

I am glad that I have resolved my mask dilemma. I think we will all be wearing our masks for a long time. Masks may even become a permanent part of our wardrobe. People are already using them to make fashion and even political statements. I have seen masks bearing the names of the current presidential candidates. I have seen Black Live Matter masks and Make America Great masks.

Like neckties or jewelry, face masks have become a way to express one’s personal sense of style. Some people like to go the whimsical route, wearing masks featuring animal faces or imprinted smiles. Some mask wearers choose colorful fabrics covered with popular cartoon characters while others prefer more somber colors.

Mask making has become America’s new folk art. My daughter, Rachael, actually wore out her sewing machine and had to buy a new one mid pandemic. She has searched the web for new patterns and designs before settling on a pattern that incorporates a replaceable cloth filter and a pipe cleaner to hold its shape. She even learned how to make masks with a clear vinyl window to help a deaf friend read her lips.

Rachael has become the “Johnny Appleseed” of surgical masks, distributing masks to virtually everyone she knows. She even made me several masks until I finally convinced her that I don’t handle cloth masks. In addition to my general objection to cloth masks, Rachael and I have very different choices in our attire. She likes bright colors, wild patterns and flashy clothing—I like blue. The masks she made for me were a bit over the top.

On the plus side, with everyone wearing masks, I have a new conversation starter. Since masks have become such an expression of one’s personality, complimenting a person’s mask is a great way to get them talking.

While waiting in a socially distanced line, simply saying, “I like your mask,” will get things going. I am sure that they are smiling under there, just like if I had praised their children or hairdo. In these times when we are trying to stay away from one another, as odd as it sounds, masks can bring us together.

I have noticed that the protests against wearing masks have died out. I think that these mini rebellions were like the tantrum a toddler throws when they are tired and do not want to go to bed, eventually they have to admit that they want a nap.

The overwhelming evidence that masks can slow the spread of the disease has won over all but the diehard libertarians. I think we will all be wearing masks for a long time to come, so we might as well get use to them.   

- Jim Busch

August 30, 2020

The Covid-19 lockdown has made it difficult to perform some of my duties for my family. Somehow, I have become one of the family elders. One day I was a young father looking to the older generation for guidance and then before I knew it I was next in line for the diving board ready to jump off into infinity. I am not the oldest male in the family, but my life experiences have earned me special status.

I come from a solidly working class background. I am the first person in the family to graduate college and the only person to work in a white collar career. Most of the men in the family held down jobs in industry. Fortunately for me, I have also worked in factories, machine shops and driven trucks. The fact that I have actually worked at a real job, a job that required physical labor, allows me to hold my head up at family gatherings.

Most of the family does not realize that my degree in English literature does not make me especially wise. I do benefit from my long career in advertising. Advertising is by definition the art of making something sound better than it might actually be. My ability to talk on a variety of subjects has earned me a reputation for being smart, despite my efforts to set the record straight. Any wisdom that I may actually possess has been acquired secondhand through reading.

Because of the combination of my age and my perceived education has led to my taking on an avuncular role in the family. The dictionary defines avuncular as “taking on the behavior of an uncle, kindly gentile and wide.”

In many cases, this is at least partially accurate, I am often asked to give advice to my wife’s nieces and nephews and their children. I try to live up to my role by sharing advice with them. I also frequently share books with them and help them with projects. I have made Halloween costumes, helped with science projects and once built a Leprechaun Trap as a St Patrick’s Day project.

Most of my wife’s sister’s family lives in Mercer County about 90 miles north of my home. Before the coronavirus struck, my wife and I went there for visits once or twice a month. It is not so far that if needed I could run up there to help with a project, but the lockdown has put an end to these trips for now.

My great niece has recently shown an interest in a subject near and dear to my heart, painting. I sent her a care package of painting supplies and paper, but I would desperately love to give her a few informal art lessons.

I have tried to fulfill my duties through my phone. I am a bit of a technophobe. I much prefer dealing with people face to face which has made quarantine a trial for me. I especially dislike texting. I have yet to figure out why if one has a telephone in their hands, why a person would want to use it as a teletype machine. I have often thought that the only logical text message would read, “Voice box torn out by wolves, send help ASAP!” Yet I constantly get drawn into discussions via what I call the “Devil’s Typewriter.”

Today, my niece, Stacey, sent me a text reading, “What do you think of Glenn Beck?” Reading this message, the first thought to run through my mind was, “Go back, it’s a trap!” I knew this was going to be a long conversation since I text at a rate of six words per quarter hour.

Against my better judgement, I replied to her and shared my opinion of Beck. The message included terms like Blowhard and phrases like “plays fast and loose with the facts.” After an extended exchange, I learned that she had seen Beck on television talking about the American education system.

Apparently, Beck was quite eloquent in describing how the Marxists had seized control of her children’s schools. She has a son and a daughter and was wondering if their teachers, who seemed like nice women, were really acolytes of Joe Stalin. She half expected her children to come home with Mao’s little red book instead of a speller.

After a long string of texts, I convinced her that she had nothing to fear from her children’s school. She then asked a truly challenging questions, “How do I know what to believe?” This is truly the central question of our time. Right up front I told her that this is not an easy task; that it will require work. I explained that the work required to practice critical thinking is why so few engage in it.

I used frozen food as an analogy. I told her that there are many companies that prepare meals that are quick and easy to prepare. You just have to heat them up and eat them. The only problem is that the food is prepared the way the company who produced it wanted it to be.

They are quick and easy to prepare, but the consumer has nothing to say about what they are going to be fed. Even worse, the consumer doesn’t know what is hidden in the meal, what chemicals are concealed in the sauce.

Likewise, pundits like Beck prepare little mental meals of prepackaged ideas. These meals may look good and don’t require any effort on the part of consumer. These meals tell people what to think if they don’t mind having Beck’s agenda hidden under the gravy.

I cautioned Stacey to avoid binary thinking. I told her that people like Beck try to divide the world into different camps 180 degrees apart. That their side is always good and that the other side is always evil. I told her that the world is seldom black and white, that the correct answer if usually somewhere in between. That it is usually a shade of grey.

I told my niece she needs to look at all sides of a story. That she needs to research the person speaking and learn what they believe. Once she has done this research, she needs to weigh the facts against her own experience and then come to a conclusion. The key is to think for oneself rather than letting others do it for them.

I have had a lot of job titles in my life, but I think my role as Uncle Jim, along with my roles as Dad and grandfather, may be one of the most important positions I have held in my life.

It is my job to help the younger generation learn to navigate through life before they wake up one day and find themselves one of the elders. It is my job to help the family find a path into the future.

 - Jim Busch

August 29, 2020,

I got to spend most of the day with my grandson, Max, today. We didn’t do much, he just wanted to chill before starting his first year of high school. His parents let him decide how he was going to handle this school year and he wisely decided to opt for taking remote classes for the entire school year. He misses his friends, but does not want to worry his parents, or his grandparents.

Because of the pandemic, we haven’t seen as much of him this year as we normally do. We usually get Max for a week in the summer. With his grandmother fighting cancer and with the quarantine we did not get to have him this year.

I truly enjoy spending time with Max. Of course I am very biased, but I think he is a remarkable young man. His parents have done a good job with him; he is interested in many things and is quite knowledgeable for a 14 year-old boy. He and I share a deep interest in history.

He is especially interested in ancient history. Max had signed up for a school trip to Italy and Greece this summer, but of course the coronavirus shut the entire continent of Europe down. I hope things turn around so that he can get to see the Coliseum and the Parthenon after all. I am a bit envious, the longest trip I took in high school was an afternoon field trip to the Allegheny County Courthouse.

When I talk with Max, I don’t have to dumb down my conversation. He has an excellent vocabulary and a quick mind. Unlike many young people, particularly young men, he is not afraid to admit when he does not understand something. He will ask for clarification if he loses the string of the conversation. 

If we are watching something on television and he doesn’t understand what is going on, he will stop the program and ask me to explain the context with him. I admire this about him. There is an old saying that goes, you can tell if a man is clever by his answers, but you can tell if a man is wise by his questions. Max is wise beyond his years.

Max’s parents are both “Type A” individuals. They met at the Pitt Law School. My son is a very successful attorney in the pharmaceutical industry and his wife worked as a public defender. She has now “switched sides” and is in her second year of studying for the ministry. They are both big readers and involved in a number of activities.

Since Max was very young, they have had him involved in numerous activities. Most of the time his calendar is more crowded than the schedule of a Fortune 500 CEO. He is active in Boy Scouts, 4H and numerous after school activities. He is currently taking both horseback riding and golf lessons.

He is an acolyte and involved in his church’s youth group. In previous summers, he has attended sleep away camps as well as some day camps at his school and at the local museums. This year Covid-19 closed down most of the camps, but his mother has been taking him to various natural areas and historical sites around the tristate area to fill the gaps. During the school year, he takes advanced level classes particularly in math and the sciences which require extra homework and additional reading.

Since he was small, Max’s politically active mother has gotten him involved in social justice activities. He has volunteered for food programs and has marched in demonstrations. When he was only 12, Max testified before the Allegheny County Council and was interviewed on television when volunteering at a cancer center. His card carrying socialist, lifelong member of the International Workers of the World, great great grandfather would be very proud of his political activism.

These days too many kids spend way too much time in front of a screen playing games. I think it is good for kids to be active and involved, but I also think it is important for them to have some downtime. I think it is important for kids to have time to be kids.

I never had to push Max’s father to do his work, in fact I often had to tell him to not be so stressed. I tried to tell him that it was not important to be the top of the class all the time, that as long as you do the best you can that’s ok. I’m still waiting for that message to sink in.

At my age, I’m supposed to tell stories about how I had to walk barefoot to school in the snow uphill both ways, but I’m a baby boomer. My generation didn’t exactly have to go to the mines when we were eight years-old. The best we can manage is to tell my grandson that I had to actually get up to change the channels on the TV for my mother…and I had to wade through deep shag carpeting both ways. This just doesn’t seem to inspire much sympathy.

The truth is that I had a pretty good childhood. I did ok in school without working too hard. My summers were idyllic. I had some chores to do, weeding the garden or cutting the grass but I liked being outdoors. I had a lot of time to myself, my parents were mostly concerned about keeping me out of their hair. I spent a lot of time in the backyard reading comic books, in my defense, at least I liked educational classic comics, and library books.

Sometimes, I would climb the hill behind my house and lie on my back in the grass looking up at the clouds. After I got my allowance, I would often go to Aaron’s Pharmacy, order a fountain Coke and nurse it while flipping idly through a hotrod magazine, dreaming of the car I would own when I grew up.

I don’t ever recall being bored. Perhaps it was my conditioning, if I dared tell my parents that I was bored, they would quickly come up with a long list of chores to keep me occupied and entertained. I think it was more than that, I think that it is like the stories that one hears about blind people developing superior hearing.

With time on my hands and nothing else to use my brain for, it compensated by giving me a highly developed imagination. While I was laying on my back in the grass, the clouds took on new meaning. Instead of amorphous puffs of water vapor, I began to see warriors and dinosaurs. The swallows circling over my head became World War I aces engaged in desperate dogfights over the trenches.

Long before fan fiction became a thing, I laid their imagining stories populated by my television and movie heroes. I wrote whole episodes of Have Gun Will Travel and the Daniel Boone show in my head. Most of all, I imagined fantastic futures for myself. I imagined living the life in the mountains like Davey Crockett, building a cabin, hunting deer and living off the land.

I imagined myself as a ship captain like Captain Blood even though I was about 400 years late. None of my fantasies ever came true but they were like training exercises. They stretched my boundaries and strengthened my creative muscles

I have worked hard for most of my life but I have never felt guilty if I goof off a little bit every now and then. Instead of a Type A personality, I am a B+ plus at best. My best ideas often come to me when I’m relaxing or just killing time. The best eggs come from chickens that are allowed to run around and scratch up the soil. Likewise, I think the best ideas come from free range minds.

Looking back at my life it seems to me that those afternoons where I did not do anything, meant everything to who I became later in life

- Jim Busch

August 28, 2020

Since my grandson, Max, was coming to spend the night with us, my wife prepared a long grocery list and sent me off to Giant Eagle. It takes a lot of food to fuel a growing 14 year-old boy, so we had to stock up. In the last year, he has shot up like a rocket and he is now at least four inches taller than I am. My wife and I were very pleased that he wanted to spend his last weekend before going back to school with us and his Aunt Rachael.

In the “before time,” before my wife’s cancer and the Coronavirus, my wife and I always took Max on vacation with us. We started by taking him to a dinosaur park and to see Thomas the Tank engine as a toddler. In recent years, he has grown into a history buff, so we’ve taken him to the Museum of the American Revolution and to Gettysburg. These trips were always the highlight of the year for all three of us. This year, Max had to settle for a few weekends hanging out with the old folks at our home.

As I walked into the store, I saw a stock boy pushing a string of shopping carts into the store. The White Oak Giant Eagle still does this “old school” with muscle power. They’ve yet to start using one of the little electric “pushers” to retrieve their carts.

It didn’t seem so long ago that I was the stock boy pushing buggies into a store. I glanced across Route 48 to where the old Marraccini’s Super Market had been. I did some quick math in my head and realized that it had been over 46 years since I left that job for bigger and better things.

When I am shopping, I am always struck by the sheer number and variety of items available on the shelves to day. When I stocked shelves, just about the only ethnic food available were Chun King Chinese dinners packed in tin cans. We had maybe six flavors of ice cream and tea was limited to Lipton or Salada teabags.

We had a couple of freezer cases housing frozen dinners and nothing in the produce aisle was labeled organic. After paying for their items, shoppers had a choice of “paper or paper” bags. I loved packing bags for customers because it gave me a chance to earn tips by carrying their groceries to the car. Fifty or seventy- five cents was a big deal to a young lad earning a $1.40 per hour.

In that pre bar code era, I spent hour upon hour marking prices on cans and boxes with an aluminum stamper. With each case of beans or soap we opened, we had to check a paper price list, then rotate the serrated wheels on our stamper to move the rubber belts with raised numbers on our stampers to the correct price.

We would then press them down on each can to imprint the price. Every now and then, we needed to put a few drops of blue ink on the felt pad near the handle to recharge our stamper. Too much ink and the price would be too blurry to read, too little and it would not register. If the management decided to change a price, we had to take all the items of the shelf, wipe off the old price with rubbing alcohol and stamp each one with the new and usually higher number.

All those boxes we sliced open with our box cutters had to be disposed of when we were done with them. The best boxes were piled in the front of the store, so that they could be used by customers who preferred them to paper bags. That was as close to recycling as we got, most of the unwanted boxes were burned in the store’s incinerator.

This was the hardest, and hottest, job in the store. It consisted of a gas fired furnace with a heavy guillotine style door that could be raised up by pulling on a counterweighted cable. The designated “burn boy’s” job was to shove the boxes into the flaming mouth of the furnace as fast as possible, occasionally poking at them with a long hooked metal rod.

The pile of boxes never shrank as the crews stocking the shelves kept adding to it. This job was hot, sweaty and frustrating. I still have a scar on my wrist where a drop of molten plastic from a banana box dripped from the door of the incinerator.

The burn boy was also responsible for helping the “pig man.” The pig man was a farmer who took away the trimmings and spoiled fruits and vegetables from the produce department. He was a grizzled old farmer with a wrinkled face, a wiry beard and overalls that smelled of manure. He was scary looking, but I found his gap toothed grin compelling and he told wonderful dirty jokes.

He also took the out of date bread, rolls and donuts from our in store bakery. Some of these always found their way to the front seat rather than the bed of his army surplus Jeep truck. He always opened his snap top farmer’s purse and gave me a crumpled dollar for helping him.

Unlike some of my fellow stock boys, I did not have a problem working with smelly old men. This meant that I was also assigned to help the “sign guy.” Our weekly sales started on Wednesdays, so Fred, the sign guy, would always show up on Tuesday mornings.

He was skinny as a jump rope and wore a paint spattered green work uniform and a battered plaid cap, the kind with the top snapped to its tiny brim. He had a splotchy red face and a swollen nose that was a result of his love for cheap whiskey.

He carried an old army canvass “AWOL” bag filled with round tin cans with silver sign markers sticking out of the top. These metal tubes held a felt wick that left a cleaner line than a brush. His bag also held a draftsman’s T-square and a straight edge, as well as a pint bottle of Old Granddad.

I was there to help Fred, but mostly I was there to make sure that he got the prices and spelling right on the signs. I was always amazed at how quick Fred could work. He had a work table in a loft above the produce department. It held stacks of poster board and big rolls of white paper.

Fred would peel off an eight foot length of the white paper and tape it to the table. Using the straight edge he would use the pencil he kept behind his ear to mark out two parallel lines running the length of the paper. Starting in the middle of the paper he would then block out the letters in pencil.

Fred explained that starting in the middle was the only way to keep the words centered. With the layout complete, he would use the paint markers to complete the sign. Once dry, the signs would be rolled up until they were taped up inside the store’s plate glass windows the next morning. Once these were done, he would use the poster board to make signs for that week’s store displays.

As I grow older, I am constantly amazed at how the simplest things can trigger a tsunami of memories. As I watched the young man wrangle his string of shopping carts through the store’s electric doors, I wondered if sometime in the 2060’s he would look back and think about the job he had back in the Covid days of the 2020’s! 

- Jim Busch

August 27, 2020

As I listened to the words of a favorite song, Lay Down Sally performed by Eric Clapton, and co-written by Clapton, Marcella Detroit and George Terry, it created a blissful morning while I drank coffee and prompted nostalgic memories of when my relationship with my husband was new.

There is nothing that is wrong

In wanting you to stay here with me

I know you've got somewhere to go

But won't you make yourself at home and stay with me?

And don't you ever leave

Lay down, Sally, and rest you in my arms

Don't you think you want someone to talk to?

Lay down, Sally, no need to leave so soon

I've been trying all night long just to talk to you

The sun ain't nearly on the rise

And we still got the moon and stars above

Underneath the velvet skies

Love is all that matters

Won't you stay with me?

And don't you ever leave

One summer night, many years ago, the two of us had been out for dinner and drinks. Neither one of us are big on crowds or clubs so we decided to go to his Little House on the Prairie. Back in those days, he had a tiny house with two rooms, bathroom, and a basement. Little House on the Prairie was the nickname he had given to his home. 

We spent a couple hours talking about our life experiences. I talked about my children, the hurt I had been through with my first marriage and the healing I was attempting to achieve. He listened, he was non-judgmental and he cared. He shared a few of his relationship experiences as well.

He expressed his appreciation of growing up in the country and how significantly he missed the freedom of being in open space. He talked of the difficulties being an only child and having older parents. He also told me about his previous romantic relationship. 

He once dated a woman with suicidal tendencies. After a few weeks, he was honest with her that their connection would not go any further and he felt they were not suited for an exclusive relationship. It was challenging to break ties and he wanted to be gentle. I respected his consideration for her as he thoughtfully initiated his way out of an unpleasant situation.

We talked until the wee hours of the morning with his arm resting around my shoulders. The moon was shining through the windows and carried soft light to gloomy corners. We had been so involved listening to each other that we never turned the lights on in his Little House on the Prairie.

He picked up his guitar, sat back down and tuned it. He then played the song Lay Down Sally. 

With moonlight gently illuminating him as he played his guitar, it confirmed what I knew already, he was the one for me and I was going to love him forever.

- Vickie Babyak

____________________

I have been writing these diary entries for several months now. On most days, I recount my activities for the day, but today’s entry is a bit different. Today, I am reporting on the day’s inactivity.

The day started early as my wife woke me at 6 a.m. This is about four hours earlier than I usually get out of bed. I am by nature a night owl and usually go to bed about 2 or 3 a.m. Knowing I would have to get up early this morning, I went to bed about one hour earlier last night. I had to get up early so I could get my wife to Allegheny General Hospital on the Northside for her 7:30 a.m. chemotherapy appointment.

After dropping my wife off at the hospital, I went to Panera Bread for breakfast and then headed for home. On the way there, I received a text from my wife saying she would be done at about 10:30. This was good news, most of her treatments dragged on for hours and left her exhausted. I turned around and headed back to the city. I retrieved my wife and we drove back home.

When we got home, I got my wife settled in and sat down on the couch. I yawned and my wife suggested that I lie down for a while. This is something I rarely do, napping just isn’t on my agenda.

Most of my days are full of activity. I am generally working on a number of projects on any given day. Today, was no exception, I had a repair job to do for my sister-in-law and I had a piece of watercolor paper taped down to my drawing table, ready to be turned into a painting. Today, I just didn’t feel motivated to do anything. I went to my bedroom shortly before noon, got into bed and closed my eyes for a nap.

When I opened my eyes and looked at my watch, I found that I had slept over five hours. I had slept the day away. I walked to the living room where my wife was resting in her recliner. Still a bit groggy from my nap, I said to her, “I must be getting old, I never used to sleep like that.”

She looked at me and said, “It’s not your age, you’re depressed.”

Her words hit me hard. I’ve been through some tough times in my life, but I’ve never given into depression. I’ve always tried to maintain a positive outlook no matter what was thrown at me. This attitude was instilled in me as a child. My mother did not tolerate any sort of complaining or “moping around.”

My sister and I were not even allowed to be sick as children. If we didn’t feel well, our mother tried to convince us that, “it was all in our heads,” and that if we got up and got moving we would feel better. On the rare occasions that I stayed home from school, she made sure that I didn’t get to enjoy a day off. I was not allowed to watch TV or even read, I was only allowed to stay in bed and contemplate my weakness.   

Likewise, if I was upset about something, I got very little compassion from my parents. If I complained about how the kids made fun of my birthmark, I was told to laugh along with them. If I had trouble understanding something at school, I was told to quit complaining and work harder.

When my grandfather died when I was twelve, I never saw my mother shed a tear over the loss of her father. I was very close to my grandfather and his passing made me very feel very sad. He was the first person who was close to me that had died. His death brought me to tears, but only when I was alone in my room, I knew better than to put my sadness on public display.

This training served me well during my career in sales. Maintaining PMA, a positive mental attitude, is something of a religion with sales people. Sales offices are plastered with posters bearing platitudes like, “Your attitude determines your altitude!” or “You can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought.”

If positive thinking was the religion of sales, its high priest was Zig Ziglar. Ziglar was the author of dozens of books with titles like, See You at the Top and Born to Win. Most sales people I knew had a couple of Zig’s (Say Zig to anyone who was in sales and they will know who you are talking about) tapes in their car to recharge their batteries on particularly tough days. One’s level of optimism was a major point of discussion in my annual salary reviews. I always got bonus points for being upbeat.

As a sales manager, I made a conscious effort to always have a smile on my face. My sales people knew that I did not allow any complaints on the sales floor. If my employees had a problem they could come into my office and talk to me, but they were not to “bring their coworkers down.” One of my sales people once said that, “If Jim had been captain of the Titanic, he would have said, well at least we’ll have plenty of ice for the bar.”

One morning my wife called me at the office as I was preparing to give a training session. She told me that the police had called my home from South Carolina to say my mother had died that morning. My wife had already called my sister and she was arranging to rent a van so we could all drive to Myrtle Beach. It would take a few hours to get things organized, so I decided to do the planned session before leaving. I closed the door to my office door, composed myself and then went on with my class. I had become so skilled at keeping up a positive veneer, no one knew that I had received such devastating news that day. I felt bad about this later, but I think my mother would have been proud.

Lately, my emotional defenses have been overwhelmed by wave after wave of disconcerting events. In the midst of the global pandemic, my wife was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. For months, I have seen her lose her beautiful hair and suffer severe stomach pain and nausea. She has lost weight and her legs and feet have swollen to the point that she can barely walk.

I haven’t been able to see many of my friends and I worry about contracting Covid-19 when my wife needs me. Added to this perfect storm, recently I have lost several close friends. All of this has happened at a time when the quarantine has denied me access to many of my normal distractions.

Without realizing it, I have been eating more and exercising less. I have also spent a lot of time just sitting and thinking, mostly about the past. Like today, I have been spending a lot more time sleeping. I don’t drink and I have never done drugs.

Sleep is my narcotic, when I am asleep I don’t have to think about my problems. I don’t have to think about losing the love of my life. I am not used to feeling bad, this is all new to me. Today, I realized that I am depressed, I would not be human if I was not feeling this way. I still retain a shred of the optimistic attitude that got me through life.

I still hope for medical miracles, both for Covid and for my wife’s cancer. I know that one way or the other I will get through this. I know I will make the best of whatever comes my way. For the first time in my life, I will allow myself to be sad. For the first time in my life, I will let others know that I am sad.              

- Jim Busch

August 26, 2020

I saw a meme the other day that read, “I’m so old that I can remember going a full day without taking a picture of anything!” I am 68 years-old, so I can remember when taking a picture was a big deal. Photography was reserved for special events such as vacations, holidays or family occasions like birthday parties. Most of the time our family camera sat in its bright yellow cardboard box along with a supply of blue flashbulbs.

Taking photographs was expensive, the film was not too expensive but the processing cost an arm and a leg. I can remember my Dad grumbling under his breath as he took his wallet out at Bridge’s Drug Store to pay for our photos.

I wanted to see the photos right away. I was disappointed when my said Dad we had to wait until we got home and my mother could look at them with us. When we got home, he tore open the envelopes and we flipped the little comb bound booklets of shiny black and white photographs with rippled edges.

If someone had been eavesdropping on us sitting on the couch looking at the pictures, they may have thought we were watching a fireworks show. Sometimes a image would elicit an “Ahhhh!” when we liked the image and other times we would go “Ewww!” when we saw a picture of a headless relative or a huge blotch. My Dad would resume his grumbling as he realized that he had just paid for pictures that were destined for the trashcan.

Sometimes, my Uncle Charlie would come to visit with his home movie equipment. He had a screen, an eight millimeter projector and some grey film cans. Not only did his family’s vacations look far cooler than our own, but I loved the idea of making your own movies.

I begged my dad to buy a movie camera, but he told me they cost too much with special emphasis on the price of processing movie film. When I whined that Uncle Charlie had one, his response was, “Your Uncle Charlie is rich. END OF STORY!”

I told my grandson this story and he looked at me like I had just described hunting mastodons in my youth. He simply can’t comprehend not having a camera within easy reach at all times. This November will be the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the first cellphone with an internal camera. That camera could hold 11 low resolution images. The user could view these on the 1.5 inch screen, but to share them or do anything else with them they had to be downloaded to a computer using a cable. Of course, videos were out of the question because of the phones tiny amount of memory.

Like every other technological advance in the digital age, camera phone technology grew by leaps and bounds. Within a few years, our phones came with features that made Captain James T. Kirk’s communicator look like a tin can on a string.

Smartphones are portable television stations, capable of capturing video and streaming it to the world via the internet in real time. A million years of human technological evolution had reached its pinnacle, which mankind used to stream cute cat videos. What started out as a cool electronic toy soon became a powerful tool for change.

In 1991, the American public got a foretaste of the impact that a video recording could have on our society. A Black man named, Rodney King, was savagely beaten by the police on a Los Angeles street. The Black community knew that this was not unusual, but on that night the rest of the world learned that police brutality was real.

An amateur videographer named George Halliday, had captured the beating from his balcony. He offered the evidence to the police, but when they were not interested he gave it to a local TV station. This led to riots and some halfhearted efforts at police reform.

The Rodney King affair would have gone unnoticed if the police had not stopped him across the street from George Halliday’s apartment. Now, with a smartphone in almost every purse or pocket, we have seen dozens of incidents of police abuse of power.

For decades, the police had dismissed these claims as false and as attempts to shift blame away from the real criminals. The camera phone shifted the burden of truth. A few years ago, these situations put the word of a criminal versus the word of a sworn officer of the law.

In virtually every case, the word of the police officer would win out. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth an infinite number of denials. For the first time, these incidents were not only recorded, but instantly shared with the community. This evidence has changed the view of the police in this country and an issue that was once limited to minority communities is now a national issue.

Tonight, I saw a disturbing video. A young man in Wisconsin was shown on video shooting down several protesters in cold blood. He killed two people and seriously wounded another. He then was shown walking away from the scene with the assault rifle he had used to commit the crimes strapped across his chest.

The video shows him walking through the police lines and past several police vehicles without being stopped. After weeks of watching a violent response to peaceful protestors, allowing this young heavily armed white man to pass without questioning certainly seems to indicate that police racial systemic racism is very real.

The night before he committed premeditated murder, this young man posted his own video. He portrayed himself as a supporter of the police and of law and order. He spoke of his intention to defend the city against rioters. He wanted his 20 minutes of fame. The next day, the unblinking eye of dozens of cell phones documented him ending the lives of two people and ruining his own.

There is an old saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Putting a camera in everyone’s hand means that it is hard to deny what is going in our streets. I believe that most Americans are fundamentally good and want to see justice done.

Seeing people abused and killed on their television and on their computers has moved them to take action. It is no longer possible to deny that some of our police officers are abusing their positions.

Back in the turbulent days of the 1960’s, Gil Scott-Heron wrote, “The revolution will not be televised.” Today’s revolution is being televised. Cell phone videos are being used to show the worst side of our culture. I hope that by showing us the error of our ways, these videos will provide the impetus we need to fix what is broken in our country. 

- Jim Busch

August 25, 2020

Today, I said goodbye to a good friend. 

Two weeks ago I wrote about the death of my neighbor, Karl Laurin. Because he was found on his back porch, the authorities conducted an autopsy and held his body for ten days. My wife and I were concerned that because his house was a bit ramshackle and Karl was found in his usual ragged attire, that he would be consigned to a pauper’s grave. 

Fortunately, the police found his emergency contact information, our mutual friend Anna, who informed the coroner’s office that, despite his appearance, Karl was a man of means and a veteran.

Anna was the executor of Karl’s estate. This is a big responsibility and a lot of work in the best of circumstances. Unraveling Karl’s estate is a massive undertaking. He was a bit of a hoarder and not particularly well organized.

Karl was not married and had no children, so Anna is doing her best to dispose of his possessions as he would have wished. This is a job that is part archeologist, part accountant, along with a full time job as a garbage man. Anna’s first order of business was having Karl properly buried and organizing a memorial service for his many friends.

Karl was injured in an accident while serving in the Air Force, so he was entitled to be buried in a military cemetery. Anna arranged for him to be interred with full military honors at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies near Bridgeville. Anna originally wanted to hold a memorial service at Karl’s home, but this proved impractical. She opted to hold the service at Striffler’s Funeral Home in White Oak.

I think that Karl would have been very pleased with his service. He was a simple man whose greatest joy in life was spending time with friends and sharing stories. The funeral home provided a large room with chairs carefully placed a socially distant six feet apart. Karl’s body was outside in a hearse ready for his final trip. This struck me as appropriate, Karl was a humble man and always a bit of a loner. I think he would have been just as happy being outside rather than the center of attention.

The head of the room was decorated with two portraits of Karl done by his friends from the McKeesport Art Group. There was also an easel with a collage of photos of Karl. Karl would never have been confused with a male model, he was always a bit disheveled and he gave very little thought to his personal appearance, but somehow he was very photogenic.

I think it was his intense blue eyes and his ever present and friendly smile. Karl would have been pleased to see the picture of his old Tomcat. Karl and that old cat loved one another. I have no idea what the afterlife looks like, but I would like to believe that they are together again on a cloud somewhere.

About 25 people gathered to honor Karl. Choking back tears, Anna started the program by reading one of Karl’s poems before she asked his friends to share their memories of him. About a dozen people spoke about Karl. The two recurring themes were his generosity and his eccentricities. Karl lived a life of voluntary simplicity, he spent very little money on himself. He wore old clothes and kept most of his cars for a decade or more.

I am sure that people who didn’t know Karl had him pegged as a miser along the lines of Ebenezer Scrooge. His friends testified to his generosity to charities and the arts. He made significant donations to St Jude, WQED and other charitable organizations.

He also gave money to friends or acquaintances who were down on their luck. Several members of the McKeesport Art Group described how he would buy works by new artists to encourage them to continue their work. He was a good man who never sought any credit for his gifts to others.

Throughout his life, Karl had a way of lifting people’s spirits. He had a droll sense of humor that was infectious. He had this effect even on the people at his own memorial service. There were a lot of chuckles in the room when his friends shared their memories of how Karl lived his life.

Several people talked about how Karl just walked up to them and started up a conversation. Despite his shabby appearance and his way of talking to perfect strangers like they were old friends, people instantly recognized that Karl was someone they could trust.

Several people talked about the experience of riding in Karl’s car with him. The interior of Karl’s car was a lot like the rest of his life, jam packed and disorganized. People talked about opening the door and having numerous items fall out on to the ground or not being able to recline the seat because of the quantity of all the stuff packed into the back seat.

My own automotive memory of Karl went back to an old Honda he owned for about 15 years. I got in the passenger seat and noticed a pair of vise-grip pliers where the gear shift lever belonged. I asked him about his unique shifter and he told me that the original handle had broken and he used the vise-grips to get home. I asked him when it had broken and he told me, “oh, about two years ago.”

Many people spoke about Karl’s gift for conversation. Karl was a polymath and could speak on a wide range of subjects. He preferred talking about ideas to sharing gossip. He never complained or criticized others, but enjoyed talking about history, botany, science or any number of other subjects that interested him.

Karl was my “over the fence friend.” In the forty five years that I lived next to Karl, we had many wonderful conversations over the wire fence between our back yards. On many occasions I became so engaged talking with Karl, that my garden chores were neglected while we talked for an hour or more.

I told the assembled group about one of my last conversations with Karl. Somehow we got on the subject of Hindu philosophy and the “web of karma.” In their belief system one’s soul, they call it the Atman, goes on after death. They believe that it is reincarnated into another being.

They have an image of each individual’s Atman traveling through eternity in a straight line where it intersects with the Atmans of others through infinity. These lines form a net or as they describe it, “the web of karma” where each soul meets along the web a gem, a glorious diamond, is formed.

Looking into the crowd of Karl’s friends, I thought of all the lives he had touched in his 81 years. Karl’s Atman, accumulated thousands of diamonds. Karl left behind a lot of people that loved and respected him. He always thought of others and never thought of himself. He did a lot of good and very little, if any, harm to the world.

Like George Bailey in the old movie, Karl Laurin was the “richest man in town,” and like George, Karl certainly led a “wonderful life.” I will miss him.

- Jim Busch   

August 24, 2020

Today, I went to Giant Eagle to pick up a few items for my wife. I grabbed a shopping basket and grabbed the three cans of Campbell’s soup on my list. I turned left as I left the soup aisle heading for the cooler case and a half gallon of 2% milk.

Another shopper practically ran me over with her shopping cart as she left the next aisle. I excused myself when our eyes met. She stared at me for a minute and asked, “Your wife give you that.”

Not sure what she was talking about I tried to get her to explain, “I am sorry, I don’t understand.”

She raised her hand and pointing to the left side of my face asked, “That big red thing on your face, did your wife whack you with something?”

It dawned on me that she was talking about the birthmark peeking out from under my face mask. A little surprised, I gave her my standard response, “Oh this, it’s a birthmark, I’ve had it my whole life,” and then added, “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

She nodded and flew off to complete her shopping. I’m not completely sure that I convinced her that the port wine stain on my left cheek wasn’t a rolling pin wound sustained in a marital squabble. I have been fielding questions like this for as long as I could talk. I was surprised by the supermarket lady’s question, because few adults are so bold to ask me about my birthmark.

Children often ask me about the mark on my face. They ask me, “Do you have a boo-boo?” or if it hurts. When they do this, their parents squirm nervously and look around for a rock to crawl under. They are afraid that I will be offended or upset, but I like little children and am happy to talk with them.

I have a standard set of simple explanations to explain the red splotch on my face. The first thing I do is assure them that it doesn’t hurt which always seems to make them feel better. I then tell them that it is not a “boo-boo,” and that I have had it since I was a baby. If the child has freckles, I tell them that it is like a big freckle, which seems to satisfy their curiosity.

My birthmark has always been the source of strange conversations. When I was a child, old ladies used to stop my mother and tell her that when I was born she should have had the nurses wipe my face with the afterbirth, which they assured her would have immediately removed it. From an early age, I’ve had a real understanding of where the phrase, “Old Wives Tale” comes from.

My grandmother and some of the other “Old Wives” went another direction with their tales. My grandmother and some random old ladies were absolutely certain that my birthmark was a sign from God. They told me that I was destined for greatness. Nothing puts pressure on a little kid like telling him that God had marked him for greatness. I hoped that nobody expected me to part the Mon River or turn water into Iron City beer.

Apparently, my birth was traumatic for my mother. I was her second child, my older sister had been born twelve years earlier when my mother had just turned twenty one. My mother had been widowed when my sister was just a baby, which explains the gap between our births.

My birth was much harder on her and also on me. My mother let out a scream when the nurse presented me to her. My head was cut and bloody from the forceps. The blood red birthmark was more than she could take in her traumatized state.

Though she never told me so, I’ve always believed that my mother felt that my birthmark was her fault. My mother bought special make up to hide it. This stuff came in a round plastic tube and you pushed it up from the bottom. The flesh colored make up was the consistency of school paste. It didn’t match my skin color very well and when it was hot it would melt down my cheek.

I refused to wear it. When my mother made me wear it to school, I would wipe it off with my sleeve before I got to the end of our sidewalk. In my school pictures, I don’t have a birthmark, my mother had the photographer airbrush it out.

My dad came from a big family. He came from a family of eight and he was the only one who remained in this area. Most of his family moved to the Detroit area during World War II. Every year my parents would drive to Michigan to attend the Busch Family reunion, but left me at home. My mother said I would be bored, but I’m sure she was ashamed of her malformed child. To this day, I have dozens of cousins I’ve never met.

As birth defects go, a port wine stain on my face is far from the worst thing that could have happened to me. In fact, I believe that it has had a positive effect on my character. As you can imagine, the kids I went to grade school with reacted to my birthmark with cruelty. They made up names for me and excluded me from their clicks and games.

This was painful at the time, but it helped turn me into an independent thinker and a bookworm. Like most kids, I might have gone along with the crowd, if they had let me, my birthmark made me a natural nonconformist. Spending a lot of time alone also provided fertile soil for ideas and helped me become much more creative than I would have been otherwise.

As I reached high school, I had enough of turning the other cheek and became much more aggressive in my response to being teased. I would take on any one who offended me in any way. I took some blows, but I always gave better than I got, making teasing me not worth the effort. As I grew older, my aggressiveness matured into assertiveness. It is why I was able to build a career in sales and as a public speaker.

My birthmark meant that I had to work harder than most people to advance my career. It is why I became an expert on telephone sales. Companies that liked my resume and what I said during an interview would give me a position in their phone room where people couldn’t see my face. On several occasions, I earned my place in management or outside sales by outperforming the salespeople who were allowed to go out and visit the clients.

Several years ago, I was speaking at an advertising conference in California. The conference held a dinner on the hangar deck of the USS Hornet, a retired aircraft carrier, in San Francisco Harbor. Steve, a publisher from New England, asked if he could join us at our table.

During dinner he told my wife, “I knew Jim had to be a great trainer because they never would have given a guy with a big mark on his face the job.” Steve’s mental software lacks some of the filters most people use to keep their foot out of their mouths, but I’m sure he is not the only one who thought this.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I got from my birthmark is an enhanced level of empathy. Because I have been abused and held back for something I had no control over, I have a better understanding of discrimination. I have lost opportunities because a small part of my skin was a different color. I have a microscopic appreciation of what it feels like to be excluded from society because of where your ancestors came from.

When I was child, I prayed for my birthmark to disappear. Now that I am an old man looking back at my life, I have reconsidered that wish. I am grateful for my birthmark for the unique perspective on life that it has given me.        

- Jim Busch  

August 23, 2020

Today, I was raking up hedge clippings in my daughter’s backyard when the drought we have been experiencing came to an abrupt end. I was caught in a cloudburst which soaked my shirt and jeans to the skin.

Since I was already wet, I just continued working, enjoying the feel of the cold rain on my skin. Up to that point in the day, it had been hot and the humidity made my shirt stick to my skin. The rain was accompanied with a slight breeze and the air passing over my wet skin cooled me. I actually felt cold, not the bitter, stinging cold of winter, but a pleasant cold, a blessed relief from the sticky summer heat of recent weeks.

I worked for about an hour in the rain thinking about my grandfather. I can remember working with him when a similar summer storm came up and I started to bolt for shelter. He said, “Where are you going, we’re not done here yet.”

“It’s starting to rain, we’ll get soaked.”

“Are you made out of sugar?”

“Huh, sugar? I don’t understand.”

“Do you think you’re going to melt if you get a little wet? We’ve got work to do.”

“But we’ll get wet.”

“You’ve been wet before and it didn’t kill you. I think we’ll be ok.”

I knew the discussion was over, so I got back to work. After a bit, my grandfather said, “If feels kind of nice, I was getting a little warm.”

I had been grumbling to myself inside my head about the “stupid rain storm,” but this remark made me stop and think. I felt the big rain drops hitting my face and on my bare arms and I had to admit it didn’t feel too bad after all.

I didn’t like the squishing of my soggy tennis shoes, but that was hardly unbearable. After our work was done and the rain had stopped, my grandfather reminded me to be sure to dry off my pocket knife and put a few drops of oil on its hinges.

Hardiness was central to my grandfather’s world view. He grew up poor on a small Western Pennsylvania farm. It was a tough life with little hope of getting out of poverty. The work was hard and continuous, this is why he didn’t let something like a little rain make him quit work.

After working through the rain shower, I got a little sense of the pride he felt when he overcame an obstacle put in his path. Hardiness is carrying on without complaint until the job at hand is accomplished. I believe he actually enjoyed working in adverse conditions because it gave him the chance to show the world what he was made of.

When I was growing up, our house was heated by an old coal furnace the size of a VW Beetle that filled a corner of our basement. We only stoked it with coal at night before bedtime, because coal burned slowly and theoretically would keep the house warm all night long. During the day, we burned wood. I grew up when the Dutch Elm was devastating the trees growing in many yards in the area. My dad got paid to take them down and haul them away.

We hauled them to our side yard where they would be cut, split and stacked. This is how we heated our house for years. Wood ash is a natural fertilizer, so we would mix the ashes into our compost pile. Carrying the ashes to the rear of our property was my job. Even in the dead of winter, my grandfather would have me complete this chore bare chested, no coat and no shirt.

He believed that exposure to the cold was healthy. Exposing my flesh to the winter air would build my resistance to colds and other diseases. It would make me hardy. It must have worked, because to this day I seldom catch a cold and I usually go through the entire winter wearing only a light jacket.

My grandfather’s lessons have stuck with me after all these years. I still enjoy all varieties and flavors of weather. I like to watch thunderstorms, love to feel the wind in my hair and enjoy walking through the snow. This is a great mindset to have when one lives in Western Pennsylvania where we can experience everything listed in a Meteorology 101 textbook in an afternoon.

I even enjoy the occasional ice storm which makes our woods look like a crystal palace. Our technology often gets in the way of experiencing nature. We live in climate controlled homes, drive around in climate controlled cars and shop and work in climate controlled buildings.

I love watching pedestrians scurry for cover like extras in a disaster movie when it starts to rain. I prefer to follow the words of that great American philosopher, Roger Miller. The author of King of the Road, Dang Me, and You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd, made a very astute observation about how people deal with weather. Miller said, “Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.”

I choose to walk in the rain. I believe I’m supposed to be hot in the summer and feel the cold when winter comes. I like to feel the rain on my face. I still occasionally stick out my tongue to catch the first snowflakes of winter.

The coronavirus quarantine has kept me inside this year more than I normally would be. This year, more than most, I am happy to walk, actually work, in the rain. In a time when death is stalking our country, the rain on my face and the wind in my hair is a welcome reminder that I am alive and the world is still a vital ever changing place.    

- Jim Busch

August 22, 2020

I heard some very disconcerting news today. The Center for Disease Control is projecting that the Covid-19 death toll will likely reach 300,000 by year’s end.

This means that over twenty thousand more Americans will likely lose their lives to the coronavirus in the next few months. I can’t imagine that number of people being carried off. In addition to those that die, many more will survive, but will sustain long term injuries to their bodies such as damage to their hearts and respiratory systems.

The projections and statistics only list the victims who contract and succumb to the disease, they do not include its collateral victims. Each of the people who die from Covid-19 leave behind husbands, wives, children, mothers, fathers and other people who love them.

Given the state of the American medical system, I am sure the Coronavirus epidemic will be followed by another epidemic, an epidemic of bankruptcies. I am sure that crushed by the massive medical bills accrued during weeks or even months in the Intensive care unit, many families will lose their life savings and homes, as well as their loved ones to the disease.

I think the saddest aspect of the last few months is that many of the victims of Covid-19 did not have to suffer. They could have been protected from the disease by a few simple precautions. Surprisingly, a thin layer of cloth over the mouth and nose was the difference between living and dying for many people.

If they wore a mask and washed their hands regularly, many of the disease victims may have completely avoided the disease. Epidemiologists believe that if everyone in the country wore their masks and practiced social distancing religiously that the epidemic could be virtually eliminated within a year.

The truth is that America is trying to weather not just one, but three epidemics. The first, of course, is the epidemic of Coronavirus. The two other epidemics, which greatly amplify the impact of the first, are the twin epidemics of apathy and selfishness.

I find the apathy epidemic particularly hard to comprehend. One would think that after the loss of over 170,000 lives, people would take this disease much more seriously than many people do.

Perhaps, it is the lack of clarity from our leaders about how to control the spread of the disease. Some said to wear a mask and others said that masks do not work. Some said that we should be very afraid of the disease which has killed so many people.

Others said that the low percentage of fatal cases means that we should not worry about dying from the disease. Some have said that the great majority of cases amount to little more than a “bad cold.”

It might be that after hearing about the Coronavirus every day for over six months may have numbed some people to the disease’s death toll. If a plane crashed somewhere in the U.S. killing say 300 passengers, it would be all over the news supported by videos of twisted wreckage perhaps with a handbag or a shoe lying on the ground as a way to add human interest to the tragedy.

More than three times that number of people are dying daily from Covid-19 in the U.S. and the news people dutifully report the latest body account on the 6 p.m. news. These reports have all the drama and pathos of the price of corn futures in Iowa. The news does run some human interest stories on the disease, but these tend to be stories of survivors rather than those who died. The only deaths that get any attention are the stories of celebrities who succumb to Covid-19.

Selfishness has also become a significant vector for spreading the disease. Health departments all over the United States are reporting clusters of Covid-19 which have been traced back to people who recently returned from the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

Last week the airwaves showed thousands of leather clad motorcycle enthusiasts partying at this annual event in South Dakota. The streets and the clubs were tightly packed with people drinking and dancing with nary a mask in sight. They were proudly flaunting their independence and refusal to be told what to do. This is part of the “biker persona” that these people like to adopt.

They are the kind of folks who refuse to wear a helmet because they like the feeling of the wind in their hair in spite of the fact that it also increases the odds that they will also feel their brains being spread on the pavement.

Refusing to wear a helmet is a personal decision, it is unlikely that this decision will have much of an impact on anyone else. It is not a very smart thing to do, but the only person likely to die from this decision is the person who made it. Refusing to wear a mask in public has a direct impact on those we come in contact with. An individual may decide to put their own life at risk, it is their life after all; they have no right to put those around them at risk.

This behavior is not limited to tattooed biker types, college students have been gathering to party and enjoy their freedom from adult supervision. Other young people have been holding huge street parties where they can enjoy all the vices that young people have enjoyed since the beginning of time.

These people have all been told about the dangers of these gatherings but are counting on their youthful immune system to protect them from harm. They are more likely to listen to the Beastie Boys than Dr. Fauci and will “Fight for the right to parteee!” These selfish party animals have forced several schools to close and have put their families and other people in their lives at risk. Notre Dame’s student newspaper The Observer implored their readers, “Don’t make us write obituaries.”

The most irksome mask opponents are the self-styled “patriots” who maintain forcing them to take precautions is a violation of their civil rights. Theirs is a “selfish liberty.” They do not understand the social contract that goes along with rights in a free society.

We are free to exercise our rights as long as they do not impinge on the rights of their fellow citizens. This is why a person is quite free to drink themselves to death; again, this is not a wise decision but it only affects the drinker. Drinking and getting behind the wheel of a car is illegal because doing so puts others at risk.

The people who refuse to wear a mask in public spaces are putting everyone they come in contact with at risk, without securing their permission first. These people are just being selfish, they are not standing up for their rights, but are denying the rights of others. For this they deserve to be ostracized from civilized society.

Losing so many people to the coronavirus epidemic is very sad. Losing people to epidemics of apathy and selfishness is tragic. A virus is a mindless killer, lacking a conscious and any knowledge of its impact on any other beings.

Humans are supposed to be a highly evolved life form blessed with a brain and a conscious. Humans are aware, or should be, of how their actions impact the people around them. They have a duty to do their best to protect the rights and lives of other people.

Selfishness is always bad manners, but in a pandemic, selfishness is unforgivable.      

- Jim Busch

August 21, 2020

I have to make a confession; I am a cyborg!

I was not constructed by aliens intent on enslaving the human race. I did not travel back through time to save mankind and I don’t have the cool metal skull cap like the “Borg” from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nonetheless, I am a cyborg!

The word Cyborg is a portmanteau word ( I just love saying portmanteau.) that is an abbreviation of “cybernetic organism.”  A cyborg is a being with both organic and bio mechatronic body parts. I wish I was “Better-Faster-Stronger” like Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, but still, I do fit the definition of cyborg.

The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline. In those early days of the space race, they were exploring the concept of enhancing human capabilities to help them survive in challenging extraterrestrial environments. The definition of a cyborg is “an organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component of technology.”

I first became a cyborg when I was 15 years-old. I have always loved shooting, so I tried out for the high school rifle team only to discover that I could not see the targets. I explained my difficulty to the coach and he told me, “Son, I think you need glasses.”

My parents took me to an optometrist in a musty second floor office in an old building in McKeesport. After I struggled reading the second line on his eye chart, he wrote a prescription for my first “cyber” enhancement, a pair of nerdy glasses with thick black plastic frames. The doctor told me that I had an astigmatism in both eyes.

A little scared, I asked what that meant and he told me that the lens in my eyes “had a dent in them.” Because it came on gradually, I had not noticed that the world was getting a little blurry.

I put on those ugly glasses and have not taken them off since. The last thing I do at night is take my glasses off and set them on the headboard and the first thing I do in the morning is put them back on. On the rare occasions when I take off my glasses, my surroundings are suddenly transformed into an impressionist paint.

I don’t have to go to France to see Monet’s waterlilies, I just have to look at my flower bed and take off my specs. A few years ago, I upgraded my sensor array. In my ‘50s, I went full on grandpa and got bifocals. My doctor felt this was much easier than stretching my arms so I could read fine print.

Like the cyborgs in the sci-fi films, I have to return to my “pod” to plug in and reboot my systems. In my case, my pod is called a bed and I plug in to a C-pap machine. A C-pap pumps pressurized air into my mouth so that my throat doesn’t collapse and strangle me. Again, I did not realize that I needed this device.

My “pod-mate,” my wife Glenda, exasperated by my snoring insisted that I had a problem and insisted that I see a sleep specialist. I was absolutely sure she was wrong, but agreed to a sleep study just to prove her wrong. I went to a lab which looked like a typical hotel bedroom where the technician hooked me up to dozens of sensors and wires.

When she was done, I actually looked like a cyborg from a 1950’s film. I closed my eyes and went to sleep, but within ten minutes the tech woke me up and connected me to a c-pap machine. The doctors wondered how I had managed to stay alive as long as I did. They told me that I had severe sleep apnea, which is a genetic condition that was aggravated by my weight.

I thought about my dad who had died in his sleep, so since that night I have slept wearing a rubber mask attached by a hose to a c-pap machine. I look like a Soviet Cosmonaut, but I sleep like a baby. I guess I’ll have to find some other way to prove my wife wrong.

Several years ago, some of my other sensors began to fail. Once again, I was in complete denial that I was losing my hearing. I got quite good at reading lips and filling in the blanks of conversations.

My wife started complaining about how loud I was playing the television and I had trouble hearing the questions asked by my students when I was training. Again, I decided to prove my wife wrong by agreeing to a hearing test. It turns out I was almost deaf in my right ear and only had about 50 percent of normal hearing in my left. I was soon fitted with two tiny hearing aids.

I was very surprised to learn that the birds had not given up singing after all. I thought they had gone out of the music business some years before, but after I got my hearing aids I could hear them again. My hearing aids made a big difference in my life, when I take them out it’s like turning off the radio, the world suddenly grows quiet. I no longer hear the hum of the refrigerator or the sound of the air conditioner.

Today, I had a real cyborg experience. I was cutting my daughters hedges. They were quite shaggy so I was up to my ankles in clippings when I took my glasses off to wipe the sweat from my face. The side piece of my glasses caught my hearing aid and sent it flying into the pile of clippings at my feet.

It may be clichéd, but the first thing that popped into my mind was, “Like finding a needle in a haystack.” At this point, I was thinking that that proverbial needle would be much easier to find that a microscopic hearing aid in a mound of hedge clippings. I made a futile attempt to find my hearing aid and was about to break my rule against using profanity when my daughter, Rachael, and my enhanced cyborg powers, came to the rescue.

Rachael asked for my phone. A modern smart phone is the ultimate cyborg enhancement to our human bodies. They extend our ability to communicate with others from a few yards to around the world. Our organic database is limited to what we can remember from what we’ve personally experienced or read, the smart phone allows us to tap into the collective memory of all mankind.

Rachael showed me how my phone could also give this cyborg x-ray vision like Superman. She opened up the app that came with my hearing aids. She touched “Find my hearing aid” and began waving my phone over the thick green mound of clippings. She moved the phone methodically over the clippings like a Navy destroyer looking for an enemy sub beneath the waves.

The phones beeping even sounded like the sonar units on these ships. In a short time, she had located the tiny Bluetooth signal emitted by my hearing aid and by carefully rooting through the hedge clippings, soon found it. There is something to be said for having enhanced cybernetic powers.

My experience with my hearing aids made me think about how much we depend on technology. In my grandfather’s day, the only thing he had to help him navigate the world was a pair of cheap magnifying classes from Murphy’s Five and Dime.

It is easy to criticize technology, to complain about too much screen time, but when used properly our devices can help us stay in touch with the world around us.

I for one am proud to be a cyborg.      

- Jim Busch

August 20, 2020

Today, for the first time in several weeks, my wife was strong enough to have her chemotherapy treatment. This meant that once again I had to drop her off at Allegheny General Hospital and find something to occupy my time for the next few hours. Fortunately, the 90 degree weather we experienced in the last few weeks cooled off so I could spend the day enjoying the fine weather.

I drove north on McKnight Road and grabbed a bagel at Bruegger’s Bagels for breakfast. After a quick stop at the Goodwill store, I drove to North Park and found a shady spot near the lake to park my car. I rolled down the windows and let the cooling breeze drift through the car.

On a slight rise above the parking lot there was a playground with multicolored slides, swings and all manner of climbing devices. Several young masked women stood chatting while their kids chased one another around the playground equipment.

I have always enjoyed watching the little ones do this. Everything is so new to them at that age, I envy their sheer delight at running and enjoying the sense of moving their bodies. They go head over heels and come up laughing. My kids are full grown adults and even my grandson is now too old for slides and swings, so I enjoyed the rare opportunity to watch these “borrowed” kids.

After a while, I took my folding chair and moseyed over to the picnic grove on the other side of the parking lot. I have always liked the word, “mosey.” It has a relaxed old timey feeling and sound. It just rolls off the tongue that syncs perfectly with its meaning, “to walk or move in a leisurely manner.”

I found a nice shady spot next to a picnic table and set up my chair. I put my book and my sketchpad down on the bench attached to the table and started to look around. I find the dappled light of the sun shining through the trees a very peaceful sight.

On a day like this, with a soft breeze blowing through the tree tops, the spots of light dance and shimmer on the fallen leaves. That same breeze carried a subtle perfume of the forest loam and the watery aroma of the nearby lake. Other than the sound of the light traffic on Ingomar Road, this spot could easily be mistaken for the Garden of Eden.

I wasn’t alone in paradise. About 50-feet away, a couple who looked about 30 were lying on a blanket in a sunny spot between the trees. They were relaxing and paid me no mind as I set up my little camp. I realized that they presented me with a perfect opportunity to practice my figure drawing. Mostly, I draw inanimate objects. I am not “quick on the draw” like more experienced artists. Still lifes, buildings, landscapes and plants all obligingly stand perfectly still while I draw them.

I am too cheap, and not skilled enough, to enroll in a figure drawing class that goes through a series of poses, holding each one long enough for the students to sketch them. I envy artists who can capture the human body in quick “gesture” sketches. The couple in the grass let me try my hand at sketching them for free. I took out my pen knife and sharpened a couple of drawing pencils and got to work.

Lying on the grass always sounds very romantic. I conjure up images of “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou,” with lovers on a bed of soft grass accented with colorful wildflowers. Lying on the hard clay soil of Western Pennsylvania is not quite so idyllic.

The thin blanket the couple had laid on the grass didn’t provide much cushioning, so they were in constant motion in an attempt to find a comfortable position. This forced me to draw quickly before they shifted in an attempt to avoid the rocks and roots which seem to be attracted to the human body.

I tried to capture the most prominent part of each pose they adopted. For a while, the man rolled over on his back with one knee bent and the other leg crossed over it. I quickly drew him before he moved. The woman rolled over on one shoulder and raised her phone with one hand, a challenging pose to draw.

I did a number of thumbnail sketches, filling one page and part of another with the tiny drawings. I kept drawing until they decided that the ground was just too hard, folded up their blanket and left. After they had gone, I reviewed and critiqued my work. Some were better than others. I was particularly pleased with one sketch of the man with his legs crossed and the woman lying on her stomach with her head up looking at her phone.               

Once my models left, I laid down my sketchbook and picked up a copy of Rudolf Flesch’s How to Make Sense. I have not read his book for a quarter century and decided to revisit his work. The copy that I had checked out of the library had a stamp stating that it had been added to the library’s collection on April 14, 1954, a few months before my second birthday. This book still has the brown paper pocket glued on the front end page with a card stamped with dates ranging from August 1, 1954 to January 4, 1966.

This was a decadent luxury for me. I read every evening, but I am usually too busy to sit down during the day and enjoy a good book. Today, I sat and read a gloriously uninterrupted one hundred pages pausing only to mark pages that I want to reread or copy down.

It was getting close to the time when I would have to leave to retrieve my wife, so I walked down to the lake. I sat on a park bench and made a drawing of a kayak and flock of ducks. I looked around to see the people on the lake in their boats and on paddle boards.

I was extremely impressed with a young woman who was doing a complete yoga routine, including a headstand, on her paddle board in the middle of the lake. I turned around and saw the cyclists, the skateboarders, the walkers and runners on the path around the lake.

As I walked back to the car, I stopped to read a plaque dedicated to Edward Vose Babcock, the Allegheny County Commissioner who had the foresight to build the county park system. I looked up into the sky to thank him for the beautiful park he had built and for the peaceful day I had just enjoyed.

As I finished, a great blue heron flew past and I thought, “I’ll take that as, you’re welcome.”     

- Jim Busch

August 19, 2020

I had to go to my doctor today for my regular checkup. I got a good report and another great story to add to my writer’s inventory. This happens to me all the time. People just like to tell me about their lives and I like to listen to them.

The story I heard today was about my doctor’s office manager and her upbringing in Italy. This conversation started with my complimenting her lovely Italian accent. There is nothing better than a compliment to start a conversation. She smiled and thanked me when I asked where she grew up.

This led to a discussion of her hometown on the coast along the heel of the Italian boot. She then took me into her office where she had a framed map of her home country. She pointed to a tiny dot, which represented the village on the Gulf of Taranto, where she grew up.

Showing me the map opened the floodgates that held back her memories. She told me about glorious sunny days on the beach with her friends as a child and as a teenager. She recalled watching the big freighters sail by and wondering where they came from and where they were going. This fed a growing desire to see the world that eventually brought her to marry a man from Western Pennsylvania.

Of course as an Italian, many of her stories revolved around food. She recalled going to the market with her grandmother to buy vegetables and cheeses. They bought their fish directly from the fishing boats bobbing alongside the town docks. She told me how her grandmother carefully inspected the shiny silver fish before choosing a perfect specimen for their dinner.

Not all of the memories she shared with me were happy ones. She told me about how her father, a violent alcoholic, would abuse her mother and his children. He had gone through some difficult times in World War Two. His drinking meant that he had a hard time holding down a job so his family was quite poor. She added that they always had enough to eat and “since everyone was poor, we didn’t realize how bad off we were.” She was a good storyteller and her words carried her back to her childhood years on the Mediterranean coast.

I have missed conversations like this during the pandemic lockdown. Like most kids, I was always cautioned about talking to strangers, but I was never particularly good at listening to my parents. Fortunately, I was better at listening to my grandmother who was fond of saying, “God gave us two ears and one mouth because he wanted us to listen twice as much as we talk.” I have taken those words to heart and they have served me well for my entire life.

I got my start listening to my grandparents’ and uncles’ stories. Many kids were bored by all this “old timey” stuff, but I found it absolutely fascinating. I would sit down with my elbows on my knees and my chin resting on my palms as I gave the speaker my full attention. I did not realize it then, but paying attention to someone is the sincerest form of respect. When you truly listen to someone you are giving them the gift of your time and this is a wonderful compliment to pay anyone.

I made my living as a salesman. This is a career that requires talking to strangers all the time. A lot of people have trouble with this part of a sales career, but to me it was what made it attractive. I have always enjoyed talking to people and learning their story.

My grandmother’s lesson served me well on the job. Many salespeople put potential buyers off because they want to do all the talking. They walk in the front door and say, “Let me tell you everything about me.” That is a story no one wants to hear. I approached calls from a different angle. “Hi, I want to know everything about you.” I’ve learned that there are very few people in this world that don’t like to talk about themselves. 

I was very successful in sales because I had a knack for getting people to tell me their problems. Once I knew that, all I needed to do to make a sale is offer them a solution to what troubled them. For many years, I kept a plaque with this quote from Robert Baden Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, emblazoned on it, “If you make listening and observation your occupation, you will gain much more than you can by talking.”

Over the years, I have had perfect strangers open up to me about their childhoods, the experiences in the military, about their jobs and even their failures. Walking back from the showers at a campground in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, I had an old man tell me about lying in the loft of his family log cabin as a child. He told me how you could see the stars between the cedar shingles on a clear night, but how when it would rain they would swell and keep him dry.

A coworker told me about his first night with his unit in Vietnam when he was assigned to spend the night keeping watch over the body of the soldier he was replacing. The soldier had been shot down in a rice paddy and his buddies could not get to him because of enemy fire. They had to wait for reinforcements and he was given the job of stopping the Viet Cong from robbing the corpse. Twenty years later, he was still traumatized by his introduction to combat.

People have told me about cars and car accidents, about their triumphs and their tragedies, about their grandparents and their grandchildren; I find all of their stories absolutely fascinating. I have never had any trouble getting people to open up to me. I start off with a comment, usually a compliment and ask a follow up question.

I only talk about myself if I can establish common ground between us. For instance, if someone talks about how their mother made bread, I would tell them, “So did mine.” I would immediately go to a follow up question, “Tell me about her bread?”  This gets them talking every time. Soon they are telling me their life story.

I find that listening to others is much more interesting than talking about myself, I already know all of my stories. It has served me well as a writer, many of their stories have found their way into my stories.

Psychologist Karl Menniger said, “When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” I’ve found that this expanded version of people is much more interesting than the masks most of us show to the world.

Deep listening has taught me how other people view the world and what is important to them. It has made me more patient with others, it is hard to criticize others once I know their story. Listening to others, makes the world a much more interesting and colorful place.

- Jim Busch

August 18, 2020

This is a back to school season like no other in living memory. Normally, the biggest decision people face at this time of year is what kind of lunch box or backpack to buy for their kids.

Covid- 19 has changed all that, getting an education during the pandemic means possibly risking your life. Everyone from governors to school boards to college students are trying to decide what to do. It is a decision fraught with emotion because the stakes are so high. Since it is a completely new experience, we have not faced something like this in a century. There are very few facts to be had when deciding what to do.

Just about everyone involved in education at every level wants to see our children back in school. The consensus opinion is that traditional classroom education is the best way to teach our children what they need to know. This extends beyond the “three r’s.” Remote schooling robs children of the chance to interact with their teachers and their peers. These interactions socialize children and teach them how to interact with one another, a valuable lesson that will stick with them their entire lives.      

I am afraid that our desire to give our children the best possible education may blind us to the risks of sending our kids back to school before we have this disease under control. The need for parents to get back to work also factors into this decision. In the pre Covid world, parents could drop their kids off at school and go off to work with a clear conscience.

Supplemental after school programs helped them hold down a full time job knowing that their kids were in good hands. Even parents who have the luxury of working at home find that tending to their children and managing their education while working is less than ideal.

Administrators and parents are placed in the unenviable position of trying to make a risk versus reward decision in the complete absence of facts. We can make educated guesses, but at best these are poorly educated guesses.

Since we are trying to chart a path through new territory, we need to treat everything we do as an experiment. The problem is that the guinea pigs we are using in our lab are our children and our teachers. A failed experiment may cost the life of one of our children which is a price no one should be asked to pay.

The experimental nature of reconvening schools can be seen in the false starts we have seen around the country. Consider the high school in Georgia that opened “normally” but asked students to wear masks. Within days, a student posted a video of a crowded hallway packed like a sardine can with unmasked students.

The video went viral, an interesting choice of words in this case. The school administration decided on a policy of “punishing the innocent” and suspended the student who posted the video. The school officials elected to stick their heads in the sand rather than address the problem the student had revealed. In short order, they reinstated the student and closed the school after a Covid-19 hotspot formed there.

Wishful thinking appears to be very ineffective in controlling the spread of the virus. The school administration decided to cross their fingers and hope their students’ robust immune systems would protect them. Somehow, they convinced themselves that their students would wear masks if they were told to do so.

One wonders if the school staff has ever met a teenager. Neuroscientists studying the development of the human brain have determined that it doesn’t fully mature until a person reaches their mid-twenties. The Georgia students simply were not ready to do the right thing.

Similar stories are happening all around the country, elementary school classes have been infected and quarantined. The University of North Carolina and Notre Dame University both opened using what they thought was abundant caution and safeguards only to close within weeks. Again, they ran into the immaturity of their students. At colleges across the country, students are doing what students do, they’re getting together to socialize and party.

There is a reason that the military targets their recruiting efforts at people in their late teens and early twenties. The military knows that young people are inclined to believe that they are “10- feet tall and bullet proof.” Young people don’t worry about their own mortality, they just want to enjoy life. They are not about to let a global pandemic stop them from attending a kegger with members of the opposite sex.

I can’t imagine what these false starts are costing the economy. Schools invested in getting their facilities disinfected and reconfigured to facilitate social distancing. They purchased supplies and brought in staff to teach and maintain the facilities. The investment in reopening their schools became sunk costs, when they had to shut everything down after just a week or so.

Parents also invested in sending their children back to school. They invested in everything from new shoes for their grade schoolers, to outfitting a college dorm room and transporting their college students to campus.

In addition to the financial costs, there is an emotional cost to this “two steps forward and three steps back” routine. Parents and students who trusted the schools when they said, “Come back to school we have got everything figured out,” are not likely to be fooled a second time. They are not likely to place their trust in the school administration when they say, “We will keep your kid safe.”

I don’t know what the answer is to this question. I am happy that my grandson will be starting his first year of high school via distance learning. At the same time, I regret that he is missing out on the experience of starting high school. He is missing out on the chance to make new friends and to take part in the many activities available to him there.

I am placing my hopes in the scientists who are working around the clock to find a cure and a vaccine for the coronavirus. I think we all want our kids back in school, but we have to fight the temptation to send them back too soon. This disease has moved through our land very quickly.

This is the ideology of a virus, their purpose in life is to mindlessly spread as fast and as far as their host species will allow. Fortunately, we have something a virus lacks, we have a brain. In this new situation, we need to use our brains to act logically rather than impulsively. Our hearts want this pandemic to go away, but wishing won’t make it so.

We need to take our time, use our heads and proceed cautiously if we are to beat this terrible disease and get back to doing the things we love

- Jim Busch  

August 17, 2020

My first real job was working as a stock boy at the old Marraccini’s Supermarket in the Rainbow Village shopping center in White Oak. I worked there through my high school and college years. The lessons I learned about the human dimensions of the business world and the customer service skills

I learned there proved very beneficial to me during my career. This early experience has given me a lifelong interest in supermarkets. Whenever I travel to other cities, I often stroll the aisles of their supermarkets to learn about the local cuisine and culture.

Supermarkets are the modern day equivalent of the water holes where our hunter gatherer ancestors congregated. They are the places where we go to do our hunting and gathering of the things we need to feed ourselves and keep our homes clean and tidy.

When my parents retired to South Carolina in 1989, a trip to their local Piggly Wiggly super market gave me a new found appreciation of Pittsburgh’s ethnic heritage. The Piggly Wiggly did not sell kielbasa, they sold Polish Sausage, and Mrs. T’s pierogis were rebranded as Mrs. T’s Pasta Pockets.

When my son went to college in the state of Indiana, their rural supermarket stocked some items unavailable here. In addition to bread, milk and eggs, shoppers there could pick up a box of 30-30 shells for their Winchester rifle. Their local market had a small sporting goods kiosk in the back of the store. If you didn’t like the meat on display in the store’s butcher shop, you could go kill your own.

Today, my wife sent me to the local Giant Eagle to do some grocery shopping and to pick up some prescriptions at the store’s pharmacy. I have lived in White Oak almost my entire life and always thought of it as a nice, quiet community. My trip to the grocery store taught me that I was very mistaken about my hometown.

It turns out that White Oak is more like the Mad Max movies or the Kurt Russell classic, Escape from New York. As I drove the two miles home from the store, I kept my eyes peeled for roving gangs and running gun battles, but I was lucky and made it home without being killed. 

I learned about the decline and fall of White Oak by looking at the titles featured on the store’s magazine rack. Giant Eagle has a double sided magazine rack next to the store’s pharmacy. After picking up our meds, I decided to check out the current titles for some quarantine reading. The left side of the magazine rack held a wide range of titles of primary interest to women.

These included many cooking magazines featuring calorie packed recipes designed to tempt the taste buds. Gorgeous color photos of pies, cakes and other goodies made my mouth water and had me seriously considering surreptitiously licking them. I am sure I put on two and a half pounds just looking at these yummy pictures.

Shelved next to these appetite enticing titles was a wide selection of weight loss and fitness titles. The covers of these magazines featured photos of fantastically fit females. The models on the covers of these titles had obviously never tasted the “Gooey and delicious cinnamon rolls” or the “Decadent family pleasing chocolate desserts you can make in a jiffy” shown on the covers of their shelf mates. If Doctor Freud had looked at this display, I am sure he would have immediately diagnosed it as having a split personality.

I walked around to the more male oriented side of the magazine rack. I looked at the one woodworking magazine on display there and read the covers of two history magazines. I scanned my eyes across the display and was struck by the sheer number of gun and self-defense titles. I made a quick count and discovered that the rack held 24 individual weapons related titles. To put this in perspective, though Western Pennsylvania is known for its devotion to football, the magazine section only held a dozen or so magazines covering the game.

I did not count magazines like Field and Stream or the other outdoor sports magazines in my count. Included in my census of these magazines were titles like Guns, Personal Defense World, Knife, Be Ready and Survivor’s Edge. The models on the covers fell into two classifications, frightened women or grimly determined and heavily armed men. Many of these magazines gave a view of the “business end” of large caliber pistols and shotguns.

Banner’s splashed across the covers told the browser about the vital information contained between their covers. Articles included, “Defending your castle,” “Keeping your family safe,” and “Embrace your inner prepper!” These magazines even tie into America’s love of movies, in an article titled, “Hollywood Fortifications: Would they work in real life,” the magazine evaluated if the booby traps created by little Macaulay Culkin are practical for home defense. 

Like all magazines, the self-defense titles are supported by advertising. To curry favor with their advertisers, they include features reviewing new products which are thinly veiled ads. The editorial staffs of these journals couldn’t seem to find any fault with “Air Venturi’s Rapid Fire Crossbow” or any of the items listed in the article titled “Protective Gear 101.”

These magazines do offer do it yourself articles that could come in handy for the apocalypse. This month’s edition of Survivors Edge has useful information of escaping terrorists when taken hostage, surviving Tropical Hell, and tips on dentistry and orthopedic surgery at home. It is truly amazing how much anyone can accomplish with pliers and duct tape.

The popularity of these magazines in my little community surprises me. I am sure the store management would not stock them if they didn’t sell. White Oak is much more Mayberry RFD than Fort Apache the Bronx.

I thought maybe I was missing something, so I looked up the FBI crime statistics for my zip code. White Oak is listed as being safer than 82% of American Communities. Violent crime is exceedingly rare and most of the assaults in the borough are related to domestic incidents and in these cases, a gun in the home is more likely to escalate rather than solve the problem at hand.

White Oak residents have a 1 in 937 chance of being a victim of a crime. These already low numbers have been trending downward in recent years. Maybe this trend can be attributed to our population being armed like Rambo, but I doubt it.

I am not exactly sure why so many of my neighbors see a need to educate themselves for the collapse of civilization. Things seem to be humming along fine here. I think they have confused the dystopian world portrayed by popular media with what they see before their eyes.

Politicians raise the specter of gangs, drug lords and riots to convince you to vote for them. Television shows about gun battles and abductions are much more interesting than stories about places like White Oak. Shows about people mowing their lawn before holding a family cookout just doesn’t make for good TV.

Dirty Harry gunned down Ozzie & Harriet with the World’s Most Powerful Handgun a long time ago, violence has been populating our entertainment industry for quite a while. Perhaps, I should create a magazine about defending oneself from paranoia.      

- Jim Busch

August 16, 2020

I have been estivating lately.

“Estivate” is the warm weather equivalent to winter’s hibernation. The dictionary defines it as the ability of an animal, particularly of an insect, fish or amphibian, to spend a hot or dry period in a prolonged state of torpor or dormancy.

I am not an insect, fish or an amphibian, but our recent string of 90-plus degree days have certainly put me in a prolonged state of torpor or dormancy. This weather has made enduring the coronavirus even more difficult.

When the lock down started in the spring, I took advantage of the cool weather to take long walks along the Yough River Trail or in one of the other parks in the area. This was good for both my body and for my soul. The exercise kept my muscles loose and burned calories.

These walks also served to clear my mind and gave me something besides four walls to look at. I was able to distract myself by looking at the successive waves of wildflowers and other plants emerging from their winter dormancy. For the past month, the only wildflowers I have seen were sighted through the windshield of my air conditioned car.

I do much better in the cold weather than in the hot. I have the build of a polar bear. Naturalists long ago noted that the build of animals who evolved to survive in the cold are quite different from those from the warmer parts of the globe. Polar animals tend to be spherical, being shaped like a “ball” helps keep them from freezing by limiting the surface area of their bodies exposed to the cold air.

Cold weather critters also tend to have tiny ears and tails for this same reason. Tropical animals are long and lean, think leopard. Anyone who knows me knows that I am decidedly more bear than leopard. I am quite round and my ears are on the tiny side. I am definitely built for cold weather.

During the furnace like weather of the last few weeks, I have limited my outdoor excursions. As soon as I stepped out into the heat, I began to sweat the minute I stepped onto the porch. I started looking at venturing outside like an astronaut planning an “EVA.” I carefully planned my tasks to make the most of my time outside of the “capsule” with it sophisticated life support systems, i.e. air conditioning.

If I was going to take the garbage to the back alley behind our home, I also took the compost and the recycling as well. I broke longer “missions” like cutting the grass or the hedges into chunks with periods of decompression in front of the air conditioner in between. I have limited my nature walks to the plants in my yard.

The last two days have been gloriously cool with temperatures in the seventies and low eighties. For the first time in the last month, the humidity was low enough that I did not feel like it would be easier to breathe though gills rather than lungs. When I went outside, I didn’t have to run for the air conditioning like an extra in Saving Private Ryan diving for cover. I enjoyed being outside with nothing but the sky over my head.

Today, I sat down in the backyard and just felt the breeze blow through my hair. It threatened to rain all day, but it never materialized. The clouds presented an ever changing tableau. I enjoyed watching them dance across the sky. Before I started painting, I thought of clouds as either white, black or gray, but trying to reproduce them on paper taught me to see the variety of colors in the sky.

As I was watching the show, a turkey vulture dropped out of the clouds and just hung there like a kite. Because it was overcast, the big bird was lower in the sky than they usually are. I could see the “hands” of both of his wings. This is how you can distinguish vultures from hawks and other soaring birds.

I live on the top of a tall hill. This topography creates the thermals that these birds use to lift them up into the sky. During the early fall and the spring, they use these air currents during their migrations. I have seen as many as forty of them circling either north or south. They never seem to travel in a straight line but wind their way where ever they go. Their patterns remind me of penmanship exercises I had to do when I was learning to write in grade school.

One would think that at my age, the sight of circling buzzards would make me a bit anxious, but for some reason I find watching them relaxing. I envy how seamlessly they mesh with their airy environment. Like the clouds, they seem to belong to the sky. Their instinctive knowledge of the sky means they can stay aloft for hours without so much as a single flap of their big wings.

Like a Zen master, they accomplish much with virtually no effort. From where I sat, I could see how the low flying birds could change their position in the sky with a slight movement of one or two of the directional feathers on the tips of their wings.

I don’t really believe in reincarnation. If I did, I think I would want to come back as a turkey vulture. I’m not sure that being able to smell a decaying carcass over a mile away would be my first choice when it comes to super powers and I think dining on road killed possum would get old real quick.

I do think that floating in the clouds, master of all I survey would be absolutely amazing. Turkey vultures have amazing eyesight, from their sky perch they can see for miles. I really do think I would like to have a buzzard’s eye view of the world.       

- Jim Busch  

August 15, 2020

Today’s entry in The Corona Diaries is my 150th since I started this record on March 19, 2020. Looking back over the past five months, I find it hard to grasp how much has changed in our country and in the world and how much has not.

In that time, many of our fellow citizens have lost their lives. I started these entries a few days after the President had declared a national emergency and governors in several states, including Pennsylvania, had ordered people to stay at home to stop the spread of the disease.

They took these steps because just over a hundred Americans had succumbed to the novel coronavirus. At this writing, 173,000 more Americans have lost their lives in the pandemic. This means 58 times as many Americans have died from the coronavirus than were killed in the 911 attacks. We declared two wars after those attacks, but our response to the virus has been far less clear and far less unified.

I was born in 1952. At the age of 68, I am right in the middle of the baby boomer generation. Throughout our lives, we were taught that we were the first generation in world history not to fear plagues and infectious disease. We lined up for the Salk vaccine so that we were not crippled by polio.

When we got cut on the playground, we got a tetanus shot to stave off lockjaw and on the first day of school our teachers inspected our arms to make sure we had been vaccinated for small pox. Our mothers and dads were not afraid that childhood diseases, like measles or mumps, would put us in a tiny coffin like their grandparents had done for their children.

This was story of Calvin Coolidge Jr. during his summer vacation from school in 1924. The President’s son was invited to play tennis with his older brother, John. Calvin Jr. forgot to bring proper socks, so he got a blister on his big toe after several games. The next day, the blister became infected. It grew worse and he was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital, where he was under the care of some of the nation’s best doctors.

This was four years before the discovery of penicillin and more than a decade before it came into common usage. Without this “Miracle Drug” at their disposal, there was little that the doctors could do for the President’s 16 year-old son and he died less than a week after the ill-fated tennis game. This kind of story was common well into the 20th century. My mother’s best friend lost her mother to a minor wound she received while cutting up a chicken for dinner.     

As we got older, medical science kept producing new miracles on a regular basis. Doctors started transplanting organs, the way our dads would put new carburetors on their Chevys. Surgeons learned to correct our nearsightedness and remove cataracts from our eyes.

They developed machines to look inside our bodies and diagnose diseases. Our scientists even learned how to cure many forms of cancer and advances in trauma care greatly increased the odds of surviving an accident. All of these advances lulled us into a false sense of security. Infectious diseases was something that killed people in the third world, not in the technologically advanced U. S. A. In our country, death was something that happened to old people.

Covid-19 changed all of this. In the past month, the coronavirus has been carrying off about a thousand people a day. The disease is not a death sentence and over two million people have survived their battle with Covid-19. Some cases were relatively minor, but many others have suffered permanent damage to their hearts, lungs or other organs.

The scientists that we have put our faith in for decades are working hard to beat back this new enemy, but have met with limited success. They have made some advances in treatment, but so far they have not come up with a vaccine to protect us.

The spread of the coronavirus has renewed interest in the influenza pandemic of 1918. This disease killed over fifty million people around the globe. During the centennial of this epidemic two years ago, historians and medical experts debated if such a thing could happen again. The consensus they reached was that such a thing was unlikely because of advances in medicine and public health methods.

Twenty first century communication and isolation protocols would contain the disease and stop it from spreading. They failed to take in account how interconnected the world had become in the last century. The virus which causes Covid-19 popped up in a remote corner of China and spread across the world before anyone realized what was happening.

What is surprising is that despite a century of medical advances, the tools at our disposal to fight the spread of the coronavirus look remarkably like the ones available in 1918. The directives issued by public health officials during the influenza epidemic should sound very familiar to people today - wear a mask and practice social distancing. Then, as today, most people followed these directives but many did not. The disease continued to spread until it finally burned itself out.

I think we have not been able to grasp the magnitude of the damage done by this pandemic, the numbers are simply too large for us to wrap our heads around. If a foreign enemy was killing 1000 Americans every day, our country would be pulling together like they did after the Pearl Harbor attack.

But the coronavirus is much more subtle than an air raid. The deaths are spread out over the country and their deaths happen out of sight in isolated hospital rooms. Perhaps, we can’t truly understand the impact of this disease because for our whole lives we have been conditioned to believe that science will protect and save us.

We see the reports on television and we read the numbers, but I do not think we really can understand the full scope and meaning of this disease until it has touched us personally. Only when we have contracted Covid-19 or someone we love has, we simply can’t understand its impact.  

- Jim Busch  

August 14, 2020

Today, for the first time in months, I visited the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. They just reopened after being closed during the coronavirus pandemic.

Of course, one can’t just walk in and enjoy the exhibits like we did before the disease changed everything. Before visiting the museum, I had to reserve a “timed ticket” online the evening before my visit. I scheduled the visit for noon and arrived about ten minutes before my appointed time.

I am a frequent visitor of the Westmoreland over the years. I am in the habit of exploring the museum from top to bottom. Once I checked in, I started heading toward the back elevator with the intention of going to the “Works on Paper” gallery on the third floor.

This is one of my favorite spots at the Westmoreland. The museum curators are constantly changing the works featured in this tiny two room gallery, so there is always something new to see there. I like to draw and do watercolors, so the works on the third floor show me how much I have to learn.

I had not gone three feet when the receptionist called me back. She mumbled something through her mask and pointed to a sign on the wall. In spite of the fact that there were only five people in the entire building, I was told I had to follow the authorized route through the gallery.

The front steps were the “up” staircase and the ones in the rear of the building were descent only. Apparently, if I strayed from the yellow brick road, it would release the flying museum monkeys. It seemed a bit silly to me, but I decided to comply.

Following the blue tape arrows on the floor first took me to the museum’s “Cantilever Gallery.” This space is part of the new addition to the original building, completed several years ago, and is used to host traveling exhibitions. The current show is a collection of 20th century African American art from the Smithsonian Institution. It was an impressive exhibit of paintings and sculptures.

The first object to catch my eye as I walked in was a hammered copper sculpture of an African mask that was masterfully done. The show was arranged in rough chronological order and many of the paintings mirrored the contemporary trends in the wider world of American art. One painting from the 1940’s looked very much like an Edward Hopper painting from the same time and a work from the 1970’s was very Peter Max in its design.

The subjects of the representative works in the exhibit were clearly done by African American artists. The people portrayed in their works were clearly of African descent. Many of the works included design elements from the African continent.

Some of the more recent works were much more abstract and did not telegraph the cultural background of its creator. This got me thinking about our cultures tendency to put people into carefully labeled boxes. This is why we have exhibits of art by African Americans, by women artists, LGBT artists, Jewish artists and other types of artists.

I’m not sure if I like the idea of breaking down artists in this way. On one hand, this knowledge helps the viewer to understand the art that they are looking at. Any artist worth his or her brushes is influenced by the culture that produced them.

A black person is going to have a different experience living in a city than a white person. When they paint a cityscape, their different viewpoint will be reflected in how they portray a street scene. This is why Mary Cassatt’s paintings of mothers and their children differ from her male counterpart’s treatment of the same subject.

Since a person’s cultural heritage has such a big impact on a person’s individual character, their background is going to influence any art that they make. To do anything else would be false and would make it impossible to produce good art.

On the other hand, shouldn’t art be universal? Art is the most human thing we do, the earliest humans produced art. Hunter gatherer tribes living a tenuous hand to mouth existence, took time to make rock carvings and create images that expressed their inner lives.

Last year, I had a chance to take in an exhibit of Australian Aboriginal art. These painting and decorated items recounted stories from the “dream time” prominent in their mythology and used decorative motifs reflecting their cultural aesthetic.

I do not claim to understand their view of the world, but I greatly enjoyed their art. It was interesting on an intellectual level, I enjoyed learning something about their culture, but it was also beautiful. I enjoyed simply looking at the delightful patterns and designs they had created.

I’m not sure how to resolve this dilemma. Perhaps we need to look at art like we look at an elaborate crystal chandelier, like the ones that hang in Pittsburgh’s Heinz Hall. They are made up of many individual cut crystal pendants, each reflecting light in its own unique way. Each crystal is lovely on its own, but the effect when they are all put together in the chandelier is stunningly beautiful.

When I was a kid, paint by number kits were all the rage. One of my friend’s mother had completed one of these and had it hanging proudly in their dining room. It was a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and it never looked quite right to me. Though hand painted, it paled in comparison to even the cheap prints of this painting in white plastic frames they sold at Murphy’s Five and Dime.

I did not know it then, but my friend’s mom had messed up by carefully following the instructions that came with her paint by number kit. These kits came with a stiff cardboard canvas with the outline of the picture printed in pale blue ink on its white surface. The image was divided into tiny blocks.

Each of these blocks had a number printed in its center. These numbers corresponded to the numbers on the lids of the small containers of paints which came with the kit. All a person had to do was take the included brush and dip it into one of the cups of paint and carefully use it to color in the appropriately numbered blocks. If the cup of red paint was number “7”, you painted all the blocks with a “7” in them red and so on.

When da Vinci painted the original, he didn’t keep his paints carefully separated but swirled and mixed them together on his canvas. All painters do this, they mix their paints and layer them until it is impossible to determine where one color ends and another begins.

Good painters know how to use the “color wheel” to blend complementary colors to create colorful effects in their work. To give their painting depth and realism they use chiaroscuro, placing light and dark colors side by side to make both tints more intense and beautiful.

One of the first lessons an artist in training learns is that “there are no lines in nature.” Lines are an artificial construct that we use in an attempt to represent our world graphically. I think we all need to learn this lesson. The lines that divide us are artificial, we created them and we can erase them if we wish.

I enjoyed looking at the delightful art created by African American artists. By blending their lovely colors with the many other shades on our American canvas, they have added depth and dimension to our country. They made our country more beautiful with every stroke of their brushes.  

- Jim Busch  

August 13, 2020

Today, I dropped my wife off at Allegheny General Hospital for a doctor’s appointment and some treatments. I was not sure when she would be done, so I stayed in the area and did some shopping.

As usual, her projected two hour hospital visit stretched into five and a half hours, so I had a lot of time to kill. I used this time to go to Half Price Books, Goodwill, Panera Bread, Harbor Freight Tools and Rockler Woodworking. I only needed one or two items at each place and actually I was just browsing at the bookstore and Goodwill. This allowed me lots of time to observe my fellow shoppers and how they are dealing with the Coronavirus rules.

Each store I visited had signs plastered all over the front doors and windows. These informed shoppers that the stores were limiting the number of shoppers permitted in the store at any one time. Some stores informed patrons to turn around if they had a fever, a cough or any other symptoms of Covid-19.

Of course, there were multiple placards stating in no uncertain terms that all shoppers were required to wear masks. I noticed that no one stopped to read any of the signage. These signs have now been in place for a few months so they have now become a part of the landscape.

When things become ubiquitous we naturally stop paying attention to them. Business writer Seth Godin wrote a book on marketing called Purple Cow. This unusual title refers to a story he tells in the book. He notes that when we drive through the countryside we see hundreds of cows standing in the landscape. If one was to be purple, we would hit the brakes and stare at it because it stood out. He noted that if we started seeing purple cows every day, they also would disappear into the landscape. The signage posted at store entrances have become too common for us to notice.

Store management has no problem limiting the number of people visiting their shops. I am not sure if people just are not buying as much or if they are doing their shopping online, but very few stores have more than a few shoppers in them. The bookstore’s posted capacity was 35, but I only encountered one other shopper in the 45 or so minutes I was there. This was the case in every store I visited today.

This lack of shoppers has led to a lack of enforcement of these rules. When I visited this store a week or so after the lockdown had been lifted, they had set up an elaborate system to track the number of patrons in the store at any one time. They had a stack of thirty five paper clips on a table inside their front door.

An employee was stationed there full time who would move a paper clip to another pile when someone entered, returning it to the original pile when someone left. I assume this “gatekeeper” would bar the door when all the clips were in the second pile. They have come to realize that this is far from necessary.

Some of the busier stores like Target and grocery stores once had people with counting devices keeping track of the shoppers entering and leaving their stores. Even though these stores have become quite busy lately, they have stopped the head counts as well. I find it hard to believe that they have any idea how many people are patronizing their store at any time.

This potential flaunting of the rules is partially due to the cumbersome nature of tracking the foot traffic in a busy store. Another factor is that limiting the number of paying customers visiting their business runs counter to everything a retailer holds near and dear. They spend a lot of money to make their store attractive to shoppers and on advertising to bring them in. They are not in business to turn shoppers away.

Since the stores reopened, I have only encountered one woman who refused to wear a mask. She not only was not wearing a face mask but bragged about not doing so when a clerk politely asked her to cover her mouth and nose.

In her tirade she said “I’m old and have asthma, so I can’t breathe with one of those things on my face, besides their ugly.” This took her to a whole new level of foolish as she was identifying herself as the natural prey of the coronavirus.

Everyone else I have seen wears their face covering without complaint. I still see people who jump out of their cars and head for the store only to turn around to retrieve their mask. Old habits die hard. Most people recognize that wearing a mask is far less inconvenient than spending months in the ICU or dying.

Most people also seem to have accepted social distancing. I have seen people cross an aisle or change direction to avoid coming in close proximity to their fellow shoppers. I see people standing in checkout lines where everyone is standing on their taped “X’s” on the floor like Broadway dancers when the director calls “Places everyone!”

They pay less attention to the directional arrows in the aisles of retail stores. I don’t think these people are trying to be rebels, they just have other things on their mind. They are focused on the items they have to buy and what they have to do before going home.

The stores don’t try to enforce this one-way rule. This seems to be one of those things that works better in theory than in practice. The health experts that came up with this concept assumed that every shopper moves through the store from front to back all traveling at the same speed.

In this perfect world, shoppers would flow through the store like a choreographed perfectly social distanced Conga line. People just don’t behave this way, they pass slower shoppers and jump around the store as they plan dinner in their heads.

The stores didn’t put much thought or effort in implementing this restriction. They obeyed the letter of the law and pasted down direction arrows on the floor. Some stores posted a few signs, but I have not seen any store try to enforce people from going the wrong direction.

I tried to observe the rules at first but soon realized that I was the only one who paid any mind to the signs. In the spirit of if you can’t beat them, join them, I have now joined the ranks of scofflaw wrong way shoppers. This is a good example of why some rules are universally ignored. If people can’t see the benefit of obeying a rule and there is no penalty for breaking it, they will ignore it.

My informal study of how local folks are handling the “new normal” and complying with the safety rules set by the state health department makes me proud to be from Western Pennsylvania. People have gone out of their way to follow these very reasonable restrictions not because they are afraid of the legal consequences but because they care about their neighbors.

Obviously, they want to protect their own health but they also worry about infecting others. This is why the viral spread here has been relatively light. People here take care of one another. It is just the way we are.                 

- Jim Busch

August 12, 2020

It has been a tough couple of weeks for me. On top of the coronavirus, I’ve had to deal with my wife’s battle with cancer. She spent six days in the hospital with painful swelling in her legs, which left me with too much time to think about what we are facing.

This weekend, my next door neighbor and good friend died on his back porch and his body was not found for two days. This left me feeling fatigued and depressed. I could use a vacation but that is not likely to happen any time soon, so I decided to run away to my backyard workshop studio.

Choreographer Twyla Tharp once said, “Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” Today was a day when I very much needed to run away, so I decided to take Tharp’s advice and make some art.

I do not claim to be an artist but like a kid who climbs into a cardboard box and pretends it is a spaceship, I like to play at being an artist. Artists are my heroes. There is nothing I enjoy more than walking through a museum and looking at the marvelous creations hanging on the walls and sitting on pedestals.

I devour books on art and artists and some of my favorite films are biopics about artist’s lives. I could watch Lust for Life or The Agony and the Ecstasy every day for the rest of my life.

Like most people, I stopped making art after grade school. As I grew older, I also grew more self-conscious and became hypercritical of myself. I was absolutely certain that I was the least attractive, clumsiest and dumbest person in the world. Who was I to think that I could draw or paint?

As I learned about the great artists, I looked at their masterworks and knew that I could never come close to their mastery. I poured my creative urges in to my career and into more practical activities. I used the woodworking and mechanical skills I learned from my grandfathers to make items needed around the house. The highlight of my year was to make Halloween costumes for my kids and ornaments for our Christmas tree. At best, I considered myself a craftsman, but I never thought I was worthy of the title “artist.”

In my fifties, I saw a Sunday afternoon “Drawing for Beginners” class listed in my member’s newsletter from the Carnegie Museum of Art. By that point in my life, I was not so self-critical and I decided to give it a try. This eight-session class was taught by a Carnegie Mellon professor and was absolutely fascinating.

I enjoyed it more than anything I had done in years. I was surprised to see an improvement in my drawings over the course of the class. Rather than focusing on technical drawing skills, the teacher taught us to enjoy the process of making art and to not be so concerned with the quality of our work. I have not put my pencil down since.

In the years since the Carnegie class, making art has been an important part of my life. I have filled sketchbooks with drawings and looking through these I can see how my skills have improved over the years. I am still not a good artist but at least my wife can recognize what I was trying to capture on paper. I kept experimenting with different artist’s materials and activities. I took up printmaking and watercolor painting. I played with markers and pastels on different materials.

I started taking a sketchbook and paint boxes on vacations in lieu of my camera. I just looked at a hand colored drawing that I did in New Orleans over a decade ago. If I had snapped a picture of it, today the image would be in an album or maybe locked away in a memory card or a disc.

The drawing is burned into my brain. Taking a photograph is easy and quick. It just takes a moment. Drawing is a much more engaging process. It is time consuming and because the artist can only capture one detail at a time, drawing forces us to really look and absorb every detail.

When I looked at that drawing, I can remember everything about that day. I can remember the weather and where I stood and what I was doing on that day. The drawing transports me back to the day that I produced it.

When I retired, I built myself a two car garage to use as a workshop and art studio. It has become my sanctuary and my refuge from an increasingly scary world. One of my favorite spots in the world is my drawing table. I have it set up with a good light source, a comfortable chair and I am surrounded with drawers holding my pencils, paints and brushes.

Sometimes I just sit there and doodle looking for ideas, other times I use the space to complete a painting that I have planned and thought about for weeks. It is the starting point for many of my shop projects. This table, which cost me $5 at the Goodwill, is a like a magic machine which generates creative ideas and brings them to life.

Today, I sat at my table and started doodling on a piece of newsprint. For some reason I started thinking about the artist Alexander Calder and his wire sculptures. My pencil decided to draw a cartoonish face made of spirals and curves.

When it was done I looked at it and thought, “That would be fun to try.” I dug into my shop pantry and found a roll of heavy galvanized steel wire that I bought at a flea market a while ago. I grabbed a couple of pairs of pliers and I was ready to go.

I started bending the metal, trying to make the heavy wire conform to the lines I had drawn on the paper. I carefully bent each component of the face and then set them aside before starting on the next piece I needed. When I had finished all the pieces, I took them to my anvil and hammered them flat. The next step was to use a finer wire to fasten the pieces together. I tried several ways to do this that didn’t work. I took them apart and started over again. Finally, I got the whole thing together and took it back to the anvil to tighten the joints.

Once I had finished assembling my sculpture, I stepped back to look at it. I liked what I saw, I started to notice imperfections but instantly reminded myself that this was a handmade object, it wasn’t supposed to be perfect.

I thought back to the Calder sculptures that I had used as my inspiration and remembered that they weren’t perfectly symmetrical either… and he was a bonafide artistic genius. I noticed a happy accident, the outer frame had bowed toward the front of the piece. I had not intended to do this but I liked the dimensional effect it created. Not bad for a first attempt.

I looked up at the big shop clock that hangs above my drawing table. I discovered that I had been working on this project for over four hours. During that time, I hadn’t thought about anything else but the work I was doing. I didn’t think about Covid-19, cancer, politics or anything else that makes the gastric juices churn in my stomach.

I was lost in time and space. The whole world was reduced to shaping a piece of wire in my hands. I was energized and relaxed at the same time. I disappeared into work and left all the things that trouble me behind.

In the next few days, I will finish this piece. I want to paint it and figure out some way to mount it for display. Once it is finished, I will be finished with it. The completed piece will mean very little to me. I care about the process rather than the product of my work.

I will probably either give it away or stash it in the attic. What I will keep is what I learned by making it. I will keep the joy of creating something new, and for a few days, I will even keep the peace that I found in making it.

- Jim Busch

August 11, 2020

We live in a proudly capitalist nation. Our official national motto is “E Pluribus Unum” but it should be “You get what you pay for.” We spend a lot more time talking about how much things cost than about how our country is a melting pot.

We brag about the great deals we found on this item or that thing and how clever we are at rooting out bargains. We believe that everything has a price and a price must be paid for anything that we want or desire. We look at these things as natural laws, this is how things are and have been forever. The truth is that this type of thinking is actually counter to the way that nature actually works.

I was thinking about this while adding some vegetable peelings to my compost bin. I had trouble finding a spot to dump them because my two bins are covered in greenery. In fact, I’m starting to have trouble getting close to the two compost containers. They are filled with potato plants and like a bathtub where someone forgot to turn off the tap, pumpkin plants are overflowing the edge of the bins and spreading out in every direction.

I did not plant either of these veggies. I should say I did not intentionally plant either the potatoes or the pumpkins. The potatoes started life as soft, wrinkled, sprouted potatoes that had been forgotten in my wife’s pantry. They went bad before she could use them so they went into the compost bin.

I have to admit I gave them a little help getting started. Instead of just throwing them on the top of the pile in the spring, I spread them out and shoved them down into the soft black soil of the compost bin. As I added items to the pile, they were covered by kitchen refuse plus trimmings from the garden and pulled weeds.

They sprouted and grew fast enough to keep the tips of their vines reaching toward the sun. In a few weeks, the potato plants will begin to fade and I will dig out a bucket full of delicious organic potatoes compliments of Mother Nature.

Compost is the perfect growing medium for potatoes. Potatoes are heavy feeders, so they like the rich black humus soil in my bins. The soil is soft so they have no trouble pushing it aside with their swelling roots. Compost is itself another one of nature’s gifts. I love to read the articles in modern gardening magazines that offer complicated recipes for compost.

According to the experts, you need to have a certain percentage of nitrogen, the right amount of potassium and of phosphorus. These books also advertise elaborate devices, tumblers and drums, to properly mix and aerate the three elements. I was never good at chemistry, so I just do what my grandfather and father did. I throw any vegetative matter I want to get rid of into the bin. Every now and then I give it a stir with a spading fork. Somehow it always seems to turn out ok. Compost does not cost me a thing and it is one of the best fertilizers known to man.

The pumpkins required even less work on my part. They just showed up like a long lost relative after you have won the lottery. A couple of months ago, I saw their distinctive leaves pop up in the back of the compost bin. I was not sure exactly what they were at first.

Last fall I threw some discarded pumpkins, several types of decorative gourds and some squash into the compost. All three of these belong to the same plant family and it is hard to tell them apart until they fruit. I would not be disappointed with any one of these three squash family cousins, so I let them grow.

I rather liked the suspense of wondering what was growing in my backyard. After a few weeks, the rapid and aggressive growth led me to bet on them being pumpkins. Earlier this week, I saw an immature fruit on one of the vines and it is decidedly “pumpkinesque.” It looks like Ma Nature is buying me my Jack-O-Lantern this fall.

This morning I had some fresh tomatoes with my eggs for breakfast. These came from a “volunteer” tomato plant in my flower garden. They were juicy, they were delicious and they were free. They probably also started in the magic compost pile. Their seeds were probably in the compost I used to improve the soil there. Though tomatoes are warm weather plants, the heat created by the decaying matter allowed them to survive the winter. Once again, nature was kind to me.

This happens all the time, I find all sorts of useful things that I never planted growing in my yard, all I need to do is leave them alone and enjoy them. Many of my favorite plants were gifts from friends and relatives. My grandfather called these “pass along plants.”

Each summer I enjoy daylilies, peonies, and hollyhocks that come up every year. We have dahlias, oxalis and canna’s that I lift every fall and save for the next year. Gardeners are always giving away seeds, volunteer plants and cuttings to other enthusiasts. These “green market” plants are usually old time varieties that seed companies and agribusiness have forgotten.

I learned a lot from my mother-in-law. She was the human embodiment of Mother Nature. She always gave to others, asking for nothing in return. She loved all living things. She once put a kitchen chair in the middle of our brick sidewalk to protect an ant colony that had built a nest there.

She was curious about everything and when a green sprout appeared in some unexpected spot, she would tell me, “Don’t pull that out, let’s see what it grows up to be.” Rather than fighting nature she partnered with it and taught me to be open to receiving the green world’s gifts.

She taught me that believing “you only get what you pay for” is a very poor philosophy to live by. 

- Jim Busch      

August 10, 2020

This morning my wife asked me to take the garbage up to the alley behind our home. When I came back in I told her that something had died somewhere near our house.

We thought maybe a woodchuck or a squirrel or other critter had died somewhere under one of our bushes. I looked around but could not find anything. Later that day we found out we were horribly wrong. Later in the afternoon I went out to check the mail and saw several police cars and an ambulance at our neighbor’s house.

I went to see what was going on and saw another neighbor standing with the police. I asked him, “Is Karl OK?” His eyes met mine for just a moment and then looked at the ground as he slowly shook his head from side to side.

My neighbor and friend Karl was dead. He had died a day or so before while sitting on his back porch listening to the radio. It wasn’t a groundhog or a squirrel I was smelling, it was him.

I felt horrible, I had heard his radio playing but this was not unusual, he often left it playing on the back porch. I must have walked within 15-feet of his body several times. Tall, unkempt trees and wisteria vines surrounded his back porch obscuring the view from my property.

Sometimes I would duck through the tunnel of greenery over his walk and stop to chat with him or to see if he needed anything. The last few days were hot and I wanted to stay in the house to help my wife, so I had not stopped to see him. I feel bad that his body sat there with no one even knowing he had passed away.

It never dawned on me that what I was smelling was a human body. I had mixed feelings, I felt terrible that I had not checked on him and I was glad that I was not the one to find him. Another neighbor had seen him there the day before, but thought he was sleeping and did not want to disturb him. When he came back today, he saw that Karl had not moved and realized something was wrong.

Karl was 81 and had lived in the house next to ours since he was a teenager. I have known him since I moved here 45 years ago. My wife has known him her entire life. She has fond memories of sitting with Karl and her twin sisters on the front porch listening to his jazz records on an old suitcase style Hi-Fi record player. He introduced her to jazz and she still enjoys it to this day. Karl was always easy going and a bit of a loner, one of those people that though they have a smile on their face you sense a sadness in their soul.

Karl was a “geek” before being a geek was considered cool. He loved electronics and started building radios when he was just a boy. After high school he went to Penn State and then joined the Air Force. He was stationed deep below the Kansas prairie in an ICBM silo. He was never allowed to give the full details of what happened but the silo was flooded with rocket fuel and radiation.

Karl was severely injured and after months in a military hospital he was given a medical discharge and sent home. For the rest of his life Karl went to the VA hospital in Oakland to receive blood transfusions because of the things he had been exposed to. Karl never married because a military doctor had told him that if he fathered any children they would likely be deformed because of the damage to his genes.

Karl came back home and moved back in with his father and stepmother. He took a job a McKeesport’s Wander Sales fixing televisions. Later he taught at a technical school and continued to putter with electronics. He belonged to a radio collectors club and would pick up discarded televisions and stereos which he would put back into working order.

He would sell these to people who were struggling for a few dollars. He never gave them away, but sold them for far less than they were worth, he did not want those he was helping to feel like charity cases. After his parents died, Karl continued living in their home as the place slowly fell apart.

Karl and I had many great conversations over the fence between our properties. He was a great student of local history with a special interest in old maps. He would walk all over the area tracing the routes of long forgotten roads and discovering the foundations of old homesteads in the woods. He belonged to the McKeesport Art Group and wrote poetry.

In many ways, Karl reminded me of the Maynard G. Krebs character on the old Dobie Gillis Show. He was an aging beatnik, a natural non-conformist with a good heart and a curious mind. Some years ago, Karl joined my wife, daughter and I to hear the beat poet Allen Ginsberg read at Carnegie Mellon University.

After the reading, Karl took a paperback copy of Ginsberg’s Howl he had found in his basement to have it signed. Like Karl, the book was a bit disheveled with a torn cover and coffee stains. Once Karl made it to the head of the line the great poet, never at a loss for words said, “Did you throw up on this?” but still signed it.

A lot of people would not have liked to have Karl for a neighbor. His house looked like something from a fundraising appeal to help the poor in Appalachia. Some years back, he declared his backyard, “A meadow” and stopped mowing it.

He had a laissez faire approach to life. On the rare occasions when he did his laundry, he would hangs his clothes out to dry by throwing them over a line. He would leave them there for several days and they would blow all over the yard. I bought him a package of clothes pins to save him the labor of picking them up. Karl’s response was to say, “That’s okay, you keep ’em, picking up the clothes is good exercise.”

Our family saw Karl as the embodiment of Walt Whitman’s true American, an independent spirit who worried little about what others thought. He was good to my kids and he always made them candy apples for Halloween. 

Despite his health problem, Karl stayed in pretty good shape. He fixed up old bicycles and rode them all over the area. His last project was an attempt to build an electric bicycle. This past year he started to slow down and he started to have trouble with his legs. The coronavirus quarantine hit him hard. He took many of his meals at local diners and liked to talk with the other regulars.

The arts organizations he belonged to quit meeting increasing his isolation. My wife would often fix him a plate and we would talk when he went out to get the mail, but Karl was more or less housebound. We tried to keep tabs on him, but lately we have been so busy with doctors and hospitals that sometimes we would not talk to him for a week or more.

A few months ago, I told Karl about my wife’s pancreatic cancer. Since that time, he always asked about her and expressed his concern. I’m sorry now that I worried him. Karl was a good man and a good friend.

I don’t know who else will miss him, but I know my wife and I will.         

- Jim Busch

August 9, 2020

This morning was the first morning in a week that she woke up in her own bed. Yesterday, she came home from an extended stay in Allegheny General Hospital. She is fighting pancreatic cancer and this week her body decided to rebel against the treatment. It’s been a really bad week with lots of pain, prodding and procedures.

We are finding out that fighting a deadly disease does not look like it does in movies, like Dark Victory, Beaches, or Terms of Endearment. The most ridiculous of these movies was Love Story, where Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal fall in love only to lose her to cancer.

When this film came out, I heard a comedian quip that she, “wanted to die from Ali McGraw’s Disease where you get lovelier and lovelier until you’re so beautiful you can’t stand yourself and you die.” Trust me, there is nothing beautiful about fighting cancer.

What started as a constant upset stomach turned increasingly painful. The doctors looked for food allergies and ulcers, but after months of scopes, scans and tests, found an inoperable tumor strangling a major artery on my wife, Glenda’s pancreas.

They gave us our options and she elected to take part in a clinical chemotherapy study. She thought this was the best course because it offered some hope and would be done in conjunction with regular chemotherapy. Of course, with the pandemic raging through the country I was not allowed to be with her during her treatment when I wanted desperately to be at her side.

We prepared for the worse, but the first two sessions did not go so bad. She had stomach pains, but at this point this was something she was used to enduring. After a few weeks, the chemo started hitting her like a sledge hammer wielded by the Incredible Hulk.

She tried to keep doing the things she had always done, but the cancer and the drugs sapped her energy and strength. She had to give up her daily walks when she became exhausted walking just a block or so on our street.

Glenda had trouble eating and most foods did not agree with her. She lost weight and her clothes no longer fit. After her third week of chemo, her hair brush began filling with clumps of hair and she made an appointment to have her head shaved.

For most of her life, Glenda has slept very little, she went to bed late and rose early, supplementing this with the occasional five minute naps through the day. Now she spends much of the day in bed or sleeping in her recliner.

We are lucky to have a team of highly educated and very skilled doctors in the trenches fighting the cancer. The problem is the battleground in this war is my wife’s body. Every week seems to bring on new indignities, like the plagues Moses called down upon the Pharaoh. We never know if a new symptom is a result of the disease or a side effect of the treatment. 

A week or so ago, Glenda’s feet began to swell and she could no longer wear her shoes. They began to develop white spots and became painful to the touch making walking difficult. When she called her oncologist he told her to go to the emergency room.

They decided to admit her when they discovered that her blood pressure was dangerously low. It would return to normal when she was given a blood transfusion and then drop again. This indicated a bleed somewhere requiring more scopes and tests. Again, they didn’t know if it was the disease or the “cure” that was creating the problem.

After a week, they decided to give her a few more prescriptions and to release her. She is now up to taking 27 different medications every day. When I picked her up she was worse off than when I had dropped her off. Her swelling was worse and she could barely walk.

Today, my wife actually found something that gave her some relief for her suffering, our son and his family came to visit bringing dinner and a much needed break in our routine of doctors and drugs. This is a rare treat since the quarantine has been in place.

We spread out in the living room, properly masked and socially distanced. My wife wanted me to pick up Mexican food for her birthday, but she wound up in the hospital instead. Our son brought a veritable fiesta with him from a local restaurant. Glenda enjoyed her meal and miraculously it did not trouble her stomach a bit. We spent several hours talking about how they have been spending their time and how my grandson feels about starting high school remotely. We laughed and reminisced, it was a perfect afternoon.

I don’t know if it was the company or the new medications, but by the evening my wife was feeling better. The swelling was down and she was able to walk a little better. She took a nap after our company left, but got up and we watched some television and talked. It almost seemed like a normal evening.

I have always loved and admired my wife. I have known how tough she is since I watched her give birth to our daughter. If men had to deliver the children the world would be a lot less crowded. I don’t believe that if our positions were reversed that I could face what she has been facing with so much courage and grace.

She has always been the source of my strength and an amazing example to our children. Even with the problems we are facing now, I have to say I have been a lucky man to have found such an incredible woman.

- Jim Busch

August 8, 2020

I have not been myself for the last few days. I have been feeling tired and lazy. Usually, I am busy from the moment I get up until I go to bed at night, working on one project or the next. I have many interests, so I usually have something to do most every moment of the day.

The last few days, I have spent a lot of my time sitting on the couch and watching television. I even took a long nap today, something that I seldom do unless I have the flu or some other ailment.

Today, I realized what has been wrong with me, I have been feeling terribly homesick. This might seem to be an odd diagnosis, since I have spent the last week in my home. Except for a few trips to the store or to run other errands, I have spent my time in the house where I have lived for over four decades.

The same house where I raised my children and the house where many of the happiest memories of my life took place. Though I have been laying my head down on my own pillow, this week it just has not felt like home.

Glenda, my wife, has been in the hospital for the last five days. Because of concerns over spreading the coronavirus, I have not been able to see her since I watched an orderly roll her away from me in a wheelchair last Monday.

Over the years, we have spent very few nights apart from one another. Sometimes, I would be gone for a few days on a business trip. On a few occasions, when our kids were young, my wife would take them on vacation with her parents. These separations were planned and had a scheduled end date.

Once the kids were grown, Glenda started accompanying me on business trips and we expanded them into mini vacations. Even a generic hotel room with bad art on the walls felt like home when she was with me.

There is an old song that goes:

Home is where the heart is.

And my heart is anywhere you are.

Anywhere you are is home.

This is the perfect description of how I feel. My definition of home is where I feel loved and wanted. It is the place that houses the things that are most precious to me.

Our house will never grace the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. It is a small frame house that was never particularly well designed and is showing its age. Many years ago, my wife and her mother went to see the film, The Remains of the Day.” My mother- in- law was discussing the manor house where the film took place, Darlington Hall.

I suggested that like English gentry we name our ancestral home. I christened our very humble abode “Tumbledown Manor,” a name that perfectly suits it. Our home lacks many of the amenities that many home buyers today consider essential, but there is no where I would rather be and there is no one I would rather share it with than my wife.

Our home was built by my wife’s grandfather ninety three years ago. For most of those nine decades it housed multiple generations of the family. My mother-in law and her siblings grew up here and when she got married she moved in with her husband. They raised their children, including my wife, here with their grandparents under the same roof.

We repeated this story when we moved in with our kids a generation later. Eventually, my wife’s parents grew old and they passed away peacefully in the bedroom my wife and I now occupy. I was with both of them when they passed and it was a moving experience.    

Few people get the privilege of departing this world from their own home surrounded by their loved ones these days. Most of us die in a sterile medical environment hooked up to wires and tubes and surrounded by strangers in scrubs. When my in-laws passed away, it was a much more intimate experience. They left the world while their daughter held their hand and their family gathered around.

I don’t claim to know what happens when we die, but I do believe in the existence of the human soul. At the moment of death, the body changes, it is like being in a room when the power goes out, everything gets dark and quiet.

My in-laws both passed away after extended illnesses, they had been bedfast and unable to communicate, barely holding on to a spark of life. Their skin faded to a pasty white and their breathing grew shallow, yet they were still the people we loved.

When death came for them, these people we loved were instantly transformed. It was almost like the scenes in the old movies when the soul left the body and floated up to heaven. One second they were there and the next they were not.

I think of our home as a member of our family. It has keep us warm and comfortable for generations. I think some of the living and loving that took place inside our home has been absorbed by its walls and floors.

For me, my wife is the soul of our home. When she is not there it is a sad place and I just want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. I’m feeling much better today, much more like myself. All I needed was a dose of “Vitamin G.”

This afternoon I brought Glenda home from the hospital. She is tired and slept most of the day in her chair, but she is here. I don’t know what I will do if I ever lose her, but I do know this, without her I will never feel at home anywhere in this wide world.

- Jim Busch

August 7, 2020

I had a long telephone call with my old friend, Ralph, today. He is suffering what may be one of the most common side effects of the coronavirus pandemic, he is desperately lonely. After months of being “restricted to quarters,” he is starting to go a little bit nuts.

Ralph and I met at work years ago. He, like me, worked in the advertising sales department of a newspaper. Since our jobs required constantly talking to strangers and building relationships with customers, a career in sales tends to attract a lot of extroverts.

People who like to be alone need not apply. Salespeople have to do a lot of things today, they have to design ads, enter orders into computer systems and keep track of their accounts. All of these activities are job requirements, but this is not what sales people get paid to do. Sales people are only compensated for one thing, having substantive conversations about their products with people who have the need for them and the money to buy them.

Ralph is a natural extrovert, but I am not. Even as a child he was friendly and outgoing, I was shy and liked to be alone. He came from a big Italian family and a raucous household, most of my childhood was spent by myself with older quiet parents.

Ralph is a natural salesman and was drawn to a selling career. I chose a sales career because it was one of the few ways I could make a living with a liberal arts degree. I had to fake it until I made it. I put on a big smile and an extroverted attitude, just like I put on a suit and tie before I went to work each morning.

Since I had a growing family, I was very motivated to be the best salesperson I could be. I played the role of a hardworking, positive thinking, hand shaking, and aggressive super salesperson so well that I was surprised I wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.     

Ralph and I each lost our jobs about four and a half years ago in a major corporate downsizing. Though I was planning to work a few more years, once the news sunk in, I looked at my finances and realized that with the buyout I received, that quitting a few years early would not put much of a crimp in my lifestyle. It turned out that the “bad news” was the best news I could get. I would finally be able to pursue all of my many interests and best of all I could sleep in every day.

One of the things I had faked for so long was that I was an “early bird gets the worm” kind of person. The truth is that I am a night owl who loves to sleep in late. For the first time in decades, I was able to pull the covers over my head when the sun rose and blissfully roll over and go back to sleep.

Once retired, my ideal day was to get up late, eat a leisurely brunch and either go to my study to read or to my workshop/studio to putter around and work on projects. On other days, I would take long quiet walks in the woods. It turns out that I have a real talent for idleness.

My friend Ralph has had a much harder time adjusting to retirement. Though he is a few years older than me, he was not ready to call it quits. He missed his customers and his coworkers. He soon found a job at his local Applebee’s restaurant as a greeter. He loved his new job, he liked the young wait staff and chatting with the guests as he led them to their tables. He was making a few dollars, but more important, he got to work with lots of people again.

All went well until the coronavirus struck the U.S. Like the rest of the restaurant industry, Ralph’s Applebee’s was forced to close for the duration of the lockdown. He was stuck at home. Since his wife was still going out to work most of the time, Ralph found himself alone most of the time. During this time, he also developed some other health problems that compromised his immune system, so when he was eventually called back to work, he had to stay home.

Ralph told me that he feels like he has been put in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He admits that he has a comfortable cell equipped with cable TV and a fully stocked kitchen. He told me he understood why men confined to solitary confinement go mad.  He said that the only time he had been out of the house, other than for doctor’s appointments in the last month, was a quick trip to fill his wife’s gas tank while she was getting ready for work.

Ralph’s prison uses something much stronger than iron bars to keep him locked up. He is confined by fear, his own and his family’s concerns about the possibility of contracting the virus. He is wisely being careful, he has several conditions which could prove fatal if he would be exposed to the virus.

On one occasion, he did slip out to the grocery store properly masked and hyper vigilant about staying away from the other patrons. When his wife and son learned about his excursion, they jumped all over him for taking the risk. To be fair, they are concerned about his health. They don’t want to lose him. They don’t realize his need for human contact.

We discussed various strategies for getting together for lunch. One suggestion was to pick up a pizza, place it in the middle of a picnic table at a local park with each of us grabbing a slice and retiring to our neutral corners, like boxers between rounds. The recent 90 degree weather and his family’s tight leash make this plan somewhat unrealistic. We are hoping that maybe we can do this once the weather gets a little cooler.

Ralph thanked me for maintaining our long distance friendship during the pandemic. He lamented how he has lost touch with the people we used to work with at the paper. I have to admit that though there are several of our former coworkers that I interact with on Facebook, I don’t talk with any of our old friends.

He said that even though he has only been gone from the restaurant for a few months, he doesn’t speak to anyone from Applebee’s. I’ve seen this same thing play out many times during my life. Someone retires or takes a new job and everyone promises to keep in touch, but they don’t.

There are people that I went to school with for 12 years and who I thought would be my friends forever. Most of them I have not seen or spoken to in fifty years. Our work friendships are situational relationships, they represent the bonds we form when we are thrown together with other people to accomplish a particular task. Once that reason is removed, the friendships wither like a plant that has been uprooted.

Ralph and I have managed to maintain our friendship because we have many interests in common. Even before we retired, we often got together outside of work. I am weathering the pandemic much better than my friend because I am still involved in a number of organizations that let me interact with other human beings. I belong to several writing groups, as well the history center and some arts organizations.

I worry about people like Ralph who are isolated because of the pandemic, as well as their age and health. Every day we see the damage this disease does to the human body, we see the mounting death toll on the evening news.

The damage to our psyches is harder to measure. If we learn anything from this terrible pandemic it should be the importance of staying in contact with one another and showing we care.    

- Jim Busch

August 6, 2020

You can tell where I was born and raised when I say that I spent the bulk of the day “Redding up my office.” I was doing what museums euphemistically call deaccession.

Deaccession is a fifty cent word for getting rid of stuff. It involves sorting through one’s possessions and deciding what items can be discarded. Museums ostensively do this to make room so they can add new pieces to their collection.

Usually the real reason for deaccessioning pieces of art is purely financial. It is a way for the curators to convert pieces of art that have fallen out of favor with the public into ready cash to cover budget shortfalls or to buy newer pieces.

I needed to get rid of some of my things because I am a bit of a hoarder. I tend to collect quantities of the things that interest me. Since I have many interests, I end up with a lot of stuff. My collection of books is second only to Carnegie Library.

I tell myself that I do not need any more books but I am drawn to book sales like a flock of pigeons to a newly washed car. I tell myself, “I am just going to look, what harm could it do?” I try to resist but somehow I find myself looking at the book shelf at the Goodwill store or at a library sale.

If I have to go to Monroeville for some errand, my car seems to steer itself to the Half Price Books store in Holiday Center. Once there I enter the store and walk to the bargain books section like a zombie looking for some nice juicy brains.

My eclectic tastes mean I almost always find a volume that I need for my collection. I come home bearing books on art, on history, books on philosophy, biographies and how-to books on painting, writing, woodwork or some other thing I would like to try. I am also drawn to retro titles from the ‘50s and ‘60s that show how much our culture has changed over the years.

I recently found a paperback titled Entertaining at home that features such gems as how to hold a Polynesian party for adults complete with instructions for making grass hula skirts and coconut shell bras. I find the vintage photos absolutely delightful and you never know when my wife might want to host a luau.

I also have files and files of articles and clippings which I tell myself are for research. While I do use these when I am writing articles, the main reason I have so many is that I put them away because I always seem to be too busy to read them at the moment. I keep adding them to my big “read someday” pile.

Going through the piles of files is like an archaeologist shifting through layers of dirt to determine what era an artifact dates from. I can do the same, today I threw out a large number of articles on various aspects of building construction. These were part of the research I conducted when designing my workshop/studio.

This project was completely slightly over two years ago, so I decided they could go. I also found reading material I had collected as background material for articles I planned to write, many of them on subjects that I’ve already published or abandoned long ago. I pity my garbage man this week because my recycle bin is going to weigh a ton.    

I also have a tall stack of tablets and notepads covered by scribbled quotations collected from my reading. There is nothing I enjoy more that well worded sentence or pithy epigram. I have been collecting them since I was in elementary school. For years I have tried to create an efficient system of organizing them into categories. I have tried to set up files and binders but I always have trouble deciding how to categorize them.

I suppose I could learn how to set up data base so that they could be cross referenced but I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to computers. I like to see things down in black and white on paper.  This is another “someday” project.

Occasionally my addiction to hoarding goes into remission. A sudden urge to organize comes over me and I start throwing things away. Today was one of those days. I think this behavior was triggered by the fact that there was not one square inch of uncluttered space on any flat surface in my office. The shelves were also filled beyond capacity with files and books squeezed into every possible nook and cranny.  It was time to clear the decks for action.

My wife is in the hospital so I set up a box for recycled papers in our living room. Next to this I started a pile to take to Half Price Books to sell. I also set up several piles for books that I wanted to give to my friends.

By evening I had cleared away two large boxes of recycling and four large boxes of books to sell. I could actually see the top of my desk. It’s made from brown plastic that looks like it is made from walnut, who knew? I even had about 14 inches of empty shelf space. This is just short of a miracle.

As I squared things away, I decided that I needed to get serious about my deaccessioning program. If I live to be 100-years-old, which is not likely given my dissolute lifestyle, I could never read everything that I have squirreled away. This is assuming that I stopped bringing new books home, which is also not likely to happen. Like the museums, I need to start curating my possessions, deciding what I want to actually read and discarding the rest.

I do not want to leave this task to my children. With all the stuff I have collected I’m considering telling them that I want a Viking funeral. All they will have to do is rent a backhoe, haul the books to that backyard, lay me on top of the pile, use the files as kindling and send me off to bookworm Valhalla.

It’s the perfect solution, they won’t have to pay for a cremation, they won’t have to deal with all my books and I will get to spend eternity drinking mead in Odin’s library and discussing Chaucer with the other mighty book lovers.

That may be a bit extreme and probably would not go over well with the neighbors, so I guess I just need to spend a few more days getting rid of my stuff. It’s time to realize that I’m running out of “somedays.”      

- Jim Busch   

August 5, 2020

I am glad that I no longer have young children. With the Coronavirus killing a thousand people a day, I am not sure how I would handle the decision whether to send my kids back to school this fall.

The decision parents face has become so politicized that it has forced parents into two widely opposed camps. Extremists on both the right and the left are telling them that they “must” choose one option or the other for the “good” of their children.   

There is a quote that I have seen attributed to both Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken. I think it describes the world we live in today to a “T.” Here’s how it goes, “For every complex problem there is a solution that is clear, simple and WRONG!”

Maybe it’s because we are always in a hurry and look for answers to our questions that fit neatly into a soundbite or a tweet. Americans no longer seem to appreciate nuance. We want everything to be black or white with no hint of grey in between. If I am a Democrat I am supposed to believe that everything the Republicans do is not only wrong, but that it is evil. If

I am a Republican, I am supposed to believe that the left has sold their souls to the devil. We are not supposed to listen to anything the opposition says. We already “know” that what the other side has to say is wrong, even if it happens to make sense to us.         

The divide keeps getting wider and wider with both sides circling their wagons as far away from the opposing tribe as possible. Social distancing didn’t begin with the pandemic. For years a lot of people were distancing themselves from anyone who disagreed with their viewpoint.

They would not discuss issues with anyone who did not share their worldview. People narrowed their view of the world until they became laser focused on one issue. If I was passionate about an issue it became the locus of my identity.

Some people saw themselves as “Second Amendment Patriots” and others marched against gun violence, but they never discuss the issue with the other side. Compromise became a dirty word. Any solution that did not give me everything I wanted was completely unacceptable. Meeting the opposition in the middle is for losers. It is all or nothing, my way or the highway if we want to be winners.

In the current environment, winning is having things our way and has become more important than being right. Finding a compromise solution that all parties can live with is not a desirable outcome. Beating the enemy is the goal no matter who gets hurt.

I have been watching this battle play out on social media with both sides predicting dire consequences if they didn’t get their way. Back in the days of the Vietnam war, I heard a proverb from that war torn country that went, “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” I am afraid as the elephant and donkey fights over this issue, it is our children that will get trampled.

I have never been a fan of distance learning. As a sales trainer I have conducted online meetings with widely separated groups. I have even helped develop curriculum for web based computer learning. These were expedients that were necessary to save time or reduce costs. I never felt that they were as effective as face to face training in helping the students absorb the lessons being taught.

I am sure that this is even worse for school aged children with limited attention spans. A skilled teacher can see when a student is struggling and will give them personal attention. With a teacher in the room, students may feel more comfortable asking questions or admitting they don’t understand something. There is no doubt that putting a teacher in a room together with a small group of students is the best way to help our children learn.

This does not mean that I support sending all our children back to school this fall. Providing a quality education for its children should be a high priority for any nation. Nothing should be more important than protecting the health and lives of our children. We must protect our future. I am not convinced that it is safe for our children to go back to a traditional classroom. This disease has fooled us before. We have thought we had it under control and then, when we let down our guard, it came back with a vengeance.

Major League Baseball has tried to break quarantine and play a limited number of games. They instituted a wide range of safety protocols including playing games in empty stadiums, regular testing and enforced social distancing.

Despite these precautions several teams have had players contract the disease forcing them to cancel games. Professional sports teams have far greater resources at their disposal than our schools. Their players are adults and more likely to understand and comply with the safety measures than school age children.

I am not sure that schools will be able to guarantee the safety of their students. A school in Georgia which opened less than two weeks ago has already sent a classroom full of kids home due to an outbreak. Arguments that children are immune to Covid-19 are proving false. Nine children under age of 18 have died from the disease in Florida.

Some school opening proponents have pointed to an increased rate of teen suicides during the quarantine period. They make the case that being isolated from their friends is a root cause of this sad statistic. It is impossible to know how going to school where one might be exposed to a life threatening disease would affect student’s mental state. Perhaps we need to invest more money on mental health services.

Opponents of returning to the classroom fear that schools might become hotspots for the disease. They are concerned that students might carry the disease home to their families. I just read about a 16-year-old boy who lost both parents to Covid-19. Imagine a scenario where a child brings the coronavirus into their home causing the death of a loved one. How might that affect the child’s future mental health?

I have to admit that I don’t have a solution to this dilemma. I am happy that my son and his wife have decided to keep my grandson at home and let him study online. This is his first year in high school. He is going to miss out on a lot of experiences and memories that we all share from our high school years but I am glad he will be safe.

There are several things I do know. I know that we will never find a solution to this problem if we do not talk to one another. I do know that if we refuse to work together, sharing ideas and considering different points of view that we will never get through this thing. I know that denying that this disease puts our children at risk will cause needless deaths.

This pandemic is a world changing event. It has touched every aspect of our lives. I hope that it will also change us for the better. I hope it will remind us that we need to work together, to listen to one another and to respect one another’s opinions.

Our species has survived many existential threats from cave bears to nuclear weapons. We often hear about the survival of the fittest but the evidence points in another direction. The secret of our success can be attributed to “the survival of the most flexible.” Our ability to cooperate with one another was more important to the rise of the human race than our big brains and opposable thumbs.

The great question of the coronavirus era just might be, “can’t we all just get along?”

- Jim Busch

August 4, 2020

Today was a wordless day for me. My wife is in the hospital with an infection related to her treatment for pancreatic cancer. With no visitors allowed in the hospital, my only contact with her was two brief phone calls.

With the infection, the cancer and the drugs they’ve given her, she obviously wasn’t in the mood to talk much. My only other human contact today was with my daughter in law who picked me up at the repair garage where I dropped my car off for inspection. We mostly talked about my wife’s treatment during the five minute car ride home.

I have been called a lot of things in my life but “a man of few words” is not one of them. I like talking with people and learning about what makes them tick. I dabble in a lot of things, I like to draw and paint, do some wood carving and woodwork. I have even done some blacksmithing and I am teaching myself to weld so I can do some sculpture. I am not particularly good at any of these things but I have mastered my one true artistic calling - the art of conversation.

Good talkers have always fascinated me. I grew up with people who knew how to tell a good story and how to use the English language to good effect. Except for the occasional errant hammer blow to the thumb, I never heard profanity come from elder’s mouths. In the world I grew up in, colorful language was not a euphemism for speech laced with “f-bombs.”

it meant language enhanced with unique turns of phrase and packed with delightful imagery. If someone was tired and worn out from working outside on a hot day, my grandfather would tell them they looked like, “they had been rode hard and put away wet.”  When my dad came in from cutting grass and wanted a beer, he didn’t ask for an opener, he said he needed a “Church Key.”

My family did not speak what is now called Pittsburghese. Our accent was far more Appalachian. My grandfather was likely to say something like, “I reckon I’ll go up the holler a ways and fetch a poke of hickory nuts home.” Even today phrases like “I reckon” and “redd up” still sneak into my English major mouth. I also tend to use folksy witticisms like, “The grass maybe greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.”

I was the kid whose hand always shot up when the teacher asked a question. I liked to hear myself talk. While most kids dreaded reading a report in front of the class, I looked forward to it. I would practice at home until I could almost do it from memory.

Most people have a natural fear of public speaking but I fear not being asked to speak. My mother sat me down in front of the TV to watch Dr. Martin Luther King deliver his “I have a dream” speech when I had just turned eleven. I did not really understand what he was talking about, we only knew one black family at that time, but I was impressed by the power of his words. I was impressed that he could hold the attention of so many people when I couldn’t keep a fifth grade class engaged for five minutes.

In high school I took part in every class discussion. Mr. Mitchell, my current events and government teacher, used to take advantage of this. He would pull me aside before class and tell me what side of the day’s discussion he wanted me to take. This usually meant going against the majority of my classmates and often my personal opinion on the subject.

During a discussion on legalization of marijuana he asked me to defend the criminalization of pot. This was 1969, so most 17 year olds were on the other side of this issue. Even though I neither drank nor did any drugs, I thought pot should be legal on purely libertarian grounds. This didn’t stop me from defending draconian drug laws like I was a fifty year-old Georgia sheriff.

As I got older I studied the art of communication. I am not sure if I knew there was such a thing as a “Communications Major” so I studied literature. On my own, I read Dale Carnegie’s books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking. Later I became a devotee of Rudolf Fleish and read, The Art of Plain Talk followed by The Art of Readable Writing.

I paid attention to people I thought were great communicators. I admired John and Bobby Kennedy, as well as Dr. King and James Baldwin. When I took my wife to see An Evening with Mark Twain, I absolutely fell head over heels in love with Hal Holbrook’s portrayal of America’s greatest storyteller. I have modeled my own speaking style on a combination of Twain and business guru Tom Peters. Whenever I watched someone give a speech I paid as much to their delivery of the material as I did to the material itself.

It is no wonder that I chose a career as a professional talker. I worked as a sales person, a sales manager, a sales trainer and as a public speaker. I would secretly record my business conversations and analyze them later in order to improve my skills. I continued to read and practice. I gained a reputation of being able to engage anyone in conversation. As a sales trainer, the reps I worked with would take me on calls to businesses where the owner would not give them the time of day.

On one occasion, a used car dealer would not talk to our sales rep. We called on him and, as expected, he said he was too busy to talk. As we turned to go, I saw a photo on the wall and asked, “Is that you with Senator Barry Goldwater?” He stopped what he was doing and told us about working on the 1964 presidential campaign.

This opened the flood gates and we talked for almost two hours before leaving with a six month advertising commitment. I told my rep that until you say something interesting, you are an interruption.    

Since retirement, most of my conversations have been with my wife. After fifty years together, we can complete one another’s sentences. My wife is as taciturn as I am verbose. I like to talk and she likes to listen, it’s truly a match made in heaven.

One of the things I’m proud of is that my wife often tells people, “Just about every day, Jim says something that completely surprises me.” I am glad that she’s never become bored with me.

Sometimes I will say something so weird and so far off the wall that my usually quiet wife will let out a big laugh. For some reason, this often happens when she is drinking a glass of milk which winds up coming out her nose. I hate to admit it but I think she is really cute with milk streaming out of both nostrils.

Today I doubt that I spoke a hundred words. After a lifetime of flapping my gums, I fear I am entering a quiet time in my life. Between the quarantine and my wife’s illness, I find myself spending a lot of time alone these days. This makes me a little sad but I think I will adapt to my situation. Perhaps I have become a “man of few words” after all.

- Jim Busch

August 3, 2020

I am one of the lucky men who got to marry a younger woman. I was born on June 19, 1952 and my wife, Glenda, was born on August 3, 1952. This means that I am exactly 45 days older than my wife.

August 3rd has always been special to me. It is the one day a year that I could unilaterally spoil my wife. On our anniversary, on Valentine’s Day or at Christmastime we exchanged gifts and did nice things for the family and for each other. Her birthday was the one day in the year that I could spoil her.

My wife and I went on our first date in October 1970 and spent every possible minute together since then. That means that this is the 49 year that I have celebrated her birthday. I remember the very first birthday present I bought for her. I went to Sears and bought her a bright orange sweater. It was tight and form fitting so it wasn’t exactly an altruistic gift.

Even in those tie dyed days my wife preferred earth tones to bright colors. The one exception to this rule was her big floppy purple hat which reminded her of one that Janis Joplin wore. She did wear the orange sweater because I bought it for her and she knew that I liked it. The vision of her in that sweater and bell bottom jeans with her long blonde hair streaming from under her purple hat down to her waist is a memory that I cherish to this day.

Over the years I tried to find gifts that I knew she would enjoy. This was more difficult than it sounds. She is not that interested in clothes and does not wear jewelry. I don’t take gift buying lightly. I believe in buying gifts that the recipient will enjoy.

A gift should be something that they would not purchase for themselves and it should be perfectly suited to their personality. When it is a gift for someone you love, it should show how much you care and how well you know them. A gift should show that you pay attention and understand their wants and needs.

Most of all a gift should be a surprise. Whether we are 9 or 90-years old, the anticipation of receiving a gift and the thrill of being surprised are an important part of the experience.

Record albums were always a good choice, my wife has always liked music. She started out with albums, dabbled in eight tracks for a while and then went to CD’s. She never got into cassettes or downloaded music and finally went back to vinyl in recent years. This has helped me out as I am often to find some great out of print albums at Half Price Books or library sales.

Books and magazine subscriptions worked as my wife likes to read. Ever the practical woman, in recent years she told me to stop buying these as they were available at the library. Every few years I could replace her Birkenstock sandals. These are her preferred footwear and these imported sandals are one of the few luxuries she allows herself. The only thing that keeps her from wearing these year round is the fear of losing a toe to frostbite when the snow gets too deep in the winter.

Though my wife tries to eat healthy, she does have a weakness for certain types of candy. She likes marshmallow “Circus Peanuts,” but only if you squeeze one through the bag to make sure they are soft. My wife also like chocolate malted milk balls especially the ones made by the Sarris Candy Company.

For many years I always got her some sort of provocative lingerie. Again this wasn’t the most altruistic gift but this was not purely a selfish one either. A woman who works hard and is busy raising children sometimes needs reminded that she is still beautiful and desirable. I wanted her to know this is how I felt.   

As time went on and our finances improved I started giving her experiences as gifts. I would take off work on her birthday and just the two of would go away. Sometimes we would go just for the day, take in a movie and have a nice dinner.

Other times we would go away for the weekend, though we usually saved this for our anniversary in September. Sometimes we would just get in the car and drive. In those halcyon days before the invention of the cell phone this gave us several blessed uninterrupted days just to talk to one another.

We are both diehard baby boomers, there is nothing that delights us more than cruising down the highway listening to music and talking about our plans for the future.

My wife and I are simple people. We never felt that buying a bigger house or driving a fancy car just to make us look more successful in the eyes of the neighbors made much sense. We’ve always agreed with the Chinese sage Lao Tzu’s statement, “The truly wealthy person is he who has enough.”

We had a roof over our head, food on the table and two wonderful children. We had enough. Rather than buy my wife more “stuff” for her birthday, I started buying tickets for concerts or shows she wanted to see. One year I bought her season tickets for the Pittsburgh Opera Theater. This was definitely not an altruistic gift as I am not a fan of opera. The joy on her face as we listened to the arias made it more than bearable. By the end of the season, I had come to appreciate what my wife saw in opera.

This year, Glenda’s birthday presented me with a serious problem. Her battle against pancreatic cancer has taken most of the joy from her life. The things that she needs now come from the pharmacy. In one day she takes 27 different pills and gives herself two different injections. Beyond taking her meds, most of her days are spent sleeping in bed or resting in her recliner. Her needs have been reduced to a pillow, a blanket and the contents of amber colored plastic bottles.

I still wanted to celebrate her birthday even if there was nothing she really needed. I bought her a few pieces of clothing suitable for longing and chemotherapy sessions, as well as a pillow to raise her swollen feet. I added a card, some scratch off tickets and a box of vanilla wafers, one of the few things her stomach still tolerates.

I wrapped these in festive “Happy Birthday” gift bags from the dollar store. She had made plans for me to go out and pick up a dinner from one of our favorite restaurants in lieu of our usual celebratory dinner out. This year we were going to celebrate “Birthday Light.” 

Even these greatly diminished plans proved overly ambitious. This morning she woke up with severe pains in both legs and was barely able to walk. Her feet were swollen and she was sick to her stomach. She called her doctor and he wanted her to go to the emergency room right away.

Our second visit this week. She got dressed and hobbled to the car. I drove her to Allegheny General Hospital and watched an orderly roll my wife into the hospital. Even on her birthday I could not accompany her into the building because of the continuing Covid-19 lockdown. A few hours later, she called me, said they were going to admit her for a series of IV antibiotics and told me to go home. 

For the first time in almost a half century I didn’t get to spend my wife’s birthday with her. As I write this I am looking at the gifts she was too weary to open this morning. I talked to her for a few minutes this evening but the morphine made even this a struggle for her.

I have never felt so alone in my life and looking at these simple gifts make me think of the gifts my wife has given me. Companionship, our children and most of all her love.       

- Jim Busch

August 2, 2020

Like just about everyone else, I have been spending a lot more “screen time” during the coronavirus lockdown. Since I am not the most digitally adept person, for me this means I have been watching more television.

Way back in 1961, FCC chief Newton Minnow famously declared television to be a “vast wasteland.” I can only imagine what Mr. Minnow, who is still very much alive at age 94, thinks about today’s television offerings.  That wasteland that was only a few channels wide when he made his remarks has expanded to include hundreds if not thousands of networks in the digital age.

I started thinking about this when Tough as Nails came on the TV after 60 Minutes tonight. In the scene I watched, the contestants on the show were building a fence. The team that finished the job first won the right to continue to the next stage of the game. 

I have built many fences over the years and have never considered this activity to be either dramatic or very visually interesting. The next task portrayed on the show was breaking up concrete with a sledge hammer and moving it to a dumpster.

The show featured the players discussing their strategy for gaining an edge on the competition. They talked about how they planned to break up and move the grey slab to win the prize. Perhaps if I had a host calling the play by play with each hammer blow when I took down the concrete porch that used to stand in front of my house, the job would have been much more interesting.   

I think reality television represents a low point of our civilization. I find it very sad that millions of years of innovation and creativity led us from the invention of fire to Edison’s light bulb to electronics so that millions of people can watch a group of duplicitous and coarse young people gossip about one another on the Jersey Shore. It makes one wonder if it was worth swinging down from the trees on to the African savannah in the first place.

It truly seems that evolution made a distinct u-turn with the invention of the television. Television is a wonderful means of communication, the ultimate way to do “show and tell.” The combination of words, music and images is one of the most effective ways to tell a story and educate large numbers of viewers.

Pittsburgh’s own Fred Rogers proved this. Unfortunately of the programs on television today are far more interested in picking your pocket than in being your neighbor. TV producers use content designed to appeal to our basest instincts to attract viewers to their advertiser’s messages.

This is nothing new, there have been low brow programs since the earliest days of the medium. The people that created these shows knew what they were doing. Gilligan’s Island used two beautiful woman, unlikely situations and slapstick comedy to attract viewers.

The producers of this show were well aware that they were firmly planted in vast wasteland which is why they named the castaway’s boat after the head of the FCC, the S.S. Minnow. The difference was that the networks of the past also produced a considerable amount of high quality programming to appeal to the better angels of our nature.

Programs like Playhouse 90 and Omnibus showcased the best work of American writers and performing artists. I recently watched a series of Omnibus shows featuring Leonard Bernstein teaching lessons on music theory and history. I learned more from these shows than I did in all the music classes I took in all my years at school.

This show was far from boring, presenting the material in an entertaining format. American television regularly featured programs on ballet, symphonies and other performing arts. Shows like The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Twilight Zone and Playhouse 90 hired the best writers in the country to pen stories to be portrayed by our best actors. These TV dramas featured well-known names like Charles Laughton, George Raft and Jessica Tandy as well as upcoming actors like Robert Redford and Elizabeth Montgomery.

As the pursuit of excellence lost out to the pursuit of the almighty dollar, these sophisticated programs were canceled to make room for The Beverly Hillbillies, Three’s Company and Alf. We were even treated to the amusing story of life in a Nazi prison camp by Hogan and his happy heroes.

There were a few rays of light, the original Star Trek series had some thought provoking story lines, but most TV programming was going the way of Hee-Haw. PBS was protected from the spreading virus of commercialism by their reliance on private and public funding.

The coming of cable TV with its many channels promised to bring a new golden age of television programming. The Arts and Entertainment network, known as A & E, featured performances and documentaries from all over the world. Their programs included museum tours and biographies of great artists.

The new History Channel had documentaries on archeology, world history and stories documenting our own nation’s culture. This lasted a few years until the quest for a bigger share of the market dumbed down these channels. Ballet gave way to true crime.

A quick scan of A & E’s programming for this week shows they now subscribe to the “if it bleeds, it leads” school of journalism. They run a remarkable number of programs about grisly murders complete with bloody crime scene film footage. There is not a ballet slipper or paintbrush to be seen.

The History Channel’s main focus these days is conspiracy theories about Ancient Aliens and on eccentric Pawn Shop owners. Stories about the history of ancient Rome is apparently far less profitable than tales of moonshiners with long beards and missing teeth. 

Like aborigines scratching out a living out in the barren desert, it is possible to find a few programs on TV that will not massacre our brain cells. There are a few bright spots on the networks like the Pittsburgh-based drama, This is Us. PBS still manages to produce great programs despite the efforts of politicians to starve them out of existence.

Occasionally the Ovation Channel runs some excellent programs. Some of the basic cable channels allow viewers to travel back in time to the programming of yesteryear. Right now the programs saved on my DVR include an Alfred Hitchcock show, The Twilight Zone and several Have Gun - Will Travel episodes for me to watch.

Bad television has a lot in common with the coronavirus. It is everywhere and it is infectious. With time on our hands, it is easy to be drawn in to watching people conspire to each vote each other off the island on Survivor. This is a waste of our time and does nothing to make us better people.

Like wearing a mask to protect ourselves against Covid-19, we can use our ability to choose what we watch to protect ourselves from the entertaining but mind numbing garbage available on television. If we are careful and use our heads, we can keep both our bodies and our minds safe during this pandemic.   

- Jim Busch  

August 1, 2020

I have had many jobs in my life. I have worked in a grocery store, as a janitor, in a warehouse, a factory and a machine shop. I have repaired mechanical cash registers, sold valves and fittings and spent thirty years in advertising.

During my advertising career, I was an inside salesperson, an outside salesperson, a sales manager, a research consultant, and a sales trainer. I have also worked as a freelance writer and journalist and did some business consulting.

I am proud to say that I did pretty well at all of these professions, but I am not sure if I will be able to handle my latest job.

Glenda, my wife, is fighting stage four pancreatic cancer. She has always been a vibrant women and was always in motion. I have always considered myself a hard working individual but she put me to shame. I used to be able to work twelve to fourteen hours straight, but when I finally threw in the towel, she kept going like the Energizer Bunny.

When our kids were sick or a holiday was coming I would see her go for days on just an hour catnap in a chair. She repeated this feat of endurance, when she was much older, caring for her parents during their final illnesses. She has dedicated her life to caring for the people she loves.

My wife has taken good care of me for almost five decades. One of the reasons that I was able to be successful in my career was because she took care of everything else. She made managing our home an art and a science.

Now the shoe is on the other foot and I’m not sure if I am up to the task. We are reaching the point in her disease where I need to be the caregiver. I desperately want to be a good caregiver, but I have come to the realization that this is a new trick and that I am a very old dog.

It breaks my heart daily to see her in pain and spending her days in bed or sleeping in her recliner. My human dynamo of a wife has simply run out of energy. She refuses to give up. At this point she is still fixing most of my meals, she quite frankly does not trust me in “her” kitchen.

The fact that she is barely able to keep anything down makes me feel even worse about this arrangement. It is ironic that she has always been very conscious about eating a healthy diet. She gave up eating red meat decades ago and began buying organic food when this branded one as a “health nut.” I am more inclined toward a diet of donuts and Fritos. She worries that I will revert to a chocolate-based diet without her to police my food choices.

Lately, I have been saying I’m hungry for certain takeout foods like gyros, hoagies and buckets of chicken. This gives her a break from cooking so she can rest. I actually prefer her cooking to anything I could buy from any restaurant. I bought some entrees from the frozen food section. I thought I was capable of heating something up in the microwave but my wife did not.

I bought a frozen calzone, unwrapped it and was punching in the time on the oven’s control panel. My wife was resting but heard the electronic beeping noise, jumped out of bed and told me that I was, and I quote, “doing it all wrong!” I was not using the preheat settings properly. She told me to sit down and heated my dinner and served it to me before returning to bed.   

My wife has a real problem with letting go of all the things she is accustomed to doing. Because her immune system is severely compromised, the first thing she let me take over was the shopping. Detailed list in hand, I’ve been the designated shopper since the beginning of the pandemic. Since my wife was in the habit of picking out every piece of fruit like a New York diamond merchant selecting gems, I never get things quite right, but I do the best that I can.

Because of her health and the medications she’s on, Glenda has not been driving. Before she got ill, she did most of the driving when we were out. She told me that she wanted to give me a break from driving because I spent so much time behind the wheel at work.

The truth was she liked to drive and quite frankly she does not like the way that I drive. She is of the considered opinion that I, “drive like an old lady.” I have to admit that when she was behind the wheel we always seemed to take less time to reach our destination than when I’m driving. Now I’m the chauffeur for trips to the doctor and the hospital.  

Lately, my wife has been asking me to do little things for her. I bring her blankets and pillows, get her meds and ginger ale. Today, I actually convinced her to let me do the dishes. She stood by the sink as I insisted that she go to bed.

This doesn’t seem like a big thing in the modern world, but my wife and I had a very old fashioned marriage. For most of our lives, she did not work outside of the home. Her job was to take care of the family and the house, my job was to “bring home the bacon.”

I worked long hours, sometimes holding down two jobs while she was involved in the PTA and our kids other activities. As our kids grew, I thought that our arrangement should evolve allowing me to take on some of the chores. My wife refused to let me and would body block me like a linebacker if I tried to do the dishes.   

Tonight, I insisted on doing the dishes and for the first time I won the argument. I am trying to be more proactive about doing things around the house. I am sure as her disease progresses, I will take on more and more responsibilities. I hope I am up to the task. I am relatively healthy, so I am confident that I will have the physical strength to handle the task.

I do question if I possess the emotional strength to face what the next few months will bring. I have never been very good at letting go of things. I have always known that this time would come, I just didn’t expect it to come so quickly.

I am not prepared and I doubt that I have either the skills or the mental toughness to do what I know I will have to do in the coming months. The one thing I do know is that this is the hardest job I have ever taken on or ever will.  

- Jim Busch

July 31, 2020

I am a slob. If you looked up clutter in the dictionary you might see a picture of my office, my studio or my workshop. As I travel through life, I leave mounds of things behind me. This chaotic approach is evident in every aspect of my life, my clothes are generally disheveled, my hair always needs combed and my shoes need polished.

My outward appearance reflects the inner workings of my mind. Where most people have a “stream of conscience,” my mind is more like a “whirlpool of conscience.” My internal landscape looks a lot like the tornado scene at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. Thoughts swirl by in an unpredictable and random manner. I never know what is coming next.

I truly admire organized people, those “a place for everything and everything in its place” folks with clean desks and well organized minds. Bill, my last boss was one of these people, the only things on his desk were a computer, a phone, a photograph of his family and the file he was working on.

He made a point of only handling a piece of paper once. He passed it on, threw it out or only rarely, filed it for future reference. He would literally shudder when he walked into my office with its piles of paper and files filling every flat surface. He repeatedly told me that I should try to bring some order out of the landfill that was my workspace.

This is why Bill was always a little embarrassed when he had to ask me for something he needed. He would call me and say, “Do you have the such and such file,” or “Do you still have a copy of the blank memo from last June?” He would be even more embarrassed when I would walk into his office five minutes later with the requested item in my hand. Sometimes you need a packrat on your team.

Fortunately, the clutter gene in my personal genome is inextricably intertwined with another one that allows me to remember where I put everything. I can recall the contents of my many piles of things like an aborigine can recall every rock and waterhole in the Australian outback.

Though my slobbish tendencies have long driven my wife to exasperation, she too has learned to put my clutter recall to good use. When she wants to put something away for Christmas or someone’s birthday, she gives it to me knowing that I will be able to retrieve it when it is needed.

I am addicted to clutter. Like all addicts, I have good intentions to kick the habit in a mythical far off someday. For years I told myself, I am simply too busy with work to take the time to stow everything away properly. “Someday, when I’m retired I will get myself organized.”

I’ve been retired for four and a half years now and it still hasn’t happened. I had to come up with a fresh excuse. “Someday I’ll build a place for all my stuff. I just don’t have room for everything.” Three years ago I built a 700 square foot workshop studio with walls lined with pegboard plus plenty of drawers and cabinet space. When I first set up this space it was as neat and organized as the model shops pictured in my woodworking magazines. Within six months, it looked like it had been ransacked by a hopped up motorcycle gang with art supplies and tools piled everywhere.

Covid-19 robbed me of my last excuse. “Someday when things slow down, I will get myself organized!  Cross my heart and hope to die, as God is my witness, I’ll never be messy again!” Well, the coronavirus has proven me to be a liar once again.

The quarantine not only slowed things down, it brought them to a full stop. Now, I had all the time I needed to get my act together, so of course I made a bigger mess. I tried, I really did, but being stuck at home just prompted me to take on more projects. As always, each new project generated more clutter which I failed to clean up before moving on to my next adventure. I am incurable.

Every once and a while I get motivated to square things away. I channel my inner Marie Kondo. I dreamt of experiencing what the title of her book promised, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” For a few hours, I would plow through my stacks of papers filing some and throwing others away. I would go through my books, organizing them by subject and stacking them neatly.

I long ago ran out of space on my shelves. I usually ran out of steam after putting some tiny corner of my world in order. I would clear off the top of my desk or my workbench before getting distracted by the next project.

I have finally decided to embrace my chaotic nature. My hoarder ways has its benefits. During the lockdown with the bookstores and libraries closed, I was never in danger of running out of reading material. I was even able to keep some friends supplied with my surplus.

Whenever I need a bit of hardware or a part to complete a repair job or create something, I usually have it in my shop. If I want to write about a particular subject, my books provide all the research I need at least to get started. What other people see as clutter, I see as a strategic reserve of the things I need to live a full and creative life.

Vincent Van Gogh is my favorite artist. I have driven as far as 500 miles to look at one of his paintings. Few people realize that he was almost as talented with the pen as he was with a paintbrush. He wrote amazing letters to his brother and to his friends.

Van Gogh wrote a line that truly speaks to me, “The way to know life is to love many things.” This is why I keep so many things around me, I love them all, I love the clutter, it helps me understand my life.

Of course, “Someday, I may decide to get myself organized once and for all.”  

- Jim Busch

July 30, 2020

This is not the only diary I keep. I have kept all sorts of journals and diaries since I was quite young. I keep lists of the books I read, a list of projects I’ve under taken in my shop and even a scrap book of doodles and random sketches that I do on store receipts and other odd slips of paper.

My favorite journal is a small book Forbes Magazine. It is a five year diary with 366 pages, one for each day of the year and space for five short entries.

I started keeping this journal in 2017, so I know what I did on each of the days for the last four years. This book has made me realize how routine and boring my life really is. It is remarkable how similar my activities are from one year to the next. For example, I’ve cut my grass on each of the last four July 13.

Of course, my entries for 2020 are radically different from the previous years. Like everyone else, the coronavirus quarantine has definitely cramped my style.

I spent most of the last ten days at home. Most of my outings have been limited to grocery stores or taking my wife to medical appointments. During the same period in the last three years, I attended a performance of Much Ado About Nothing, enjoyed an ice cream sundae at Klavons in the Strip District and took my grandson to see Ant Man at the movie theater.

Other activities included hosting a publication party for the Loyalhanna Review, the literary magazine that my writer’s group, the Ligonier Valley Writers, has put out for the last 30 plus years. This year there was no party and no magazine due to the virus.

Last year, my wife and I took our grandson, Max, on a vacation to Lancaster and Gettysburg. We spent four days living in hotels, eating at restaurants and interacting with strangers from all over the world without a thought of social distancing or wearing a mask.

We ate dinner at the Maple Grove Buffet, they claim to be Pennsylvania’s largest, which now would be considered a suicide mission. We pushed our way through the crowds at the Lancaster Central Farmer’s Market for handmade hot pretzels in what we now know was a cloud of aerosol droplets chockfull of microbes.

The only time we were socially distanced during the entire trip was during our visit to Civil War Tails, a museum which features detailed diorama’s of scenes from the Civil War, where all the soldiers were replaced by tiny models of kitty cats.

There were brave Confederate kitties charging up the Union kitty’s defenses at Gettysburg. Models of the USS Monitor and the USS Merrimac warships were sailed by maritime kitties, tiny kitties in elegant gowns waltzed with dashing kitty officers in dress uniforms in the ballroom of an antebellum mansion. We did not have to worry about crowds there, because apparently not a lot of people share my grandson’s twin passions for cats and American history.

On July 28, 2017, I went to the Half Price Books annual clearance sale at the Monroeville Convention Center. The hall was packed with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of book lovers in search of bargains. Of course, as we stood shoulder to shoulder perusing the books we chatted about our favorite titles and authors.

Since the books were sorted by genres, the chances of finding someone who shared your own reading tastes was quite high. After watching computer animations of how far nasty viruses spread in crowds, I’m not sure I will feel comfortable in this type of environment ever again.

Last year on July 28, I covered Port Vue’s annual “It’s Fun to Be a Kid Day” for The Mon Valley Independent newspaper. I wandered around the borough park taking photographs and interviewing people enjoying the festivities. It was the 25th anniversary of this community’s celebration and the ball field was filled with rides, games and hundreds of happy families.

Many of the parents I spoke with shared cherished memories of attending the event with their parents, when they were kids themselves. This event had become a Port Vue tradition that people of all ages enjoyed and looked forward to every summer. Of course after a quarter century, the 2020 Fun to Be a Kid Day was canceled. I wonder if it will ever be held again even if the Coronavirus is eliminated.

If my five year diary ends up in some dusty archive, future historians writing about dining out at the end of the “Precovidian Era” will find it an invaluable resource. Since I enjoy nothing more than sharing a meal with my family or friends, my record includes references to many memorable meals.

These include Mexican meals at the Acapulco Restaurant or El Campesino and Chinese food at China Jade. Dick’s Diner in Murrysville and Ruthie’s in Ligonier make the diner list as does Drew’s in Forest Hills. I can’t imagine eating German food at the communal tables at Southside’s Hofbrau Haus these days.

Though retired, I still like to listen to the Marketplace business report on NPR. This week they interviewed an industry expert that said that 80% of American restaurants may not survive the enforced shut down needed to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

One restauranteur interviewed for the piece said that most small restaurants only make a profit when they are at 75 to 80% capacity. Even if they are allowed to reopen 25% of their tables, they will be forced to close.

Piper’s Pub features in many of my diary entries. It is one of my son’s favorite spots and I love their Yorkshire pudding. It is located in a long narrow old time storefront on Carson Street. If forced to space patrons six feet apart, I doubt that they could serve more than four people at a time. I think that the pandemic is going to change how we dine out for at least a decade, if not forever.

My mother in law used to say, “As we get older, the days get longer and the years go by faster.” Life moves so fast that sometimes we forget how we spend our days once they are gone. My five year journal helps keep track of the days as they pass. In these strange times, they help me realize how much the pandemic has changed the world.

I have a year and a half to go in my current diary and will start volume two when that is done. I am sure that when I look back over the pages in a few years, the 2020 entries are going to mark a major turning point in our lives.

- Jim Busch

July 29, 2020

My mantra lately seems to be “Hurry up and wait.” I always find myself waiting for something or someone, somewhere. I am either waiting in line at the store or waiting outside a doctor’s office or hospital for my wife.

At least today, I found myself in a comfortable waiting room at the Pep Boy’s auto service center. I was waiting to have new tires installed to replace the one I had destroyed the previous evening. As a connoisseur of waiting rooms, I could appreciate their air conditioning and the comfy, socially distanced leather arm chairs, television and modern plumbing.

As I sat there reading, my mind began to wander again back to the long lost halcyon days of last January. I added to my mental list of things I miss from that happy pre-Covid time. Like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string—before the pandemic, these were a few of my favorite things.

I miss chatting with perfect strangers. I have always enjoyed talking to people I encounter in stores or in line. This is a habit I learned from my dad, who would talk to anyone he met like they were a long lost friend. My wife is always amazed at how much I know about the people who wait on us when we are out.

My knowledge extends to their children, their pets and their hobbies. This is because I am genuinely interested in the people I meet and in their lives. She is also amazed at the number of places that give me an employee discount. People like to be noticed and enjoy rewarding those who do. The wearing of masks and the distance we must maintain between each other makes these interactions virtually impossible.

In a similar vein, I miss eavesdropping. It is probably impolite, but I like to listen in on the conversations of others. It is part of my lifelong quest to understand the human race. I like to observe how people treat one another and how others react to what we say and do.

Before I retired, my job required me to spend a lot of time writing. I often would set myself up at a table in Panera and watch and listen to the folks who came and went at the tables around me. I have won a number of fiction writing contests and often was told that I write realistic dialogue. This is because I try to absorb the rhythm and sound of others’ speech.

I once overheard a man, who was dressed in a suit, sitting in a back booth at Panera. He was angrily talking to someone on the phone about a lawsuit. At first I thought that he was talking to a business associate, but kept listening and learned that he was divorced and was speaking to his estranged adult son. He was angry at the beginning of the call, but was crying at the end as his emotions got the better of him. Hemingway could have written an entire novel about this single overheard phone call.

I miss intimate family dinners at the China Jade restaurant. This little family restaurant has been a favorite spot of our family for years. The people there know us and make us feel like we’re long absent friends when we go there. Since the pandemic took hold, I have had China Jade takeout several times, but as I find myself saying this a lot anymore, “ it’s just not the same.”

For some reason, eating Chinese food is a very social activity. Maybe it’s the oversized portions or the variety of different dishes available, but eating Chinese inspires people to share food at the table. This in turn breaks down barriers and leads to good conversation and laughter.

Summertime is usually a season full of music and drama for my wife and me. We usually take full advantage of the free outdoor concerts and plays that grace the local parks in the warmer months. On Fridays, we would pick up a bucket of chicken or a pizza and head to South Park for the Allegheny County Summer Concert season.

Sometimes the bands weren’t very good, but the night was warm and the company was good. We would sit in our folding chairs, eat, talk and listen to the music. We saw Don McClean there and hearing him do Starry Starry Night live is one of my favorite memories, as was seeing Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie in concert at Hartwood Acres.

One of the highlights of our summers is always the performances of the Poor Yorick Players. This dedicated troupe of amateur actors would perform two different Shakespeare plays, a tragedy or a history play and a comedy, every summer at the Tall Trees Amphitheater in the Monroeville Park.

These free shows were bare bones affairs with minimal stage sets and obviously homemade costumes. What the Yoricks lacked in production value, they made up in enthusiasm. Their love of the bard’s works were apparent in every line and in every movement on stage. I have seen collegiate and professional productions of Shakespeare’s works, but I never enjoyed a play more than I did in my lawn chair under the stars in Monroeville.

The thing I miss most under the quarantine is taking my grandson, Max, on vacation. Since he was a toddler, his grandmother and I would take him on a trip every summer. When he was little, Max was obsessed with trains and Thomas the Tank Engine.

We took him to the state railroad museum near Lancaster. We booked lodgings in the Red Caboose motel. He fell asleep on the drive there, but woke up as we carried him into the train car that night. I will never forget the look on his face when he cried out, “We in a caboose. We sleeping in a Caboose.” Now wide awake, it took us hours to get him to sleep again.

Over the years, we’ve taken him to a dinosaur park in Cincinnati, the San Diego Zoo and to the beach at Lake Erie. These days he’s more interested in history than “Choo-Choo’s,” so last year we took him to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

It was a wonderful trip with stops at Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, lunch at the Reading Market and dinner at the historic City Tavern. It was a memorable trip that made us realize that he was growing up too fast. I would have liked to take him on a few more trips before he gets too old to waste time with his old grandparents. I am afraid with everything going on in our lives we may not get the chance.

At this point, I’m not sure that we will ever get back to the “old normal.” At least I have the memories of the things I did in all the summers before this one.

Like they say, when the Covid bites, when the Coronavirus stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things and then I don’t feel so bad! 

- Jim Busch

July 28, 2020

John Denver has always been one of my favorite singers. In addition to his big hits like Take Me Home Country Roads and Rocky Mountain High, I like some of the songs from his later, and less popular albums. One B-side song that particularly speaks to me is Some Days are Diamonds. The chorus of this song goes:

Some days are diamonds, some days are stone

Sometimes the hard times won’t leave me alone

Sometimes a cold wind blows a chill in my bones

Some days are diamonds, some days are stone

If that is true, today I was buried under a full on avalanche of great big stones. I got up with the intention of going to the grocery store for my wife and then working on some art projects.

The fates had something else in mind for me. When my wife got out of bed she could barely walk. In the last few days her feet had been a bit swollen and she intended to talk to her doctor about them during her appointment later this week. This morning they were much worse. In addition to being even more swollen, her feet were bright red, hot to the touch and very painful.

She left a message for her oncologist and he called back within a few moments. After a couple of quick questions, he instructed her to immediately go to the emergency room at Allegheny General Hospital (AGH). He was afraid that with her compromised immune system she had contracted some sort of serious infection and he did not want to let it spread. We got her things together and I helped her to the car.

Of course, my wife insisted on making a stop before we went to the hospital. She made me stop at my sister’s apartment so she could organize her medications for the week. For the last several years, my wife has been doing this every Tuesday.

She looks at her responsibilities like the post office looks at delivering the mail. Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night, nor a serious life threatening infection, would stop her from completing her self-appointed rounds. In interest of social distancing, I drove her to my sister’s, but I stayed in the car. I watched her hobble up the sidewalk knowing each step had to be very painful.

Once that was accomplished, we drove down the Parkway to AGH. As a lifelong believer in the concept that it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, I tried to walk beside her as the orderly rolled her into the ER in a wheelchair. I was stopped within a foot of the door and told that due to the danger of spreading Covid-19 only patients were allowed in the hospital - NO FAMILY MEMBERS!

I was directed to their In Car Waiting Room which is a fancy way of saying they had put a porta-potty in the parking lot. I retreated to the car, rolled down the windows and settled in for a long wait. This was not my first Covid rodeo, so I came equipped with a bottle of water, some packages of snack crackers and plenty of reading material.

Generally, I am a very patient person. I spent a lot of my working career waiting for customers, waiting for ad layouts and waiting for my people to do what they said they would do. I just tried to make productive use of my time. These days, waiting weighs on my mind. I hate sitting idly by while my wife is undergoing some kind of medical procedure. I want to know what is going on and that she is being well taken care of, I want to be with her.

Waiting is a dangerous activity these days. It allows my mind time to think about what my wife and I are facing. It allows me to think that I might lose the person that has been at the center of my life for five decades. Waiting makes me wonder how I will manage to go on alone in my life if I lose her. In short, waiting makes me very sad.

After about an hour and a half, my wife called me and told me that the doctors thought she had cellulitis. They were going to give her a series of IV antibiotics. She wanted me to let the rest of the family know what was going on and told me to get some dinner.

I sent out a group text and then headed up McKnight Road in search of some food and a bathroom that smelled a bit better than the one in the In Car Waiting Room. I stopped at Half Price Books to relieve myself and restock my supply of reading material before going to Panera for dinner.

After dinner, I returned to my post and continued waiting. By the end of my shift, I had to hang up a flashlight to read by. Finally, they wheeled my wife out about 9:15 p.m. She was worn out and in spite of all of the IV medications, her feet were no better.

We crossed the Allegheny River and headed home. A construction crew was working on the exit to the Parkway East and being distracted, I hit a curb hard as I headed toward the Boulevard of the Allies. Things seemed to be okay until we got through Forest Hills when the tire started to go flat. The perfect ending to a perfect day.

I pulled into the Sunoco station at the end of the Westinghouse Bridge, as the tire let out its last gasp of air. We’re card carrying members of the American Automobile Association, so we called their roadside service number. The customer service rep took our information and told us someone would be there within 45 minutes.

I grew increasingly angry with myself as 45 minutes stretched into slightly more than two hours. My wife desperately needed a hot shower and to lie down in her own bed and my careless driving was keeping her from both. When the AAA truck finally arrived, the driver quickly got our spare on the car and us on our way.

We finally walked through our kitchen door a few minutes before midnight, 13 hours after we had passed through it that morning. My wife apologized for all the trouble she was causing me. I reminded her that the vows we exchanged almost 48 years before included a clause stating “in sickness and in health” which I believed was still in effect.

I told her that for the last 47 years my life had been dedicated to caring for her and for our family. It is a measure of the kind of woman I was lucky enough to marry, that she was apologizing to me for having cancer.

Most of the last 50 years have been made up of “diamond” days, why should I complain that some of my days lately have been “stone.”

- Jim Busch

July 27, 2020

As a retired gentleman of leisure, the Coronavirus quarantine has had a much smaller impact on my lifestyle than on younger people. It prevented me from taking a few freelance writing assignments, but it didn’t affect my life or income like someone who goes out to work every day.

At my age, my social life largely consists of watching the weather followed by Jeopardy on television, so the virus has not put much of a damper on my nightlife. After four months of the corona lock down, there are some things that I really miss.

Things that enrich my life and which bring me joy. What follows is a list of some of the things, in no particular order, that I truly miss.

One: I miss smiling at people and seeing them smile back at me. I am definitely pro mask, I understand that these simple coverings are the best way to prevent the spread of the disease and save lives. Like the old American Express commercials said, I “don’t leave home without it!”

I do miss seeing the expressions on people’s faces. Even if I’m feeling a little down, I try to keep a big smile on my face. I believe a smile is infectious and that by smiling at others, I can make them feel a little happier.

I have seen this happen as I walk down the street, I will smile at someone with a glum look on their face and when I give them a grin they “turn that frown upside down” and return it to me. With everyone going around dressed like the James Gang getting ready to rob a train, this strategy no longer works. This is a shame because people need the gift of a smile now more than ever.

Two: I miss browsing the “new books” shelf at the library. Before the pandemic hit, at least once a week I would drop by the main Carnegie Library in Oakland. I would walk through the big doors, pass through the entry hall and hang a sharp left into the main room. There I would find about 20- feet of shelves housing the new nonfiction books.

When the library gets a new title, the staff puts a yellow “New” sticker on its spine and adds it to this section. The new title lives here for a month or two until it makes its way to the library’s stacks.

As an information junkie, I feel like a kid in a candy shop browsing this section and the new book shelves in the second floor hallway. This section has introduced me to new books, new authors and new ideas, greatly enriching my knowledge of the world. I know I can browse books online, but it’s just not the same.

Three: I miss the free samples at Costco. A couple of times a month, my wife sends me to the big warehouse store to pick up groceries and other necessities for the house. In the “good old days”, the aisles at Costco were populated with smiling folks wearing hairnets and plastic gloves handing out free samples of whatever goodies they happened to be promoting that day.

This was a good marketing strategy for them because shoppers are reluctant to purchase a twenty pound box of something if they don’t know whether they will like it or not. Since I am anything but a fussy eater, I found most things to my liking. This allowed me to try new things and gave me a chance to chat with the people giving them out.

For obvious reasons, Costco had to stop this practice. I understand why this is necessary but I am still disappointed when I visit the massive store and that there is not a toaster oven, an electric skillet or hairnet to be seen.

Four: I miss teaching. Before I was retired, I was a professional trainer. I taught sales, management and soft skills like customer emotional intelligence and customer service. I loved my job and even after retirement continued to volunteer with industry associations, local libraries and writers groups.

In the past six months, I was scheduled to teach at a conference in Florida and to do a public speaking program for a local youth group. It is likely that I would have done some other programs as well. All of these engagements were, of course, canceled.

I miss the chance to interact with young people and to share my knowledge with them. Many people helped me during my career and I feel it is my responsibility to “pay it forward” by helping others improve their skills.

Five: I miss long lunches with my best friend. Several times per month we would take turns buying each other lunch. We would meet late in the lunch hour so that we would not inconvenience the restaurant by tying up a table for up to three hours. We would eat a leisurely meal and then stay at the table drinking coffee or soda and talking.

We would talk about our family and how everyone is doing. We would talk about getting old and of the things we remembered. We share an interest in history, philosophy and art, so we covered the newest things we had learned and about the books we had read. These few hours were as relaxing as a two week vacation for me and I miss our get-togethers. We still talk on the phone, but once again, it’s just not the same.  

My grandmother used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I wish I could do some of these things again, but I fear it may be a long time.

It is entirely possible that I will never again experience some of these simple things. I have found some new pleasures to occupy my days, but it is just not the same.

          - Jim Busch

July 26, 2020

Yesterday, I wrote about my family’s Christmas in July celebration. The biggest challenge I faced in preparing for this event was what to get my wife for a present. She has always been a woman of few wants. She does not like jewelry and she is not into clothing, she seldom is seen in anything but jeans and a t-shirt.

She does like music so I will buy her records, she is a music purist preferring LP’s to digital downloads. I often resort to buying her practical gifts like kitchen gadgets or baking pans. This is not as boring or unromantic as it may sound as she truly enjoys being creative in the kitchen.

This year choosing a gift was made more difficult by her cancer diagnosis. I did not want to blow this one, sadly it could be my last chance to get her a Christmas present that she would truly love.

My personal philosophy of gift giving is that it is better to give than receive. I am a serial gift giver. My gift giving is not limited to holidays, birthdays and other events. I am always on the lookout for items that will put a smile on the face of my family and friends. Gifts are a wonderful way to cement relationships and nothing gives me more pleasure than making those around me happy.

I spend a lot of time poking around secondhand stores and this helps me find gifts that are both very unique and very cheap. For example, this week I found a copy of The Albert Schweitzer Album: A Portrait in Words and Pictures for the princely sum of 79 cents at the St. Vincent de Paul store.

I have a good friend who is fascinated by the life of this African missionary, who will love this 1960’s era coffee table book. This gift will not only show that I was thinking about him, but that I truly listen to him and remember what he finds interesting.

The second tenet of my gift giving philosophy is that it is better to make a gift than to buy a gift. Since childhood, I have been fascinated with arts and crafts. I credit my grandmother with teaching me the power of handmade gifts. Her health kept her housebound, but my grandmother liked to sit on her sunporch and watch the birds through a tiny set of opera glasses.

At Lou Oddo’s Hobby Shop in downtown McKeesport, I saw two model kits of songbirds. Instead of buying my usual car or ship models, I bought a blue jay and redwing blackbird model. I carefully put them together and painted them following the chart in the instructions. I gave them to my grandmother for her birthday. She was thrilled to hear that I had built them and they hung on her kitchen wall until the day that she died.

Over the years, I have made hundreds of gifts for my family members and close friends, everything from a four poster doll bed for my daughter to toy ninja weapons for my son. I have made birdhouses modeled after people homes when they buy them and all kinds of Christmas decorations.

I have carved Celtic wedding spoons for weddings and workaday spoons that my wife uses daily in the kitchen. This requires a little planning and the materials often make them more expensive than buying the item at Walmart. I find making gifts is much more enjoyable than shopping and adds a personal touch to the gifts I give.

I puzzled over what to make for my wife’s Christmas in July present. I thought about all that she has given me in our years together and all the memories we’ve shared. I decided to give some of those memories back to her. I wanted to make something to house them and again a shared memory came to my rescue. We’ve taken a number of trips to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I particularly like their collection of American folk art. I decided to replicate a tramp art box from their collection.

Tramp art was produced by the hobos who traveled through the United States in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. They would collect bits of scrap wood and make decorative items with their jackknives that they could trade for food or lodgings. One popular item were decorated wooden cigar boxes. I decided to make one of these boxes for my wife and fill it with slips of paper writing a memory on each one.

True to tradition, I started with a cigar box I had purchased some time ago at the Goodwill. For the layered decorations I used wood from a crate I found abandoned in a parking lot. To make it any more authentic, I would have had to carve it in the “hobo jungle” while eating Mulligan stew out of a tin can and wearing a beat up fedora hat.

I chose a heart theme for obvious reasons and painted it in a blue and red theme. The project took several days, as I had to cut decorative notches in every layer of wood by hand. It was time consuming, but a labor of love.

I worked in my workshop by day and at my desk at night writing out memories on slips of paper. This task was easy, just a matter of free association. After fifty years together, I have an extensive stockpile of memories to draw upon. All I had to do was write down thoughts as they popped into my head.

I remembered vacations, major events like the birth of our children, as well as ordinary every day activities we’ve shared. I even included a few memories that only she and I would appreciate.

My original plan was to roll each one into a tiny scroll. To paraphrase a popular line from the movie Jaws, once I started putting the rolled papers into it I realized, “Looks like we’re going to need a bigger box!”

I had written out over two hundred slips of paper and I ran out of time long before I was about to run out of happy memories. I abandoned my plan of rolling the slips and simply laid them in the box in layers.

My wife was delighted with the gift. By the time everyone went home and things calmed down, she was completely worn out. Propped up on pillows she slid open the box and read the slips of paper one by one. It did my heart good to see her smile as her mind went back to happier times. There is a line in the theme song of The Goldbergs television sitcom that I like, “Don’t know the future, but the past keeps getting clearer every day.”

We don’t know what the future holds for us, we’re not even sure if we have a future together, but we both know that we have had a good life full of beautiful memories. At least nothing can take that away from us, no matter what happens.

- Jim Busch

July 25, 2020

Merry Christmas!

I know it is 90-degrees outside and everything is green and growing, but today was Christmas Day for my family. Christmas in July was my wife’s idea. She said it would be fun and would break the boredom of being quarantined for so long.

We did not explicitly say what was on both of our minds, she wanted another Christmas because there is a good chance that she might not be here in December. Glenda is not the kind of woman who would let pancreatic cancer stop her from lavishing love and gifts on her family.

A few weeks ago, my wife asked me what I thought about holding an early Christmas this year. I have always had a hard time saying no to her. Since her cancer diagnosis if she asked me to cover my arms with beeswax and feathers and leap off the U. S. Steel building, I would be forever remembered as the “Plummeting Birdman of Pittsburgh.”

I, of course, said yes and she swore me to secrecy. Glenda wanted Christmas in July to be a surprise.

In spite of the Coronavirus restrictions at retail stores and her own flagging energy, she started her Christmas Shopping. She has become a master at online shopping. She reviewed my kids’ Amazon wish lists and wrote down the items they wanted; ordering the items directly would have tipped them off that something was up.

Just like we had done since we were picking out Fisher Price toys, we discussed what gifts to buy them and for everyone else on our list. Our porch began piling up with boxes, just like it was November or December.

A couple of weeks ago, she mailed out invitations for “Dinner and a Slide Show” to be held at our house on July 25th. This was not entirely false, she planned to show slides and to fix dinner. Everyone quickly responded saying they would be there. Like my wife told me, “Nobody says no to a woman with cancer!” We dug out some of our Christmas decorations and began to finalize our plans. My wife asked what we would do for a tree, being we always have a real tree. We toyed with the idea of scouring the secondhand shops for an artificial tree, but came up with a better idea.

Whenever we, or our neighbors, get a new large appliance I save the cardboard and keep sheets of it in my studio. I use this to prototype projects or to protect my workbench. I cut some of this cardboard into the shape of a full size Christmas tree with several layers of branches. I painted this green and drew in needles with a sharpie.

Our family Christmas tree is unique in that it is topped by a plush monkey puppet rather than an angel or a star (A story for another time). I used a piece of coat hanger wire to mount the Christmas Monkey on the tree then decorated it with family pictures from Christmases past. There were photos from Glenda’s and my early Christmases to pictures of my grandson, made me realize how far we have come.

Christmas stockings have always been a big part of our holiday traditions. Two weeks ago we went shopping for stocking stuffers at Barnes and Noble. Properly masked we picked out magazines, books and other items for everyone. We chose everyone’s favorite candy at the grocery store and bought personal care items at the drug store. I was delighted to see the look of joy on Glenda’s face as she picked out nice things for her “chicks.”

Earlier this week, I drove Glenda to the South Hills to do her grocery shopping at the Market District and Whole Foods. Again, nothing makes my wife happier than doing things to please her family. For our “Christmas Dinner” she had planned a menu that was just slightly larger than any one of Henry the Eighth’s wedding banquets.

We bought a ham, a large turkey breast and a beef roast. Each of these was about twice as large as we would need to feed our family on its own account. My wife’s dinner planning always includes an allowance for sending large containers of leftovers home with each guest. That week, she also sent me to Costco to buy a large package of restaurant take-out containers.

I was responsible for the desserts, not preparing them, just picking them up. Glenda considered baking cookies and pies for dinner but she was not sure if she had the energy or oven capacity to pull this off. In place of home baked goods, she placed large orders with Nancy B’s Cookies and Oakmont Bakery. Just for good measure, she ordered a Dairy Queen cake made to her specifications, double cake crunchies and extra fudge sauce.

Yesterday, my mission was to go to Costco to pick up some last minute items for the dinner and the cookies from Nancy B’s. I also had to paint a Christmas in July poster announcing the event. I also staged the outdoor decorations to be installed the next morning. This morning while my wife replaced her summertime yard flags with Christmas themed banners, I put out a large cutout Santa and several other decorations. Most of our neighbors think our family is a bit nuts. I am sure that decking out our house in Christmas decorations in sweltering weather convinced the last few hold outs and made this opinion unanimous.  

Continuing my role as Gopher Elf, on Saturday morning I drove to Oakmont bakery to pick up my wife’s order and then to the DQ to get the cake. With this accomplished, all that remained for me to do was fix my wife’s stocking and wait for the family to arrive.

Our “Manhattan Project” level of secrecy about this being a Christmas party proved fruitless. Our guests arrived wearing Santa hats and other holiday attire. My wife shot me a dagger glance, convinced that I had let the cat out of the bag.

My daughter Rachael came to my defense. She had figured out the plot as soon as she got the invitation. She knows how her mother thinks, to confirm her suspicions she suggested her mother move the party a week earlier when she didn’t have a chemo treatment. Her mother’s insistence on holding the event on the 25 convinced her that she was right and called her sister- in- law to share her thought.

Personally, I’m happy about the security breach. I think it gave people time to process the reasoning behind the early holiday thus preventing potential emotional breakdowns. It also allowed them to bring gifts for Glenda making the event seem more like old times.

We had a wonderful evening full of reminiscing and laughter. The only thing that distinguished this day from our normal holiday gatherings was the fact that everyone was wearing t-shirts rather than sweaters. We exchanged gifts, ate an incredible meal and enjoyed watching slides of our family growing up. We even had Christmas music as the Sounds of the Seasons music channel on our cable system was playing Christmas in July tunes just for us.

I was a bit quieter than I typically am at these kind of gatherings. I was gratified to see my wife and my family enjoying themselves. My wife likes nothing more than making a big meal and doing things to make the people she loves happy.

I loved the look on her face as she watched all her hard work come to fruition in our living room. I just could not forget why we were doing this. She wanted to have one more Christmas. She feared that she wouldn’t be here in five months when the rest of the world celebrates the holiday.

She wanted to make her family happy one more time before the cancer completely robs here of the energy to do so. I am always happy when my family is gathered around me, but today the melancholy was overwhelming.

I couldn’t stop wondering what it will be like not to have my wife with me for all the Christmases to come.      

- Jim Busch

July 24, 2020

As an English major, I am legally required to use big obscure words. It comes along with the secret handshake and funny hats that we wear at our clandestine conclaves. (Note: a non-English major would have said secret meeting).

Our super power is sounding pretentious and it is one of the few compensations for the limited financial rewards and lack of respect for our chosen academic path.

The truth is that we literature loving types are word nerds. We delight in the sound and rhythm of language. We admire the richness and precision of the English language’s massive vocabulary. The Oxford English dictionary contains well over two hundred thousand words.

As English majors, we figure if the languages gives us all those words, why wouldn’t we try to use them all. Besides the obvious advantage of sounding much smarter than we are, this allows us to communicate with great precision.

My pretentious word for today is “autocthonic.” As I type this, Microsoft Word underlined and highlighted it to tell me that this word either does not exist or is horribly misspelled - it is not.

Autocthonic is a legitimate English word that is found in any unabridged dictionary - take that Bill Gates. I will even use it in a sentence: “I, Jim Busch, am an autocthonic resident of Western Pennsylvania.” Which is my surreptitious (sneaky for non-English majors) way of getting to the meat of today’s diary entry. Another character trait of my literature loving breed is that we seldom get directly to the point.

The rough meaning of autocthonic is not comparable, but its precise meaning goes far beyond words with similar meanings like unique. The description of this word is “existing where it was formed or born, native, aboriginal, indigenous.”   This is how I feel about my Western Pennsylvania home. This feeling goes far beyond saying I was born here or that I like it here, I am saying this is where I belong.

One of the reasons that the population of western Pennsylvania is so old is that many people of my generation and younger fled the regions battered economy in search of employment. I live just a few blocks from my childhood home, but seldom encounter my high school peers as I run errands. Most of them now live in other cities. The same is true for my children, who both also chose to remain in this area. I once saw a t-shirt that read, “Would the last person to leave Pittsburgh please turn out the lights.”

I have been very fortunate to have a job that allowed me to travel all around the United States. I have stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon, seen an alligator seize its prey in the Everglades and had dinner on a New England maple farm.

I have walked through the desert, seen the redwoods and the Statue of Liberty. I have eaten Mexican food in Tucson, brats in Wisconsin and beignets at the Café Du Monde in New Orleans. These places are all beautiful and I enjoyed visiting them, but I never felt like I belonged there. I can’t imagine living anywhere but here, I am just not myself on the plains or next to the ocean.

My family has been here for generations. We have worked here, had families here and most of us have died here. My own parents broke this pattern when they retired to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. They never seemed to quite fit in, in the decade or so that they lived there. They looked like the homes picked in Better Homes and Gardens where everything is perfect and everything is in place, but it just doesn’t look like somewhere that people actually live.

Western Pennsylvania is a strange place. It is one of the few places in the United States where most people who are here, have always been here. We do not get a lot of new people moving here.

For decades, the trend has been going in the other direction. The few people who do move here quickly fall in love with our region. They have an appreciation of this area that many natives lack. Our negative population growth keeps our region affordable.

It’s a matter of supply and demand, with fewer people looking for homes, housing prices compared to other cities are very low. When I talk with my colleagues from around the country they can not believe how low the appraisal on my home is or how little I pay in taxes. This key economic factor drives down the whole cost of living and makes living in Western Pennsylvania downright cheap.

Though it has been a long time since Pittsburgh was an industrial city, working class values are still strong here. We still have the melting pot idea that I don’t care where you come from, show me what you can do. These values are particularly strong in the Mon Valley. People continue to be good neighbors, proud of their hometowns and patriotic to a fault.

Visitors to our hometown are amazed at how local drivers will stop and let them into traffic and how people here respect their neighbor’s right to a parking place if they stake their claim with a folding chair.

Pittsburghers are proud of their heritage. This is evidenced by our devotion to our sports teams. Win or lose, our enthusiasm never flags and we continue to cheer on the “Black and Gold” on the diamond, gridiron or on the ice. Linguists have found that people here are inordinately proud of our regional dialect. We proclaim our “Yinzer” identity on coffee mugs, bumper stickers, t-shirts and as we say here, “n’at!” 

Biblical scholars feel that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in the Fertile Crescent. I think they are way off, I am sure it was located somewhere near the Point in Pittsburgh. My theory is based on how nature has blessed our area.

Our climate can only be described as moderate. It gets hot and muggy in the summer but we never reach the temperatures that bake the south, the Midwest or even the Philadelphia area. Likewise, it can get cold and snowy here but we don’t get buried like Erie or Buffalo or have to endure the Nor’easters that hit the coastal regions, or the tornadoes of the Midwestern plains.

One thing that you can say about Western Pennsylvania weather is that it is never boring. Our weather is as changeable as the image in a kaleidoscope. This just keeps us “Yinzers” hardy and prepared for anything.

If people have one complaint about our climate is that Western Pennsylvania is a bit dreary. We get a lot of cloudy and rainy days but this is part of the charm of living here. The rain all flows downhill and fills our mighty rivers. Without this precipitation, we would not bear the title of City of Bridges.

All this rain keeps our region a soft green place. Few cities around the country has as many trees as we do, a function of the rain and slopes too steep for building. We have one of the most resilient ecosystems in the world. Fail to cut your lawn for two weeks and it will start turning back into the mixed hardwood forest our original settlers found here two hundred years ago.

Even the vacant lots in our towns and cities are filled with a succession of wildflowers and picturesque weeds from early spring to late fall. We share our bounty with all manner of birds and wildlife, while our rivers are once again home to many varieties of fish.

Though we have a few snakes, how could it be an Eden without them, most of our critters are harmless and peaceful.  Deer, rabbits and woodchucks roam our suburbs making our neighborhoods look like an outtake from a Disney movie. Songbirds fill our trees and serenade us with their calls. Even the occasional bear sighting does not inspire much fear, our local black bears are pussycats compared to the western Grizzly bear cousins.

That is my paean to my Western Pennsylvania home. Webster’s defines paean as, “a joyous song or hymn of praise, tribute, thanksgiving, or triumph.” Paean exactly describes how I feel about this place, plus it is another pretentious English major type of word.

Now I can take the day off tomorrow and enjoy a beautiful Mon Valley summer day.

- JIm Busch

July 23, 2020

As the Coronavirus crisis has dragged on and on, experts have expressed concern for the nation’s mental health. The fear of contracting disease, financial pressures from the impact of the disease on our economy, plus the inability to interact with the larger world are a perfect storm for depression.

Sharing a confined space even with people we love for extended periods can be emotionally taxing. This is compounded by a lack of activity to distract us from the constant barrage of bad news coming from the media. I believe that the biggest blow to our psyches is the uncertainty we face and our inability to control events.

For many years, I earned my living as a professional optimist. My official job title was officially sales person, sales manager and finally sales trainer, but “Professional Optimist” is a better description of what I did on an everyday basis. Salespeople are the people who refused to listen to their mothers when they said, “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t ask so many questions, and certainly don’t ask for money.”

Every mother that has ever lived has uttered the words, “Be careful, don’t get hurt,” numerous times during the day. If they are doing their job properly, a salesperson is constantly putting themselves in situations where they are likely to get hurt. I am not talking about skinned knees or banged up elbows, but bruised egos and crushed self-esteem.

Any salesperson worth their salt will hear No more than Yes. Rejection is part of our business. As a trainer, I told my students, “You have to remember that the prospect is not rejecting you personally, they are rejecting what you are offering.” Even as I spoke these words, I knew they were bull. I have heard “No” at least a million times during my career and I took every single one of them personally. Anyone who does not, lacks the passion and commitment to be successful in the sales profession.

The secret to surviving and thriving in sales is resilience. Like the old Timex watches a good salesperson has to, “Take a licking and keep on ticking.” Most salespeople I know are naturally optimistic. Psychologists have found that everyone has a preset “Emotional set point.”  This means that regardless of their outside circumstances some people will remain upbeat and others will be down in the mouth. Some people seem to have an internal reservoir of positivity to draw on which their more pessimistic peers seem to lack.

Salespeople and others who work in stressful careers often top off their reservoir by reading motivational books and listening to motivational speakers. They surround themselves with upbeat quotes and images.

The Successories company has built a retail empire by marketing posters and tchotchkes featuring inspirational quotes and gorgeous images from nature. For over 35 years, I have sent out a positive quote to a subscriber list that consists largely of people that I have trained over the years. In my world, we all believe in “PMA—Positive Mental Attitude” and our mantra is “Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude.”

I never completely bought into the idea that if one wants something bad enough that it will manifest in your life. I am a strong believer in the power of optimism. When we expect good things to happen we are more likely to see opportunities that will lead us in this direction.

Pessimists on the other hand are too busy feeling bad for themselves to notice them and walk right by the “Golden Goose.” I am a firm believer that, “you have to believe it to see it.”

So far this has worked out for me, I have had a great life. I have shared my life with a wonderful woman, had two great children who grew into good adults, and an amazing grandson, found work that I loved, and had a lot of fun. Like anyone, I have experienced sadness, I have lost jobs and loved ones. I endured an injury that kept me sidelined for six months and some of the things I have attempted have failed, but on the whole I can’t complain.

Things took a turn in the other direction with my wife’s recent cancer diagnosis. This news hit me hard. I’ve experienced something that I didn’t recognize at first. I have been tired and listless lately and my muscles have been tense. Some days I feel like going to bed and pulling the covers over my head and staying there.

Occasionally, some memory or something I see will bring a wave of sadness over me and I get inexplicably choked up. I realized that for the first time in my life, I am depressed. The thought of losing my wife has sucked the optimism right out of me. Yet, I continue to go on.

On FaceTime, my niece asked me how both my wife and I have remained so positive during her illness. We can’t deny our concern and sadness over her likely terminal disease. We are living with the 800 pound pancreatic cancer gorilla constantly in the room.

Two things sustain us, the memory of all the wonderful years we’ve shared together and our determination to enjoy whatever time we have left together.

- Jim Busch

July 22, 2020

I was an idealistic young man. Like the good flower child that I was in those days, I was not interested in a lucrative career. I chose a college major that would feed my soul rather than my bank account. I attended Penn State in McKeesport, we called it Renzie U, for two years before transferring to Pitt for my degree.

I was a good student and graduated with a 3.7 GPA in spite of the fact that I worked one and sometimes two jobs the entire time I was going to school. In the summer of 1974, I received a Bachelor of Arts degree. It was a dual degree in English, with a concentration in medieval literature and European history.

Just for good measure, I added a minor in comparative literature. Essentially, this degree meant that I was fully qualified to ask life’s big questions like, “Would you like fries with that?” in iambic pentameter.

As often happens, fate decided to kick me while I was down. Not only did I have a degree with no clear career path, but I graduated in the depths of the recession caused by the OPEC Oil Embargo. I found that the education I got working in my grandfather’s workshop was far more valuable than my university degree.

My skills with tools and machinery helped me land a job in a baby bottle factory running a vertical blow molding machine. A deep dive into my resume will show that I was responsible for the first successful production run of the 12-ounce Wa-Wa Raccoon character bottle. When that plant laid me off, I landed a job in a machine shop making parts for steel mill machinery, followed by a stint as a repairman for a cash register company.

My boss at the register company let me moonlight as a salesman and paid me a commission on every machine I sold. I discovered that I liked selling cash registers more than fixing them. I also discovered that I was good at it, so good that my boss decided that he did not want to pay me.

On three out of four of my sales, he found some old notes that he had called on them in the past, so the sale and the commission was his. I didn’t think this was very fair and hefting 250 pound cash registers into a truck was getting old, so I decided to look for a full time sales job.

Through an agency I landed an interview with a valve and fitting vendor. This was the first time my college education paid off. Only applicants with a college degree need apply. This wasn’t because they needed someone to explain the plot points of Macbeth to their customers, they just wanted people who could stick with something for four years.

They didn’t care what you had studied, college degree was just an item on a checklist like valid Pennsylvania Driver’s License. I had a suspicion that they felt that the financial pressure of paying off college loans would inspire loyalty in their employees.

During that interview I was asked, “What was the last book I had read?” I answered that I had just finished The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s book about U.S. test pilots and early astronauts. It turned out that the owner of the company had flown a B-24 in the war and loved aviation. This answer, plus my understanding of mechanics landed me the job.

The valve and fitting company had a very thorough training program which provided me with my first practical career education. I stayed there for several years, until the steel mills which were their best customers started to close.

One of my coworkers had left to take a job at the Yellow Pages. He called me, told me that they had some more openings and got me an interview. During the interview, I knew I had found my niche. I loved the advertising industry and spent the next thirty years fully employed, but never working a day of my life. Advertising was too much fun to call work.

I am not sure how much my college studies helped me in my career. It did improve my facility with language and gave me a chance to practice my writing. I never tried walking into a customer’s business and saying, “Hail Sirrah and well met. Prithee, I beg a sparkling moment of your time to trip around the blue orb Great Jove set like a jewel in the firmament to discuss proclaiming your enterprise to the noble folk hereabouts.” That might have worked in Elizabethan London but would fall flat in Pittsburgh where, “Yinz want an ad n’at?” was far more effective.

Only once, did I find a chance to use my course of studies on a sales call. I made a cold call on a very upscale home furnishing store. As soon as I introduced myself, the owner said, “My good man, I simply do not have the funds to advertise at this time, besides the type of clientele I attract know where to find me.”

The “my good man” plus his snooty tone told me that I was never going to sell him anything. He was looking at me like I was a peasant begging alms at the hem of his lordship’s cloak, so I decided to give it right back to him. “I believe it was Niccolo Machiavelli who said, the poor merchant decries his wealth, while the wealthy merchant decries his poverty.” I still didn’t make the sale, but I did have the satisfaction of seeing his face when a peasant quoted The Prince to him.

So, would I do things differently if I had to do it over again? Would I take a degree in accounting, mechanical engineering or some other remunerative subject? A degree in one of these fields certainly would have made my early working life much easier. The answer is, a resounding NO!

The poet and scholar Robert Graves said, “While there may be no money in poetry, there is certainly no poetry in money.” Admittedly, my education has not helped me make a living, but it has certainly helped me make a life.

I make a point of reading at least one new poem every day. Today, I discovered The Thing Is by Ellen Bass, a poet I had not read before, and it was thrilling. I will track down more of her works. My life is richer for knowing her work.

Reading Shakespeare has taught me more about human behavior than any psychology text that I have read. Poetry, novels and short stories have paid wonderful dividends by helping me navigate and understand a complex world. This has been especially true during the Coronavirus quarantine. Literature has not only given me something to occupy my time, but it has helped me to sort out my thoughts during these troubling times.

These days the emphasis is on STEM subjects at the expense of the liberal hearts. I hope that our colleges are not becoming very expensive trade schools. By focusing on teaching our children to build robots, I hope we are not turning them into robots designed to be a cog in our economic machine.

Just to prove a degree in English literature is useful, I will end with a quote from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, “No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en.” meaning, sir, study what you most affect” or in modern English “If it feels good, do it!”  

- Jim Busch             

July 21, 2020

The Coronavirus has killed many people. Many of its victims had preexisting conditions that put them at a greater risk to succumb from Covid-19 and its complications. Younger, healthier individuals while still at risk of losing their lives, are much more likely to fully recover. This is not only true for individuals but also for institutions.

One ailing institution that the outbreak of Coronavirus may push over the edge to oblivion is the enclosed shopping mall. Today, I did something I have not done for a very long time, I walked around Monroeville Mall.

In recent years, trips to the mall were limited to its periphery. I would shop at the Barnes and Noble store on the outside of the mall or at Harbor Freight Tools in the rear annex. Today, I went into the mall to visit the Premier Imaging camera store to have some prints made from some old 35mm slides for my wife.

When I entered the mall, I saw a poster proclaiming the 50th anniversary of the mall. It is a measure of how long it’s been since I’ve been to the mall that the poster also bore the legend, “1969 to 2019.” I guess I was a little late for the cake. The poster also said there was an exhibit of vintage photos on the upper level near J. C. Penney’s.

I have always enjoyed looking at old photographs so after concluding my business at the camera shop I decided to stroll through the mall to look at the anniversary display. This did not seemed to be too risky and if I had added a few tumbleweeds, the mall’s walkways would have been indistinguishable from a western ghost town.

Enclosed malls have been slowly dying for a long time, replaced by strip centers and online shopping. The Coronavirus lockdown may have dealt them a fatal blow. As I walked the length of the mall, I was struck by the number of empty stores.

Many of the storefronts were filled with businesses that were marginal at best, an indication that the mall had greatly reduced their rent to provide cash flow and try to maintain some semblance of prosperity. One shop sold cheap rock and roll t-shirts and one had been become a pool hall.

One prime bit of real estate, a large double space near the escalators was transformed into a boxing gym complete with a full size ring. This was operated as a hangout for local youth by the Police Athletic League, so this space may have been donated.

I was disappointed by the promised display of vintage photos. It consisted of about a dozen pictures, some only a few years old. The pictures of the Zamboni on the mall’s ice rink and the mechanical puppet clock did make me smile. I have many more pictures locked inside my head of the days when the mall was in its glory.

I can remember when the walkways would be packed with shoppers. At this time of year, mothers would be dragging their kids from store to store for school clothes and school supplies. On Friday and Saturday nights, a much younger crowd would be roaming the mall. Groups of preteen girls would talk and laugh while popping their gum and twirling their hair.

The boys would push out their chests and bump their shoulders into one another to determine who the alpha male of the group was. Although sometimes referred to as “gangs of kids”, no one feared them and security did not pay them much mind.

Teenagers and 20-somethings paired off and walked the mall hand in hand. My wife and I were amongst this group. When we were dating I had very little money, window shopping at the mall was free and it allowed us to talk. One of our favorite stores was a Shop Called East. This store sold all sorts of cheap Asian imports, like plastic Buddha’s, gongs and beaded curtains.

I am not sure why we liked this store and I don’t think we ever actually bought anything there. For some reason we loved poking around in this incense filled emporium of oddities. Other favorite spots included the National Record Mart. Record stores seemed a lot more fun when you could flip through the bins and look at the colorful album covers. I occasionally bought an eight-track tape to play in the car, but I definitely preferred LP’s.

In those days, there were two book stores in the mall, B. Dalton Books and Walden Books. This was a few years before Borders introduced Pittsburgh to the super book store concept. Then as now, I used book stores as a place to identify titles that I would request at the library on my next rip.

For its first 30 years, the mall did not have a food court. If you wanted to eat, you could go to the restaurants inside of Gimbels or Murphy’s. I was more likely to hit Murphy’s candy counter for some chocolate covered peanuts or fresh roasted cashews kept warm under big heat lamps. To draw in customers, the malls were always hosting special events. We loved the craft shows, car shows, antique shows and free concerts at the mall.  

The space that the food court now occupies was originally “Pennsylvania’s Largest Ice Rink.” We used to stop and watch the skaters glide gracefully across the ice as classical music filled the air. In later years, we signed our son up for skating lessons there, one of our least successful experiments.

On one side of the rink was Di Pomodoro, an upscale white tablecloth Italian Restaurant. Early in our marriage I worked as the service manager at a local cash register company. I got an after-hours call from Di Pomodoro that their cash drawer was jammed. I drove to the mall and repaired their machine so they could ring the evening’s sales.

The manager was so grateful that he tipped me with a gift certificate good for dinner for two. This was a real treat because in those days we were lucky if we could afford a hamburger in a paper sack. We got dressed up and went to the mall. The manager treated us like we were VIPs and it was one of the most memorable meals of our life.

As our family grew, trips to the mall became family affairs. At some point, we switched our loyalty to Century III, largely because they had the area’s first food court. We spent many a Friday evening wandering the mall and treating the kids at KayBee Toys. My daughter could spend hours at Claire’s Boutique browsing their collection of costume jewelry and hair accessories.

Our son’s favorite spot was the spot in the back of Walden Book’s where they sold the Dungeons and Dragon’s manuals. He and I both liked Cutlery Unlimited which sold knives and swords. The evening always began and ended at the food court. We would grab a table at the center of the space and then ask the kids what they wanted to eat.

We would give them some cash and would let them buy their own dinners while we watched. Corndogs and deep fried cheese sticks were a popular choice as was Sbarro Pizza. This less than healthy meal was washed down with giant plastic cups of fresh squeezed lemonade. We would reconvene in the food court after shopping for some dessert. I liked a gooey, deadly sweet Cinnabon while the rest of the family went for the Dairy Queen.

Like the rest of the country, we gradually stopped shopping at the mall. Our kids grew up, we found the strip centers allowed us to get in and out quickly and once the internet came along anything our hearts desired was just a click away.

In my life, I saw shopping centers kill the downtown shopping districts, then I saw the malls kill the shopping centers and finally I saw Amazon gobble up the retail world. Monroeville Mall was just about dead when the lockdown kept their few remaining customers away.

It is possible that the pandemic may make the malls go the way of the general store, but my memories will always linger in my mind, like the Cinnabons will always linger on my hips.     

- Jim Busch

July 20, 2020

Since the pandemic began, I have been seeing news reports about people who are buying or adopting pets to help them weather the quarantine. These people felt the presence of a dog or cat would help alleviate the loneliness of being stuck at home and that having an animal to care for adds purpose to their life.

My wife and I have shared our quarantine with three cats, I don’t know if they have made our life any easier, but I am absolutely certain we’ve made their life a feline paradise.

I have to admit that I am not a pet person. Perhaps this stems from my mother’s love of French Poodles when I was growing up. It was my job to walk these feminine looking pooches. Her dogs had names like Fifi or Boo-Boo, were always obese and sported fancy haircuts with pom-poms on their tails and feet.

The only way I could have made walking these cutesy canines more emasculating was if I or the dog was wearing a pink tutu. I always wanted a real dog, like Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s husky, Yukon King or the tough German Shepherd, Rin Tin-Tin.

Even though she was a girl, I would have settled for a collie like Lassie, you never know when you are going to fall down a well. None of these dogs would have made me the laughingstock of the neighborhood.

I think that the real reason that I have avoided owning pets is that I grow too attached to them. Given their much shorter lifespans, it is likely that we will outlive our pets. Even at my advanced age, I am likely to survive a new puppy. I have always felt that life is fraught with enough tragedy to take on anymore.

I guess I could solve this problem by adopting a giant tortoise. They live to a hundred or more years old. The downside of turtles is it takes a really, really long time to walk one around the block. Though my wife loves animals, she has come around to my anti-pet views based on the amount of work required to care for them.

Our three cats are a legacy from my wife’s mother, Eleanor. Ellie always loved animals and always had at least one pet. She kept multiple generations of Schnauzers. She bred one of her Schnauzers, Nikki, with the idea of selling most of the pups and keeping one for herself. Nikki did her part and delivered a litter of eight pups.

One pup died, my mother- in- law sold four pups, gave one to my wife’s sister and kept two for herself. She pampered these pooches, cooking them gourmet meals and giving them lots of attention, but eventually as noted above, Nikki, Little Bit and Precious, grew old and passed away. The sad task of burying them in the backyard fell to me.

The last Schnauzer died shortly after Ellie’s husband, John, had died and the dog’s death hit her hard. She missed having a dog, so she rescued a mutt at the shelter. Annie, the terrier, was a bit grey so my wife tried to talk her mom out of adopting an older dog. Ellie left Annie at the shelter but couldn’t stop thinking about her, so the next morning she became a member of the family. Annie lived for years and proved to be a model canine citizen for my mother-in-law.

When Annie passed from the scene, Ellie decided she was too old for another dog. She had taken to feeding a feral cat and her kittens. We dubbed the cat “Mama Cat” because she survived outdoors for several years and raised multiple litters of kittens. We tried to capture Mama and have her spayed, but she was too wily. She was a wild cat, but she wasn’t above accepting a handout for her kids. She would bring each successive litter to our porch for Ellie to feed them. We captured a number of them and found them homes.

Eleanor took a liking to one little grey and white kitten and decided to keep him. She was a fan of the Big Bang Theory so she named him, Sheldon Leonard. Sheldon became the recipient of Ellie’s maternal instincts and he spent his days curled up in her lap having his fur stroked. She would share her yogurt with him, both using the same spoon. When Eleanor became bedfast, Sheldon would curl up beside her and was almost always at her side.

We thought we would lose Sheldon when Ellie passed away in 2014. He would sit outside her door and cry. He stopped eating and just would roam the house looking for her. He almost starved to death, when he finally began to pull out of his funk and regained his appetite. Even now, six years later, he still stands outside her old room stares at the door and lets out a sad cat cry.

Before her death, Ellie wanted to bring in the survivors of Mama’s last litter. My wife put her off because she simply didn’t have the energy for additional pets while caring for her mother. Once her mother passed away, guilt compelled her to bring in the two remaining kittens. We managed to capture Jane and Nutmeg.

Eleanor had named them before she was no longer able to get to the patio door to watch them.  Jane got her name because she was always seen with a litter mate that Ellie called Tarzan. Sadly, one day Tarzan did not return for his lunch. Nutmeg was marked with distinctive grey stripes and Ellie just thought she looked like a Nutmeg.

We still have all three cats and they have formed their own little feline community. Each one has their own unique personality. Though neutered, Sheldon is ambitious and likes to think of himself as the alpha kitty. He likes to initiate cat wrestling sessions and chasing the ladies around the house.

He has some very doglike qualities, greeting us at the door when we have been out and begging at the table for scraps. Perhaps, his most eccentric behavior is his love for sweet corn. When my wife has corn on the table, he cries and scratches our legs until he gets a few of the yellow kernels. Shelly is a bit of a kitty insomniac and only sleeps about nineteen hours a day.

 Nutmeg is our untamed cat. She refuses to be domesticated. She spends much of her days sitting in the window, staring at the birds at our feeder and licking her lips. We have to be careful every time we go in and out because she is always trying to slip out the door. She has managed this several times, but we have always been able to lure her back into captivity with lunchmeat.

Nutmeg is a true Western Pennsylvania kitty and is addicted to chipped ham. “Nutty” loves to hide away in tiny spaces. If we leave a cardboard box anywhere in the house, she will declare it her personal kitty cave and occupy it for her nap. Nutmeg will endure the shame of allowing herself to be petted by a mere human, but only for a few strokes. She is a wild cat and proud of it!

Jane is a furry hedonist. When we brought her in, she was sleek and athletic, nowadays she is a flabby tabby. Like a Las Vegas tourist, she makes full use of the never ending buffet of Cat Chow provided by my wife.

We have a gate that keeps the cats out of our living room. Every night at precisely 9:30, Jane sits at the gate, stares at my wife and cries. I think she has a tiny kitty watch under the fur of her left paw that tells her it is treat time. She is a punctual kitty and chastises my wife if she is tardy doling out her nightly treats, She always gulps down her treats and then tries to steal a few from her housemates.

Each time I go down to our basement, Jane meets me on the stairs for a round of step petting. She sits on the second step and waits for me. She will hold this position until I stroke her fur for a while. When I take a step she goes up exactly one step and we repeat the process.

She demands attention on every step and shows her appreciation by purring like an Evinrude outboard motor. Somehow, she knows when I am about to ascend the steps. She can be sound asleep in the far corner of the house and will come running before my foot hits the first step. She comes charging down the steps looking like a fur covered bowling ball. 

I guess I can understand why people want to share their quarantine with a pet. They are a lot of work and worry, but they do keep us company. Thanks, Ellie, for leaving us your kitties to remind us that we all need something to love.      

- Jim Busch

July 19, 2020

One of worst parts of the coronavirus quarantine is that it has kept my wife and me away from the movie theater. I really doubt that going to the type of movies we go to would put our health at any great risk.

We prefer cerebral dramas over superhero epics and movies that feature lots of car chases and explosions. Since I have been retired, we usually take in a weekday matinee so the theater is seldom crowded. In fact, most of the time we feel like billionaires enjoying a private screening in our mansions. The only time we ever encounter a crowd is when we attend a free “Movies for Grownups” program that comes with our AARP membership.

We have been watching movies together for almost half a century. I took her to the movies for our first date in October of 1970.

 We went to the old Eastland Theater for a double feature, a comedy, The Out of Towners with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Denis, plus a thriller, Wait Until Dark starring Audrey Hepburn. This second film is about a blind woman being stalked by a killer in her darkened apartment. She avoids the assailant using her knowledge of her surroundings, plus her enhanced hearing.

In one particularly dramatic scene, Audrey Hepburn’s stalker opens the refrigerator flooding the room with light. Surprised by the sudden appearance of the knife wielding killer, my future wife leapt a good six inches out of her seat and let out what I thought was an adorable sound as she exhaled rapidly.

This was not the image she wanted to project on our first date and was quite embarrassed. I told her that it didn’t bother me at all. I didn’t bother to tell her that on a previous date, I took another young lady to see the film Airport, about a saboteur on an airliner. At the critical point in the film, my date jumped up and shouted, “He’s got a bomb!” at the top of her lungs. I got up, moved over one seat and put our coats in the seat between us. Needless to say, it was our last date.

My wife and I hit it off on that first date and we never looked back. I was a poor college student in those days, I didn’t have a lot of money to wine and dine her, so our dates usually involved window shopping at Monroeville Mall, long car rides or movies.

We particularly liked going to the Guild Theater on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill. The Guild was a 1930’s movie palace that had fallen on hard times. It was a bit worn around the edges and smelled a bit musty. In the 1970’s, it played vintage movies that probably flickered on its tiny screen when it was a prosperous neighborhood theater. The price of a ticket for a double feature was just a dollar and they didn’t mind if you smuggled in a candy bar or two.

My wife and I are very different people, but one thing we do share is a love of old movies. We were regulars at the Guild where we watched all the Marx Brothers films and my wife indulged me by accompanying me to an Errol Flynn festival including Captain Blood, They Died with Their Boots On and, of course, Robin Hood. I learned to appreciate a good tear jerker by taking her to see Bette Davis in Dark Victory, Of Human Bondage and Now, Voyager. I was sorry when the Guild closed in 1979.

As our family grew, we passed our love of going to the movies on to our children. We took them to see all the Disney films and other kid’s movies. Later, it was Star Wars and the Indiana Jones movies for my son, while my daughter liked musicals like Xanadu and Grease. I’m happy that they still enjoy going to the movies and that my son has passed this on to my grandson.

Even when our kids were young, my wife and I would leave them with their grandmother and slip out to a movie. On one occasion, I heard a review of a film on NPR. It was a musical that had been filmed in Pittsburgh that sounded intriguing, so I told my wife that we should take it in.

She asked what it was about and I said it was about a welder who danced in a bar at night. She looked at me and rolled her eyes. That night we caught the 9 p.m. show at the old Rainbow Theater. My wife greatly enjoyed Flashdance, so she rescinded the eye roll and the movie became one of our favorites.

Since the Covid police had shut down all the theaters, we are reduced to watching movies on television these days. Tonight, we did a musical double feature. First we watched Alex weld and dance her way into her boss’s heart. Today, our enjoyment of the film is enhanced by looking at the background scenes of Pittsburgh in the 1980’s.

Next, we watched the original Mama Mia movie. When this film came out, we went as a family to see it. My wife and I, our kids, their spouses and my mother- in- law thoroughly enjoyed the musical stylings of Meryl Streep and company.

Even though this film is light and fun, we both felt a little tinge of melancholy while watching it. It became one of my mother-in-law’s favorite films before she died, she would watch it over and over on cable. It was sad watching this movie without her. This is part of growing old, everything triggers a memory and as more and more of the people we know pass from the scene, more and more of these memories are sad ones.

I enjoy movies because they have the power to transport me to different places and different times. I can sail the Spanish Main with Captain Blood or travel West with the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. Lately, they also take me back to who I was when I first saw them so many years ago.

This is only natural when the road behind me is so much longer than the road ahead. I hope the movie theaters open soon, I would like to see a few more good films and make a few more good memories before my final credits roll.      

 - Jim Busch

July 18, 2020

My wife and I got news today that we have a new relative. We have a new great, great niece born to my wife’s sister’s granddaughter on July 13. Her name is Nevaeh, which I was informed is heaven spelled backwards.

As I do with every new arrival, I wonder what the world will hold in store for her. Will she recognize the word Coronavirus? Will people still remember and talk about the Pandemic that took place back in the ‘20’s or will it be just a line in a history book like the Teapot Dome Scandal is for us.

Nevaeh is a child of the 2020’s, her great great grandmother, Eleanor, was a child of the 1920’s. Both were born during a pandemic, Eleanor at the end of the Spanish Flu and of course Nevaeh during the world wide outbreak of Covid-19.

Eleanor knew about the influenza epidemic, her parents had lost friends to the flu, but it was not something that she thought much about. By the time she got old enough to know what was going on outside her home, it had subsided into history. I hope this is the case for Nevaeh. Only time will tell.

Every generation believes that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that things were much better when they were young. Eleanor used to talk about how wonderful the world was when she was growing up. As a historian, my response was, “Yes, back in the good old days when you had great things like Polio and Nazis!”

I often think about this when I hear the young fretting over how divided the country is today. They talk about feuding political parties, violent extremists and riots in the streets. They proclaim, “Things have never been this bad before.”

I just smile and point to my grey hair and say, “You’re not old enough to remember 1968. We had protests and riots in every major city. The Democratic National Convention turned into a full-fledged battle and several of our leaders were assassinated while we watched on TV.”

The biggest difference between then and now is that events of 1968 are recorded in the history books and the events of 2020 are reported on the evening news. 

Just for good measure, I remind them that that era also had its own presidential impeachment and that our president also liked to attack the press. I do tell them that calling journalists “nattering nabobs of negativity” was far more creative than the phrase. “Fake news.” Recently, I heard a term I hadn’t heard for a while, “the silent majority.” It’s “Deja vu all over again.”  

I also wonder what technologies the older folks will declare to be the ruination for Nevaeh’s generation. For Eleanor’s generation, it was the growing popularity of automobiles that would lead young people astray. The four wheel “passion pits” were sure to make teenagers forsake morality and turn to drink and promiscuity.

This decline in virtue would be assisted by the new lascivious music on the new-fangled radio. Many people wanted to ban Bing Crosby because using the new microphones to sing was an alluring conversational style instead of belting out songs like Rudy Vallee.

My own generation was driven down to perdition by television and rock and roll music. The decline of western civilization can be traced to September 9, 1956 when Elvis Presley gyrated his way into unsuspecting American homes on The Ed Sullivan Show. Nevaeh’s grandmother and her peers were ruined by video games. Who knew the road to hell was paved with Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.   

That is not to say that Nevaeh has nothing to worry about. My biggest concern for her generation may be global warming. For the last several decades, environmental scientists have been monitoring and warning the public about a steady rise in temperatures around the globe. The clues were subtle at first, but became more and more noticeable as time went on.

We are now at the point where the polar ice caps are melting and glaciers are disappearing. Considering the fact that the rate of this warming seems to be accelerating, I believe that this will bring major changes in the world Nevaeh grows up in. So far, most political bodies have ignored this threat choosing to focus on other issues and many scientists agree that time is running out.

Nevaeh’s generation isn’t the first to face major environmental challenges. In Eleanor’s youth, clouds from the midwest’s dust bowl darkened Pennsylvania skies.  When I was a child, I remember when Pittsburgh’s steel mills pumped black smoke into the air and our rivers and streams ran rust red with mine runoff.

In the 1960’s, we learned that lead from our paint and gasoline was ending up in our bodies. When I was in high school, we were waiting for Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb to explode leaving starvation and mass poverty in its wake. Later satellites found a massive hole in our planet’s protective ozone layer. It seemed we were destroying the earth for beehive hairdos as the chemicals that powered our spray cans of hairspray and paint was eroding our atmosphere.

So far, mankind has been able to stave off environmental disaster. When people got fed up with the mess, they pushed their leaders to finally tidy up the planet. New regulations forced industries to clean up their act and our local skies turned blue and fish returned to our rivers.

We removed the lead from our cans of paint and our gas tanks. The much feared population bomb was a flash in the pan and we found new chemicals to hold our updos in place. We were able to deal with these problems once we found the political will to address them.

Global warming is a far bigger problem and we have tried to ignore it for far too long. It is probably too late to avoid all the consequences of rising temperatures, but I refuse to believe that Nevaeh’s generation is doomed. They may face some difficult times but they will find a way to adapt and overcome the challenges earlier generations left for them. Experience tells us that it is never wise to bet against human ingenuity.

Good luck, Ms. Nevaeh, you have a fascinating life in front of you. I can’t even begin to imagine what wonders you will get to see. The only thing we have to teach you is that things are never quite as bad as they might seem. 

- Jim Busch

July 17, 2020

My wife spent a good bit of the day in the kitchen organizing our collection of family photographs. She had the entire table covered with snapshots we have taken over the five decades we have been together.

This is a task that she has wanted to do for a long time, but somehow never found the time to do. Sorting the photos is a “want to do” rather than “have to do” task. It is one of those things that we all put off until “someday.” There is always something more important or more urgent to be done.

Many of those “more important” tasks disappeared because we have been forced to stay home during the coronavirus quarantine. My wife’s cancer diagnosis has moved sorting our memories to the “urgent” column. We both know that the far off “someday” has arrived like an unexpected guest. Sorting our photos has become a now or never task.

I can honestly say that my wife and I never took what we had for granted. We have always known that what we had was special. We loved one another and we loved our two children. In addition to our nuclear family, we were close with our siblings and her parents.

Our kids grew up playing with their cousins and our house was often filled with our kids’ friends. Throughout our marriage, friends and family members often commented on the strength of our relationship. They told us what we had was special.

I have to agree with this and I think I know why. My wife and I from day one have been focused on each other and on our children. Living our lives for the family didn’t leave time for pettiness or the dissatisfactions that cause so many marriages to crumble.

My wife always had a sense of how quickly time was passing. She could see our kids growing up and her parents growing old before her eyes. She wanted to hold on to every possible moment before it slipped away into the ether. Her camera was the net she used to capture these fragments of our lives.

In those pre-digital days, after every holiday or birthday we had a bag of Kodachrome rolls to take to the drug store for processing. After a vacation, we sometimes had to wait for weeks to get our film processed because we didn’t have the money to pay for the prints.

I can still remember standing with my wife in Thrift Drug as we pulled the stack of photos from the yellow Kodak envelope and flipped through them laughing and smiling. Once we got home, we would gather the family in the living room and pass the pictures around, one at a time so everyone could see them and share their memories of the event pictured.

I love my digital camera and the camera built into my phone, but there is something to be said for the anticipation and surprise in the Instamatic era. The process was similar when we shot slides. We would hold them up to the fluorescent lights in the drug store and set up the projector after dinner to put on a show for the family.

After the initial sharing of our pictures, some would go in the mail to relatives and others would go into albums. After a while, we simply had too many photos for albums and started filling old shoe boxes with our memories. We told ourselves we would look at them every so often, but our lives were too busy then to spend much time looking backwards.

Boxes of grade school photos were joined by pictures of high school, vacations, graduations, college visits, marriages and new family members. We had boxes of pictures showing the family dressed in bell bottoms, driving cars that rusted away to nothing and family members that we have lost.

I always pictured my wife and me as an elderly, but still good looking couple, sitting in our rockers looking at these photos and smiling at one another in our golden years. My wife’s cancer has crushed that dream along with so many others. It is unlikely that we will get to grow old together. This makes looking at our photos bittersweet.

Unlike George Bailey, I don’t need an angel to tell me I’ve had a wonderful life. These stacks of photos remind me of all the things we have done and enjoyed. They remind me when we were young and hopeful and our whole life lay ahead of us.

Our photographs also remind me of all that we have lost. There are pictures of my late parents, and of my in-laws. Pictures of family friends, aunts and uncles who are all gone from our lives. Even the pictures of the family pets that I buried in the backyard make me feel sorry for myself.

I saw a plaque in a catalog that read, “Don’t be sad that they’re gone; be happy that they were here at all.” I am sure that this motivational gem was composed by a young person that has yet to experience deep loss. It sounds great in theory, but is very hard to put into practice.

Most of all, looking at these photos of my wife and I and our life together, I know that she may be missing from the photos taken on future Christmas mornings or at family picnics. We have always known that this would happen someday, but I am not ready to lose her. I can’t imagine a life without her. I can’t picture a future without her standing beside me smiling for the camera.     

- Jim Busch

July 16, 2020

Today, my great niece Facetimed me to ask a question. To help her and her mother get through the lockdown period, I have been sending them art supplies.

They wanted to know what YouTube channels I recommend they watch to learn how to paint. I couldn’t answer their question, I am not in the habit of going online when I want to learn how to do something. While I have used online videos when trying to fix some specific device, such as disassembling a particular brand of faucet, my go to resource is books.

I suggested that they look at the beginner’s painting book I sent along with the paints, but I am sure they were googling “How to paint” before my phone was back in my pocket.

I have always considered books magical. In this age of computers and other electronic devices, I think books are the pinnacle of human technology. They are simple, yet effective. They carry the wisdom of the ages, but require no circuit boards, no touch screen or even batteries.

They are relatively portable and durable. They require no updates and their software has remained basically unchanged for thousands of years. The technology used to produce them has come a long way since Gutenberg, but the user experience has remained virtually unchanged. We just flip the pages and read the words.    

Some years back, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of medieval Irish art. The centerpiece of the show was an illuminated manuscript produced a thousand years ago in a monastery on the coast of Ireland. It was beautifully illustrated with gold leaf and calligraphy.

It was written in Latin and because of my pre-Vatican II upbringing in the Catholic Church, I could pick out some of the words on the page. This is where the magic kicks in—in a museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was reading the thoughts of a scribe across an ocean of salt water and a millennium of time. It is almost impossible to retrieve data stored in our word processors and floppy disk computers from just a few decades ago, yet scholars can read Roman texts predating the birth of Christ.

Earlier this week, at the Norwin Goodwill I found a copy of The Complete Essays of Mark Twain for just $1.99. It was 60 years-old and had a cracked hinge on the front cover. A few of the pages showed some foxing, evidenced by brown stains on their edges, but the rest of the binding was tight and none of the pages were missing. It was what the online booksellers call a good reading copy. This is exactly what I intend to do with this delightful book.

Full disclosure, I have loved Mark Twain for as long as I can remember. I think he was an amazing man and an incredible writer. Most of all, I admire his resilient spirit. Twain’s life was marked by tragedy after tragedy, yet he always seemed to find the humor and humanity in every situation. He was a keen observer of his surroundings and especially of his fellow humans. Long before tape recorders, he was able to capture the rhythm and color in the speech of the America of his era.

Through hard work, Mark Twain developed his ability to communicate his observations and his thoughts on what he saw to his readers. He was born Samuel Clemens, but he worked his whole life to create Mark Twain, wordsmith. In a time when most writers wrote in a style that allowed them to show off their erudition, their knowledge of the classics and the scope of their vocabularies,

Mark Twain used the simple language of the people he met on his travels. He wrote to express ideas rather than impress others with himself. During his lifetime, much of his income came from his public lectures. He was a storyteller on the stage and on the page.

If books are magic, Mark Twain was the master magician and the Merlin of the printed page. Twain died a decade before my mother was born, but I feel like he is my friend and mentor. Twain was a radically honest man, he poured his thoughts, his heart and his soul onto the page without filtration.

When I started my speaking and writing career I often thought WWMTD (What would Mark Twain do)? I tried to model my presentations and writings on his. I never came close to matching Twain’s expertise at the podium or on the page, but he still helped me grow.

I am looking forward to reading my new Twain book. The first thing most people think of when they hear Twain’s name is Huckleberry Finn and all the classic novels he produced. In his own day, being a novelist was his side hustle.

Twain spent decades as a correspondent, reporter and newspaper editor. He was a popular and widely read journalist. My Complete Essays is mostly articles he wrote for the magazines and newspapers of his day. I am sure that the reason this book is long out of print is that the publishers feel that its subject matter is dated and would be of no interest to contemporary readers. I strongly disagree with this assessment, Twain is timeless.

An essay titled Stirring Times in Austria from 1898 describes a dysfunctional government where representatives are divided into factions that vilify one another, use ethnic divisions to try to gain political advantage and generally get nothing productive accomplished.

This essay and a follow up essay Concerning the Jews is also is one of the most thoughtful things I have read on the subject of racism and discrimination. This is more evidence of the magical power of the printed book. Looking at these issues, that occurred a hundred and twenty years ago, takes the anger and emotion out of our arguments.

We are not emotionally invested in the Austria of 1898, so we can think about these issues without putting up our dukes to defend our position. This shows us that these problems are not new and it is time to resolve them once and for all. Time traveling through the pages can give us a perspective on contemporary issues that is unavailable anywhere else.

I know that modern media outlets have a lot to offer. I am a power user of search engines and other online resources. In my humble opinion, none of these technologies have either the staying power or the ability to engage the mind like the printed word. Their power to allow us to connect with great thinkers across time and space is truly magical.        

 - Jim Busch

July 15, 2020

If I was going to put a title on today’s diary post it would be, “The Groundhog’s Revenge—the Return of Peanut Chuck.” In slightly smaller type, I would add this subtitle, “He’s back and he’s still hungry!”

People who read the diary entry I wrote yesterday know about my ongoing battle to keep the Groundhog we’ve named “Peanut Chuck,” from devouring the squirrels’ food.

Much like Bill Murray’s gopher in the film Caddieshack, Chuck outwitted me every time I tried to keep him from eating the peanuts my wife put out for the squirrels she enjoys watching. We’re not prejudiced when it comes to rodents, we don’t dislike woodchucks; it’s just that they are gluttons. In a few minutes, Chuck can gobble down enough peanuts to feed a tree full of squirrels. 

My adversary proved to be more adept at stealing our peanuts than predicting the weather. Yesterday, after a number of failed attempts, I declared victory over my furry adversary. I felt that the Rube Goldberg contraption I had put together out of wood, plastic pipes and rope presented an impenetrable barrier that would keep our peanuts safe from Peanut Chuck.

After watching Peanut Chuck’s multiple attempts to breach our defenses, I declared victory. He repeatedly circled the feeder table, he tried climbing to the top and sniffed at the ropes that blocked his way. Finally, he slunk away to his den, his tail dragging through the grass in dejection. I was filled with pride. It had only taken me two weeks to defeat a chubby rodent with a brain the size of a walnut. Victory was mine.

This morning my wife sent me out on a shopping expedition. When I returned, she was sitting at our kitchen table and without saying a word, she pointed a finger toward out patio. I saw our squirrel feeding station and immediately saw that it had been ransacked. The squirrels daintily take one peanut at a time and scamper away to bury them in our flower beds.

The mess on the table was obviously the work of Peanut Chuck. There is nothing dainty about Chuck’s table manners. He behaves like the motorcycle gang in an old movie. He greedily shoves the nuts in his mouth and spits out the shells in all directions. He had defeated my defenses. He had defeated me.

The ancient Romans had a proverb for situations like this, “Sic transit gloria mundi” which translates to “All glory is fleeting in the world.” When the Roman generals would return in triumph after conquering an enemy, a young page would stand behind them on their chariot and whisper this phrase over and over in their ear. It was thought that this would protect the victorious warrior from becoming too full of himself. Peanut Chuck had certainly humbled me and given me a new found respect for nature.

I asked my wife how Chuck had accomplished this feat. She didn’t know. She had been next to the window all morning, but she was so focused on completing some paperwork that she had not looked out the window. She got that strange feeling you get when you sense that someone, or in this case something, is looking at you.

Startled, she looked up to see Chuck’s beady little eyes staring at her through the glass. He was shredding a big peanut, but she was convinced that he was laughing at her. After he had eaten the last peanut, he jumped down from the table and waddled off to his burrow for his afternoon nap.

I went out to examine the scene of the crime to try to figure out how Peanut Chuck had managed to circumvent the obstacles I had put in his way. Everything seemed to be intact. I searched for a tiny hang glider, grappling hooks or perhaps a groundhog sized parachute, but found nothing. Tomorrow, I will put out some more peanuts and wait for my worthy opponent to return. I will carefully study how he made a fool of me. Then it will be my move and I will try to harden my defenses against his assault. I’m thinking of something using motion detectors, robotic arms, drones and laser beams.

My grandfather taught me that nature has many lessons to teach us. All we need to do is open our eyes and our hearts to absorb its wisdom. Peanut Chuck has taught me the power of persistence. He knows what he wants and refuses to let anything stop him from achieving his goal. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself or quit, he just keeps coming. Chuck and Mother Nature have taught me a valuable lesson and the cost of the tuition was literally peanuts.

        - Jim Busch

July 14, 2020

Ahab had his Moby Dick, Santiago had his great blue Marlin in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and I have my Peanut Chuck.

These epic tales are all part of the oldest story in the world, the story of man’s struggle against nature. Like Ahab and Santiago, I have become obsessed with besting my foe and reaffirming my supremacy over the animal world.

I may not have my opponent’s mighty buck teeth, I may lack his razor sharp digging claws, and I certainly do not have his survival instincts or his cute little ears. All I have to face down this beast is my big brain and my wits. Since the dawn of mankind, it has been an eternal struggle of man against beast or in this case chubby man against chubby rodent.

My battle with this determined rodent started on a warm spring day. Because of the governor’s stay at home order, my housebound wife had taken to watching the birds and squirrels through the picture window in our kitchen. Her sister sent her a picture of a squirrel feeder in the shape of a tiny picnic table.

She shared the picture with me and I went to my shop and made one for her. She loved seeing the bushy tailed squirrels sitting on the table’s benches like they were attending a family reunion. She would call me to the window, point to the squirrels sitting on the table on our retaining wall and say, “Look how cute they are.”

All went well until Peanut Chuck arrived. Next to the grey squirrels, he looked like Godzilla in a Japanese sci-fi movie. He waddled up to the table as birds and squirrels fled his approach. He sucked up the peanuts and sunflower seeds on the table with the efficiency of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

In a matter of seconds, he decimated the squirrels’ food supply. My wife was beside herself. She doesn’t dislike groundhogs. She puts out watermelon rinds and other treats for him. She just didn’t like him stealing the food on the table she set for his smaller cousins. She looked to me for a solution.

My first thought was based on the fundamental difference between woodchucks and squirrels. Woodchucks are ponderous ground dwelling critters, while squirrels are agile and athletic, adapted to a life spent leaping from branch to branch in the treetops.

The solution was simple, lift the squirrels’ food off the ground out of reach of the earthbound woodchuck. I was the peanut Nazi, “No peanuts for you, Mr. Woodchuck!”

 It was back to the shop to build something to elevate the feeder off the ground. I decided on a small table which would raise the feeder three feet above the groundhog’s reach. Using some wood salvaged from pallets, I made a table large enough to hold the picnic table and an additional bin for sunflower seeds.

Once I had finished the table, I set it on our patio with a victorious flourish, filled the seed bin and put the table in place. “Take that Mr. Woodchuck! Enjoy eating your grass, sucker!”

I was in my office when my wife called me into the kitchen. She pointed out the window. The critter I had dubbed Peanut Chuck was sitting on top of the table wolfing down his favorite food and enjoying the view. I asked my wife how he had managed this stunt and she was not sure. He was already on top of the table when she saw him. When he had joined the clean plate club, he jumped down from the table, like he was light as a feather and waddled away for a much deserved nap.

We refilled the table and staked out the scene of the crime by hiding behind the kitchen curtain. We knew this repeat offender could not resist returning to the scene of the crime to get another peanut fix. Sure enough, he waddled down the three steps to our patio, waddled across the patio and then climbed the leg of the table as nimble as a ninja.

In just a few minutes, he polished off his second helping, leapt down and waddled away. My grandfather had told me that he had seen groundhogs climb trees to grab apples or cherries, but I didn’t believe him. I thought it was another of his tall tales, I’ll never doubt you again, Grandpap. The score was now Peanut Chuck 2, Jim 0. This was our, “We’re going to need a bigger boat moment!”

This time it was my wife’s turn to use her highly evolved brain to outwit Pennsylvania’s second most clever groundhog. She thought about the baffles used to keep squirrels out of bird feeders. Her theory was that because he was so fat that if he had to lean back while climbing the legs he would fall backwards.

I thought her theory made sense and that her suggested solution was brilliant. She sent me to the dollar store to buy four Frisbees. I cut a hole in each disk so that we could slide them over the legs. We were certain that Peanut Chuck would fall to the ground if he tried to get around these barriers. My wife even expressed her concern for our adversary saying, “I hope he doesn’t get hurt.”

Since it was late in the day, we decided to wait to the next morning to humiliate Chuck. The next morning we restocked the feeder and sat back to watch what we were sure would be an amusing sight as the woodchuck did somersaults for our amusement.

It wasn’t long before Chuck showed up, like Bad Bad Leroy Brown in the Jim Croce song, sending the birds and squirrels scurrying around. We are not experts at reading rodent facial expressions, but we are fairly certain Peanut Chuck was “chuckling” at us. The score now stood at Peanut Chuck 3 - humans zip!

It was time to crank up the cerebellum and go all dominant species on Chuck’s furry butt. I was beginning to feel like Wile E. Coyote as I went back to the drawing board. I cut eight blocks and drilled a hole in each at a 15 degree angle. I attached these to the feeder table and inserted eight inch long pieces of plastic pipe into these.

Each pipe had four holes drilled in them which we used to stretch cords between them. This formed an impenetrable net around the table top. We knew that the cords would not hold his weight, causing him to plummet to the ground. This contraption made the table top look like a safety net below a circus trapeze rig.

The next morning we waited and watched as Chuck waddled up to the table, looked at it for about 22 seconds and climbed up the inside of the leg, squeezed his body through the ropes and enjoyed a delicious breakfast of peanuts with a side of sunflower seeds. Chuck 4 - Jim 0!

It was back to Home Depot for more pipe. I cut these and drilled holes for the screws I used to mount them to the table, so he couldn’t repeat his morning performance. I was sure that this would stop him from squeezing through his way to the top of the table. The only thing I forgot to do was tell Peanut Chuck. He was back on top of the table almost before we got into the house to watch him. The score was now five- zip!

This morning I went to the dollar store and bought a supply of clothes line. My wife wove a net of rope through the lines stretched from the pipes. Our simple feeder table was starting to look like a Federal Super Max Prison.

Once she was finished with her anti-rodent macramé project, we restocked the table and sat back to watch what happened. Chuck soon appeared and waddled to the table. He sat up on his haunches and studied the changes in our security system. He climbed up each of the legs searching for a way to his beloved peanuts. Finally he gave up and waddled away in disgust. The final score Chuck 5 - humans 1.

Victory was ours, at least for now. I have learned not to underestimate my foe. I am sure Peanut Chuck has a whiteboard in his underground lair and is plotting a peanut heist like the team in Ocean’s Eleven.

For now, we have an unseemly amount of pride in outwitting an obese burrowing rodent. These days we will take any wins we can get.       

- Jim Busch        

July 13, 2020

Today, I had an online conversation with a conservative friend about Covid-19. He maintained that the mortality rate is in the single digits, only one or two percent, and we should not worry about the disease. That the president was right to say that the disease is relatively harmless.

I told him that the 135,000 Americans that succumbed to the coronavirus might disagree, if they could. This discussion got me thinking about how binary our culture has become. In our search for simplicity, we have tried to put everything we encounter into one of two boxes. We live in an either/or society, things are either good or bad, right or wrong. We can no longer see shades of grey, everything is black or white.

The impact of Covid-19 on individuals is an object lesson in why binary thinking is a very poor tool for understanding our world. It is true that some people infected with the virus manifest no symptoms, they may be tired and a little achy, but nothing else.

These are the asymptomatic people that doctors feel may unknowingly spread the disease to others. In the binary world view, the only choices are life or death. In this life good/death bad worldview, many more people survive the disease than die from it. This rationale allows some people to believe that the disease is not to be feared.

In the binary view of the world, people either die from Covid-19 or recover and return to robust health. The binary choice is sick or healthy, there is no room in this worldview for long recoveries or permanent disability. The truth is far more nuanced, there are many, many shades of gray lying between black and white.

No two cases are precisely the same because no two people are the same. Medicine is an inexact science because the human body presents far too many variables for certainty.

Stochastic is a term that scientists and mathematicians use to describe a process where the results are impossible to predict. Because of the complexity of the human body, we are a walking, talking, stochastic process. Penicillin may quickly cure one person, while the same dosage may kill the next person because they are allergic to the drug.

The impact of coronavirus falls along a long continuum with many different outcomes, lying somewhere between a mild case to death from Covid-19. As patients advance along this scale, each step ads to their level of suffering.

An analysis of the cases treated so far during the pandemic has shown us that for every single person who has died from the coronavirus, nineteen people are hospitalized. For every Covid- 19 death, eighteen people will suffer permanent heart damage and 10 more will have chronic lung problems. For each fatality, three people will have a stroke, two more will have neurological damage leading to weakness and loss of coordination and two others will experience brain damage impairing their cognitive functions.

It is too early for science to understand the long term impact of this disease on the body. For example, many children fully cured of their polio lived healthy active lives until the paralysis returned when they reached middle age. It is possible that Covid-19 patients may experience higher levels of cardiac or pulmonary disease than their peers later in life.

Many people also have a binary view of who should be concerned about contracting Covid 19. Either you are at risk from the disease or you are not. People who are in the at risk group include the old or people with preexisting conditions, which weaken their immune system. Young healthy people believe they have nothing to worry about.

Recent experience has shown us that while certain groups are at a greater risk, the coronavirus is an equal opportunity infector. The story of Nick Cordero makes this point. Cordero, was only forty one years old and a Broadway performer.

As a dancer, Cordero was as fit as an athlete and took good care of his heath. Despite this, he contracted Covid 19 and spent weeks in the Intensive Care Unit. He suffered a number of setbacks prompting his doctors to put him into a medically induced coma and amputated his leg because of circulation problems. Despite these heroic measures, Nick Cordero died last week.

The case of a 30 year-old man from San Antonio, Texas is a cautionary tale on the dangers of believing only old sick people get Covid-19. This young man decided to test this theory for himself and attended a “Covid Party.” The party was hosted by a friend who had tested positive for the disease. He only had minor symptoms and assured his friends that Covid-19 was no big deal.

They got together for a drinking party to laugh in the face of death. The young man in the news story was not as lucky as his friend, he developed a severe case of Covid-19 and died in the ICU at a San Antonio hospital. He spoke his last words to a nurse, who was trying to save him, “I think I might have screwed up.”

I believe one of the wisest thing ever said was H. L. Mencken’s statement, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong!” Americans love simplicity. We would rather watch a movie that is ninety percent car chases and gun fights, than a film that requires them to think.

We find science requires too much mental effort. Instead of listening to medical professionals on how to stop the spread of the disease, we would rather get our health advice from the internet. If you can’t believe a site that shows pictures of Elvis and JFK playing golf with aliens inside Area 51, what can you believe?

I think that our love of simple and wrong answers explains our binary approach to life. If everything my political party says is perfect and everything the other party says comes directly from the devil, I don’t have to waste time learning the facts and thinking about issues. It is much simpler to believe than to think!

The coronavirus may actually teach America that there are some things in life that can’t be simplified. There are some problems that do not respond to simple solutions. Perhaps like the poor young man in Texas, our country will reconsider our binary either/or approach to every problem and say, “I think we may have screwed up!" 

- Jim Busch

July 12, 2020

This week a new reality show premiered on CBS. Tough as Nails features people who work doing hard manual labor compete in tasks such as moving bags of cement with a wheelbarrow.

Contestants have jobs like drywaller, farmer and ironworker in everyday life. It is essentially a program that lets the viewing public sit in the comfort of their homes while watching other people work. When I saw a promotion for this show, I wondered what my dad would have thought of this show. Since my father worked with his hands all of his life, I am sure he would have found this show quite amusing.

Though I spent most of my working years in white collar jobs, I know what it is to do manual labor. In my younger days, I worked unloading trucks, driving a forklift in a warehouse, running a molding machine and working in a machine shop. When I used a milling machine to resurface ingot molds for a steel mill, I would sweat out the cast iron dust lodged in my pores. My wife had to bleach my pillowcase and sheets to remove the rust stains where they had touched my body.

The plants I worked in were hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. My arms and chest were constantly burned by chips of hot metal flying off my machine. With cranes running overhead and powerful machines spinning pieces of metal, some weighing a ton or more, at high rates of speed, I had to be constantly on my guard. I saw several men severely injured when they forgot to watch their step.

I worked in a shop on the banks of Titusville Creek that was home to rats the size of fat beagles. We could always tell a new guy because they brought their lunch to work in a paper bag. When the lunch whistle blew, all that would remain of their meal was a few scraps of brown paper covered with rat droppings. It did not take long to figure out why millworkers carry metal lunch buckets.

Chuck was one of the senior guys in the shop. He was a tool and die maker which required incredible precision and skill. He was also an accomplished rat trainer. He always had his wife pack some extra slices of bologna in his lunch. When the lunch whistle would blow, all of the workers and the rats would head to the beat up picnic table at one end of the shop.

Chuck had named the largest of the rats, Bob, after our foreman. He would break off a piece of the bologna and hold it up. Bob would sit up and beg like an obedient poodle. Chuck would throw him his treat and take a bite out of his own sandwich.

After taking a second bite, he would hold up another piece of bologna and wave it in circles. Bob would lie on the floor and roll over several times before sitting up to get his reward. Chuck also taught Bob to play dead and to chase his tale which provided everyone with a lot of entertainment with their lunch. Bob was the unofficial mascot of the shop.

A few years later, I was able to leverage my unique combination of a college degree and machine shop experience to land a sales job with an industrial valve and fitting company. This job took me into steel mills, refineries, railroad repair shops and all sorts of industrial plants.

I got to see how hard the people who actually make things have to work in order to make modern life possible. I met a lot of tough hardworking men, and as things changed, some women. Those blue collar workers were a little rough around the edges, but on the whole they were good people and fun to be around.

My time working with and hanging around working people taught me that the idea of the harder you work, the more successful you will be is a myth. Some of the hardest working people in our society are also the poorest paid.

These people include janitors, kitchen staff, and day laborers who work long hours, often for minimum wage. The tightening of our immigration laws has created a crisis for our large farms and orchards, because few Americans are willing to work all day in the hot sun for a few dollars a day.

My own career proved this point. As I became more successful, my dad was amazed that I got paid to wear a suit and tie, sit in an air conditioned office and take people out to lunch, none of which he considered work. He just couldn’t figure out how I got paid more than he ever earned for “just talking to people.” It simply didn’t make sense to him.

The pandemic reminded us how important manual labor is to society. It is ironic that some of the people who were designated essential workers are also the least well paid. This includes people like truck drivers, hospital janitors and grocery clerks. These people had to go to work if their organizations were to continue to function.

In many cases, these workers had to do their jobs without proper protective equipment, yet they continued to do their jobs without complaint. A few companies gave their frontline workers hazard pay or bonuses, but most people continued to work for poor pay.

When interviewed by newscasters, many of these people said they felt it was their duty to help their customers and expressed pride in doing their job in spite of the danger. Many of these hard working people contracted Covid-19 and some died. It is sad to think of people sacrificing their lives for a minimum wage job.

I hope that when this pandemic is finally under control, that we remember these underpaid workers are essential to our society. We need to stop taking them for granted or, even worse, looking down our noses at them because they work with their hands.

I hope we remember their sacrifices and honor them with something more meaningful than a reality show on television that they’re probably too tired to watch.

- Jim Busch

July 11, 2020

Today, I was thinking about the timing of this pandemic. It is fortunate that it came after the world had gone digital. Our smartphones, tablets and computers have allowed us to work efficiently from home and to stay in touch with family and friends during this time of social distancing. For as much as we complain about Zoom meetings and bad connections, our technology has made this period of quarantine much more bearable.

I can’t imagine how much worse this disease would have been if it would have occurred in the early 1990’s before most people had computers or internet access. Not only would people have been forced to go the office for work, but they would have had less access to information about how to deal with the virus.

The number of people who let down their guard as soon as the restrictions were lifted is evidence of how bored and claustrophobic people became when the governor offered his stay at home order. Once the door was opened an inch, they went barging in like the virus had miraculously disappeared.

This “Virus has left the building” attitude resulted in a major resurgence of the disease. Imagine how much harder it would have been to keep people at home without internet access. Many people described their confinement like they were chained to a dungeon wall and forced to live on moldy bread and muddy water. The Count of Monte Cristo might never have escaped if his dungeon had access to Netflix and his meals were catered by Door Dash and Grub Hub.

Our technology was a Godsend to parents who had to shelter in place with young children. There is a reason that children in the 1950’s and 1960’s were sent outside to run around in the woods or play stickball in city streets. Even the most loving parents would be driven to guzzle the cooking sherry if they had to spend even a few days locked in the house with their children without any way to entertain them.

Today’s parents have everything from cable television’s Nickelodeon channel to video games and streaming movies. Limits on screen time imposed by concerned parents were quickly suspended for the duration of the pandemic.

Contemplating being quarantined for months with teenagers is more terrifying to most parents than Stephen King’s nightmares. Teenagers are very social animals and without Facetime and other modes of communications to stay in touch with their circle of friends, they would require a chair and a whip to keep them caged.

Technology also made it possible to educate our children when their schools were shut down. The pandemic revealed a serious gap in internet access between poor families and their wealthier neighbors. It is possible that this digital divide may widen the educational and economic gap among people of various income levels.

If the disease continues to flare up whenever people gather together, we may need to keep our children home from school for a year or more. If this is the case, our educators will have to develop and implement more effective methods of online learning than we currently use.

Today, I heard a story on National Public Radio that talked about the uses and limitations of technology in a pandemic. Comedian and comedy writer Laurie Kilmartin was a guest on It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. Kilmartin had written an essay about her 84-year-old mother’s death from Covid-19.

Her mother had broken a hip and then contracted the coronavirus in the hospital. Like so many people, she was not able to be with her mother as she fought for her life due to isolation protocols. I know this feeling because I haven’t been able to be with my wife as she has been undergoing chemotherapy for her cancer. I am only separated from my wife for a few hours, I can’t imagine not being with a loved one for weeks on end.

To partly remedy this situation, Kilmartin provided the hospital with a tablet and a rack to hold it. She worked with her mother’s nurses to coordinate FaceTime sessions. For the first few weeks, Kilmartin and her sister kept the sessions short not wishing to tire their mother. They contacted her several times a day, but only talked for a few minutes. At first, they tried to assure her that she would recover and talked about what they would do when the older woman could come home. Despite the upbeat face they showed to their mother, the two sisters saw that their mother was growing weaker and weaker.

Finally, Laurie Kilmartin and her sister were in her kitchen and decided to check in on their mom. They called the nurse and set up the call. As soon as the link was established, they saw that their mother’s breathing was labored. The two women had been with their father when he passed away and realized that their mother was failing.

They wanted to be with their mom, but knew they couldn’t be. The only thing they could do was sit there and watch. Their mother was unconscious. It is unlikely that she knew that her children were there with her, at least digitally. Heartbroken, the sisters kept the line open for over 70 hours, taking turns catching short naps.

After almost three days, their mother’s breaths grew further and further apart. Finally, the older woman simply stopped breathing and died peacefully in her sleep. They sat looking at the body and after about an hour a nurse came in and called a code. The doctor came running, but instantly saw there was nothing he could do. The time on the death certificate was about an hour after her actual time of death.

The nurse spoke to Kilmartin on the FaceTime and told her that there was no hurry to move her mother if she wanted to spend more time with her mother. They kept the link up for another hour. Finally, the undertaker arrived and the nurse told them goodbye and switched off the tablet.

After watching her mother’s slow death, the suddenness of the screen going dark struck her. She was there and then she was gone. It was like switching off the television after a show had ended. It seemed surreal to her that she had watched her mother die without touching her or watch her being taken away.

After she had finished telling her story, Sam Sanders, the show’s host, asked Laurie Kilmartin, if she was angry at the hospital. She said that the hospital had done their best under the circumstances. She was angry at the person who brought the virus to her mother’s hospital room. She didn’t know who it was, but she said it was probably a person who decided that a mask was uncomfortable or inconvenient, not knowing the pain they were about to cause. She wanted her story to be a reminder and a warning to the people who resist wearing a mask when out in public.

Our devices have become the modern version of crystal balls, allowing us to visit distant places and people without leaving our homes. My son was a fan of the science fiction show Babylon 5. On this show, set on a space station in the far distant future, there was an order of “technomages.” These men were absolute masters of technology and made everything they did look like magic.

I like this image because the technology that has helped us get through this pandemic is really quite magical. The last few months have taught us all just how much technology can do for us.

It also taught us the limitations of technology and that nothing will ever replace our need to be with one another, to touch one another and to embrace one another.

- Jim Busch

July 10, 2020

Everyone has had to give up at least a few things during the coronavirus lockdown. Some of the things we have had to give up are minor, just inconveniences. Some people missed going out to the movies or out to eat and others lost their jobs. Other things are far more serious.

Unfortunately, thousands of people have lost their lives or the lives of loved ones. Of the things I have had to go without in the last few months has been the sounds of everyday life.

I come from a family with stout hearts, loud voices and lousy ears. All the men in my family have had trouble with their ears. It is entirely possible that my very existence can be attributed to the flaw in the Busch family’s genetic makeup that messes with our hearing.

My dad tried on numerous occasions to enlist in the military during World War II. The Army, the Navy, the Marines and even the Coast Guard all agreed that they did want a man with punctured eardrums wearing their uniform, no matter how patriotic he was. Knowing my dad, he probably would have stood up in the middle of a battle to see what was going on and got himself killed long before he and my mother got together.

I got my own ear drums punctured when I was just eight-years-old, when after years of drops, the doctor put tiny glass tubes in both ear drums. Our family ear doctor was an older man who didn’t believe in new-fangled things like anesthetic, so he just took a needle and poked holes in my already inflamed ear drums.

I screamed so loud that people on the street looked up for Russian bombers, because they thought they heard the air raid sirens going off. Fluid drained from my ears for weeks and gave me some temporary relief, but I have always had trouble with my ears. The family malady is part of the legacy I have passed on to my son and my grandson, who both have had ear problems.

I aggravated my hearing problems over the years by exposing them to excessive noise. I learned to shoot before it became common to where hearing protection. I spent many happy hours punching big holes in targets and tiny ones in my eardrums. Engine noise also contributed to the damage.

As a young man, I liked American muscle and British sports cars, the louder the better. My midlife crisis car was a Pontiac Fiero. I liked this car, it handled like it was glued to the road because of its mid-engine design. Putting the motor in the middle of the car meant that for the twelve years I drove it, I had a loud engine just inches behind my head. All of these factors, plus a few years running large machinery and the occasional concert, treated my ear drums like it was Muhammed Ali’s punching bag.

Though I refused to admit it, by the time I reached my 60th birthday, I was getting hard of hearing. I learned to carefully watch people’s lips and body language to fill in the blanks of our conversations. My wife began to ask me why I was playing the TV or radio so loud. I particularly struggled with the high pitched voices of children and young women.

When I was teaching at a conference in a large meeting room I realized that I was having trouble hearing the students’ questions. Before my remaining sessions, I told the class that I was hard of hearing and asked them to speak up. This was the first time I admitted that I had a problem.

When I retired, I had to choose my own medical insurance plan. One of the factors I used to evaluate the various offerings was their hearing coverage.  This was important because hearing aids are ridiculously expensive. These tiny electronic devices cost more than a full featured Smart TV or a top of the line laptop, which makes no sense to me. I am sure either of these devices cost far more to manufacture, but the Audiology Mafia knows they have us seniors over a barrel.

When I finally got my hearing aids, it made a world of difference. I was able to hear so many things I had not heard in years. I had forgotten how wonderful the choir of bids sounded in the morning and for a while could not figure out the noise I was hearing in the kitchen was the refrigerator running.

My wife liked my new hearing aids as much as I did. She didn’t have to stick cotton in her ears when we were watching TV in the evenings. Best of all, I could converse with people without struggling to figure out what they were saying.

For years, normal conversations had sounded like a dramatic reading from a classified document redacted by the FBI - you could catch the gist of what was being said, but a lot of critical details were missing.

I considered my hearing aids to be a technological miracle. They made me realize how much I had been missing. Losing your hearing is a slow process, so I didn’t realize how bad my hearing had become. Everything went well until earlier this year when my hearing aids began to fail.

I called the audiologist and got an appointment in March. When Governor Tom Wolf declared a statewide lockdown, like everything else, that meeting was canceled. For some reason, hearing aid centers are not an essential business. I can understand why they closed their office. Most of their clients are elderly, so they were at a severe risk of contracting the disease. By this point, my hearing aids had become very expensive ear plugs, and once again I was living in a very quiet world.

The precautions used to stop the spread of Covid-19 exasperated my hearing problems. Masks muffled people’s speech and made reading their lips impossible. I am not sure if Plexiglas barriers block the spread of coronavirus, but I do know that they are quite effective at absorbing sound waves.

I had many conversations with grocery store and pharmacy employees where they had to repeat something back to me several times until I figured out what they were trying to tell me. In the past, my wife functioned as a living hearing aid, listening to a conversation and relaying what was said to me. Since chemotherapy has suppressed her immune system, she has been trying to stay home, so I am on my own.    

This week I learned that my audiologist was reopening, so I immediately called for an appointment for this morning. He checked out my two hearing aids. He was able to fix the left one and when I put it in, the world came suddenly alive.

I could hear the ventilation system and his receptionist on the phone outside his office door. When he asked me if it was working, it sounded like someone had turned up his volume. He turned his attention to the right hearing aid, but he soon determined that he would have to send it to the factory for refurbishment. He promised to have it back to me within a week.

In the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about social distancing. My hearing loss went far beyond distancing, in a way it built a wall between me and everyone around me. Even though I am only half way back to normal, I am very happy that my auditory exile is finally over. 

- Jim Busch

July 9, 2020

My wife and I got good news, of a sort, today.

My wife was healthy enough to be injected with poison. She is supposed to receive chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer every Thursday, but last week she received a call as we were going out the door to the hospital.

It was the oncologist’s nurse telling her that she had decided that my wife’s red cell count was too low to go ahead with the procedure. The nurse told her that the doctor wanted her to report for a series of three shots to help her restore her blood count. Even though the chemo makes my wife deathly ill, we were distressed by this news because this was my wife’s only hope of surviving her disease.

For three days, I drove her to Allegheny General Hospital for the injections plus a CAT scan to see if her cancer had spread. We hoped that her weekly blood test would show enough improvement that the doctor would continue her chemotherapy.

This morning we got up early and were getting ready to go to the hospital when her phone rang. I uttered a word a seldom use and is not suitable to reproduce here.  My wife looked at her phone and said, “It’s Susie.”

The call that had made my heart skip a beat was just her sister calling to wish her luck, so we were on our way. Because of the coronavirus, I am not allowed to be with her, so I dropped her at the hospital. I spent the next five hours running errands and worrying about my wife until I went to retrieve her.

When she got in the car I pummeled her with questions about what had transpired. I learned that her blood had greatly improved and that the doctor had ordered a new series of shots to fortify her red cells. She was able to go ahead with her scheduled treatments. I then asked her the question that was weighing most heavily on my mind, did they find anything on her scan?

I held my breath waiting for the answer, but soon learned the doctor had not received the results as yet. I went into a bit of a rant about why you should not have to wait for a digital test, “It isn’t like they have to develop the film in a darkroom!” She told me to calm down and that Dr. Mongo promised to call her as soon as she got the results.

On the way home, she talked to both of her sisters and my daughter repeating the same information she had related to me. I knew there were several more family members who would receive the same status report before the day was done. I told her she should just record it and play it back to everyone that called.

When we got home I saw a massive Amazon box on our porch. I asked my wife if she had ordered something and she said “Yes.” Looking at the huge box my next question was, “What the hell did you buy?

She smiled at me and said, “It’s your anniversary and Christmas present.”

I dragged the box into the house and looked at my present. It was a large flat screen Smart TV.

Choking up, I looked at my wife and said, “I know why you did this.”

After 50 years together, we have developed a telepathy that allows us to communicate without speaking a word. She said, “Yes.”

She knew that there was a good chance that she might not live to see Christmas or even our 48th anniversary in mid-September. I fought back the tears because I knew she was right and because she was thinking of me and how I would manage after she is gone.

She is not much of a TV watcher preferring to listen to music. She knows that I love watching movies and documentaries. Our current television requires a complex series of steps to use the smart cast system from our phones to watch streaming channels.  She wanted to make it easy for me to watch the programs I like when I am living alone.

I read a lot of military history. In all my readings I have never discovered anyone, man or woman, who has shown more selfless courage than my wife has shown in the last few months. Faced with her own death, her primary concern is for what will happen to the family after her death. She is hoping for the best and is fighting hard to stay alive, but she knows the odds are against her.

Since the beginning of our marriage I have often quoted Oscar Wilde who said, “No woman loves a man so much that she doesn’t consider him to be somewhat of an ass.” 

I know Glenda has her doubts about how well I will manage without her. We’ve always practiced a strict division of labor. I made the money and she dispersed it. I went to work and maintained the yard and garden and she took care of everything inside the house. Glenda always took care of the bills for our household. She has been organizing our finances and writing lists of bills, taxes and other responsibilities for me.

She is doing the same for my medications and has been making similar lists for them. We have had discussions about what I will eat, she is concerned that I will live on junk food if she is not there to monitor my dietary choices - she knows me well! Though her disease and treatments sap her energy, she has been going through her things and deciding what is to be done with them.

Though I know that these discussions are for my benefit, I find it hard to talk about these things. I do not want to imagine living without her in my life. When my time comes I would like to think I would be as brave and steady as my wife, but I doubt that I will.

Her courage and composure at this time makes me love her more than I ever did - something I didn’t think was possible. It is going to make the toughest thing I ever faced even tougher.

- Jim Busch

July 8, 2020

I have always considered myself a creative individual. I chose to pursue a career in advertising and journalism because they offered lots of opportunities to exercise my creativity.

In my spare time, I like to make things. Over the years, I have taught myself wood working, carving, blacksmithing, gardening, writing fiction, poetry, printmaking and painting.  I love talking with creative people, writers, photographers, painters, sculptors, etc.

In talking with these creative types, I have identified two things that separate them from the average person. First, they believe they are creative and can not be convinced otherwise. They know in their flesh, in their blood and in their souls that they are creative people. They ignore that inner critic that says, “Who are you to think you can come up with something new. If that was a good idea, someone would of thought of it before.”

The second thing that distinguishes creative people from others is that they create things. Many people have lots of creative ideas. They dream of being a dancer, a painter, a musician, or some other type of artist. They have a thousand and one reasons why they don’t act on these creative urges. They don’t have time, they’re too busy launching their career; they’re too tired; they don’t have the money they need to get started, and the list goes on and on.

They keep their dreams on life support, it lies there in a coma unable to move or express itself. They hope that in that mythical time known as “someday,” it will sit up in bed and they will suddenly begin to paint like Pablo Picasso or dance like Martha Graham.

Some people are in complete denial of their creative gifts. When they see someone else’s work they say, “Boy, I wish I could do that, but I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”

To this I politely reply, “BUNK!” I believe everyone is creative. Until relatively recently, most people made many of the things they used in their day to day life. They sewed their own moccasins, made their own tools and crafted their own bowls. When you look at these handmade objects in museums you can see that although they are simple in design and utilitarian, their makers couldn’t resist embellishing and personalizing them.

Pots are glazed with elaborate designs and clothing was decorated with beads and fringes. Our ancestors didn’t say, “I’m not creative, I simply could not make a bow and arrow so I will just go hungry.” Human beings have been creators for millions of years and I don’t think this ability suddenly disappeared when the industrial revolution came along.

It is true that we don’t need to make all the necessities of life these days. If we want a shirt, we can buy a shirt or anything else we need. In the modern world, we can purchase well made products for a relatively low cost. We can work a few hours to buy something that would take us many days to produce for ourselves.

It is also true that many of the things we consider necessities these days are far too complex to make outside of a sophisticated factory. Even the most talented village blacksmith would not be able to hammer out a smartphone on his anvil.

In the 21st century, society has evolved to the point that we no longer need to produce anything for ourselves. In fact, it is a waste of time and money to do many things for ourselves. I saw a plaque in a catalog that said, “I spent $600 on tools, seeds, fertilizer and water, but I have $2.75 worth of tomatoes to show for it.”

From a purely economic standpoint, creating things for ourselves is downright foolish. The same could be said for a lot of things we humans enjoy like love, marriage and having families. Like these things, exercising our creativity gives us great satisfaction and reminds us what it is to be fully alive.

The quarantine imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus reminded people of their need to create. With most restaurants closed and time on their hands, many people discovered the joy of cooking was more than a book title. Stores sold out of flour and yeast as people who had never turned on their oven began baking bread at home.

Others started journaling and writing about their experiences. People who had not touched a brush since grade school art class took up painting. When left to their own devices many people discovered that making something with their own hands gave them a sense of satisfaction that far exceeded the joy they found in buying something at the store.

My niece, Stacey, is a good example of this phenomenon. Several weeks ago I sent her daughter, Seneca, a set of children’s water colors. This consisted of a pan of primary colors a couple of brushes and a pad of paper. Stacey called to thank me and I thought she was joking when she asked, “Are these for me or for my kids.”

To my surprise, last week she sent me a picture of a painting she had done after her children had gone to bed. For a first attempt using elementary school art supplies it did not look bad. It dawned on me that she had not been kidding me when we talked. I called her and promised to send her some “grown up” painting supplies.

This past weekend, I went to my art supply store and bought a beginner’s acrylic painting kit. The kit included a nice selection of liquid acrylics in tubes, a small palette for mixing colors, a few sketching pencils, a couple of brushes, and a supply of heavy watercolor paper. I added in a sharpener for the pencil.

I sent this to her along with a book on basic acrylic techniques I selected from my studio bookshelf. In the enclosed card, I encouraged her new interest in painting and told her not to be too critical of her efforts and to simply enjoy the act of painting. I reminded her that what we produce is not as important as what we become from our creative efforts.

I am happy that I helped rekindle the creative spark in my niece. I hope she kicks her inner critic to the curb and continues to paint long after the world goes back to normal. Once this happens, I am sure many people will leave their kitchens for the convenience of the restaurant and others will let their tools grow rusty, but I am also sure that many people will continue to make things just for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

Maybe when this is all over we will look back and speak of the Coronavirus Renaissance that sparked a flowering of creativity across the arts. I certainly hope this will be the case.     

           - Jim Busch

July 7, 2020

First it was toilet paper, then it was paper towels and after that hand sanitizer. The coronavirus has created shortages of many things over the last few months. The reopening of the economy is responsible for a new coronavirus related shortage, the shortage of coins.

As I have gone about my business, lately I noticed signs imploring shoppers to use either exact change or credit cards to pay for their purchases. Many businesses have waived their minimum purchase requirements for customers using a charge card.

At first, I didn’t understand the connection between Covid-19 and the change in my pocket, so I did some research. I learned that like many other workplaces, the Federal Reserve Banks and the U. S. Mint sent their employees home to shelter in place. This greatly reduced the number of coins placed in circulation and being produced by the government.

Another factor in the change shortage is the increase in the number of purchases being made online. All transactions on Amazon or other internet shopping sites are always made using credit cards or services like PayPal. Many local businesses required customers to use credit cards to buy the items they would pick up at the curb later in the day.

As stores began opening for business on a quasi-normal basis, they continued encouraging their customers to use plastic for purchase because they feared that the bills and coins might be infected with the coronavirus.

For many years, I have heard that the economy was about to go cashless. That we would make all of our purchases with credit cards or even our phones. We were told that this was more efficient and gave people a better accounting of their purchases. Like predictions of jetpacks and flying cars this was always just around the corner and would happen any time now, but it never materialized.

Just like most people, economies are set in their ways. It takes a major kick in the backside to make them change the way they do things. In the move toward a cashless society, the Coronavirus pandemic just might be that motivating kick in the seat of the pants. This may be one of the long term changes brought about by the virus and the lockdown imposed to fight it.

I for one will be sorry to see coins go out of style. I have always liked the look and feel of coins. As a child I was an avid coin collector.  My dad would put his pocket change in a tray so I could go through the coins looking for the pennies, dimes or nickels I needed for my dark blue Whitman coin folders.

These cardboard trifold boards had spaces cut out for a certain type of coin like Mercury Dimes. Each space was labeled with the dates and mint marks for the coins. The goal was to assemble a collection of every configuration of a particular coin. Nothing was more beautiful to me than a page of one of my folders with every available slot filled.

When I was young my family would go to Geneva on the Lake, Ohio for vacation. I liked playing on the beach and the penny arcade with its vintage machines, but the best part was a chance to complete some of my collection folders.

Elmer Lundquist, who owned the cabin we rented, also owned the Log Cabin Bar. He was a kind old man who took a liking to me. Elmer allowed me to go through the coins he took in at the bar before he made his deposit at the bank. It was like I struck the mother lode because every day he took in hundreds of dollars in coins.

Many people saved their coins in a jar all year long for vacation and in the early 1960’s I would find all kinds of old coins. His bags of coins included Indian head pennies, Mercury and the occasionally the older “Barber” dimes, Franklin half dollars and beautiful walking liberty quarters.

Elmer trusted me and allowed me to sit at a table in the bar in the afternoon going through his change unsupervised. He even gave me an ice cold Coke from its cooler case. I would set aside the coins I wanted and my dad would settle up with him. They were my souvenirs from our vacation. Sometimes I even found a Morgan silver dollar and hoped my dad was feeling particular generous.

I have always been frugal. When I got my first regular paying job at the former Marracini’s Super Market, every payday I deposited most of my paycheck in my passbook account at McKeesport National Bank. I kept out $20.00 for spending money, which in the 1960’s would hold me over for the two weeks until my next payday.

I always requested this in Eisenhower silver dollars. Somehow I thought this seemed like more money than a flimsy twenty dollar bill. I carried these in a brown leather pouch I had sewn myself. When I wanted to spoil myself, I would go to Burger Chef on Lincoln Way for lunch. I could get two hamburgers, fries and a coke.

I felt like Matt Dillon at the Long Branch Saloon when I tossed a silver dollar on the counter to pay for my meal. The big silver coin made a resounding and satisfying clunk when it landed on the stainless steel counter.

Today, I stopped at Breadworks on the Northside. The clerk rounded my sale price down and gave me my change in extra dinner rolls. I felt like I was bartering at the trading post. I can’t imagine living in a world without change jingling in my pockets, but lately I been going through an awful lot of things that I never could have imagined.        

- Jim Busch    

July 6, 2020

I don’t know if it is God, Karma or Nature but it seems that in the worst of time the universe provides some sort of compensation. In this year, when we are struggling against the spread of the coronavirus, the natural world has put on a grand show. It seems to me that from the first wildflowers in the spring to the height of summer, the natural world has been working overtime to produce a bumper crop of flowers for our eyes to feast on.

Every time I go out for a walk or even stroll through the backyard it seems that there are flowers everywhere. I considered the possibility that because of the quarantine I have been spending more time outdoors. Perhaps I have just had more opportunities to look for blossoms this year.

It is also possible that after all the things I have been through this year, maybe I want to believe there is some extra beauty in the world. Sometimes you have to believe in something to see it. To test my theory, I looked at the photographs I had taken over the years. I compared some of the photos I had taken at Braddock’s Trail in the past few years with this year’s images. I looked at photographs taken in my yard over the years. I also paged back through some of my journals from the past. I was able to prove that my thesis about this being a particularly verdant year is absolutely correct.

I am a rather lackadaisical gardener. Rather than trying to conquer and control nature, I try to achieve a state of peaceful coexistence with the native plants, also known as weeds, of our region. I blame my grandmother for my live and let live approach to the black sheep of the botanical world. She told me that, “weeds are just plants we don’t know how to use yet.”   

I thought my wise grandma had made this up. It wasn’t until my college years that I found out that she had ripped off Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying, “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Plagiarist or not, she practiced what she preached. The border of her garden included wild daisies and tiger lilies that were found growing wild along the railroad.

Like my grandmother’s garden, my property is a mixture of domesticated flowers and their wild cousins. Not long ago our mailman asked me about some of the plants along our front retaining wall. He asked, “I was telling my wife about those tall spikes with the little yellow flowers. What are they called and where did you get them?” I laughed and told him that they grow all over western Pennsylvania, usually in the places with the worst soil possible along the roadside.

I was tempted to be fancy and tell him that they were Verbascum Thapsus but rather than show off, I told him they were Giant Mullein. I hadn’t planted them, they were “volunteers.” Many years ago one appeared in my yard, probably a gift of the wind or of a passing bird. Since then they have popped up at various places around our property. I have tried to help them along by shaking their seed laden stems here and there throughout my flower beds, but they always seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to choosing a place to take root.

In deference to my Scottish ancestors, I always let thistles grow when they pop up in the corners of the yard. My grandfather told me how the cowardly English were trying to sneak up on a camp where our Campbell clan was sleeping. Our warrior kin jumped up, Claymore swords in hand, when the enemy cried out in pain when they crept into a thistle patch. I love their spikey geometry and resilient nature. They are the botanical version of the tattooed biker bad boy—tough but attractive. I find their spherical purple blooms appealing and in the fall they attract flocks of Gold Finches to feed on their downy seeds.

Every morning when I step out of my door to get the newspaper, I stop to look at the spiderworts that bloom on my back patio wall. Modern hybridized plants are bred to produce big blossoms and a minimum amount of leaves. We get petunias that are almost all flower. In most wildflowers this ratio is reversed. They are far more practical, they know that leaves are what feeds the rest of the plant and keeps it healthy.

Spiderworts embody this philosophy. They are about 99% leaves topped with tiny flowers that only survive a single day. Fortunately, the leaves are beautiful, growing in thick clumps of sword shapes. At the very top of the clumps, Spiderworts sprout rich purple blue flowers with three round petals surrounding a tuff of bright yellow stamens. Each flower is slightly larger than a dime and rest on a platform of three spikey leaves.

While watering my plants this morning, I discovered a new “guest” growing in my yard. I spotted the leaves of a Datura growing in a pot of Dahlias. Datura or Jimsonweed is a fast growing plant that grows to the size of a small tree in a season. It produces massive trumpet shaped flowers that transform into big spiny seed pods. These seed pods gave the plant its name and is also why many people dig it out the moment they see it. “Jimsonweed” is a corruption of Jimtownween or Jamestownweed.

The starving early settlers of Jamestown tried to eat the seeds of the Datura with bad results. The plant is a natural hallucinogenic and many of the Englishmen went mad and ran off into the forest never to be seen again. The seeds often make anyone who eats them believe they can fly, so it was used by witches to concoct flying spells. I am afraid of heights so I don’t plan to make any spells, but I do admire the plant for its prodigious growth.

I love going to nurseries and greenhouses to look at what they have to offer. Looking at lavishly illustrated seed catalogs makes the cold winter months much easier to bear, but I have to say that my weeds are some of my favorite plants. This may be the one place that the statement, You only get what you pay for doesn’t ring true. For those who are ready to receive them, nature has a lot to give us.       

- Jim Busch 

July 5, 2020

The Coronavirus quarantine has put a stop to many of my normal activities. I have not been able to go out to write newspaper stories and it put my speaking career on hold. Fortunately, I have been able to continue to pursue my oldest and most important occupation - student. I became a student when I first learned to read at age 5 and 63 years later it continues to be a major focus of my life.

My parents put great value in education. Their dream was for me to become a teacher, which they saw as a noble profession. It is ironic that I tried to go another direction and become a businessman, in the second half of my career I became a professional trainer. It seems that their dream came true in a somewhat roundabout way.

As a child I was not good at sports because of an orthopedic problem that meant my one leg went out at an odd angle. The large port wine birthmark on my face made me a shy child. The only area where I could excel was in my schoolwork. I liked the praise I got for being a smart kid from my teachers and my parents, so I became an enthusiastic student.

Originally I studied to earn good grades, then as I got older I studied to get myself ready for gainful employment. Once I got into the business world, I read business books and took classes to increase my chances for promotion and advancement. After I became a trainer, I studied business so I could pass the information on to my trainees.

Somewhere along the line I learned to love learning for its own sake. I expanded my self-education far beyond the practical subjects needed for my career. I pursued studies in a wide range of subjects from history and art to botany and handicrafts. There has not been a day in my life when I didn’t spend some time trying to expand my store of knowledge.

There is a big difference between studying and just reading. Reading is skimming the surface of a subject, studying is digging deeper into the matter at hand. When I get interested in a subject I start by checking out a number of books on the subject.

As I read, I keep a pad of post-it notes next to me to mark the pages where I find interesting passages. When I am done reading a book, I go back and reread these passages and copy many of them into my notebook. As I read I look for references to other books or other sources to pursue, which I jot down for my next trip to the library.

I call this the corridor principle of learning. You open a door to one subject that leads to a corridor lined with doors that lead to new subjects of study. Each of those doors leads to a new corridor full of wonderful subjects to explore.

If I am studying a book on art or handicraft, I experiment with the techniques and examine the results. Over the years I have tried blacksmithing, horn crafting, woodblock printing and papier mache. I am less interested in what I produce than what I learn in the process. I don’t value academic subjects over more practical pursuits. I think learning a new gardening technique is as valuable as studying philosophy or history.

As I get older I wonder why I continue to love learning so much. I think about something a close friend and fellow trainer likes to say, “You live and learn, then you die and forget it all!” I am not sure how I will use what I am learning these todays.

This morning I read a book on the history of how many garden plants were discovered and how they got their names. This book taught me many things I had not known about a number of plants that grow in my backyard. From now on when I look at my Hollyhocks, I will remember that they were found in the Holy (Holly) land and their leaves were used to heal the legs (hocks) of the crusader’s horses. This won’t make them any more beautiful, but I think knowing their history makes them far more interesting.

In the afternoon I switched to a more practical subject, the art and science of welding. I have always wanted to learn to weld. It is a skill that will help me to make repairs on household objects and to fabricate new objects. I was talking with my family about an interest in learning to do metal sculpture, so they bought me a welder for my birthday. I know this is a new trick and that I am a very old dog, but I am excited about the prospect of learning a new skill.

I started my studies by reading the manual that came with my new machine. I read the section that listed the 147 ways I could kill myself with it. These ranged from direct electrocution, it turns out that arc welding requires far more juice than the seat of honor on San Quentin’s death row, to burning down your home.

Other ways to die include inhaling toxic gases to burning through an artery. In addition to killing you, the welder produces an arc several times brighter than staring at the sun which can barbecue your eyeballs in a millisecond. I saw these dire warnings as part of a Hero’s Journey described by Joseph Campbell. Only those who set aside fear are worthy to join the noble fraternity of welders. Tomorrow, I will move on to a book with the optimistic title Teach Yourself to Weld.

If I had to describe myself in one word, I would simply say, “I am a student.” Even though I am old, I feel as long as I continue to learn that I will keep my mind young. We live in an endlessly fascinating world and I am resolved to learn as much about it as long as I am still here.

For me, to live is to learn!

- Jim Busch

July 4, 2020

Because of the Coronavirus this was an odd Independence Day. In recent years, my daughter has hosted a big picnic for family and friends. She would reserve a pavilion at a local park and we would have all sorts of food and games for the kids.

Obviously, a big picnic was out this year because of social distancing. We had a small gathering at her house the previous night to watch fireworks and that was it for this year’s festivities. We were happy that our grandson, Max, was able to come home with us and spend the night after the gathering at my daughter’s.

Prior to the pandemic lockdown we used to get to see Max a few times a month. He is a great kid and we enjoy spending time with him. He loves his grandmother’s cooking and he and I share an interest in history. We had not seen him for months until he and his dad visited for a few hours for Father’s Day. He had not been able to stay over for an extended visit since the Christmas holidays.

My wife fixed Max and me a delicious breakfast of French toast, fresh squeezed orange juice, scrambled eggs and bacon. At breakfast we discussed my wife’s cancer. Max’s mother is a breast cancer survivor so he knows more about cancer than the average 14-year-old boy. He had gone online and researched pancreatic cancer. He tried to assure us that his grandmother had a good chance of surviving her diagnosis. We knew that this was based more on his wishful thinking than on the information he had googled.

After breakfast, I decided to revive a tradition that dated back to the days when his father and aunt were just kids themselves. I always tried to make every holiday a learning experience for my children. At Christmas I would read the gospel story, on Memorial Day I would read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address honoring the fallen soldiers, and so on through the year.

My goal was to put the holidays into perspective. I wanted my children to know that our holidays were about more than store sales and big meals. I love old films, so I also integrated historical dramas into my educational programs. We would watch Spencer Tracy in Plymouth Adventure at Thanksgiving, Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln for Presidents’ Day and the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol.

My own children never appreciated my educational approach to holiday celebrations. They wanted to eat hotdogs and have fun like all their friends. My choice in films didn’t exactly thrill them either. They were far more interested in contemporary films than my black and white classics. Fortunately, the “Nerd Gene” apparently skips a generation.

My grandson loves to hear about history and before the quarantine I had started showing him classic films. He had really enjoyed Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood and John Wayne’s Fort Apache. Since today was Independence Day, I was going to show him the film that his father and aunt detested more than any other. Every year I forced my children to sit on the couch and watch the film 1776 with me.

1776 is a musical retelling of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It starred William Daniels as John Adams and Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson. My favorite character in the film was Benjamin Franklin played by Howard De Silva. While the film gets a few things wrong, it does a fairly good job of showing the political infighting in the Continental Congress and the over the top personalities of the founding fathers.

Somehow seeing Adams, Jefferson and Franklin dancing up and down a staircase singing a song about what bird, the dove, the turkey or the eagle, should be the national symbol for the new country, allows these men to step down off their pedestals where they had been for so long.

The relationships between John and Abigail Adams and Thomas and Martha Jefferson shows they were flesh and blood, not marble figurines. My favorite line in the film comes when Jefferson’s wife arrives from Virginia and they are locked in a passionate embrace. When Jefferson fails to acknowledge Adam’s request to introduce them to his wife, he turns to Franklin and asks, “You do suppose she is his wife, don’t you?” and De Silva replies, “Of course they are John, see how they fit!”

In one scene, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina performs a dramatic song about the triangle trade in African slaves. This prompted a great conversation with my grandson on a very topical issue. I paused the movie and we talked about the history of racism in the U.S. and its relationship with the protests going on through the country today. He brought up how his mother disliked Jefferson because of his fathering the children of Sally Hemmings. After discussing these things with him, I was proud to realize that my young grandson knows more about his country’s history than some of our leaders.

Not wanting to embarrass her grandson, my wife texted me, “It looks like you’ve finally found a kindred spirit!” She was right, my grandson had put down his phone and was fully engaged in the film. He asked good questions and made very astute observations.

I can’t remember when I have had a more enjoyable afternoon. I was proud of him and proud of my son and daughter-in-law for raising such an intelligent and thoughtful young man. I look forward to seeing the kind of man he grows up to be.   

- Jim Busch

July 3, 2020

My wife is one of the world’s greatest fireworks aficionados. There is something about the sight of colored flashes in the sky, plus the booms and crackling of fireworks displays that fill her heart with joy.

As a child, her father raised champion rabbits which he showed at the old Allegheny County Fair in South Park. The fair was the highlight of her childhood summers and for her the best part was the fireworks show on the fair’s closing night. She remembers sitting in the bowl shaped amphitheater and feeling the concussions of the rockets pounding in her chest.

During our 47-year marriage, we have seldom passed up a chance to watch a pyrotechnics display. We have seen some spectacular shows over the years. Every Fourth of July and every Light Up Night we endured the crowds and the traffic to watch the Zambelli family work their aerial magic over the point.

One year I had to attend a convention in San Francisco, a city my wife loves. She was excited about going with me, but was disappointed that she would miss Pittsburgh’s Light Up Night that year. When we arrived in California, we discovered that it was also light up night in San Francisco and the fireworks would be launched from the plaza outside our hotel on the Embarcadero. We sat on our eighth floor balcony and watched a wonderful fireworks show at eye level with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop.

When the county held an international fireworks show at Hartwood Acres I bought her VIP seats. In addition to the rocket’s red glare, we got to see amazing ground displays and a Spanish style plaza display with fireworks strung on a massive net of ropes. Every time we visited Disney World, we planned our days so that we found ourselves on the shore of the Epcot Lagoon in time to watch their nightly fireworks and laser spectacular. I can understand why the Disney Company is the second largest purchaser of explosives in the world. Only the U. S. Defense Department buys more bangs with their bucks.

It was looking like this would be the first year that my wife wouldn’t get to enjoy a fireworks display over the Fourth of July weekend. In an effort to promote social distancing many communities, including the City of Pittsburgh, have canceled this year’s festivities.

I was glad to hear that McKeesport was going forward with their program but my wife didn’t feel up to attending. Her cancer and the drugs she is taking to fight it made her too weak to stand and she did not want to risk it. I felt bad but this seemed to be a wise decision. My daughter did not want to give up so easily.

Last night I got a mysterious text from my daughter Rachael saying, “Have mother at my house tomorrow evening at 9:40 p.m. Don’t let her know until the last minute.” On the pretext of taking my daughter some donuts for breakfast, I stopped by her house this morning and she filled me in on her plans. At 8:30 this evening I said to my wife, “We’d better to get dressed.”

Confused she asked, “For what?”

“Rachael wants us to come to her house.”

“I’m not feeling too great, why don’t you go.”

“She wants you to come. It’s Rachael, she won’t take no for an answer.”

With a groan my wife got up and got dressed. I drove us to our daughter’s house. Rachael met us in the front yard and escorted her mother to her back patio. When we got to the back of the house we were greeted by Rachael’s friends. Chris and Jesse and their son Brandon. They are close to my daughter and my wife has been like a grandmother to Brandon. We were really surprised to see our grandson Max. His mother was recovering from ankle surgery, so his parents were house bound. Rachael had picked him up earlier in the day so he could be with his grandmother.

Rachael had arranged her lawn furniture to create a viewing gallery and we were seated in the place of honor on her settee. She welcomed her mother to the “G Lee Busch’s Fireworks Frenzy.” Rachael’s friend Gabe, wearing a red LED headlamp was the launch crew, while Rachael played the role of emcee and announcer.

The show began with a forest of oversized sparklers which lit up the whole yard. Next came a long series of aerial fireworks and ground displays each accompanied by a chorus of “ooh’s” and “ah’s” from the assembled and properly masked crowd.

There were multi-colored rockets and fiery fountains. The “Peacock” was an absolutely gorgeous ground display. I don’t know what she spent, but it was obvious that Rachael had made the salesperson at Phantom Fireworks very happy.

The show lasted at least 25 minutes. It was not exactly up to Zambelli standards but it was beautiful. More beautiful still was the look on my wife’s face. She had her family around her and she knew she had raised a good daughter. She had raised a woman who would go out of her way to take care of the people she loved and to make them happy. She knew she had done a good job and that Rachael would take care of things if she was not there to do it.    

- Jim Busch

July 2, 2020

The Coronavirus news has been very disheartening this week. Every day there are more and more cases all over the U.S. Many states have reported record breaking numbers of new cases. In the south and west, hospital systems are close to reaching their capacity.

Just when many businesses were starting to reopen and we thought life was getting back to normal, the virus came back like Godzilla in an old Japanese science fiction film from the 1950’s.

This time around, the disease decided to pick on younger victims. Many younger people in their teens and twenties are contracting Covid-19. Public health officials attribute both the rise in the number of cases and its changing demographic to carelessness. Over the past few weeks, people, particularly young people, have been gathering in large social groups. We have seen images of beaches covered with sunbathers, bars packed with clients and raucous street parties. With so many people in close proximity, the spread of the virus was inevitable.

Why are so many people so cavalier about taking precautions against the spread of the coronavirus? Public health officials and most political leaders have been doing their best to educate the public about how to protect ourselves and our communities, so it is not a lack of knowledge about the disease.

In the early days of the pandemic, personal protection equipment was in short supply but since then, everyone from major corporations to grandmothers sitting at their sewing machines have produced enough masks to cover every American mouth.

I think young people lack the vision to imagine themselves contracting the disease. I have always thought it strange that it is young people, rather than old folks like me, who tend to engage in risky behavior. Logically, we seniors should be the ones driving speeding motorcycles and jumping out of airplanes, we have so little to lose. If a twenty something jumps the curve at 110, they are throwing away sixty, maybe seventy years of living. At 75, we are only risking a few years, but this isn’t how the human brain works.

When we are young we think we are ten feet tall and bulletproof. This is borne out in the interviews with young people on the television news, many of them say they don’t believe that they will contract the disease and if they do catch the Covid bug, that it will not be a bad case.

They simply haven’t had enough experience with infirmity to understand what it is to be seriously ill. When people reach my age, they have usually had health problems of their own and they have known people who have been ill. We seniors have all lost friends and peers.

We know that there is a microbe or cancer cell out there with our name on it. The young Covid-19 victims interviewed on the news seem genuinely surprised that their young healthy body failed them. In addition to the other symptoms they are experiencing, they have a bad case of shattered illusions.

Today, I suffered a few shattered illusions of my own. When my wife was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, my logical brain understood that her chances of surviving even a year were very small. Like every other human, the logical brain makes up a very small part of my psyche.

After fifty years together, I can’t truly comprehend not having her by my side. I simply can’t imagine being alone. This is why I grab on to any sliver of hope no matter how slim. I am trying to reconcile what my brain tells me with what my heart wants to believe.

When my inner Mr. Spock tells me that “Captain, the data indicates the survival rate for this disease is less than 10%,” I want Scotty to come running in saying, “Jim, me and the lads in engineering have an idea that will save the ship!”

I put my hope for a miracle on an experimental drug trial recommended by my wife’s oncologist. I know this is a thin chance. For all we know, she may be getting the placebo and not the new drug, along with her regular chemotherapy treatment.

Though we were told “early indications were good,” the new protocol is a far cry from being a cure. In the best case scenario, the tumor will weaken so that we can move on to radiation in hopes of shrinking it small enough that it can be removed in a dangerous surgical procedure.

Like I said, it is a slim hope, but it is still hope.

Today, was supposed to be “chemo day.” We go to Allegheny General Hospital on Thursdays for her treatment. We were just leaving the house when her doctor called. Her blood work indicated that she was too weak for them to perform this week’s treatment. They are going to do a series of injections in hopes of fortifying her blood, so they can continue the treatment protocol.

For some reason this hit me hard. I was holding on to this microscopic sliver of hope and they ripped it right out of my hand. For the first time I was able to imagine the unimaginable, that I could lose my wife.

All day I felt like I wanted to curl up in a ball and go to sleep. I pulled myself up and went on with my daily routine. I do not know what to think, I don’t know how to describe what I am feeling, the only thing I do know is that the shards of shattered illusions cut deep and the cuts are painful.   

- Jim Busch

July 1, 2020

I have lost a lot of things that I treasured as a child. I wonder what happened to my Davy Crockett flintlock rifle. You could put a cigarette lighter flint in the hammer and it made sparks just like Davy’s.

I miss the collection of models I built over the years and displayed in my room until I became too grownup for them. I miss the two bladed pocketknife my grandfather gave me and lost somewhere along the way. Most of all, I miss my childhood imagination that let me be anyone and anything I wanted to be. I miss pretending.

This morning my wife told me that today was going to be a “pretend day.” She decided that she needed a break from Covid-19 and especially from cancer. With the exception of doctor visits and “Chemo Thursdays,” my wife hasn’t been out of the house in months. Because of her compromised immune system I have been running all the family errands alone.

Today, I needed to drop my car off at the shop to have the air conditioner repaired. Since I needed to take my wife to chemotherapy the next morning, my daughter offered to loan me her car. She is working from home and had client calls scheduled all day, so she couldn’t get away to pick me up when I dropped off my Subaru. The only solution was to drop my wife off at my daughter’s and have her pick me up at the repair garage. I thought this would be okay because she would be in the car and not exposed to anyone.

I dropped off the car and my wife was there to get me. I asked her if she wanted me to drive and she said no. My wife has always liked to drive. Normally, I was in the passenger seat and she was the one behind the wheel. My intention was to take her home and then run some errands.

Glenda had other plans. That was when she told me what she wanted for her pretend day. She said being behind the wheel felt like the old days.  I reminded her that the old days was just over three months ago. But I knew what she meant. The last 90 days had seemed like a bizarre dream where everything is a bit out of kilter. She wanted a break from our new normal by pretending we were still living in the old normal.

She wanted to spend the day doing wild and crazy things like going to the credit union and the library. I got in the passenger seat and we were off on our adventure. We didn’t exactly throw caution to the wind, we remained masked and my wife avoided all contact with others, but she was out of the house and seeing people who were not wearing white coats and stethoscopes.

Our first stop was the credit union, she parked and I went in while she waited in the car. When I came out, she asked, “Are you hungry? Do you want to get some lunch?” When I said yes, she said, “How about Long John Silvers? I think that sounds good.”

Surprised, I said, “Are you sure?” For weeks she has been living on graham crackers and cottage cheese. One of the symptoms of pancreatic cancer is a permanently upset stomach so she has been avoiding all but the blandest foods. Even these plain foods usually disagree with her.

For my wife, eating fast food, particularly Long John Silvers which may be the greasiest food on the planet, is the culinary equivalent of jumping on a grenade. As we were eating our Fish and Chicken & More Meal she said, “I know I’m going to pay for this later, but damn, it really tastes good right now.”

Our next stop was the Penn Hills library. I dropped my books in the drop box where they would be quarantined for the next 72 hours and then we drove to the curbside pickup lane. Once we were parked in spot number three, I called the special pickup hotline, told the librarian where we were parked and waited.

In a few minutes one of the librarians walked out to bring me the audiobook I had ordered. It was in a small shopping bag and he handed it to my wife at arm’s length. He asked how we were and we enjoyed a pleasant little chat. Normally, we are upfront about my wife’s illness but on “pretend day” we told him that we were both fine.

Pulling out of the library lot, my wife asked me, “What’s the best way to get to Moio’s from here?” I told her to make a left, I knew what she wanted. We have shopped at Moio’s Italian Bakery in Monroeville for decades. They make some of the best pastries and cannolis this side of Naples, Italy.

Every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day, they also make terrific Italian Ice from fresh fruit. Stopping for Ices had been a tradition for us since our kids were tiny. When we arrived at the shop my wife sent me ahead to see if the store was crowded. I peeked through the glass door and was happy to see there was only one person in the store and she was checking out. I waved to my wife and she got out of the car.

We were sorely disappointed when we learned that this summer they were only making the Ices on the weekends. Because of the quarantine not enough people were buying enough of the Ices to justify making a batch every day. We made the best of the situation and my wife bought some of her favorite gingerbread men.

Moio’s is a family business and we’ve known the people who work behind the counter since they were kids. When they asked, “How have you guys been?” we answered “Good, we’ve been good.”

We left Monroeville and headed home to White Oak. When we got home my wife was worn out, the disease and drugs she is taking to fight it saps her energy. Before settling down in her recliner for a nap, she smiled at me and said, “That was nice, wasn’t it?” I could answer this question honestly, “Yes, it was a really nice day. Pretend day was fun!”   

- Jim Busch

June 30, 2020

Since my wife’s chemotherapy has greatly compromised her immune system, I have become the designated shopper for the family. She prepares a list of the stores I am to visit and what I am supposed to buy from each one and where the items are located in the store.

Much like the World War II bomber crews in the old movies, I get a mission briefing and I have to repeat the instructions to make sure I fully understand what I am supposed to do. After my return home, we do a debrief to see how effective I was during my shopping sortie. I really don’t mind doing the shopping, as I like to see what’s going on in the world and these days this is my only opportunity to do so.

As I was checking items off my list at the Oak Park Giant Eagle, I saw a young mother shopping with her two children. The mom was pushing a shopping cart with a toddler strapped into the fold down seat and her kindergarten-aged son walking alongside. They were all wearing matching masks featuring a Batman print fabric.

This triggered a number of thoughts. First, I thought the woman probably had made these for her family and that she was quite talented. My second thought was, I wondered how she got the smaller child to wear his mask without a peep of complaint.

I then got to thinking about how these masks and all the other changes brought about by the pandemic would affect these children and the rest of their generation. The Coronavirus is so widespread and the changes it has forced us to make are so pervasive that I don’t think the average adult has been able to wrap their head around it yet.

How are young children supposed to process what is going on? The boogeyman has been replaced by an invisible virus that makes even the grownups very afraid.

Being told that they can not go to school or the playground and that they can’t see their friends has to be very scary for our kids. I can remember having bad dreams about mushroom clouds after we did duck and cover drills during the Cuban missile crisis.

Our generation feared nuclear tipped ICBM’s (International ballistic missiles) coming out of Russia, this generation of kids fears a killer disease coming out of China. Like they say when you get hit hard by something, “That’s going to leave a mark!” This generation has been hit hard by Covid 19.

Childhood is often thought of as an idyllic time, a stress free time before the onset of adult worries and woes. Childhood in the 1950’s and 60’s when I grew up was fairly peaceful, except for the pesky possibility that the world would be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.

Polio, the last remaining biological threat to children, had been eliminated by Pittsburgh’s own Jonas Salk. We had yet to hear about global warming and the pollution that filled our skies just meant that our fathers had work. We didn’t associate it with cancer or other diseases. We just didn’t worry about things like this.

I remember playing baseball on the field adjacent to Lincoln Elementary School on hot summer days. If we got thirsty, we would walk across Kelly Street to a kindly neighbor’s house where a tin cup hung by a chain from an outdoor faucet. We thought nothing of drinking from this common cup and to the best of my knowledge, none of us died.

My mother kept a clean house but we were not obsessed with cleanliness. I can remember my dad pulling a radish or carrot from the garden, wiping the dirt off it with his hand and shoving it in his mouth. After a morning of working in the dirt or manure in his greenhouse, I never saw him wash his hands before picking up the sandwich my mother had packed him for his lunch.

He used to say, “You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.” I was a strange little kid and when I heard this, I decided to carefully avoid eating my lifetime allotment of dirt, thus becoming immortal. Being the typical American boy, I soon realized that this was a hopeless quest. I could identify with the Pigpen character in the Peanuts comic strip.

We also did not fear human predators. In the summer, the only time our mother knew where we were was lunchtime. We were what is now called “free range.” We rode bikes, played in the woods or hung out in another kid’s basement. Just like today, I am sure that back then, like now, there were bad people who would do bad things to children. Back then, like now, there were very few of these predators and fortunately, most of us never encountered them.

The difference today is with our interconnected and globalized world we hear about these people with terrifying frequency. Nowadays, parents are understandably concerned about their children and want to keep them close to the nest. I have to wonder what this does to these children’s spirits as they grow to adulthood without ever having had the opportunity to explore their corner of the world on their own.

I thought about the kids I saw in the store today. The disruptions and fears of this time has to have an effect on these children. Being repeatedly told that they have to stay home as much as possible, wear masks when they go out, and stay away from other people, has got to affect their way of looking at the world.

I wonder if after we lick the Coronavirus if we are not going to face an epidemic of agoraphobia. If we are not going to raise a race of people who are afraid to engage in the real world. People whose world is compressed into what they can see on their devices. An entire generation afraid of the world they live in may be the saddest effect of this disease.            

- Jim Busch

  ________________________________

Recently I had a dream about floating lanterns. If you have seen the 2010’s Disney movie Tangled, then the first thing you would probably remember was the lantern scene. Lanterns were lit as a memorial on Father’s Day. I still think of those lanterns as a memorial for fathers.

 I lost my grandfather when I was six and half-years-old which was 15 years ago in February 2005. Seeing those lanterns made me think that he was with me on Father’s Day.  I miss him very much. It was special to see those lanterns lifting off, no matter where we go. My family and I consider it a special day when we see the lanterns. 

People were lighting off lanterns at the old George Washington School. I felt like I was part of the Tangled movie. I still remember the first time I saw that movie. As soon as the lantern scene happened, I cried because it made me think of my grandfather. I guess nobody will forget that magical night, as well as the fireworks.

 I still I want the magic to continue and never leave. I know that I will be setting off lanterns in memory of both my grandparents. Lanterns will become the highlight of this year because of so many deaths this virus has given us.

Pittsburgh also holds lantern events in both the sky and in the water, but it also got canceled this year due to the virus. But I think people are still probably sending lanterns in honor of friends and family that were lost to the virus. I wish my city McKeesport would have their own lantern festival to show respect and honor all the loved ones who were lost in our community. I think it would also show the light of peace for those who want peace in this world due the marches and riots that are happening.

 Lanterns have so many messages. It could mean peace, love, honor, memory, celebration and so many other words. Light a lantern to share your light, show your spirit and let go. Let’s light Coronavirus away.  

 -   Maria Palmer

June 29, 2020

“Hello, my name is Jim and I am a bibliophile.” 

I sometimes imagine giving this speech in a 12-step meeting for people like me who are addicted to books. The lockdown period has been hard on us. All our dealers had to close up shop. With the libraries and book stores closed, we had trouble getting our fix of new volumes. With the state solidly in the green phase, I was able to go to Half Price Books in Monroeville to sell a stash of books I read during the quarantine and to browse their shelves.

I am a hard core bibliophile, in fact I have gone beyond bibliophile to full on tsundoku. Tsundoku is a Japanese word which describes a person who “buys more books than they could ever read.” I have stacks of books that I have not read as yet. This doesn’t stop me from looking, I never know when I might find a title that I absolutely have to read even if I never heard of it before I spied it on the shelf.

Like any addict, “I can stop at any time.”

Some of my favorite memories took place in book stores. When I was 11 or 12, my parents let me go shopping by myself on Fifth Avenue in McKeesport. Every other Saturday we would drive to town so the priest at St. Mary’s German church could hear our confessions.

This was a challenge for me, because at that innocent age I didn’t commit enough sins in a two week period to interest the priest. I solved this problem by making up 2 or 3 venial sins to share with the good father and then finishing with “I told 2 or 3 lies.”

I never did tell him that this final transgression was “hot off the presses.” After kneeling in the dark wood pews long enough to say the Our Fathers and Hail Marys assigned as our penance, I always noticed that my dad took a bit longer than the rest of the family, I guess he was just a slow prayer.

After church, we took our freshly cleaned souls the three blocks down to Fifth Avenue to go shopping. While my mother and dad ran their errands, I was allowed to wander the shopping district on my own with instructions to meet them somewhere, usually in front of Murphy’s, at a specified time.

I felt like a real man about town roaming the streets of the bustling city. I had some folding money in my Roy Rogers simulated leather wallet and some change jingling in my pocket. Saturday was allowance day, when I got paid for doing my chores plus I had money earned from cutting the neighbor’s lawns and for running errands for my grandmother.

I had several favorite spots and I tried to budget my time so I could hit them all. I would go to the Schrader’s sporting goods store to look at the .22 rifles. Trying to decide which one I would buy when I got older. The next store was Gala Jewelers to visit their in store coin shop. Old Mr. Gala treated me like his best customer, talking to me about the coins he had on display and telling me their history. Looking back, I think he liked seeing a young boy who enjoyed the hobby as much as he did.

I would buy a few beat up Buffalo nickels or a Mercury dime and he would throw in an Indianhead penny as a bonus. I spent even more time at Lou Oddo’s Hobby Shop looking over the model kits. Most of my friends liked hot rod or airplane models, but I favored historic sailing ships like the Santa Maria or Francis Drake’s Golden Hind.

I thought about Oddo’s not long ago when I had to buy a can of spray paint. Nowadays it is easier to buy an assault rifle than paint, its kept locked in a security cage and is held at the counter until you’re ready to check out. When I was 10, Lou Oddo would sell me all the paint and airplane glue I wanted.

My very favorite store in the whole world was located just off Fifth Avenue along the B & O railroad tracks. A big red and white sign reading “Book Sale” hung above the door. I didn’t know it then, but this was a remainder store. The publishers would put their books in the major book and department stores on consignment.

The books that didn’t sell were returned to the publisher and sold to stores like Book Sale by the pound at a very lost cost. This made the store a paradise for a nerdy little kid like me. Their selection was eclectic, diverse and best of all, dirt cheap. The stores shelves and tables were piled high with books on every subject and in every size.

People who commuted by train to Pittsburgh for work would stop by to buy last year’s best sellers for pennies on the dollar, but I was drawn to the big non-fiction books that laid flat on the tables in the middle of the store. I’ve been surprisingly consistent through my life and even then enjoyed history and handicraft books.

My parents were always surprised at what I would show up with when I met them in front of the Five and Ten. My selections included a facsimile copy of Campfires and Battlefields, a collection of Civil War magazine articles originally published in the 1880’s and illustrated with vintage engravings. I found a copy of Harold L. Peterson’s Book of the Gun illustrated with gorgeous color photographs of antique firearms. This book served me well when I got an A+ on an essay about the history of firearms in my history class.

One of my best finds was W. Ben Hunt’s Big Book of Whittling. I trace my interest in wood carving to this book. I cut my fingers a few times with a pocket knife as I attempted some of the projects in the book.

Even though no one in the family smoked a pipe, I converted a one pound Maxwell House coffee can with a metal lid into a tobacco can in the shape of a Hopi Kachina doll. I read that book over and over until the covers literally fell off. I never did build the sailing catamaran with pontoons carved from discarded telephone poles. About a year ago, I found a copy of the book in decent shape at a library sale so maybe I will build it after all.

No place I frequented in my childhood brought me more pleasure than that little bookstore. I have spent a lot of my life in bookstores, big chain stores, University book stores and secondhand shops in the cities I have visited. My wife and I even owned a bookstore for a number of years.

I browsed Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore where the Beats hung out in San Francisco. I’ve been to specialty stores like a cook book shop in Philadelphia and a store that sold only books on architecture in Palm Springs.

I’ve loved all of these stores, but that old shop by the tracks in McKeesport holds a special place for me. I have a Jeff Madden print of the store hanging in my living room, but I don’t need a picture to remind me of the Book Sale. It had a lot to do with who I am today.     

- Jim Busch

June 28, 2020

One of my favorite writers is David McCullough. Originally from Pittsburgh, McCullough writes well researched histories and biographies. He has a way of making his subjects very approachable. I have had the great good fortune to hear him speak on several occasions and find him an insightful thinker who speaks as well as he writes.

Today, I was thinking about something I heard him say that stuck with me. He said the people in the past never thought of themselves living in the past. They never thought about making history, they were focused on dealing with the problems of their time. To illustrate the point he said that Benjamin Franklin and John Adams did not stand around saying, “Well look at us wearing these quaint costumes and making history.”

This is true for us today, though logically we know everything changes, we can never picture our personal situation changing. Before the lockdown occurred, we could never imagine a life where we do not leave our homes and had to stress over finding a supply of toilet paper.

Likewise, we don’t realize how growing older will change our lives, we imagine ourselves as young energetic people with a little grey hair added to make us look more distinguished. We can’t imagine a time when we will not have the energy, the ability or the desire to do the things we enjoyed as younger people.

I grew up around a lot of older people, but this did nothing to teach me anything about what it was like to be an elder. My wife’s cancer has given us a crash course in frailty.

My wife has always been an active woman. She was always doing something around the house or in the yard. She liked to bake her own bread and harvest vegetables from our garden. When I was still working, I often had people ask me “Where I did get my shirts done?”

Since my wife Glenda’s middle name is Lee, I would tell them at G Lee’s Laundry. They were amazed that my wife washed, pressed and starched my shirts at home. When my kids were growing up, my wife was the first to volunteer to help with school activities and she led my daughter’s scout troop for over a decade. I’m not sure what my employees thought of me, but I know they loved my wife. She was always baking batches of cookies or making big pots of soup and fresh bread for them on cold days in the winter.

When my kids grew up and got homes of their own, my wife would often chip in and help them with cleaning or other household chores. My daughter- in- law once described this as like being in one of those old cartoons with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, “I know I should do my own housework, but she makes our house looks so nice.”

When my grandson came along she watched him five days a week while caring for her aging mother. She also went out of her way to help my sister, her sisters, as well as her nieces and nephews. It is not an exaggeration to say I married a human dynamo.

About ten months ago, my wife started having stomach problems. At first she thought she had gotten food poisoning or a parasite at a Labor Day picnic. She went to her doctor, but the remedies they gave her provided no relief. She researched her symptoms online and found that they matched those of pancreatic cancer.

When she shared this with her doctor she was told to “Stay away from the internet.” Her problems persisted and grew more intense. During this entire time she struggled to maintain her usual hectic schedule. The doctors ran all sorts of tests and treated her for ulcers and other gastrointestinal maladies. Finally, a few months ago they discovered that my wife did indeed have pancreatic cancer.

For the last six weeks, my wife has undergone a series of chemotherapy treatments. These sessions have hit her like a ten ton truck. Her pain levels have increased as have her stomach problems. In spite of these escalating symptoms, my wife tried to maintain and even increase her activity level.

She mustered the energy to get 10,000 steps a day and has been making all my favorite dishes, as well as special treats for other members of the family. She resisted taking the pain pills her doctor had given her because they made her tired.

We’ve found that the weekly treatments have a cumulative effect. Each one was harder on her than the last. This week, her doctor raised the dosage of her pain medicine and told her to take them as prescribed.

This week the cancer, the chemotherapy and the pain meds have caught up with my wife. She has spent much of the last three days in bed. I have told her that I am quite capable of feeding myself, but she has insisted on rising to prepare my meals. She is constantly apologizing for her lack of energy and activity like this was something she chose to do.

It is odd for me to come into the house to find it quiet. For almost fifty years, I’ve been used to hearing pots banging on the stove or the vacuum cleaner running. My wife, who is a fan of vinyl, was in the habit of putting Janis Joplin or the Beatles on the record player and blasting the music throughout the house as she cleaned and dusted.

Today it was quiet and I try to keep it that way. I am a large clumsy individual who tend to make a racket, but these days I try to be as quiet as a ninja. Since I am hard of hearing, I turn on the close captioning if I’m watching television, but usually I just read or go to my workshop/studio in the backyard. I am living a life I never imagined, quiet and sad. For the first time in my life, I am beginning to dread the things that the future has in store of me.

- Jim Busch 

June 27, 2020

A friend called me this morning to see how I was doing. He has several conditions which compromise his immune system, so except for the occasional visit to the doctor he’s been under house arrest for the last three months.

I had just stepped out my backdoor when my phone rang, so I sat down on my patio to talk to him. We talked for over half an hour. After we had brought each up to speed on our families and solved all of the country’s problems, we vowed to get together for lunch as soon as possible and said our goodbyes.

After I hung up the phone, I looked up in the sky and decided to stay there for a while and watch the air show going on above my head. It had been threatening to storm all morning. The weather gods had turned the sky into a fantastic charcoal drawing covering every square inch of the blue canvas on their easel. The heavy grey clouds dragged down the sky until it almost touched the chimney tops in my suburban neighborhood.

The high pressure system that would bring us several thunderstorms before the day was over made the air dense and thick, making it difficult for the local birds to reach their normal lofty altitudes. This gave me a front row seat to their avian antics.

The first performer to catch my eye was a solitary turkey buzzard resting on an updraft as still as a cat sleeping on a couch. He was pressed against the underside of the cloud bank and he reminded me of the model airplanes that I used to hang from sewing thread from the ceiling of my childhood bedroom.

These big birds constantly circle over my home. When a visiting niece noticed the big black birds above our front yard, I told her they hang around because they can sense my age and are patiently waiting to feast on my carcass. While this might be the case, I think they like surfing on the thermals that rise from the steep sides of the hill I live on. During the spring and fall migrations we sometimes see dozens of these birds overhead circling their way either north or south as the season dictates.

The low cloud ceiling and his relatively fixed position let me get a better look at the buzzard than I normally see. Once many years ago, I got an even closer look at these airborne scavengers. In the Allegheny National Forest, I was making my way uphill on a dirt road when I came across two of them tearing apart a deceased raccoon. They were focused on their meal and the wind was blowing down the hill so they didn’t smell my approach.

Turkey vultures have one of nature’s best noses and can smell a dead deer carcass from more than two miles away. I got within 20-feet of their dinner table before they saw me and took to the air. As they flew over my head, I got to see their naked heads and great wingspan just a few feet above me. It is a sight I will never forget.

Today, I watched the bird in his natural element, the sky. I watched him use the air currents to remain in essentially the same spot for over fifteen minutes. He moved a few feet in one direction, then fell back a few more before returning to his original spot tracing out a perfect triangle in the sky.

One of the easiest way to identify a turkey buzzard is to look for the finger shaped feathers on the end of their wings. From my seat on the patio, I could see how he uses these feathers to adjust the trim of his wings and to hold his position. I envied the big bird as I imagined what it would be like to have the sky as my playground. Finally, he used those feathers to swoop out of sight in a wide arc. Maybe he got the scent of death and decided it was lunchtime.

I watched a red-tailed hawk soaring in tight circles heading into the west. He was forced to fly lower than usual as well, and I could see the reddish caste of his spread tail feathers. I surmised that it was an juvenile bird because it had to flap its wings now and then. A more experienced bird would have known how to let the wind and the thermals take him where he wanted to go.

The grand finale of the show was nature’s answer to the Navy’s Blue Angels, barn swallows. These tiny boomerang shaped birds spend most of their lives on the wing. Like most Americans, they like to eat while on the go. Instead of stopping at the fast food drive thru, they grab flies, mosquitoes and other insects on the wing. Like a fighter jet, they have narrow swept back wings which make them incredibly maneuverable. They twist and turn, dive and climb at breakneck speeds.

I love watching a flight of swallows careening through the sky in pursuit of their insect prey. Even with dozens of these purple and tan bullets zig zagging through a small patch of sky they never collide or seem to be in each other’s way. As a child, I thought they looked like the World War I dog fight scenes in one of my favorite Errol Flynn films, The Dawn Patrol. I could watch them for hours.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about how bored they’ve been during the coronavirus lockdown. I have some advice for these folk. Look around, look up and pay attention. Nature provides us with a never ending and endless fascination show for our entertainment. All we have to do is sit back and watch the show. 

      - Jim Busch

June 26, 2020

This is the 100th Corona Diary entry I have written. After all this time, the Coronavirus is still holding the country in a death grip. In the past few weeks, the country has tried to edge back toward normal but the virus decided it is not ready to go into the history books yet.

States like Texas and Florida which decided to flex their muscles and tell Covid-19, “You are not the boss of me” have seen their infection rates rise to record levels. People who decided it was safe to take a vacation to Myrtle Beach brought home boxes of salt water taffy and coronavirus infections as souvenirs.

The resurgence of the disease has led to many areas making a U-turn and reinstating some of the measures intended to stop the disease from spreading. On tonight’s news, I learned that governors of Florida and Texas ordered bars in their states to close down and in Pennsylvania, 52 people died from the vir.

If terrorists or rabid raccoons had killed this many people it would have been big news, but this story was barely mentioned on the local news broadcast. It turns out that pretending that the virus had gone away was not a very good strategy.

The Carnegie Museum of Art opened for business today after being locked down for three months. They are exercising an abundance of caution, limiting the number of people in the buildings by requiring visitors to reserve timed tickets online before visiting. I find this mildly amusing because other than holidays or special events, the museum galleries were rarely crowded.

If it was not for the blue jacketed museum guards walking around on most of my visits, I felt like the last survivor of humanity in some old dystopian science fiction film. The first weekend was limited to card carrying members of the museum like myself. I usually visit the museum several times a month and have missed this pleasure during the quarantine period. Since there is no way of knowing how long we might remain in the “green” phase, I decided to spend the day at the Carnegie.

I arrived at the registration desk about 15 minutes before my scheduled noon time slot. As I suspected, there were only two other people checking in. No pushing, no shoving, folks, there is plenty of high culture for everyone. The masked young lady behind the desk welcomed me back and asked if I had preregistered. I traded the ticket I had printed out for a tiny square paper tag fitted with a loop of string for attaching to one’s body. This told the guards that I was an authorized visitor and that there was no need to call in the SWAT team when they saw me in the building.

I like to apply the words of the song my daughter used to sing in Girl Scouts to my art viewing, “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold!” I started in the rotating exhibit gallery to look at An-My Le’s On Contested Terrain exhibit. It was a large show of photographs by the Vietnamese-American artist which blurred the line between documentary and art photography. Her technique and eye were quite impressive, she was definitely one of “my new friends.” I spent about 45 minutes looking at her work before wandering into the main galleries where my old friends live.

The museum staff had used the lockdown to rearrange the galleries and swap out some of the works with others from storage. The museum has many more works than can be displayed at any one time. I toured the new Teenie Harris permanent gallery. I plan to make this a regular stop because the Carnegie is home to the Teenie Harris Archive, an amazing collection of more than 70,000 of his negatives.

Each one is a masterpiece, so they will be able to keep refreshing this gallery for a long time. The next room has been set up as a permanent gallery to show photographs recently acquired by the museum. I was impressed with the variety and creativity displayed there.

I liked the new arrangement of the main galleries. The changes made me look at works I had seen many times in a new light. I walked slowly, enjoying the luxury of having nowhere else to go and drinking in each painting and sculpture. I lingered before my special favorites. I looked at every square inch of Gustav Klimt’s Orchard, marveling at the thousands of individual brush strokes he applied to the canvas. I imagined him standing before his easel with his full beard and shaggy mane, wearing his weird caftan while carefully applying paint.

I had to smile at the young woman in Robert Henri’s Equestrian. She was so full of life that I wanted to know her. She has probably been dead for a century, but she will live forever thanks to Henri’s brush. I lingered before the museum’s collections of John Kane’s work. Kane is my hero. He was a simple Pittsburgh working man, who painted houses and boxcars for a living, but aspired to be an artist. He was naive enough to submit his paintings to the Carnegie International alongside the work of the world’s best known artists. Like a made for television rags to riches movie, the jury loved his work and Kane became a darling of the American art world.

As always, I sat down in front of Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield after a Rain Storm. I love the color of Vincent’s palette and his use of light in this large painting. I could sense his energy and vitality in his bold brush strokes. It is hard to believe that he painted this work just a few weeks before his death. I felt sorry for the people who walked past this wonderful painting giving it just a passing glance.     

I looked at every work on display including some of the conceptual works that I usually gloss over. I tried to look at them with fresh eyes. I slowly circled a gaunt Walking Man sculpture by Alberto Giacometti to see it from every possible angle. I enjoy working with paper-mache, so I spent a long time looking at a large sculpture made from this malleable material.

One of the challenges I face whenever I visit a museum is restraining my desire to experience the art directly. I know better but the urge is still there. In the decorative arts gallery, I wanted to sit down and enjoy the midcentury modern Chieftain Chair designed by Finn Juhl.

It looked so welcoming I wanted to see if it was as comfortable as it looked. As I walked the galleries, I jotted down notes on artists to research and ideas to experiment with in my own studio. One of the reasons I love spending time at the museum is that I always walk out the door a better person than when I walked in. This practice lets me extend this experience long after I have left.

I spent almost four hours at the Carnegie today. The galleries and my mind were quiet when I was there. I lost myself in the art, I didn’t think about politics, Covid-19 or cancer. When I left, I felt relaxed and refreshed as if I was returning from an extended vacation.

I don’t know how long we will be in the green phase, but I hope the museum can stay open. We all need a little beauty in our lives, now more than ever. 

- Jim Busch

June 25, 2020

My grandfather liked to tell the story of a farmer who bought a mule from a neighbor. When he got the animal home, he could not get him to work. He was trying to plow his field when the mule’s original owner was passing by. He called the man over and told him his problem. The man nodded and said he would show the man how to get the mule to work.

Picking up a fence rail, he hit the mule right between the ears. When he said “Giddy up” the mule began pulling the plow. Turning to the mule’s new owner he said, “If you want that mule to listen, first you have to get his attention!” Today, I realized that the coronavirus pandemic may be the fence rail that got our society to pay attention. 

Thursday is “Chemo Day” for my wife and me. I drive her to Allegheny General Hospital for her weekly cancer treatment. I am very familiar with this drive because I used to work in an office a few blocks from the hospital on the Northside.

Every morning, I was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic from the Ardmore Boulevard on ramp through the Squirrel Hill tunnels. Once I exited the tunnel, I could speed up to a snail’s pace until I reached downtown and the traffic all but stopped as everyone tried to merge on to the Fort Pitt or Fort Duquesne bridges. I had to build 45 minutes to an hour into my commute if I wanted to arrive at work on time.     

I am an old dog and slow to learn a new trick, so I always tell my wife we have to leave an hour and a quarter before her scheduled appointment. This means that we’ve been getting her to the hospital 45 to 50 minutes early. I keep waiting for the dreaded traffic jams to return as the stay at home orders are relaxed and people return to work.

Though we’re several weeks into the Green Zone we sailed through Forest Hills and on to the Parkway. We had to slow down just a bit as we went through the tunnel. Once we were on the city side of the tubes, we were able to maintain our speed all the way to the hospital. There was barely a brake light to be seen on the entire trip. Quite a change from the pre-Covid days.

I joined the business world about 15 BC (Before Computers). When I started working, desks held typewriters and telephones were tethered to the wall and to the world by long black cords. I remember when my company got its first fax machine, people used to watch a document print out saying, “That’s amazing!”

The people who put in our first computers had unbounded enthusiasm for the new technology. I remember being told that in a year or two we would be working in a paperless environment. They said that we would have to search high and low if we needed a piece of paper to write down a phone number.

Computers kept getting better and better, while the promises of the changes they would bring got bigger and bigger. As computer networks expanded and the internet grew in importance, we were told that soon we would all be working from home. That there would be no reason to maintain expensive offices and endure long commutes.

The computer would free us living near an office, so we could live in Montana if we wanted, even though our company was located in New York. We were told the financial and social benefits of working remotely were so compelling that it would become the norm in just a year or so. Until a few months ago, every day people were still sitting in traffic so they could sit all day in tiny cubicles with lots of people doing the exact same thing. Swap out the computers for a Smith Corona and it would have been indistinguishable from 1968.

For decades, the business press published story after story about the benefits letting people work from home. Business schools from Harvard to Tokyo presented research to prove the efficacy of this practice, but very few workers were released from their cubes.

Organizations are inherently conservative. No one wants to be the first to try a new idea. There is a well-known business adage that goes, “No one ever got fired for suggesting we do things the way we’ve always done things.” Managers looked at the studies and read the articles and thought, “Sounds great, but if I try it and it doesn’t work, I’ll be the one sitting at home looking for a job.”

This all changed when the Coronavirus pandemic hit. The choice suddenly became, “We can let people work from home or we can forget about getting any work done.” After years of finding excuses why letting people work from home wouldn’t work, companies scrambled to figure out the technology to make it happen. The term Zoom meeting entered the vocabulary and people carved out workspaces in their basements, laundry rooms or any other available space.

After talking about it for twenty years, suddenly lots of people were working from home. Companies that had feared allowing people to work from home would slash their productivity, found that people didn’t need a boss over their shoulder to make them work.

They found that while an employee might take a break to walk the dog, they were just as likely to sit down at their desk at six o’clock to complete a project. To everyone’s surprise, the people working from home were even more productive than they had been in the office.

The pandemic forced businesses to walk the work from home plank. The option they had was to hold their noses and jump. When they did, they found out that the water was fine and the sharks they had worried about turned out to be friendly and playful dolphins. Employers and employees have had a taste of working in their sweats and don’t want to go back to suits and tight shoes.

Long after a cure and or a vaccine is found, I think people will still be working at home with their cat sleeping on their desk. They will be happier and more productive. This disease has changed a lot of things, some for the worse, but also some for the better.

I think this pandemic may bring about the biggest change in America’s work culture since people left the farms to work in a factory or an office at the dawn of the industrial revolution. The pandemic was the whack between the ears that finally got our attention.

- Jim Busch

June 24, 2020

I celebrated my 68th birthday last week. This means that I am close to reaching my Biblical “sell by” date of three score and ten. The path that lies before me is not nearly as long as the path that I have already trod.

This means that I have a large store of memories packed into the nooks and crannies of my brain. The ability to recall past times and relive them when we wish is one of the greatest gifts bestowed upon mankind. The power of memory is right up there with the prehensile thumb, the ability to walk upright and fast food drive thru windows, when it comes to things that make life easier to bear.

I have been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a good memory. I can recall details from events that happened over half a century ago with remarkable clarity. This is part nature and part nurture. Like the color of my eyes, I seem to have been born with a retentive brain. Things tend to stick with me.

As a small child, I was praised for the things I could recite from memory and I liked the attention it brought me. I started to memorize passages from books and poems in order to show off. I would practice them over and over until I had them down pat. To fix things in my brain, I copied them down in notebooks and journals, a practice I follow to this day.

The most vivid memories are formed when we are fully engaged with life. This is why we never forget our most emotionally intense moments. Times when we are extremely happy, frightened, excited or falling in love are permanently burned into our brain’s hard drive.

It is often difficult for me, but I try to take a Zen approach to life. I try to be fully present and absorb all the details of what is going on around me. This is why I remember odd and absolutely worthless details from my life. I remember where I bought almost everything I own. I remember minor interactions with people I will never see again and other things that serve no practical purpose. My mental computer does have a few glitches, for some reason I have trouble remembering people’s names and family birthdays.

I’d like to say that my memories are organized like the books in a library. A place for every recollection and every recollection in its place. I can find a memory when I need one, but most of the time they just show up out of nowhere unannounced. I will see something vaguely similar to something from my past and abracadabra, a memory appears out of thin air.

I never know what will trigger a recollection, today it was turning the page on the calendar. In small print under the date were the words, St. Jean Baptiste Day (Canada). I read this and was instantly transported back to Montreal in 1987.

In 1986, I was promoted to my first sales management position, I wanted desperately to prove myself and to be successful in my new role. I worked nights and weekends and on most nights I brought work home. This all paid off and my team won several sales awards.

One of the things all my hard work earned me was a Road Trip with the Pirates. My company sponsored the Pittsburgh Pirates on KDKA-TV and radio. One of the perks that came with this advertising program was a weekend for two with the team at an away game against the Montreal Expos. As the top sales manager in the Pittsburgh office, I was the one chosen to go on this junket with the Bucco’s.

Neither my wife nor I are sports fans, but we looked forward to the trip. My wife never complained about the long hours I was putting in on the job. She knew that I was trying to make things nice for her and the kids. I always tried to be present at my kid’s events, but I know I had been neglecting my wife. This trip was a chance to get reacquainted and make up for lost time. We flew to Montreal on the team plane and checked into a four star hotel in the heart of the city. We were given a packet at the desk that had dining vouchers and tickets for the three games that weekend.

We gave away the tickets for two of the games. We kept the tickets for the game where KDKA hosted us in a skybox at Olympic Stadium. We were served a gourmet French Canadian meal and watched the pregame festivities which included a circus and a balloon ascension inside the domed Olympic stadium.

We skipped out during the seventh inning stretch. Neither of us has ever been to Europe, so this French speaking city was exotic and exciting to us. We spent most of our time exploring the shops and just wandering around. We toured the city’s botanic gardens and had the most romantic dinner of our lives in a tiny French bistro.

I even remember what we ate, the restaurant’s special was two lobster tails and pomme frites for $12.75 Canadian dollars. It was a festive weekend in Montreal as we happened to be there on St. Jean Baptiste Day. We watched a bit of the parade and enjoyed fireworks after sunset. It was a perfect weekend in every way.

Over the years, my job as a sales trainer has allowed us to travel all over the United States.  We’ve been treated like VIP’s at some of the country’s nicest resorts and made a lot of memories. We were scheduled to go to Orlando this year before the pandemic struck. This worked out well because I would have had to cancel my talk.

We learned my wife has pancreatic cancer just before I was supposed to speak. I don’t know if we will have the chance to take any more trips together, but I will always have the memories of the good times we had exploring the country together. A storehouse of happy memories is truly one of the compensations for growing old.   

- Jim Busch

_____________________________

During the weeks leading up to July 4th, I see big and bright fireworks being shot off every night near where I live. I think this is a great thing. Because I like to think that everyone has this stupid virus on their minds and these fireworks are the perfect thing to take our minds off the virus and enjoy.

Some people may not like it because they go to bed early, but others love it since most of them are families with kids. Kids have been stuck in the house since late March and with all they had to do to complete school, it is time to enjoy summer.

I think these fireworks have brought out the happiness in kids on my street and brought out my happiness, as well. I may not understand why they do it every night, but I enjoy watching and seeing the colors. I know that deep down everyone is more happy and anxious waiting for the fireworks than thinking about this virus.

I can’t say I blame them. I don’t want to think about the virus either, but I know this is what we want to see when any red white and blue occasion happens. These fireworks are the greatest thing to happen during the summer. We need any kind entertainment for kids to enjoy. I would feel sad to see it end after July 4th and I would feel sad for the kids who wants to have something to do for the remainder of summer.

Due to the virus, no community pools are opened. Only Sandcastle, but it limits how many people can come into the park. Fireworks are the only thing they can enjoy until they get the OK for parties, picnics, and so many other things for little kids like to do. I cross my fingers the fireworks will continue for the rest of the summer.

- Maria Palmer

June 23, 2020

It has been months since we have seen active sports. Now that we are in the Green Zone it is time to come up to the plate to bat, kick some soccer balls to make a goal, and get ready for football so we can tackle the coronavirus down to the ground.

 Fans may not be allowed to enter the stands for their own safety and everything else, but they will be cheering as they watch on TV. Teams are pulling out their jerseys as they play games. Fans have been waiting for a long time for sports to come back, especially for kids who planning to do sports and are graduating in 2021.

Everyone is especially waiting for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Penguins and Steelers to start their seasons. The fans are wearing their home team colors, hanging their mascots or team name as a flags, pulling out their Terrible Towels or McKeesport Tiger Towels. But people are still confused about how these teams are going to get through the rest of season considering half of their season is already over. It leaves them in the dust.

Even colleges universities are waiting to see if basketball can be played on the court along with volleyball and so many other sports. I guess you can say that we need to see if Penn State Lions and the Pittsburgh Panthers are ready to go at it again.

Renzie Park has come back to life again with softball and baseball. I have seen the action and I am so happy to see teams play once again.

 No sports have been easy due to this virus, but everyone hoped and prayed to see them come back and to be able to cheer for something or someone. I know no one was happy to see this virus affect so much, including me since I played on a volleyball team before I had a job.

I was on the softball and kickball teams at the Family Resource Center in downtown McKeesport. I had to decide between sports or my job.  On the one hand, I am working and getting paid.  But on the other hand, I am getting exercise and being outside. I enjoyed my sports activities, but I had to give it up because I realized my job was more important. Sure, I wanted exercise, but I had to do it in my spare time.

It will not be easy for anyone anymore due to a lot of safety guidelines that were put into play for sports. As much as everyone does not want to, they have to follow the guidelines no matter what so everyone can stay safe.

 I may not be playing sports anymore, but I am sure everyone else will find a way to enjoy playing and staying safe at the same time. The bright side to this is that when you are playing sports you don’t have to wear masks. The reason for not wearing a mask is because they need to see what is in front of them. They also need to breathe. Each team member need to time catch their breath and stay hydrated. There would be no way to play any kind of sports if they had to wear masks. I wish all the teams good luck as they come outside again.

  -  Maria Palmer

_____________________________

Next week I have my regular checkup with my endocrinologist. Before I see her, she wanted me to get a full panel of blood tests, so I started my day at Quest Diagnostics. Like everyone and everything else, their business has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Everyone in the waiting room was wearing a mask and the waiting room chairs were spread apart at a safe social distance.       

The biggest difference in Quest’s business is the time required to complete their tests. Because of the risk of infection, each of the rooms where they draw blood must be thoroughly cleaned between patients. The technicians now have to wear disposable gowns which must be changed, along with their masks and gloves, between patients. This extra work requires a great deal of time and limits the number of tests they can complete in a day. I checked in at the Quest facility about 15 minutes before my 10 a.m. appointment. It soon became apparent that I had awhile to wait.

I’ve spent a remarkably large portion of my life waiting. As a salesman I was at the mercy of my customer’s schedules. If they were busy, I had to wait for them to finish before they would see me.

I always made sure I had something to do with my time. I would complete paperwork or catch up on my business reading. Since I have retired, I have replaced these productive activities with more pleasurable ones. I always make sure I have something to read or my pocket sketchbook with me. If I really get desperate, I can amuse myself with my phone.

This morning I decided to use my time pursuing one of my favorite activities, people watching. When I have the privilege of spending time with my fellow human beings, I like to closely observe them. If I have my drawing materials, I might make surreptitious sketches. I often do this when I am having lunch in a restaurant or café. Other times I practice painting word pictures.

Sometimes I record these descriptions in my notebook, but usually I just do this in my head. My goal is to describe the people around me so accurately that a reader who is not present can picture them in their imagination. If I have the time, I try to imagine their backstories. Based on what they are wearing and how they act, I give these strangers a name and craft a fictional biography for them. Sometimes these creations become characters in my fiction writing.

Generally I like my subjects, but today I encountered one rather impatient and reprehensible individual. Most of the people in the Quest waiting room exhibited some signs of impatience. They tapped their feet, shifted about in their seats and kept looking up at the video screen displaying the names of the patients in the order they were to be seen.

One man protested having to wait in a loud voice. Ostensibly he was talking at the man who had been unlucky enough to choose the seat closest to this unhappy soul. He had his volume knob turned all the way up so everyone in the room could hear his complaints. From his rantings we all knew that his appointment was scheduled for 9:30 and that it was now 10:20. We learned that “this was no way to run a business” and learned that he was wondering, “what the hell they’re doing back there?” 

I pitied the technician who appeared at the door to get the next person in the queue. He pounced on her like a leopard on a wounded gazelle. Leaping from his seat he put his mask about three inches from her mask and shouted, “I have an appointment!”

She replied, “Yes sir, everyone here has an appointment. We’re doing the best that we can.”

He repeated, “I have a 9:30 appointment! 9:30, do you hear me? 9:30!”

The young woman did her best to remain calm and to defuse the situation but he kept shouting the time of his appointment at her.

Finally she firmly, but politely said, “Please take a seat, sir! We will be with you as soon as possible” before turning her back and shutting the door behind her. When his name was called about ten minutes later I secretly hoped she was the person assigned the task of sticking a needle in his arm. I am sure it would take her a few extra punctures to find a vein.

I wondered why he was in a hurry. He looked to be about my age, so he was probably retired. Perhaps he had an audience with the Pope or a meeting with the Secretary of State later that morning, but I doubt it. I am certain that he was the kind of guy who blows his horn when the traffic backs up outside the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, absolutely convinced that all the other drivers are conspiring to ruin his day. I thought of something a wise old coworker once told me, “What’s your hurry, we all reach the grave soon enough.”

I actually found myself feeling bad for this impatient man. I’ve found that anyone who tries to assert himself so rudely, usually has self esteem issues. A jar filled with acid slowly eats itself away. He was a man who was afraid of being left alone with his own thoughts.

When I got called in for my appointment I sought out the young lady who bore the brunt on this man’s irrational anger. I told her that I was a retired trainer who had taught customer service skills for decades. Praising her composure, I told her I would be proud to have her on my team anytime. I think this made her feel better and I hoped it would help salvage some of her day.

I only wish I could have done something for the angry impatient man. It is sad to see someone so angry and so sad that they spread bitterness behind them like a farmer sowing seeds.    

- Jim Busch

June 22, 2020

After a three month hiatus, I was able to get together with my sister today. Peggy is a cancer survivor and is missing half a lung, so she is at a high risk for Covid-19. I’ve missed her over the past months, but until things started to loosen up a bit we both felt it was best to stay apart.

Technically, Peggy is my half-sister. Her father died when she was just a toddler. I came along later after our mother remarried my father. I never think of her as my “half” sister, we’re more like twins born eleven years apart. It’s funny, but we are very much alike, but neither one of us are like our mother. We both favor our maternal grandfather in appearance and our approach to life.

I was her bratty little brother. I have always had a mischievous streak and she was my primary target of my devilish nature. I liked to do things like hiding her purse minutes before she was supposed to go out on a date. I always thought that I would make a good spy because no amounts of threats, torture or bribery would make me reveal its location. I used to attack her with our mother’s ironing board.

Our kitchen didn’t have room for a refrigerator, so my mother kept it in the hall. She kept her heavy metal ironing board in the space between the wall and the fridge. I would hide behind the ironing board and tip it out to hit my sister when she went past. It is a tribute to Peggy’s gentle nature that she didn’t drown me in my bath when she had a chance.

Once, when my parents went to a family wedding in Michigan they left me with Peggy and my grandfather for a long weekend. During an intense, “you’re not the boss of me” tantrum I threw a shoe at Peggy. It missed her, but did manage to go through one of the glass sidelights that flanked our front door. This wasn’t a plain piece of window glass. Our turn of the century home featured sidelights made from small pieces of cut glass held together in a soldered lead framework. It was like a stained glass window but made with chamfered clear glass.

Peggy’s pump sent the tiny bits of glass flying leaving bits of twisted lead which looked like a demolished bridge. When my parents got home on Sunday afternoon, I ran down the sidewalk to meet them shouting, “Peggy broke a window.” During the interrogation that followed, I explained why she deserved the blame for the damage, “It was her shoe and she shouldn’t have ducked.” To this day, our old front door has one leaded glass window and one of smooth plate glass.

If I didn’t know better, I would think that Peggy got married at 18 because she wanted to get away from me. She literally married the boy next door. My mother wasn’t happy with the marriage, so I didn’t see much of Peggy for the next few years. I was happy to have my own room, but I missed her. We got back together when I started to drive.

Peggy never learned to drive because my dad traumatized her. He tried to teach her to drive on our giant 1957 Pontiac Superchief, a car the size of a small naval vessel. The size of the car, my dad’s impatience, and his temper conspired to keep Peggy from ever getting behind the wheel again. When it came my turn to learn to drive, my mother signed me up for lessons at the YMCA. One of the ways I put my new license to work was taking Peggy shopping or on other errands.

She was there for me when I got married young creating a rift with my parents. She knew what I was going through better than anyone. We were always cordial, but we were both busy with our families and usually only got together on holidays and family events. Over the years, my wife and Peggy came to be very close. I was very proud of my wife’s dedication to my sister when she was fighting her lung cancer. She went above and beyond the call of duty.

Peggy is also very close with my children and my grandson. She has always been good to them. She is especially close to my daughter. As I said, my sister and I are very much alike. This is also true of me and my daughter, so she also is much like her aunt. They often go shopping together or to the casino. My sister only has one child, a son, and she treats Rachael like the daughter she never had. They have a lot of fun together.

Our outing today involved a trip to Michael’s craft store. Peggy, like me, likes creating things and had a piece of her needlework she wanted framed. I was happy to be her chauffeur. I think she had an ulterior motive. I think she wanted to see how I was weathering my wife’s cancer.

Again, she knew how I felt better than I do. She lost her husband to illness more than a decade ago and has had time to process her feelings. We didn’t talk about this, it’s not our way, but being with her made me feel better. I knew she was concerned about me.

We usually hug when we part but skipped this due to social distancing, but I could feel her love wrapped around me.

- Jim Busch

June 21, 2020

I am a natural optimist. I always look for the positives in every situation. If one looks closely, they can find a positive from almost any event. This includes the Coronavirus. I am not minimizing the pain the pandemic has caused, it is terrible that so many have lost their lives and many more have lost their jobs.

Despite these obvious problems, adapting to the disease has created many new opportunities for our society. Many companies have learned that working from home has benefits for both workers and their employers, the environment has rebounded and many people have learned new skills and taken up new hobbies.

Since today is Father’s Day, I was wondering how the stay at home order has impacted the relationship between fathers and their children. The closing of schools and of workplaces have thrown dads and their kids together for months. I hope that in most cases this has drawn them together.

Growing up, I didn’t see much of my dad. He worked steady second shift as a machinist at Westinghouse. When I got home from school, my dad was heading out the door to work. When he got home I was in bed and he was asleep when I left the next day. By the time I came along, he had plenty of seniority and could have bid on a daylight job, but chose to remain on night turn.

His reasoning was that he got paid a shift bonus and there were fewer bosses around to bug him at night. In the summers, he had a second job mowing grass for a landscaper buddy of his. On Saturdays, he was busy during chores during the day and he and my mother went out clubbing every Saturday night. Sunday’s after church, he took my grandfather to spend the afternoon with his buddies at the fireman’s club.

My dad and I got along great. He was fun to be with and told great stories. I just didn’t see a lot of him. I treasured our camping trips in the summer when we would go to Gettysburg or some other historical site. I inherited my dad’s love of history.

One trip was especially memorable because we explored his personal history. He took me to the spot where the CCC Camp he had served in when he was a young man was located. He showed me the mountainside where he and his bunkmates had battled a forest fire.

The fire was one of the great adventures of his life and I could hear the roar of the flames and smell the smoke when he described it to me. When I got older, my dad started cutting lawns on his own and I was his crew. I enjoyed these days working with him. I especially liked lunchtime when we would hit a bar for a burger or a fish sandwich with a side of his stories of bumming around the country in the depression.

When I became a father, I tried to be there for my children. This was one of the reasons I pursued a sales career. My flexible schedule allowed me to attend school and scouting events. Like my dad, I worked long and hard, but I always carved out time for my children. I tried to never miss dinner so that I was there to hear about their day and help with homework and other projects.

After they went to bed, I would retire to my home office to complete the day’s paperwork and plan the next day’s activities. We would take hikes and go to plays or take in some local attraction. I am proud to say that their friends thought I was one of the cool dads.

I saw the education of my children as one of the most important jobs of my life. Most Saturdays, we would go to the library in Oakland as I wanted them to know the value of reading. On weekends and vacations, I would drag them to cultural events, museums and historical sites. They complained loudly then, but have both grown up to be cultured and very literate adults.

I was very involved in their school work. On some occasions, they would bring home a paper with an A or B on it and I would make them rewrite it because I knew they could do better. When they got to college they could breeze through their papers because they were already writing at a college level. I often would read poetry and encouraged them to memorize poetry because I believed that this was the best way to develop a facility with language.

In addition to academic subjects, I tried to teach my kids about the ways of the world. I sometimes would tell them fantastic, but believable stories and then let them figure out that they weren’t true. I wanted them to learn to question what they were told and verify facts for themselves.

I taught them to stand up for themselves and not to kowtow to authority. This gained them a reputation with all their teachers and the respect of the best ones. I tried to teach them to do more than was expected of them and push themselves. My daughter once called me a “Covey Pusher,” when I made them read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I also taught my kids to have fun. I taught them to enjoy singing and telling jokes. We went to movies and concerts. I supported their interests, buying musical instruments, early computers, craft supplies and just about anything they wanted.

Halloween was a major holiday and we spent weeks crafting elaborate costumes. I made a complete suit of armor out of aluminum and a rolling robot with lights and electronic sounds. My son’s octopus on a treasure chest with eight arms that moved won first prize at Century III Mall and was featured on Chilly Billy’s Chiller Theater.

When I look back on my life, I realize that raising my children was the most satisfying and enjoyable thing I have done in my life. I think I did a good job because my children grew up to be good people.

It earned me a promotion to grandfather, a sort of emeritus position where I get to do the fun stuff without the bother of enforcing discipline or ever having to say no. I am extremely gratified by the relationship my son has with his son.

He is a great dad. I hope that this quarantine helps fathers realize that their most important job isn’t at the office. I hope it reminds them to focus on their children and on the fun of being a dad.    

- Jim Busch

June 20, 2020

The coronavirus lockdown has finally loosened up. I weathered the isolation period quite comfortably, but I don’t think I would have fared so well if I had been cooped up in an apartment. My house is quite small, but I have a large yard that has allowed me to get out and enjoy the sun and fresh air whenever I wanted.

Years ago, my wife watched my grandson while his mother was at work. She did this from the time he was an infant to a toddler. One of his favorite things to watch on TV was The Backyardigans. This show featured a group of kids who played together and enjoyed many adventures without ever leaving their back yards. Though I’m all grown up, I am definitely a Backyardigan.

Our property is long, but narrow. My wife’s family farm once covered the entire top of the hill we live on. Over the years, the property was divided among the family members. The plot we live on is the result of several more subdivisions over the generations. The family member who inherited the land immediately behind me kept their five acre chunk of the original farm intact. Except for one small house, this land and the even larger tract that adjoins it has grown into a mature forest.

This means that I live on the edge of prime wildlife habitat. I share my yard with deer, groundhogs, red and grey foxes, raccoons, possums and squirrels. A wide variety of birds circle overhead including turkey buzzards, red-tailed hawks and swallows. Though we haven’t seen them in the yard, there are coyotes in our “woods” and black bears have been known to wander through. Our local critters are an endless source of entertainment.

We didn’t always live in the middle of a suburban wilderness. I used to make a big garden that provided much of the family’s vegetables. As the abandoned farm fields grew into a forest and the wildlife returned to the hill, I found myself doing a lot of work to feed freeloading woodchucks and deer.

If I wanted to grow a garden today, I would have to fence my property like the exercise yard of a maximum security prison. I did attempt to fence in the garden, but knew I had lost the battle when I came home to find three groundhogs gleefully munching tomatoes. I said to my wife, “What an idiot I am. I forgot to close the gate and the woodchucks are in the garden.” She looked at me sheepishly and said, “Well, the mother groundhog was in the garden, but her little ones couldn’t get in so I opened the gate for them. I didn’t want to keep them from their mama.” I knew I couldn’t fight both the animal kingdom and my wife’s maternal instincts, so I gave up on gardening.

I don’t really miss the big garden. It’s just my wife and I today, so we do not need the veggies and I don’t miss the digging and weeding. In its place, I have planted a variety of perennial and wild flowers. These attract all manner of bugs, bees and butterflies. I enjoy watching them flit about on their errands.

Another big change is my backyard workshop/studio. For years, my workshop was housed in an old building that originally housed the family’s rabbits and chickens. It was narrow, dark, unheated and I had to share the space with generations of field mice and squirrels. When I retired, I tore it down and built a two car garage as a workspace. This was a lifesaver during the pandemic as it gave my wife some much needed alone time when I left the house to go to the shop. I can step out of the house, stroll up through the yard and lose myself in a project at my workbench or my drawing table.

About half way between the house and the shed is my sanctuary. This is a small patio I built as a place to read, relax and reflect. This was a blessing when our little house was home to three generations of six people, plus an endless stream of relatives and friends of my kids.

It was meant as a personal space, but my mother-in law fell in love with it. I spent many peaceful evenings there with my wife and Eleanor, her mother, just sitting and talking. It was Eleanor that named this spot, the sanctuary. A lot of times when the family was gathered on the brick patio, I would retire to my little space and just enjoy the scene from a distance. People like me who are drawn to writing and art often like to sit back and observe the world at a distance. This quiet spot gave me a place to sit and to savor the most precious things in my life. 

Tonight, after I had finished a project in the shop, I walked down through the yard. I saw several deer browsing on the edge of the neighbor’s woods and saw a pair of robins hurrying to their roosting spots for the night. I could see the sun beginning to set and the blossoms on the ornamental raspberry bushes.

As I neared the house, I paused to look at my father-in-law’s yellow roses that I have worked to keep alive for years. Looking past the roses, I saw my wife through the big window in our kitchen. She was working at the sink and framed by the window looked for all the world like a Johannes Vermeer painting. She was my Girl with the Pearl Earring. A vision of perfect beauty and love.

Focused on tidying up the kitchen, she didn’t see me there watching her, drinking in this delightful moment. I know some people dream of traveling to exotic places, about taking cruises or partying in Las Vegas, but for me the words of an old cheesy song say it all, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”     

- Jim Busch

June 19, 2020

Today is my 68th birthday. My family chose this occasion to declare the Covid-19 quarantine null and void. For the first time in months, my son and my daughter, plus my grandson came to my home for a long visit. At this point in my life, nothing makes me happier than spending time with the people I love most in the world. It was the best birthday present I could imagine.

My two children have very different personalities. My son, Jesse, is much like my wife and my daughter’s personality is a lot like mine. Rachael is so like me that she even likes girls. When someone asks me about my children, just for fun I respond, “I have two children, one’s a lawyer and the other is a lesbian. I’m so proud of her!”

Actually, I am very proud of both of my children. They are both good people with noble spirits and kind hearts. My daughter is off on Fridays, so she came in the morning bearing honey chicken biscuits from Wendy’s for breakfast. Properly masked, we sat on the couch and watched several episodes of “Making it” on television.

This is a reality show where people compete to make craft projects. My daughter, like me, has an artistic bent and enjoys creating things. We discussed the projects on the show noting techniques and ideas we would like to try. For lunch, my wife made us a meal we both enjoy, homemade corn dogs and fresh cut French fries. It is wonderful to raise children who grow up to become good friends.

We spent a couple of hours watching TV and talking until she had to run some errands. When she left, I went to my studio and spent several happy hours painting at my easel. Time dissolved as I tried several new techniques and produced a small painting that made me reasonably happy. When I looked up at the clock, it was almost time for dinner, so I cleaned my brushes and walked down to the house where my wife had been busy cooking all day.

About five, my daughter returned with her wife. A few minutes later, my son and grandson Max arrived. Jesse’s wife wasn’t able to come as she is recovering from ankle surgery. My daughter had not seen them since the beginning of the quarantine and was amazed at how much Max had grown. He was a full head taller than his aunt.

It was gift time and my family proved that they know me very well. I received a number of interesting books and several gift cards. My daughter presented me with a mounted print of my wife and I posing as the couple in Grant Wood’s iconic painting, American Gothic.

One of my life’s ambitions is learning to weld, so my family went together and gave me a gift certificate for a new electric welder. It may sound a little weird to get choked up over something like a MIG welder, but that is exactly what I did. It meant a lot to me.  

We talked for about a half an hour when my wife announced that it was time for dinner. Despite being worn out from her cancer and the chemotherapy, she set out an impressive spread, starting with cheese and crackers, an antipasto tray, chips and dips. The main course was freshly made Maryland-style crab cakes and her special chicken wings.

This was followed by my favorite chocolate cake and my kids’ favorite Dairy Queen ice cream cake. In a nod to the new normal, I pulled the lit candles off the cakes and turning away from the table and the food, blew them out one by one. I wished for a medical miracle that I know was not likely to happen.

Once the table was cleared, my wife led everyone into the living room. She wanted to do something we hadn’t done in years, watch a slide show. For her birthday last year she had asked for a slide projector. After a search, I found one at the Goodwill for a few dollars and was able to get the vintage machine back into operating condition.

I helped her set up the Kodak Carousel and a screen and dimmed the lights. The slides she had chosen for the evening’s show was pictures of my children when they were very young. Everyone laughed at the 1970’s clothes and how young my wife and I were in those early days of our marriage. There were a few quiet moments when family members who are no longer with us appeared on the screen big as life.

Our kids remembered their grandparents and shared some stories with my grandson. It was a special evening and we promised some future showings once I locate some more slide trays for the old machine. Even in the darkened room, I believe I detected a few tears in my wife’s eyes. I have to admit there were a few salty drops on my own cheeks.

After the slide show, it was time for everyone to go home. My wife packed up several bags of leftovers for both of our kids and after taking a few more photographs, the house was quiet again.

Exhausted, my wife fell fast asleep in her recliner and I sat down to think about the day. I’ve always liked the timing of my birth. I was born on the cusp of the longest day of the year in the midst of the green world’s explosive growth. I love the long days and warm sunlight. Mother Nature always has a special gift for my birthday, she coaxes my favorite wildflower into bloom. I love the sky blue blooms of the cornflower which seem to float in space on delicate green stems. Sprouting from the roadsides, they seem to tell me Happy Birthday.

When I was young, I liked the fact that my birthday came after school was out so I could spend the day lazing about in the sun. As I grew older, I appreciated that my birthday marked the midpoint of the calendar year. This served as a reminder to reassess my goals and check my progress toward them.

Like everyone else, I make plans on New Year’s Day, but my birthday serves as a reminder to revisit them and make necessary midcourse corrections. That all went out the window this year. The Coronavirus threw a microbial monkey wrench into everyone’s well laid plans.

My wife’s cancer makes any planning for the next six months a fool’s exercise. My only goal is to keep her alive and to make the most of the time we have left. I know my wife pushed herself harder than she should have to make this birthday special for me.

We both know it may be our last time to celebrate it together. Everybody I know sent cards or called to wish me a Happy Birthday, and I did, but this year it was mixed with melancholy. I am not sure I will ever be able to have another happy birthday if my wife is not by my side to share it with me.            

- Jim Busch

 June 18, 2020

In this morning’s paper, I read about the plans for the McKeesport Area High School graduation. Due to the social distancing requirements this year, the administration has opted for a drive through graduation this year. The seniors and their families will file past the principal when their names are called.

The student will get out and receive their diploma. At the same time their family, appropriately masked of course, to cheer for them. I am thinking that organizing this event is going to require just slightly more organizational expertise than the 1944 Normandy invasion. The odds of getting everyone in the proper place and having them stick with the program will be no easy task.

I wonder how the class of 2020 will remember their graduation. Will they regret that they did not have a chance to walk across the stage on the football field and shake hands as they get their sheepskin like generations of graduates have done? Perhaps, breaking with tradition will make their ceremony even more memorable.

My guess is that they will remember their graduation as a highlight in their lives. In 2075, they will tell their grandchildren about the great pandemic of ’20 and how they had to finish school online, that’s what we called it back then.

They will talk about how they went to their graduation in a “car,” the old fashioned kind that used gasoline and had rubber tires. They will tell their grandkids that this was just the first time they had to overcome a crisis to get through life. Of course, this discussion will end with them telling the young people that they don’t know how easy they have it today.

This made me think back to my own graduation fifty years ago. I am a proud member of the McKeesport Area High School class of 1970. We had our own crisis to deal with. My male classmates who were not college material knew that there was a good chance that they could be drafted and shipped off to Vietnam.

By this time, the war was not going well and was dividing the country into opposing camps. Even those of us who were going to college feared for our lives. For years, America’s college campuses had become home front battlefields. Just a month or so before graduation, many of us had walked out of our classes when we learned about the Kent State students who had been killed by the Ohio National Guard. There was a lot of us wearing caps and gowns that day, we were born at the midst of the baby boom, and we all were a bit scared of what the future would bring.

I remember going to the high school to pick up my cap and gown thinking it was a weird thing to be wearing, essentially a dress. I wondered why my mother had insisted I wear a tie when it was invisible under my gown. I began to sweat as soon as I put the silly thing on.

That June was unseasonably warm and the nylon gowns held my body heat in transforming me into a walking sauna. We lined up in the hallways in alphabetical order, before marching onto the field for the ceremony. The only thing I remember was being hot and bored. I don’t recall the speeches or even who gave them. The highlight of the day was when the principal congratulated the Class of 1970 and wished us good luck, so I could get out of my sweaty choir robe.

My parents enjoyed the ceremony. My mother told me about her graduation. She took a commercial course that trained her to type and manage files, she never used those skills; she worked at G.C. Murphy’s as a clerk before marrying her first husband a few months later. My dad was very proud. He kept mentioning that I had graduated “with honors” and would be going to Penn State in the fall. My dad had to drop out of school to support his widowed mother during the depression. I think he was vicariously sharing my experience. I was impressed that he had taken the night off work, something he seldom ever did.

For a treat, my parents took me out to dinner at Chef Paul’s restaurant and told me that I could order anything I wanted from the menu. We seldom ate out and never at such a fancy place. I took full advantage of the offer and ordered a steak smothered in sautéed mushrooms.

After we ordered, my mother took a box out of her purse and handed it to my dad. He in turn presented it to me. I opened the box and found a shiny new Timex watch with a stainless steel expansion band. It was a self-winding model, a pendulum inside the watch would wind the mainspring with every move of my wrist. It wasn’t an expensive watch, but it meant a lot to me. I wore it for years.

Chef Paul’s is long gone. There has probably been a dozen or more different restaurants in their building in the intervening years. I drive past their old building probably at least once a week, sometimes more, and I think of that graduation dinner every time I do.

I didn’t know it then, but in the next few years I would attend two colleges, I would fall in love, get married, start a family. I would find jobs, lose jobs, have successes and failures and did a whole lot of grownup stuff.

Before I got turned around, I was retired and a grandfather. I envy those kids, they would argue with this title, who don’t know what’s to come. They’ve been waiting and working for this day a long time, but they don’t know how much everything is going to change for them.

We never do, it’s impossible to imagine a world we’ve never seen. I wish I could tell them they’re about to embark on a scary and wonderful adventure.   

- Jim Busch

June 17, 2020

After three months in lockdown, I decided to treat myself with an outing today. On Facebook, I saw that the SAMA, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Ligonier, had reopened so I decided to take a mini road trip.

The older I get the more important art becomes to me. I love art for the same reason that I love stories, both give me the chance to see how the world looks through someone else’s eyes. I also enjoy film and photography.

I never miss a photography exhibit if I can help it, but they are different. The camera can only see what is in front of the lens. I know that photographers and cinematographers are artists in their own right. I know that their eye and the way they frame things makes the difference between a snapshot and a piece of fine art. The thing that sets painting, sculpture and graphic art apart is that they can portray a reality that doesn’t exist anywhere but in the artist’s mind.

SAMA is one of my favorite galleries. It sits along route 711, just a mile or so south of the Diamond in Ligonier. The building is constructed from several 19th century log farm houses.  This design, plus its location in the wide Loyalhanna Valley at the foot of Chestnut Ridge, creates the illusion that the museum has been there forever.

The gallery is surrounded by flower beds planted with wildflowers, perennials and annuals, all chosen because they are attractive to butterflies and other pollinators. Though carefully tended, they look wild and natural. Like the building they encircle, the plantings appear to have sprouted spontaneously from the valley’s soil. They are a delightfully chaotic kaleidoscope of color.  

The museum specializes in works by local artists or from local collections. The curators and I must have similar tastes in art because I have enjoyed every exhibition I have seen there. They have one permanent exhibition, a collection of art glass paperweights displayed in a room divider between the galleries. Although I have seen them hundreds of times, I always take a moment to admire their craftsmanship and their luminosity.

The current exhibition was In search of beauty with a brush: Robert Bowden. This show was a retrospective of the artist’s work. Born in 1933, Robert Bowden was a local watercolorist who spent his life capturing the beauty of southwestern Pennsylvania with his brush.

Though the show included some still lifes and paintings from his travels, most of the works depicted our area. As an artist from the “City of Bridges,” the Bowden exhibit featured many paintings of these graceful structures. I was particularly taken with a painting of the Westinghouse Bridge which is just a few miles from my home.

The Westinghouse Bridge has always been a leitmotif in my life. My dad worked in its shadow for forty years. As a child growing up in Turtle Creek, he watched the bridge being built. He said the men walking on the wooden scaffolding high above him looked like ants. Whenever we drove across the bridge, he told me about the men who fell to their death from that scaffolding and were buried forever in the wet concrete of the bridge.

This image is stuck in my head even though when I researched it later in my life, I found that this was not true. Several men had died building the bridge, but they were not entombed there. My dad never let the truth get in the way of a good story. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree because one of the most popular short stories that I have ever written told the story of the ghost of a man buried in the bridge’s concrete.

Once when I was about 10, my dad came home from work with $739.00 in his lunch bucket. My mother asked him where he got the money and he replied, “I won a pool in the shop.” My mother knew my dad inside and out, from the tone of his voice she could tell he was holding something back.

“What pool?” she asked.

“The bridge pool!”

She pressed him for more information and found that the “Bridge Pool” took advantage of the fact that the Westinghouse Bridge was for lack of a better word, a popular spot for committing suicide. The bridge soared 197 feet above the railroad tracks, so if you wanted to end it all, this was a good spot to do it. I remember my dad talking about this and using his employer’s advertising tag line, You can be sure if it is Westinghouse!

My mother said, “That’s awful. Don’t you feel bad making money off of a tragedy like that?”

“I didn’t push the guy.”

“But, still, it doesn’t seem right.”

My dad also knew how to pull my mother’s strings so he responded, “Alright, I’ll put the dough in the collection plate Sunday if that will make you feel better.”

“Well, I didn’t say that.”

After some negotiation, twenty bucks went to the church and we purchased some new living room furniture.

I thoroughly enjoyed my day. I have looked at a lot of images online over the last few months, but there’s nothing like the real thing. Like a man who hadn’t eaten for a few days, I quickly walked around the gallery devouring the visual feast as fast as I could.

Once I had seen the entire show, I walked around one more time. This time I went slowly, savoring each delicious picture, noting the composition and each individual brushstroke, enjoying looking at familiar sights through Robert Bowden’s eyes. I spent about an hour and a half at SAMA, but it was as refreshing to my soul as a two week vacation.   

- Jim Busch

June 16, 2020

The lawns in my neighborhood look better than they ever have. The grass looks like a putting green, every weed in the flower beds have been diligently pulled and dandelions are dug out within hours of unfurling their jagged leaves. New plantings have appeared, the shutters and trim are all sporting new paint jobs and many driveways have a new top coat. This mania for home maintenance is a collateral effect of the Coronavirus quarantine. When you’re ordered to stay at home, you might as well fix the old place up.

I have always tried to keep my yard looking nice, but I have to admit that I’ve been spending more time in the yard this year. Today, I took advantage of the nice weather to do some pruning and trimming. I trimmed the privet hedges which surround my front yard. I had finished cutting the hedges and was starting to rake up the clippings when the postman delivered our mail. I decided it was a good time for a break, so I collected the mail from the box, and went inside for a cold drink. 

I grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and sat down to sort the mail. We received the monthly coupon book from Costco, an Aldi’s ad, several other sales flyers and several greeting cards encased in colorful envelopes. Since word of my wife’s cancer diagnosis reached her friends and family, she has been receiving an abundance of cards, flowers and other gifts on a daily basis. She is a kind woman who has touched many lives and they want her to know how much she is loved.  

My wife was sleeping in the recliner. It had been a rough day for her. This week the chemotherapy drugs had reached critical mass in her bloodstream and her hair had started coming out by the handful. Early that morning, her hairdresser had met her early before the shop opened to cut her hair. She went from having long hair to a cut that would pass inspection in a Marine boot camp. The doctors had told her this was coming, but that didn’t make this change any less traumatic for her. She knew that I always loved her long hair and was concerned what I would think.

After 47 years of marriage, I am less concerned with what is on her head than what’s in her heart and I know that will never change.

Not wanting to disturb her, I tried to be quiet as I laid the cards on the end table, next to her chair where she would find them when she woke up. As I put the cards down, I noticed the stamps on the larger one. I had seen these distinctive Celebration stamps on my wife’s desk.

For the first time, I noticed the address on the pale blue envelope. It was addressed to me. I had forgotten that my birthday was just a few days off and I would also be receiving a few cards in the mail. I took this card back and went to the kitchen table to read it.

I sat down and looked at the return address on the envelope. It was the same as the address line, this was a card from my wife. This is something my wife has always done. She mails my cards to me. When I was still working, she would mail one to my office and another to our home.

I have always been very frugal, my family calls it being cheap, so I always leave my wife’s card on her pillow or on the kitchen table, saving the price of a stamp. My wife believes that getting a card in the mail makes it that much more special. Getting a postmark on the envelope is the Hallmark equivalent of having something blessed by the pope.

I ripped open the envelope to find a card with the heading, “The Wonderful Man I Married.” This was followed by a beautiful verse enumerating a lot of manly qualities that I am not sure I actually possess.

One line read, “I appreciate and love him as I’d cherish and enjoy a rare and precious work of art.” If that is true, I’d be a Jackson Pollack, a messy canvas filled with spilled and spattered paint with no apparent rhyme or reason.

I was glad my wife was asleep when I read the dedication in her flowing script. It told me how much she cherishes our time together. I lost it when I read the line wishing me, “many, many more happy birthdays.” I knew this might be the last time we celebrated my birthday together. I can’t imagine what a birthday would be like without her in my life.

I choked up and tears filled my eyes. I was glad she didn’t see this moment of weakness, I am trying to be strong for her. I took a drink of water, tried to compose myself and went to my workshop to be alone for a while. This will be a hard birthday, but I know that there will likely be harder ones to come.   

- Jim Busch

June 15, 2020

Before the Coronavirus hit, my wife and I often went to the theater to take in a movie. If there was a historical drama or an adventure film playing, genres she doesn’t enjoy, I would slip off and watch a movie by myself.

I like the experience of watching films on the big screen in a darkened theater. Until the theater’s reopen, I am limited to watching films on the small screen in my living room. The only compensation is that the popcorn is better and considerably cheaper.

I was feeling lazy today, so after mowing the lawn I settled down on my couch to watch a film. I subscribe to several premium networks and streaming services. These give me access to a long list of recent films and other new programs, but today I chose to watch The Quiet Man starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.

The Quiet Man is as old as I am, we both debuted in 1952. Wayne plays Sean Thorton, a Pittsburgh steelworker turned professional boxer who returns to his ancestral Irish home after accidentally killing another boxer in the ring.

The day he arrives he spies Maureen O’Hara and falls madly in love with her at first sight. He buys his family’s former cottage and comes into conflict with Squire Danaher, O’Hara’s brother, played by Victor McLaglen. The rest of the film portrays Wayne’s courtship of O’Hara and their marriage. The film ends with an epic fistfight between Wayne and McLaglen ending with the two men sharing a drink together and becoming fast friends. 

The setting of the film, the village of Inisfree, is an idyllic setting populated by a full cast of charming Irish characters. It is one of my favorite movies and I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times. Some years ago I even got the opportunity to see it on the big screen at a special Saint Patrick’s Day showing of the film.

I can practically recite the film’s dialogue from memory. I know every scene and of course I know everything will work out for the people of Innisfree in the very happy ending of the film.   

My wife walked through the living room as John Wayne and Victor McLaglen were fighting their way across the Irish countryside. She asked, “Are you watching The Quiet Man again? Do think the ending will be different this time?”

She was just teasing me, but her comment got me thinking. Why do we watch the same old movies over and over again? With all the new content available today at the touch of a button, why was I watching a movie that was almost 70-years-old? 

It is easy to understand why we go to see the latest film or watch the newest program on television. We like to be surprised, we like novelty. A film that we have not seen before tells us a new story and introduces us to new characters.

If the film is done well, it will keep us on the edge of our seats wondering how it will end. Adrenalin flows through our veins as we vicariously tag along with the film’s protagonist as they try to escape their present predicament. In most cases we are rewarded by a satisfying, if not downright happy, ending.          

After we see a film once, the suspense is gone, we no longer have to be concerned for the film’s hero. We know he’ll be ok, we know the happy couple will live happily ever after and that Lassie will find Timmy in the well. So why do we do it. Why do I watch The Quiet Man again and again and why can’t my wife resist watching Bette Davis in Dark Victory any time it is on TV.  

I think watching an old familiar film is like spending time with an old friend. We know what to expect and do not expect them to challenge us. We anticipate a comfortable interaction and some pleasant conversation.

Talking with an old friend reinforces why we were attracted to them when you first met them. You liked their quick wit or kind smile, likewise watching an old film reacquaints us with what we liked when we first saw it. In my case, I wanted to live in Innisfree, in a beautiful little town filled with quaint characters who genuinely care for one another. 

Everything in real world is constantly changing, I feel myself growing older, the world is fighting a pandemic, the economy is on the skids, and my wife has a deadly disease. In Sean Thornton’s world, Maureen O’Hara is always young and beautiful, the lads at the pub are always breaking out in song and everyone is happy in the end.  

I know what to expect when I watch The Quiet Man. I don’t have to worry about how things will turn out and I don’t have to think about what’s going on in my ever changing reality. I felt much better today after my all too short vacation to Innisfree.

Maybe I will go again tomorrow.         

- Jim Busch

June 14, 2020

Today I received an early Father’s Day present, my son and his family came to bring me lunch and visit. I have seen them for only a few brief minutes since the Coronavirus lockdown began over three months ago. His family has plans to celebrate him next weekend, so he wanted to see me this week.

He called the night before and asked what I would like for lunch. I told him to surprise me and he did so, and I was very pleased with his choice - Rowdy Barbecue. He brought me an outstanding beef brisket sandwich and an order of perfect onion rings.

It was a Goldilocks day, not too hot, not too cold; warm and sunny with a soft cooling breeze. Taking advantage of the beautiful day, we ate our barbecue on the brick patio outside my kitchen. I asked my son, Jesse, about his job. He is an attorney for a generic drug broker.

Even before the lockdown order, he worked from home much of the time, so his work was barely interrupted by the pandemic. Though I enjoy being retired, I still enjoy the business world and find the complexity of his industry absolutely fascinating. He is one of the top people in his field and I am immensely proud of him.

I asked my grandson Max and his mother Erin how they felt about the end of the school year. Max just completed middle school and is now officially a high schooler. My daughter in-law is a recovering lawyer who decided to make a midlife career change and is studying for the ministry at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Because the crisis disrupted their schools, letter grades were abandoned this year in favor of a pass/fail system and they had both passed. They are both good students and highly competitive people, so they lamented not getting grades or class standings.

We talked about what they have been doing for relaxation and how they are navigating the new normal. I gave Erin three raspberry plants I had started from root cuttings and shared planting and care instructions with her. I also gave them some books I knew they would enjoy.

Erin and my wife discussed some recipes for using the eggs Erin had brought from her coop. I gave my son some advice on a repair project, plus some shrinkable insulation tubing needed to properly complete the job. 

Going through some boxes from the attic a few days before, I found a seven-foot bullwhip from my childhood. My sister brought it home for me after visiting the Six Flags Amusement Park in Texas when I was nine or ten.

I loved practicing with it as a child making it crack and picking leaves off of bushes in the yard. I showed my grandson how to make it crack and after a bit of practice he was ready to become a professional muleskinner. His dad joined us and we had a lot of fun seeing who could get the sharpest report from the braided leather. I even sang a few verses of the Deadwood Stage song from the film Calamity Jane.

“Oh the Deadwood Stage is a-headin over the hills. Where the Injun arrows are thicker than porcupine quills. Dangerous land, no time to delay, so…whip crack-away, whip crack-away, whip crack-away!”

I must admit that Doris Day sounded much better than I did with this tune.  

We visited until almost 5 p.m. when it was time for them to go. I can’t think of a better way to spend a day than sharing a meal and chatting with the people I love. I thought about all the wonderful family gatherings we had shared on that old brick patio shaded by the crabapple I had planted over forty years before. I know my wife enjoyed that day as much as I did despite the impact of the cancer and chemotherapy was having on her body. 

Normally on days like this, my wife flitted about like a hummingbird in search of nectar, seeing to the needs of everyone else. It broke my heart to see her sitting slumped in a folding lawn chair, barely moving, joining in the conversation with a weak and weary voice.

Though the temperature was in the mid-70’s, she asked my son to go into the house and bring her a blanket which she wrapped around herself. The sight of her sitting in a chair wrapped in a blanket on a warm summer day hit me hard.

The long separation from those we love during the coronavirus lockdown proves the truth of the old saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

I have always loved my family, but after not seeing them for so long I treasure every minute I get to spend with them even more. Like so many memorable moments in life, today was bittersweet, a blend of joy and sorrow. I don’t know what is to come, but I do know I will treasure this simple day as long as I live.        

- Jim Busch  

June 13, 2020

Throughout the pandemic lockdown, I have tried to get outdoors on a regular basis. Some psychologists believe staying indoors too much is bad for our mental health. There is even a condition known as Nature Deficit Disorder which can lead to depression and a shortened attention span.

In the interest of maintaining my sanity, I would go for one or two hour walks. The rest of the time was spent in my home or in my workshop/studio. Now that the summer months are approaching with its balmy weather and longer days, I am able to spend more and more time soaking up the sunshine and enjoying the outdoors.

Along with warm days and blue skies, the arrival of summer comes with a long list of seasonal chores. I tackled a number of them today. I mowed grass, pruned some shrubs and pulled some weeds.

While I went about my work I thought about the line from the poet James Russell Lowell, 

“What is so rare as a day in June?

Then if ever come perfect days.” 

 This happens a lot to us English Literature majors. Our brains are conditioned to recall a line of verse or literary fragment to suit every occasion. With the warm sun on my face and a gentle breeze in my hair, Mr. Lowell’s words popped into my head and I was inclined to agree with him, for this was indeed a perfect day.

I took a break and sat down on my patio and Googled the entire poem on my phone. Years ago, I would have been forced to go into the house and search for the poem in one of the Norton Anthology of English Literature books left over from my college years.

Search engines and smart phones are the literature nerd’s friend. I quickly found it and read the poem several times. I was amazed at how accurately this poem, written in 1885 as a retelling of the medieval grail quest, described my backyard on this afternoon. I looked around and started checking off the items mentioned in Lowell’s work.

Mother Nature was more than willing to assist me in my quest. As I read the line which goes, 

“Whether we look, or whether we listen 

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.”

I heard a buzz and looked up to see several fat bumblebees with the sun glinting off their yellow and black bodies. Their silver wings a silver blur. There is a positive thinking meme about these creatures that says that this chubby insect shouldn’t be able to fly, but do it anyways. It is as popular as the “Hang in there” cat posters.

I know that naturalists long ago figured out the physics of bumblebee flight, but still looking at them float effortlessly in the air, it does seem that they are held aloft by a magical spell.

Rising from my chair to walk around the yard, I read,

“The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,

And there’s never a leaf or blade too mean 

To be some happy creature’s palace.”  

I silently thanked Lowell for a new perspective on the tiny yellow flowers growing along my fence. Their waxy blossoms did remind me of golden goblets. I saw ants and other insects going about their business in their green palaces. An entire community surviving and thriving in a few inches of grass.

Like a kid listening to a bedtime story, nature urged me to turn the page and move on to the next stanza. Two robins bumped their red chests and flapped their wings as they flew in tight circles trying to determine who would be the owner of this particular section of my yard.

Their battle came to an end when the larger of the two won the match and was awarded the deed to this territory and all the wriggling worms contained in it. The theme music to this fight scene was provided by a chorus of songs from birds of all sizes and species. This was the height of the breeding season which Lowell described as,

“His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,

And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;

He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

Everywhere I looked I saw Lowell’s words made flesh. The dandelions blooming, the clear blue sky, the soft breeze whispering in my ear. Following the poet’s instructions I shut my eyes and just stood there listening. I could feel that this was, “The high tide of the year.”

I felt good, I felt happy. In my rational brain, I knew that Covid-19 was still rampaging through the country, I knew our streets were still filled with angry people protesting an evil that seems to never go away, I know my wife still has cancer and I am growing old, but today in the sunshine for a brief moment I am perfectly happy.

James Russell Lowell described this feeling as,

“Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;

Everything is happy now,

Everything is upward striving;

‘Tis as easy now for the heart to be true

As for grass to be green and skies to be blue…

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.”                                                                                                

- Jim Busch

June 12, 2020

I was talking to Mike, our young neighbor, about everything that is going on in the country. He was convinced that the country was about to come apart because of the pandemic, the faltering economy and demonstrations and looting in our streets. In an effort to reassure him I said, “I’m confident we’ll come through this, okay.” He shot back, “How can you be so sure of that?” I answered, “Because we’ve been through this all before!”

I’ve always been interested in history. My father was a history buff and we often visited historical sites together. I received firsthand history lessons in my parents’ stories of their younger years living through the depression and World War II.

My grandparents’ stories took me back even further in time. I am sure that their stories had been enhanced and embellished with every telling, so by the time I came along the times they lived in sounded much more interesting than mine.

Once I learned to read, I discovered my favorite books were biographies and histories. I loved the Landmarks Books children’s series and read every one in the library at Lincoln Elementary School.

To this day, much of my reading is comprised of history texts, biographies and autobiographies. I have always found true stories much more interesting than fiction. 

I not only find studying history fascinating, but I also find it useful in interpreting current events. I have reached an age where I have seen a lot of history unfolding before my eyes. We live in a young country, my lifetime accounts for about 27% of the time since the United States declared its independence. My study of history, coupled with my longevity, gives me a different perspective of the evening news that my young neighbor lacks. 

Mike sees the riots and looting as irreparable cracks in the foundations of our society. I can remember that almost everyone felt that way when American cities were burning in 1968. I know they are horrible, I know they are frightening. I know they are costly. But I also know they are temporary. The streets will be cleared, the glass swept off the sidewalks and life will go on. Some lives were forever changed by the chaos of the 1960’s, but most people moved on and went on with their lives. 

Mike had heard about the unrest in the 1960’s, but had no idea they were so violent or so widespread. He still wasn’t convinced that my belief that we’ve “been there, done that” was correct and began to test me.

The Coronavirus pandemic—the 1918 Spanish flu. I told Mike about talking to survivors when I was a young man.

Living in a divided country - I told him that the Civil War had been more than a tad “uncivil.” For good measure, we talked about dueling congressmen and the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Fake News and attacks on journalism—we talked about William Randolph Hearst and other “Yellow” journalists inciting the U.S. to go to war with Spain.  He thought I was teasing him when I told him about a politician with a weird name, Spiro Agnew, who called journalists, “nattering nabobs of negativity.” I reminded him that truth is often stranger than fiction.

We played this game for a while and for every calamity of modern life, I came up with a historical precedent. I finished our discussion by telling him about the book I had just read on the Thomas Jefferson administration. Jefferson was accused of using a yellow fever epidemic for political gain.

The opposition revealed he had an ongoing affair with one of his slaves and he was accused of being an agent of a foreign government, as well he was constantly battling congress while some members of his staff worked against him.

Jefferson’s Embargo Act was intended to protect American lives, but it threatened the economy and led to massive unemployment and violent demonstrations. I looked at Mike and concluded my diatribe with my favorite Yogi Berra quote, “It’s Déjà vu all over again!”

I understand why many schools have cut back on teaching history. They want to make more time for STEM classes. I think this is shortsighted. Students who study history are better equipped to deal with life’s problems.

Viewing through the lens of time, it is easier to see the big picture than it is when you’re being carried away in the rush of current events. Knowing that others endured the same sort of problems and survived gives us the confidence that we will be okay if we stay the course. History can teach us what we should and should not do.

I agree with Winston Churchill who said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” 

• Jim Busch

June 11, 2020

Some people celebrate “Hump Day” on Wednesdays or “Taco Tuesdays,” but for my wife and I, life has forced “Chemo Thursdays” on us. Thursday is the day I drop my wife off at the hospital so strangers can pump a cocktail of poisons into her body.

Since her disease was diagnosed in the midst of a pandemic, I am not even allowed to hold her hand while she undergoes this indignity. It’s not something I really want to see, I hate hospitals in the best of circumstances, but I hate not being there for her. 

The doctors call what they do, a procedure, but I think poisoning is a more accurate description. Her poisoning takes about six hours, so I have to find something to do until I can go back and retrieve her.

I considered going home to take a nap. I have sleep apnea and normally sleep with a C-pap machine which stabilizes my breathing throughout the night. The power had been out the night before, so I had not slept much. Somehow, I didn’t want to go home and climb into our bed alone. 

I had just received an e-mail from Rockler Woodworking telling me they had reopened and tempting me with a 15% off coupon. Rockler is my toy store. They sell specialized and high end woodworking tools. I had not been to their new location, so I decided to go there rather than go home. I knew the distraction would do me good.

Stores like Rockler are more like a social club than the typical retail store. The patrons and store personnel share a specialized set of experiences and interests. They speak a language that sounds quite cryptic to those outside the woodworking fraternity. Add a secret handshake and it would be indistinguishable from a secret society or a cult. Arriving at the store, I was welcomed like a long lost friend and asked a question about what I was doing in my shop.

With lots of time to kill, I slowly examined every item in the large store. I checked out their selection of books and watched a demonstration of a computer operated carving machine. I treated myself by buying a scorp.

A scorp is an archaic carving tool shaped like a knife bent into a loop. It is used to carve hollows into blocks of wood. The name is an ancient one and comes from the same Latin root as scalpel. I wanted one because it would be useful in carving wooden spoons. I have been carving spoons for my wife for almost fifty years. She likes using them in the kitchen and I like seeing her using them. Buying this tool was my way and my prayer that I can keep making spoons for her in the years ahead. 

I have always had a love of tools and hardware stores. In an odd way, this interest is tied to my love of philosophy, I am intrigued by the big ideas, in knowing the operating principles of the universe. I’ve come to see our existence as a constant struggle between organization and entropy.

A group of atoms come together and organize themselves into an oak tree, it stays together for a few centuries until entropy kicks in and it dies and slowly dissolves back into atoms. This cosmic recycling process holds sway from the Big Bang to the very short lives of fruit flies. 

Tools help me impose a tiny bit of organization in my world. I can take a few pieces of wood and organize them into a piece of furniture or something useful like a spoon. I can take some paints and organize them on a page to create an image of something I want to remember.

I know that these efforts are fleeting, I know what I create will eventually decay and disappear. I have lived long enough to see things I made as a younger man fall to pieces.

Still, I feel compelled to create, to organize my world into useful and cohesive forms. I do this even though I know everything, spoons, universes and people are all destined to fall to inevitable entropy.

This is also why we let the people in blue scrubs shoot poisons into my wife’s veins. Why we try to beat the odds and beat the cancer. I want her atoms to stay organized as the woman I love. Love is why we fight against the forces which constantly try to tear us apart.      

- Jim Busch

June 10, 2020

I guess I could emulate that great American literary figure, Snoopy, by opening this post, “It was a dark and stormy night!” Though this is a bit clichéd, it is a very accurate description of the day. 

I live on a tall hill. My home is located in the heart of the Mon Valley just outside of McKeesport. According to Google Maps, it is exactly fifteen miles from my home to the point in Pittsburgh. Despite this distance, I can see the tops of the downtown buildings from my front yard.

We also have an extraordinary view of approaching storms. This evening I watched a big “boomer” coming at us from the west. A wall of roiling black clouds punctuated with flashes of lightning was rapidly moving in our direction. The approaching storm front reminded me of a buffalo stampede in an old time western movie. An unstoppable, malicious force moving at the speed of a runaway train.     

I have always found storms exhilarating. As a child, I used to sit on our back porch swing watching them sweep across the valley where I lived then. From my perch, I could see the lightning strikes on the hill behind my house and watch the big butternut trees sway wildly back and forth like modern jazz dancers.

Sheets of rain looking like heavy vinyl shower curtains would come in waves making a machine gun sound on the metal porch roof. The wind whipped the rain on to the open sided porch soaking me to the skin, but I still refused to go inside and miss the show. I stayed at my observation post until my mother realized that her son was not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree and ordered me inside to dry off. 

I’ve grown a bit smarter now that I’m a grey haired grandfather. I watched the storm cross the valley from my front window. The darkness swallowed the soft afternoon light and the trees shook in fear before the advancing danger. The edge of the storm was like the blade of a massive bulldozer pushing its way across the land.

The wind seemed to come from every direction at once and I saw bunches of leaves and small branches swirling inside the tempest. Pine cones, small sticks and other bits of vegetation pelted the window glass mixed with bullets of rain. I saw the occasional flash of lightning and clap of thunder, but this storm was primarily a wind storm. 

After about ten or fifteen minutes, the storm began to play itself out. The wind died down and rain slackened. At one point the glow of the setting sun behind the retreating storm front morphed into an unusual combination of bright sunshine and pelting rain.

Had I been brave enough to step outside, I am sure I would have seen a rainbow in the sky. Once the storm had passed, I went out to survey the damage. The ninety degree weather earlier in the day had heated the blacktop of our street almost to egg frying temperature. The residual heat was cooking off the rain water and clouds of steam were rising from the street in front of my house.

Small branches littered the street and a neighbor’s garbage can was rolling back and forth in front of their house. I made my way to the backyard and found that the storm had cost my big pine trees a few branches including one as big around as my forearm. Fortunately, we hadn’t suffered any significant damage despite enduring, as I was to learn later, sixty mile an hour winds. 

Going back into the house, I found my wife busy resetting all the clocks that had been flashing since our lights had flashed off for a moment at the height of the storm. The storm hadn’t accomplished anything except putting on a good show and terrifying our cats, or so we thought.

A few minutes after 8 p.m. our power went out. My wife checked with her sister who lives just down the road to see if she knew what had happened. Her husband had been a member of the local volunteer fire company for years and still had a police/fire radio scanner. We learned that a tree had fallen across a power line and then shorted out a transformer. She said they thought the power would be out until 9 or 9:30 p.m. 

I sat for a while reading a magazine in the dying light of the summer evening. When this became too difficult, I went indoors and read for a while using a flashlight. 9 p.m. came and went and still no power. I gave up my attempts to read and sat on my couch in pitch black darkness.

This was a strange experience. Usually even with all the lights off, the light from the streetlight in front of my house and from the neighbor’s streams in through the windows. In this electronic age, digital displays shine in every room of my house. Our DVD, stereo, microwave, stove, washing machine and numerous other devices normally create an unblinking neon glow throughout our house.

Tonight, the only display came from the tiny clock on my Fitbit watch when I moved my wrist. The house was also deadly silent. We’ve gotten used to the constant hum of the air conditioner and the refrigerator, the gurgle of the aquarium pump, the swish of the ceiling fans. Usually, the washer or dryer is churning laundry and one or more televisions are playing. Not tonight.

Sitting there in silent darkness, I thought about a verse by singer songwriter John Gorka. Gorka has an amazing way with words and I consider him one of America’s great poets. A verse from his song “Night is a Woman” came to me, “She gives me to me, the gift of less to see. Night is a woman who embraces me.”

The power did not return until the next morning. I suppose I could have experienced this time as boring. Like some people I could have become afraid in the dark. The next day some neighbors expressed anger at the storm and especially at the blankety-blank Duquesne light company, but I did not get mad.

I found it peaceful, an island of quiet in a noisy world. I’ve read about people who pay large sums to float in a sensory deprivation tank, the storm gave me this experience at absolutely no charge.

I am not sure I would like to live in darkness, but for this one night I appreciated the “Gift of less to see.” 

- Jim Busch  

June 9, 2020

The world is starting to get back to normal. More stores are opening, road construction is clogging traffic again and even some restaurants are opening.

We still are wearing masks and staying six feet away from one another, but it is tempting to think that Covid-19 is finally going away. The protests and riots that erupted after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police have stolen the pandemic’s thunder and dominated the headlines for the last ten days.

In the early months of the year, every time we turned on the TV or picked up the paper, we would see stories about the businesses and institutions ordered to shut down to prevent the disease from spreading. Since the entire state has entered the green phase, we’re seeing the news being rewound as these businesses and institutions open back up.   

We are all anxious to put this crisis behind us. Though we still have not reached the midpoint of the year, it seems like it’s been at least a decade since we all got together and hugged one another last Christmas.

We’ve been thrown out of work, forced to stay home and been forced to hunt for toilet paper, like a hunter gatherer looking for roots and berries. We learned to fear human contact, even with our friends, and we have been left to our own devices for entertainment. We’ve learned to bake bread and to work from home. We went from a country that usually buys more than half its meals from outside the home to spending more time in the kitchen than Grandma Walton. 

We’re all tired of being “Corona Hermits.” We want to go shopping, not because we are running out of bread flour or disinfectant, but because we just want to look around. We need a little “retail therapy” after the stress of the past few months. We want to work out at the gym and hangout at Starbucks or Panera. We want to see a show or go to a concert, maybe get a drink with friends.

We want our life back and we want it now!

I am just as excited as anyone that the log jam that has put our lives on hold is, at long last, starting to break up. I was delighted to get a haircut this week and poke around the local Goodwill store. Just today I learned that my home away from home, the Carnegie Museum of Art, will open by the end of this month. I was never quite sure why they shut down in the first place, Pittsburgh isn’t the kind of town where social distancing is ever a problem in an art gallery. This is the longest time I’ve been separated from my favorite Klimt painting in years. I am sure Gustav misses me. I’m looking forward to some quiet time in the galleries.

My grandfather used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!” No matter how much we want to be done with the Coronavirus, I don’t think we are ready to mount up just yet.

On tonight’s news, I learned the state health department announced that 61 more Pennsylvanians have succumbed to Covid-19. A few months ago this would have been major news. After months of watching coffins pile up and mass graves being dug, this number was buried in the middle of the news report.

The loss of 61 lives, of 61 people loved by their families was reported with all the gravity of a three point drop in the NASDAQ. I fear we have developed “Covid Fatigue.” We’ve become accustomed to dozens of people dying from this disease. 

We have forgotten that all the things we’ve done in the last few months, staying at home, wearing masks, social distancing, were not intended to eradicate the virus. The objective of these measures was to simply “flatten the curve.” They were intended to just spread out the incidence of the disease over time. Instead of hordes of blood thirsty viruses overwhelming our medical defenses, now we only have to contend with virus assassins waiting to pick off anyone foolish enough to raise their head above the social distancing wall.

Cities around the U.S. which opened up early have seen significant increases in the number of cases. Until an effective vaccine and treatment is found for this virus, none of us can afford to let our guard down.

Like everyone else, I plan to venture out of my home. I will go to the museum, and I will start patronizing local businesses again, but I will do so cautiously. I will keep my distance and wear my mask. I will also mourn those who continue to die. Their family’s grief will not be diminished because we are used to people dying from this disease.

The people who die this summer deserve to be remembered as much as those who fell to it in January when it was still new to us. Just because we desperately want this disease to go away, doesn’t mean that it will.

We can’t click our ruby heels like Dorothy and say, “There’s no place for Covid-19 in my life” and find ourselves back in our pre-pandemic lives. Let’s be careful out there!         

- Jim Busch

June 8, 2020

This may be the first day since the quarantine began that I actually lost some weight. I left about eight and a half pounds of hair on the floor of the Oak Park Mall Great Clips salon. At least that’s how it felt, as the stylist ran the shears over my noggin like a Kansas farmer mowing his wheat fields.

This was the first time I had been in the barber chair since before Christmas. I tend to stretch the time between haircuts, but six months was a little excessive even for me. If the region hadn’t gone into the green phase, I would have been forced to take radical steps.

My hair was starting to interfere with my vision and I considered adopting a headband ala Jay Silverheels as Tonto. I thought this would keep things under control until I could form my mane into Pipi Longstocking braids.

The haircut experience has changed considerably since my last visit to Great Clips. One must prove themselves worthy of having their locks trimmed. No one was admitted to the sacred tonsorial parlor until they were examined by the gatekeeper, sitting at a folding table on the sidewalk outside the shop. First, I had to beg admittance, they are no longer accepting reservations over the web.

Next, I had to demonstrate my patience. I tried to get a haircut on Sunday and was told to come back the following afternoon at 4 p.m. When I arrived at the appointed time, I was told to wait another 20 minutes.

During my wait the gatekeeper took my temperature. I have a slow metabolism and my temperature is usually low. When she saw a reading of only 92.2 degrees I feared the worst, but she was kind. After 45 minute wait (another test of my worthiness I’m sure) I was admitted and finally received my much needed haircut.          

My hair was starting to become a severe inconvenience. As the weather was heating up, it was hot and didn’t take long to become soaked with sweat. I found myself using copious amounts of shampoo in the shower and it took forever to dry. I was just about ready to get my wife to share the secret of wrapping a towel around my hair in turban fashion until it dried properly. I have always liked the way she looked after a shower, with her hair in a towel and wearing a robe, very sexy. I am sure that had I adopted this technique it would not have been nearly so attractive on me. 

The recent haircut famine taught me to appreciate what my wife has gone through over the years with her hair. I admired her long blonde hair when we were in school. The natural look was in vogue in the late 60’s and she wore it straight and long. It hung down her back and reached below her waist. It was one of the things that led me to ask her for a date in college. She did not cut her hair for many years when we were first married. At one point, it hung down almost to her knees. 

I have always tried to be a loving and attentive husband, but my wife’s hairdo proved me to be an abject failure in this regard. One day, I had had a really bad day at work. Everything I had tried to accomplish ended in failure. I stomped in the door, greeted my family and plunked myself down in front of the TV and pretended to watch the news. My wife was in the kitchen a few feet away where I could see her.

I was home about an hour before she asked me if I had noticed anything different? Her tone told me that somehow, some way I had screwed up. I looked at her and realized that she had spent her day at the beauty shop. I consider myself to be quite observant, but somehow I had failed to notice that my wife had had almost three foot of her golden hair cut off. She had gone from hippie flower child to a 1980’s shag haircut. Not my best moment. 

Since that time, she has let it grow long and on occasion had it cut short. The only thing my wife has ever used on her hair is shampoo and crème rinse, so we have grown grey together. To be more precise, I have grown grey and she has grown white, her light blonde hair has skipped the grey stage and gone to a beautiful lustrous white. 

I asked my wife if she wanted me to set an appointment for her, but she said no. She told me that there was no sense paying to have her hair cut when it was going to fall out soon. Hair loss is one of the more visible side effects of the chemotherapy she is undergoing. Her statement was both pragmatic and sad at the same time. I thought about that first time she had gotten her long hair cut. One of the reasons she had decided to adopt a short style was she had learned about a program to help cancer patients. She donated her hair to an organization that made wigs for people undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. 

My wife’s hair may have been what attracted me to her, but it’s not what’s kept me around. I feel bad about what the cancer is doing to her, but I am proud of how brave she is in facing her disease. No matter what happens, she will always be my golden haired beauty and the love of my life.     

- Jim Busch

June 7, 2020

One of the best things about being forced to stay home during the pandemic lockdown is that it has freed up a lot more time for home projects. This is good because these projects always take exponentially more time than we anticipate. I have found that it is necessary to apply Hofstader’s Law to any job around the house.

Douglas Hofstadter was a computer scientist who postulated that any reasonably complex project always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account. Like Murphy’s Law and the Law of Gravity, there is no way around Hofstadter’s Law, it is part of the fabric of the universe.

Several days ago, I wrote about building a small replica picnic table as a squirrel feeder. My wife’s sister had seen one on Pinterest. She thought seeing the bushy tailed critters sitting at a picnic table enjoying their lunch was super cute. She sent me a picture along with the world’s most dangerous question, “How hard would this be to make?” I knew I was trapped, so I went to the shop, sketched a quick plan, selected some scrap wood, and built a tiny picnic table. One and done, over and out, or so I thought. I didn’t realize it at first, but the little table was to become a “Gilligan Project.”

A “Gilligan Project” is a term I coined years ago to describe any project that takes far longer than planned. Like the castaways on the old Bob Denver TV show Gilligan’s Island who embarked on a “Three Hour Cruise” only to find themselves stuck on an island for years, a project that is only supposed to take a few hours to complete and ends up taking days is a “Gilligan Project.” My wife liked the table I made for her sister, so I made her one. Since I had already created the design, the second table came together much quicker. So far, so good!

The table was an immediate hit with the local critters. In fact, it was too popular. I placed the table on the stone wall bordering our patio. The squirrels and birds came to eat at the table, this was fine with my wife.

Things went south when our local neighborhood groundhog showed up and cleaned out the little table’s seed cups like a Hoover vacuum. My wife decided that this was unfair and gave me the task of finding out a way to make this a “Squirrels Only” dining area. I proposed placing the table on the top of the fence that serves as a rose trellis just beyond the patio. My wife shook her head and said, “No, I want you to build a table to put it on.” That way I can watch them on the patio.”

At this point, I knew it was going to be a Gilligan Day and I wouldn’t even get to meet Ginger and Maryanne. I went back to the shop, rifled through my woodpile, designed and built an 18 by 25-inch table. I put the big table on the patio and placed the tiny table on top of it.

My wife looked at it and said it was very nice. “Very nice” is code for “Close but no cigar, bucko!” She said, “Let’s add a tray for seed for the birds on the other end of the table.” I was off to the dollar store where I bought a small drawer organizer tray. When I got home, I traced out the shape of the tray cut a hole in the table top to fit and inset the dollar store tray.

My wife said, “Oh that’s much nicer, but…” She had decided it would look much more natural if the table was covered by a piece of Astroturf grass carpeting. She told me she had seen some at Busy Beaver. I was back in the car and off to Busy Beaver. I waited in line to get into the store, but once in found they no longer carried what I needed.

I called my wife and she suggested going to the pet store and buying the grass fabric used to line reptile tanks. She had worked in a pet store and knew about such things. I went to Pet Supplies Plus and paid $21.00 for two terrarium liners. Did I mention that the costs of a Gilligan Project mirror the time required?  The cost is always more than initially anticipated. 

When I got home, I spent several hours cutting the terrarium liner to fit before hot gluing it to the table. This involved several third degree burns. Using hot glue gives one an appreciation of how it felt to have boiling oil poured on you from the battlements when attacking a medieval castle. The molten glue produces third degree burns and when removed takes a patch of skin with it. Another trait of a Gilligan project is that they always involve painful physical injuries.

I installed the tray, placed the tiny table in its spot and finally, a mere seven and half hours later, the project was finally done. My wife looked at it and thanked me with a kiss and a hug, saying the words I wanted to hear, “I love it!”

This phrase told me I was finally going to be rescued from the island and could put my tools away. Later that evening, my wife said, “You know that seed tray looks like a pool. How hard would it be to make a little diving board and a tiny slide. That would be really cute!”

Cue the theme music, “A three hour tour, a three hour tour.” Why not, what else can I do as this lockdown continues? Back to the drawing board.      

- Jim Busch

June 6, 2020

Today, I did something I haven’t done for over 12 weeks. I talked face to face, or should I say mask to mask, with my best friend. Ralph and I have known each other for many years, but the Coronavirus quarantine has keep us from getting together for the last few months.

Ralph and I worked together in the advertising department of Trib Total Media. We got to know one another around the photocopier and during breaks at company meetings. We discovered that we have a lot in common. We are both mill town kids, Ralph grew up in Rankin and I was raised outside of McKeesport.

We both are interested in art and history. We are both devoted to our families and enjoy a good meal. Ralph and I went on a lot of sales calls together and found that we made a good team. Over the years, we had many good conversations during our lunch breaks.

Four and a half years ago, Ralph and I were both forced to retire when Trib Total Media radically downsized. I embraced retirement as it gave me the free time I needed to pursue my interests and hobbies. Ralph felt himself adrift and actively tried to find work, finally taking a job as a greeter at Applebees.

After our retirement, Ralph and I continued to get together for lunch every few weeks. Because we no longer had to worry about getting back to work, these lunches sometimes stretched to two hours or more. He is an engaging conversationalist and a lively storyteller. I particularly enjoy Ralph’s stories about growing up as the child of Italian immigrants and of his time as a photographer in the Navy. I have missed our lunches since we’ve been in lockdown.

When Ralph and I would get together, I usually had a bag of books for him. During our enforced separation, I had accumulated a number of books that I thought he would enjoy. This is why I drove to his home today. I didn’t think he would be home because he told me that he had planned to go to his son’s to do some landscaping. It seems that’s one more thing we have in common.  

My plan was to leave the books on his porch and go. On a whim, I rang the doorbell and he came to the door. His plans had changed and we talked for a socially distanced hour from either end of his porch. Since we were both old salesmen, it seemed odd not to shake hands when I left. Ralph, who is a big fan of Downton Abbey, suggested that we bring back the gentlemanly habit of bowing to one another. So we bowed to one another before I got in my car to go. It felt good to see my friend.  

As I drove home, I smiled to think of the enjoyment I knew Ralph would get from the books I left him. Perhaps, its because books were my favorite gifts as a child, so I have always liked giving books to my friends and family members. Giving books is one of the best ways to build bonds between people. A well chosen book is a gift that says you care about that individual, that you know them and their interests, that you understand them.

The gift of a book shows that you respect them and their intellect. It is a gift that brings pleasure and helps them to grow as an individual. By shopping at second hand stores and library sales, I am able to find some wonderful books for just a few pennies. This permitted me to play philanthropist on a poor mans budget. This method has allowed me to regularly give books to several of my friends, my brother-in-laws,  my nieces and nephews and of course, my children and their families. I seldom let a week go by without passing a few volumes along to the people I care about. 

I really enjoyed seeing my friend today. We talk regularly on the phone, but its just not the same. I could not see his smile through his mask, but I could see his happiness at seeing me in his eyes. They also showed me his genuine concern when we discussed my wife.

Like me, Ralph is sorely missing his local library, so I  was pleased to see his joy at having his supply of reading material restocked. Ralph and I are both getting older. He has survived several bouts of cancer and we both are not as fit as we used to be. Neither of us have no idea how long we have on this earth. This crisis has stolen away many happy hours spent with my old friend, I truly regret that I will never get this precious time back.

I really need to get a haircut, I would like to go to the movies and the museum. I would enjoy going to a restaurant and I desperately want to go to the library. All of these things are minor hardships compared to being kept away from my friends. I hope that if we learn nothing else from this pandemic, that their is one lesson that should be burned into every heart.

The lesson is this: The only things that matter are not things, they are the people we care about and who care about us.  Every minute we get to spend with them should be treasured and never, ever taken for granted!

- Jim Busch

June 5, 2020

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. There are thousands of people still being infected everyday with the Coronavirus. These numbers are likely to increase as the restrictions are relaxed and people start going to restaurants and other public venues again.

To add to the country’s woes, crowds of angry people are marching in the streets. Riots have broken out and our cities have been looted and burned. Our police have reacted with tear gas and truncheons, exacerbating the problem of police brutality that sparked these demonstrations.

On top of a global pandemic and nationwide civil unrest, I have problems of my own as my wife is fighting cancer. With all these things weighing on my mind, there was only one thing I could think to do—make a tiny picnic table for squirrels.

Playwright Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, “Life is far too important to be taken seriously.” I couldn’t agree more. I believe when life gives you lemons, the best thing to do is make them into a lemon crème pie and start a pie fight, just like the Marx brothers.

I’ve been told that I have a gallows sense of humor. This disturbs some people, particularly that do not know me well. It is not that I lack compassion, I feel things very deeply. It hurts me to see others suffer, I try to avoid movies with depressing story lines and sad endings. I’ve never been able to watch Schindler’s List and I have not seen Old Yeller in years. 

I come from a solid blue collar working class background. My dad and both of my grandfathers, spent their lives working in the region’s mines, mills and machine shops. This was difficult, dirty and dangerous work, not for the weak of body or of spirit.

Their wives were just as tough as the men they married. While the men faced death and danger on the shop floor, the women risked the complications and dangers of childbirth. They were not people prone to complaining about their lot in life.

Long before anyone in our family every heard of psychiatry or psychology, they relied on their sense of humor. Laughing in the face of tragedy and hardship was their way of proving that life had not beaten them down.

I remember my dad telling me the story of a man who carelessly put his hand in the wrong place on a machine that automatically drilled and tapped screw holes in steel plates. Before he could get out of the way, the machine drilled a hole straight through his finger and cut bolt threads through the bone. The foreman came running when he screamed, saw what happened and told him, “Just thread a bolt in the hole and stop bleeding all over my machine.” I remember my dad found this very amusing. It was part of his way of dealing with the dangers he faced every day at work.

My grandfather was a victim of an industrial accident. He lost a little finger, most of the next finger and the tip of his middle finger when his left hand got stuck in the gears of a rolling mill. He almost died of shock and only lived because his boss had the presence of mind to cut his fingers off and rush him to the hospital.

He was the janitor in my elementary school. He used to show his fingers to the kids and point to the stumps and say, “I think this one grew a little bit, what do you think?” Sometimes we would play guns by pointing our fingers and making pew-pew noises. He always said he would win because he was armed with a sawed off shotgun.

In our culture, men were not allowed to cry and even the women seldom shed a tear in public. If you can’t cry, you might as well laugh. Just like a vacation can help us deal with stress, a good laugh takes us away from our problems. Laughter provides both a physical and a mental release. I’ve been to family funerals that sounded like the soundtrack from a 1950’s sitcom. When my father died, I learned many funny stories about him from my uncles, but heard no sad ones. This is just the way we are. 

When my daughter went away to college, I was worried about how she would handle the stress. Her mother talked to her just about every day on the phone, so she did not really need to hear the news from home, but I still wrote her several letters a week.

I would pick up old travel souvenirs at the Goodwill and send them to her with a detailed account of our fictional trip to these vacation spots. On one occasion, I sent her a boot shaped plastic drinking glass from Branson, Missouri. My letter described how her mother had received it as a prize for winning the female division of the Boxcar Willie impersonation and yodeling contest.

When I found a set of plastic deer antlers at the flea market, I took them home, duct taped them to my head and had my son take a picture. I glued the photo to a post card and sent it to her with the label, American Jimalope.

I followed up with a complete direct mail package from the Save the Jimalope Foundation and later a plastic Jimalope action figure crafted from a WWF wrestling figure and a toy elk. When she got a letter from home, she was summoned to the lobby to read them aloud. It seemed that she wasn’t the only one that needed a little humor.  

Humor and whimsy are my pressure relief valves. When I’m feeling stressed or worried, I will make a bad pun or joke. I often pick up a pencil and draw a cartoon or compose a bit of silly doggerel.

Today, I got my whimsy fix by making furniture for arboreal rodents. These seemingly silly activities are vital to my sanity. They distract me when I need it most.

At times like these, I think we should all heed the words of one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, who said, “You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.” 

- Jim Busch

June 4, 2020

Today at the Goodwill store, I met a woman who was the embodiment of this particular moment in history. She was wearing a protective face mask emblazoned with the message “Black Lives Matter.”

I complimented her on her mask and we engaged in a pleasant conversation on masks. She told me that a friend had made her mask and I told her about how my daughter had worn out her sewing machine making masks for her friends, family members and clients. We chatted for just a few moments while waiting a socially distanced six feet apart in the checkout line, but it was a very pleasant moment.        

This encounter made me think of one of my favorite images from mythology, the web of karma. This web is a part of the Hindu religion’s view of the universe. They believe that every individual’s spirit, their atman in Sanskrit, goes on through eternity.

They picture the soul’s path through time as a straight line. Everyone’s atman is on a different path, so there are lines going in every direction and cross one another forming a net or a web. At the point where our soul intersects with the soul of another, a beautiful sparkling diamond is formed.

I love this way of looking at the world. I like to think that every time we encounter another person, even if just for a moment, we create something beautiful. This is why I offered a compliment to this woman, who I have never met and will likely never meet again. I wanted to make sure our meeting sparkled just a bit for her.

Her mask got me thinking about the two viruses that are afflicting our nation right now, the coronavirus and the virus of racism. The remedies of these two potentially deadly diseases are completely different. To stop the spread of Covid-19, we must wear masks and stay as far away from others as possible. We are safest if we stay home with just our families. The best way to fight the spread of the coronavirus is to isolate ourselves until science finds a way to kill it.

To stop the spread of racism we need to do just the opposite. We have to take off our masks and our blinders. We need to reach out and touch people that are not like us, people that we don’t know from cultures that are not our own.

Racism, and all other biases, spread when we do not interact with people who are not like us. This is why the white supremacists fought so hard to maintain segregation. They knew that once people began interacting with people different from ourselves on a regular and equal basis that they would start realizing that skin color, or sexuality or religious beliefs are relatively minor parts of the human experience. 

When we begin to look beyond our differences, when we stop putting labels on one another, we begin to see that we are more alike than we are different. We all love our families, we all worry about what others think about us, we all worry about our children, we all want to be happy.

When my Irish ancestors came to this country many people said that they were ignorant, dirty, lazy, and untrustworthy. They faced discrimination and abuse, but when they got to know them this began to change. The same is true of the Italians, the Greeks, the Polish and members of every immigrant group that came to our shores looking for a better life. 

The discrimination against African Americans is more complex than the discrimination experienced by other ethnic groups. For 250 years, white society had to tell itself that black people were inferior, in order to justify the sin of slavery. They lived in constant fear of slave uprisings and built a culture of suppression to hold their enslaved population down.

Once other immigrant groups learned the language it was easy to forget that they were one of the “others.” Black people do not have this luxury. To people from a culture with a history of vilifying African Americans, their black skin color triggers memories of the lies that white people have been told about people of color. 

Scientists are working hard to discover a cure for Covid-19 and a vaccine to stop it from returning. We know the antidote for racism. The more we talk to other people and get to know them, the harder it is to treat them badly.

I think the efforts of the heroes of the 20th century’s civil rights movement are finally beginning to show results. Young people who have grown up in a multicultural society have been immunized against this cultural disease. This is evident in the prevalence of white faces in the protests that are taking place across the country.

Racism is a disease that will not be cured quickly or easily, but I think we are starting to see it finally go into remission. The more we reach out to one another, the more diamonds we create on the web of karma, the quicker this disease will be eradicated from our country.      

- Jim Busch

________________________

When I first heard about the pandemic, I went to my trusty dictionary to learn what this word meant. At the time, when we first all heard of it, it was called Coronavirus. We knew to be wary of sneezers and coughers, and that people were to use social distancing as a way of interacting.       

The word pandemic means something affecting an exceedingly high proportion of the population (of a country or an area) like a disease. After looking at the news, I realized it not only affected cities, but states and even countries. People were frightened and a little skeptical about touching everything: door handles, shopping carts, and soap dispensers.         

Hand sanitizer was suddenly a necessity and so were masks.  We wore them over our mouths and noses to prevent the spread of the virus.  I saw blue ones and black ones, homemade ones and store-bought ones.                  Some looked like World War II gas masks.

People wore blue plastic gloves in the stores and even while driving. We were all determined not to let this hidden thing get the best of us. We listened to the mounting death tolls in cities. I saw six newly dug grave sites near one city's hospital, with trucks waiting to carry out bodies of the dead as many as could fit inside.

We saw our first line of defense - the doctors and nurses worn out and bone tired, but still fighting to save the lives of the sick.  All wore masks and some even line danced in the hospitals to stay awake after long hours and shifts.  Racing one step ahead of death themselves. The virus was contagious and we cheered them on.

Hospitals worried about lack of supplies like masks, testing kits, ventilators, beds, even a cure;                           all the things we just assume would always be there.

I went to stores that had no bread, no toilet paper (Good heavens) no paper towels, no bags of potatoes and store shelves empty of some foods. They even had to tell people to buy only two packages of toilet paper. Leave some for others!

The schools closed for classes in March, April and May because of the virus, but they still gave out instructional packets for diligent students and determined parents.  They still wanted their children to learn and so did the teachers and volunteers such as myself.

But in the neighborhoods I did not see any children, everyone­ was at home. Graduates donned caps with tassels and gowns but were not hearing the “make you cry” graduation march song. Parents took pictures and then promptly closed their doors and celebrated inside their homes with congratulations posters on doors, front lawns and windows. Adults were also quarantined at home,

Stay at home orders hit many cities, jobs were lost, many busi­nesses were closed; both big and small. And the government came to the rescue with stimulus checks. Restaurants were allowed to do curbside pickup or takeout orders, but no one could eat inside.

Churches were closed - I mean don’t we really need God now with so many being sick? People with their masks on nodded hello, instead of speaking. If you must go to a store for necessary items, stores limited the number of people admitted into a store, and you had to stand six feet behind the person in front of you. Floors were marked with yellow and black stripes. This was social distancing needed to stop the spread of the disease.

In foreign countries like Spain and Italy, their streets were completely empty of cars and people. Here I learned that this great country of ours turned its attention to what matters most - the people.

America, you are still strong. Please stay that way. Stay healthy and stay safe.

- Colette Funches

June 3, 2020

In these days of quarantine, I don’t see or talk to many people except my wife, but I find that I still have to be careful about what I say.

“Loose lips sink ships” was a popular slogan during World War II. The slogan I’ve adopted at this point is, “Loose lips expands my hips.” I don’t have to watch my words for fear of offending my wife, but because they will send her scurrying to the kitchen to whip up whatever delicacy I happen to mention. 

My wife has always aimed to please. She has always tried to make things as nice as possible for everyone in the family. When my kids were growing up, their themed birthday parties were productions worthy of Broadway.

Holidays at our house were feasts that outdid the ones pictured in the culinary magazines. My wife always knew the favorite dishes of everyone in the family and tried to make everyone happy. Since my kids had very different palates, she often made several individual dishes to suit them at suppertime. 

As silly as it might sound, my wife has felt somewhat guilty about her cancer diagnosis. She has felt tired and not quite herself lately, unable to do all the things she wants to do for her family. She also worries about who will take care of me if something happens to her.

This is a reasonable concern, as I am completely lacking in all domestic skills. I left my mother’s home at age 19 to marry my wife, so I have never actually done my own laundry or mastered anything but the most basic skills in the kitchen. I definitely fall in the “high maintenance” category. 

Her unwarranted guilt combined with her natural inclination to make the most of every minute of every day has put her desire to please me on a double dose of steroids. I feel like the Larry Hagman’s astronaut character in the old I Dream of Jeannie TV series. All I have to do is mention, or even think of something and my beautiful “Genie” makes it magically appear on a plate in front of me. 

One day, I came home from doing some chores at my daughter’s house to find the rarest of desserts waiting for me - Ranch Pudding.

Ranch pudding is a concoction of Bisquick, molasses, chopped walnuts and dates. It was one of my father’s and my favorite deserts growing up. My wife tried to master it for years, but could never get it quite right. Finally she had found a recipe for it in a 1930’s cookbook that we bought at a library sale. It seems my mother had altered the recipe when she gave it to her new daughter-in-law. My mother did not like to be out done and was not above a bit of subterfuge.  

Ranch pudding is super sweet, gooey and richer than the Rockefellers. One bite and I need to record my blood sugar numbers in scientific notation. Two bites and I have to punch a couple of new holes in my belt. In the interest of keeping me alive, my wife usually only makes Ranch Pudding once a year around Thanksgiving, but here it was in the middle of May. 

On Memorial Day, we were reminiscing about how we celebrated the holiday in the past. I casually mentioned how much I liked her mother’s “poke cake.” It was called poke cake because to make it you pour molten jello into holes “poked” into the surface of the cake. The next morning she offered me a piece of poke cake for breakfast.

Other dishes that have appeared in similar fashion are potato pancakes, hot German potato salad and homemade corndogs. Yesterday I said, “When the restaurants open back up I’d like to go to El Campesino for cheese enchiladas.” Guess what appeared on my plate tonight - YEP!

Cheese enchiladas and a quesadilla. I hadn’t even mentioned the quesadilla, but she knew that is what I usually order with them. I am starting to feel like King Midas, except that instead of everything I touch turning into gold, it turns into a high carb diet.

Yesterday, I was reading a book on ancient Rome. I was afraid to mention that Roman emperors dined on flamingo tongues. I was careful not to say, “ Huh, I wonder what Flamingo tongues taste like?” for fear that she would get arrested at the zoo shopping for tomorrow’s dinner.

One of the reasons my wife and I get along so well is the fact that we have complimentary skills. She likes to clean and I am a slob. She behaves like an adult and I am like her biggest kid. Mostly, she is a great cook and I love to eat. 

I have always known that I was a lucky man. I found a good woman to be my partner in life. During our almost 48 years together I have never taken advantage of her generosity and I’ve done what I could to make her life easier.

I try to get her to rest more and to take care of herself. To let me do more around the house, but she wants to do what she has always done, take care of me. I do feel bad about the special treatment when she is so ill, but that doesn’t mean I won’t ask for seconds.     

- Jim Busch

June 2, 2020

My niece Stacey reached out to me on Face-Time today. She was at the end of her rope, frustrated by having her kids home all the time during the Coronavirus lockdown and the pressures of homeschooling.

She was also upset that she had discovered a few items missing from our summer cabin during a recent trip there. Nothing major was missing, but it hit her hard. She was sobbing and called me to complain about a cousin who, she was certain, was the culprit. As an elder, talking people off the ledge is one of the roles I play in the family. 

A long time ago, I learned that there are good and real reasons for everything. Good reasons are logical, easy to explain and complete “BS.” They help us maintain the fantasy that we humans are rational beings who use our big, highly evolved brains to conquer the world and restrain our emotions.

Real reasons come from deep dark places inside our psyches. They are the emotional drivers behind human behavior. Someone might give a good reason that they bought a BMW, “I appreciate German engineering and craftsmanship.” The real reason might be, “I drive a BMW to impress other people and to overcome my low self-esteem.” If one digs for the real reasons behind the things people do, we will find that getting along with them is much easier.

I knew that Stacey was not really upset about a few missing knick-knacks, her distress came from a much deeper place. The “Camp” was a very special place for her. When she was young, she spent much of the summer there with her grandmother, her mother and my wife. The place is wrapped up in memories of idyllic summers playing with her siblings and cousins, making s’mores around the campfire and taking baths in the wheelbarrow.

Now, years later, her grandmother is gone, the place is no longer full of life and her aunt, my wife is battling cancer. The missing items were symbolic of all the things she sees slipping away. She was experiencing the fundamental tragedy of being a human being that we all know everything and everybody we love will one day be taken away from us. 

I let Stacey vent a bit and then I reminded her that the missing items would not be missed. At this point, she started talking about the place and how it needed work. She went on to talk about all the memories that she associated with the summer place. I asked would her memories disappear if a tornado came and carried the camp off to Oz like Dorothy Gale’s house did in the Wizard of Oz? She said no and I told her that she would always have her memories. Nothing could take those away. 

I keep a library of aphorisms in my brain that I can access when I am counseling another person. They come from minds much more sophisticated than mine and make me sound much smarter than I am. On this occasion, I pulled out a line from the American poet Sara Teasdale, “I make the most of all that comes, and the least of all that goes.”

I explained that she needed to focus on the good things in her life and all the good things to come as her children grow to maturity. After almost an hour on the phone, Stacey was feeling better and I was able to get on with my day.

When I got home, I went to my studio and made a card for Stacey featuring the Sara Teasdale quote I had given her and an encouraging message inside. I put it in an envelope, drew a garden scene on its back, a stamp on the front and sent it off to her.

I often do this. I’m not that good of an artist, my best work doesn’t come close to the quality of the art on a Hallmark card, but I find my little creations do a better job. It may not be a “Hallmark Moment”, but it’s my moment and I want to share my thoughts, not some generic message from a copywriter.  

My crude homemade cards also carry more emotional impact than the store bought version. When we are struggling emotionally, we want someone who will drop everything and focus on helping us. I am not much for talking on the phone, I usually exchange a greeting, ask about the weather, and hand the phone to my wife.

The reason I spent so much time talking with Stacey is that she needed to know that she was the most important person in my life at that particular moment. Taking the time to make a card reinforces this feeling. It demonstrated that I was thinking about her and cared enough to spend something more important than money, my time to make her feel better.

Sharing some of your precious life is the best way to touch a person deep down in the place where the emotions that drive us live. I think spending my time to make that kind of connection is a real bargain.      

- Jim Busch

June 1, 2020

With the changes brought about by the Coronavirus, we’ve been hearing a lot about the “new normal.” People are wondering what the world will be like after we leave our homes and go back to work, back to school and back to all the things we were accustomed to doing just a few months ago.

We know two things about the future, first it will be very different from anything we’ve known and second, we have no way to know what it will look like. This has kicked our natural fear of the unknown into high gear. I am facing a bigger change and more uncertainty than most because my wife was recently diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. I am potentially facing the biggest change in my life since I fell in love with her fifty years ago. 

Like most people, when faced with a major change in my life, I reacted by trying to hold back time. The only way I know how to accomplish this daunting task is through the magic of photography. Since I am in danger of losing my wife, I want to make and preserve as many memories as possible. To that end I asked Gabe, a friend of my daughter’s, to come to our home to take some photos for me. Gabe has a degree in photography and has the equipment and skills that I lack in this area.

When I was a young manager one of the buzzwords circulating through the business world was MBWA, an acronym for “managing by wandering around.” The idea is that a manger should wander about their company to see what is going on so they can make informed decisions.

I have adapted this for my own purposes and I operate on the principle of CBWA, “creating by wandering around”. As I go through my day, I am constantly on the lookout for things that trigger ideas in my brain. During my recent travels, I found two things that triggered two different photographic scenarios in my mind, a romantic one and another that was somewhat whimsical.   

The first thing I found was a home décor plaque at the local Goodwill store. It featured cut out letters that spelled out “True Love.” I liked its red color and the simple daisy decoration, but its sentiment closed the deal. I pictured a photo of us holding this plaque between us. 

During that same trip to the Goodwill, I bought a two year old Smithsonian Magazine because it featured an article on Grant Wood, one of my favorite artists. The article went into detail about Wood’s most famous painting, the iconic American Gothic. For some bizarre reason, a picture of my wife and myself posing in front of our home with a pitchfork popped immediately in my head. When I talked to Gabe about my ideas, he loved them.

My wife has always been far more comfortable behind the camera than standing in front of it. She has never liked to have her photo taken, but given our current circumstances she indulged me. I left costuming up to her. She picked out some shirts for us that would look good with the red and white paint on the plaque. I don’t own bib overalls and she doesn’t have an apron, but she worked up a couple outfits that would serve as an homage to Grant’s Iowa farm couple. 

Gabe came to our home to take our pictures. He expanded upon my ideas and got some great pictures of us in both scenarios. To my surprise, my photophobic wife had a scenario of her own in mind. She set up one of the chairs from the patio set under our crabapple tree. She commanded me to sit in the chair and she sat on my lap, something we haven’t done in a long time.

Gabe took some photographs of us sitting there like the young lovers we once were. Apparently, my wife also wants to hold back time for a while as much as I do.  

- Jim Busch

May 31, 2020

This is the 74th Corona Diary entry I’ve written. I sometimes wonder how I will find something new to write about after two and a half months, but each day offers me some new surprise. Today I got a “Happy Birthday” kind of surprise rather than one of the unpleasant “You’re being audited” variety.

For some reason we didn’t receive our Sunday morning newspaper today. My wife called the paper’s customer service department. They apologized and said they would credit our account. I still needed to get a paper, so I stopped at Giant Eagle on my way to cut my daughter’s grass. I grabbed a paper and was planning to go through the express checkout. Since I was going to be working out in the heat I would pick up a cold Coke while I was there. I noticed the cooler case at express was empty, so I went to another line to get my drink.

I did not want the lady waiting at the checkout to think I was cutting in front of her so I said, “Excuse me, I just want to grab a drink.” She nodded and looking at the paper and the bottle of Coke I was holding asked, “Is that all you’re getting?” I nodded yes and she said, “Why don’t you go ahead of me.” By this time, there were five people in the express line, so I thanked her and stepped in front of her overflowing buggy.

Ahead of me, a young woman was almost finished checking out so I placed my paper and my Coke on the conveyer belt. I was digging in my wallet for my Giant Eagle Advantage card when the belt advanced and the clerk scanned my paper. 

I apologized and said, “I’m sorry, those are my items.”

The young woman said, “That’s Okay! I’ve got this.” I must have had a quizzical look on my face because she added, “I’ve got this. I’m paying for your items.” 

Realizing my frayed lawn mowing attired made me look like a hobo that had just ridden the rails in from Denver, I told her, “You don’t have to do that.”

I could not see her smile under her Covid-19 mask, but I could hear it in her voice as she said, “I know, I want to do it. You can pay it forward for someone else.” She pulled her credit card from the reader and with a “Have a nice day” pushed her buggy toward the exit leaving the bag with my Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Coke waiting for me on the counter. 

These two small gestures made a big impression on me. In the course of five minutes two perfect strangers inconvenienced themselves just to be nice to me. The first woman, I’m sure, had been in the store a long time because her buggy was fully loaded. I am sure she wanted to get home, put her groceries away and relax. Still she prolonged her shopping trip so I didn’t have to wait in line. The second woman was willing to part with a few of what I’m sure were her hard earned dollars just to make a stranger smile. 

Just the day before, the subject of one of my favorite radio programs was human generosity. The Hidden Brain hosted by Dr. Shankar Vedantam on NPR is a program that investigates human motivations and recent psychological research.  This week Dr, Vedantam and his guests talked about why people like my two benefactors choose to help others.

On the show they discussed how economists fail to consider it in their calculations and theories. The commentators shared numerous examples of people going out of their way to help others. They discussed how modern economic theory is built on the premise that people are selfish and always act in their own best interests. The two people I met in the Giant Eagle cash register line do not exist according to economic theory. 

I see images on television of heavily armed people demanding haircuts at the top of their voices, of sadist cops and angry rock throwing rioters. These images make me want to resign from the human race. I want to turn in my Homo sapiens card and join the Chipmunk or Muskrat union.

These two delightful people made remember that most people are generous, kind and good. This reminder is far more valuable than a few minutes of time saved or a few dollars at the checkout counter and I am grateful to them.

As I walked to the parking lot with my paper and my bottle of pop, I thought of something my grandmother used to say, “If we are not kind to one another, where is the evidence of God’s love in this world.”    

- Jim Busch

 May 30, 2020

I’ve been a news junkie since I used to watch Bill Burns on the KDKA-TV noon news when I walked home for lunch from Lincoln Elementary School. I think my grandfather got me hooked on the news. He used to sit and read the McKeesport Daily News out loud, often adding his own editorial comments. I never had a problem acing my current events tests.

Lately, I’ve grown weary of the news. For the last several months, the news has been repetitive and grim. It is all Coronavirus, all the time. In the last few days, the newspapers and broadcast networks have had a story to report and unfortunately it is even grimmer than their coverage of the pandemic. 

The story that has taken the spotlight away from Covid-19 is the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis police. Floyd was handcuffed and held on the ground with a police officer kneeling on his neck. The event was recorded by an onlooker and despite Floyd repeatedly saying he couldn’t breathe, the officer held him down until he died.

Despite the recording of this incident going viral, the Minneapolis police were slow to react, taking days to fire the officer involved in the incident and even longer to place him under arrest. Three officers who stood by and failed to intervene to save Floyd have not been punished. This killing came shortly after another unarmed black man was killed by vigilantes in Georgia. Again, the local authorities failed to act promptly and only arrested the killers when the video drew national attention. 

These most recent killings led to massive protests in cities across the United States. Many of these peaceful demonstrations quickly morphed into riots and looting. The killing of George Floyd may have sparked this violence, but the fuel that kept the fires burning has been building for decades, if not centuries.

These events reminded me of the riots that rocked the country when I was growing up in the 1960’s. I can still remember my father and grandfather loading our considerable arsenal of deer rifles and shotguns to defend our home if the rioters came our way. I also remember Dr. Martin Luther King saying, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” These events are not a response to the killing of George Floyd or of Ahmead Arbery in Georgia, they are a response to the systematic racism that has infected this country since Jamestown.

I grew up with a very bigoted father. My dad was racist, an anti-Semite and somewhat of a male chauvinist. I grew up on a regular diet of racial slurs, jokes in poor taste and downright falsehoods. Fortunately, my mother was much more liberal and open minded than her husband. Her influence, plus growing to maturity in the peace and love era of the 1960’s and 70’s, led me to see that racism was wrong from an early age. I hoped that the civil rights movement would show the country the error of its ways, but this blot on our nation is far too ingrained to be blotted out so easily. 

I see very little hope for the end of racism in the halls of government. I don’t think that we can count on big business to solve this problem. As a young sales manager for the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, I gave a young black man named Darryl Cordell a position in my department.

Since he was already employed by the company in a clerical position, I didn’t need to run his promotion through HR. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had been hired in a data entry position to satisfy our corporation’s racial quota. He was the first black sales person in the Pittsburgh office’s history. 

A month or so after I hired Daryl, I got a call from Tom Pappa, a corporate VP. He asked me some minor questions about my department and complimented on my sales results. This made me a bit wary as someone at Tom’s level seldom deigned to talk to a lowly frontline manager like me.

He then asked me about my staffing. I told him that I was fully staffed. His response was cryptic, “In the future, you want to hire the right kind of people.” I didn’t catch his drift, so I said that I tried to find people who could sell. “He then said, “You know, you want to hire people like us.”

Tom was thirty years old, an alcoholic and half my size, so the only thing we had in common was the color of our skin. We had been inundated with memos from corporate saying we were an Equal Opportunity Employer, so I decided to call Tom’s bluff. I said to him, “Tom, just give me the guidelines you want me to follow and I’ll follow them.” I knew this wouldn’t happen, he didn’t want a paper trail.

Darryl’s job was safe and he went on to be one of the company’s top sales people, though it took him twice as long to be promoted as his white peers.

Although the country has a long way to go, I think we’ve finally turned a corner on racism. Where I do see hope for the country is on the streets of McKeesport. I see hope in the children who play with friends whose skin doesn’t look like their own. I see it in young couples who don’t let skin color determine who they choose to date or fall in love with. I see hope in our Tube City Writers group where people from different backgrounds gather together to share and listen to everyone’s stories.

Like any worthwhile change, the end of racism will come from the people and I think our little town has made a good start.     

- Jim Busch

May 29, 2020

Like many other people, my wife and I have used the Coronavirus quarantine to do some housecleaning. We have thrown out a lot of the flotsam and jetsam that has accumulated in our house over the years.

Like archeologists, we’ve also discovered some artifacts from a long forgotten age. The most valuable of these treasures was several large cases of 35 millimeter slides taken in the early days of our marriage.

We hadn’t looked at these pictures for decades. When I was still in college, I bought a 1940’s one slide at a time projector at a church sale for $2.00. This old machine gave us hours of enjoyment for years. Used in conjunction with our Kodak Instamatic camera, this projector helped us capture some of the happiest memories of our life.

In those days before digital cameras, we could not wait to pick up our pictures at the Photo Hut in the parking lot of the local supermarket. The Photo Hut was a tiny building about the size of a shower stall that sold film, flashbulbs and other accessories. They also processed film, you just dropped your film at the drive-up window and in as little as five business days we could go back and see how our pictures turned out.

Taking pictures with an old viewfinder camera was always a bit of a crap shoot, you never knew what you were going to get back from the lab. My father-in-law, who was a crack shot with a rifle, somehow always managed to cut off the heads of anyone he photographed.

After years of good service, our old projector finally gave up the ghost. We always intended to buy another one, but projectors were expensive and growing kids always seem to need new shoes. The slides sat in their metal boxes as we went on with our lives and eventually we moved into the modern age of digital photography.

I told my wife I would be happy to have our old slides scanned onto a digital format, but she decided that she still wanted a slide projector. She takes a retro approach to media.

A couple of years ago, I bought her a turntable and a speaker system so she can play scratchy old Janis Joplin records at maximum volume while she cooks or cleans the house, just like she did when she was in high school. Recently, I saw a console stereo, radio, 8-track player much like the one her parents owned, at an estate sale. It was in operating condition and if I thought we could have found room for it in our house, I might have bought it for her.

I did buy a Kodak Carousel slide projector at the Goodwill. The slide tray didn’t move, but after a little fiddling around with the mechanism, I got it in proper working order. It cost me five bucks, twice as much as our original projector, so it was a real bargain. The original receipt from the old David Weis store was stapled inside the owner’s manual. The projector cost just over two hundred and seventy five dollars in 1978, about the price they go for on Amazon today.

My wife spent the better part of the afternoon sorting slides using my artist’s light box and loaded them into the donut shaped tray. I loaded it on the projector and we were off. I did my best impression of Jon Hamm playing Don Draper in Madmen. My favorite scene from that show was when Don pitched an advertising program to Kodak for their new projector. “It’s not a wheel, it’s a carousel. It’s not a space ship, it’s a time machine, it can take you back or forward in time. It allows you to travel like a child, round and round until they arrive back home where they belong.” 

Looking at the pictures on the screen, like Don Draper said, we were transported back in time. We saw our children when they were just babies. We saw people we love who are no longer with us. We saw ourselves when we were young and everything lay before us. We laughed when we saw decapitated photos of the family remembering when her father took them. 

My wife and I decided that once we can get back together with the family, we want to share these memories with the people who helped us make them. We’re looking forward to hosting a backyard slideshow party. Along with our loved ones, we’ll laugh at the funny haircuts and clothes we wore and shed a few tears for the people we’ve lost.

I’m glad that the quarantine led us to this treasure trove of memories. We really enjoyed the trip back to our younger days and happier times. For once, Don Draper, the advertising man told the absolute truth. Our Kodak Carousel is truly a time machine.   

- Jim Busch

 May 28, 2020

Today, I felt like sending a thank you letter to Governor Tom Wolf for moving Allegheny County into the “Yellow” phase. The opening of area businesses today was a lifesaver for me, as I was in desperate need of some retail therapy. Normally, I don’t mind being stuck at home, but today was different.

This morning I had to drop my wife off at Allegheny General Hospital for her first round of chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Despite the “Yellow” designation, the hospital rules would not allow me to spend the day at her side. I dropped her off at 10:30 a.m. and we were told that she would be there until 3:30 p.m.

This meant I had to find something to occupy myself for the next five hours. My wife suggested I go home and relax. This wasn’t a bad idea, as it is only about a 35 minute drive to the hospital given Covid-19’s impact on Parkway traffic. These days the traffic keeps moving even through the dreaded Squirrel Hill Tunnel. 

I just didn’t want to go home to an empty house. To me “home” is not a place, it is a person. Home is my wife. When we filled out the 2020 Census form, my wife listed her occupation as “homemaker.”

This is 100% accurate as I far as I’m concerned. My wife is the person who has always made our house a home. She is the sun at the center of our family galaxy. This is true not only for me and my children, but also for our extended family, her sisters and their families. They all depend on her, including my sister.

The solar system is held together by the force of gravity, my wife holds the family together with the force of her unconditional love. 

I know that in the future my home may become an empty house, but I didn’t want to face that fact today. After leaving the hospital, I drove north to McKnight Road. My first stop was the Half Price Books store there. With time to kill, I took my time going through all the sections of the store I enjoy.

I chatted with the one clerk that I have known for years. After almost an hour, the only thing I bought was a two dollar paperback, Collected Poems of Robert Frost. I intended this as a gift for a friend who I’m trying to introduce to poetry. 

From the bookstore, I crossed the highway and stopped at the North Hills Goodwill store. I looked through the books there and found an interesting volume of reminisces of people who knew Henry David Thoreau and a sketchbook. One can never have too many sketchbooks. Heading south, I went to the Goodwill on the Southside. I bought another book there.

I don’t have a problem. I’m not addicted. I can stop buying books at any time. Really I can! 

When I left the Southside, I crossed the Hot Metal Bridge and went to Hazelwood to photograph a church that interests me. I walked around and got some interesting shots of some of the buildings along Second Avenue. I then drove to yet another Goodwill in Lawrenceville. There I bought a small stainless steel water bottle to add to my portable watercolor pack and another book, maybe I do have a problem! 

Finally, it was time to go and retrieve my wife.

My total expenditure for the day totaled less than ten dollars. For my money, I got a number of books to read or give away, a hardback sketchbook and an addition to my field painting kit.

The most important thing I found during my shopping trip was distraction from my problems.

Actually, my one problem is my wife’s illness. It gave me something to look at and it gave me something to think about, “What was the person who owned this like?”, “How could I use this item?” and sometimes, “What the hell is this thing?” 

I found this to be a much healthier way to spend the day than sitting at home with my thoughts. Thank you, Governor Wolf for your gift of distraction today.            

- Jim Busch

May 27, 2020

Governor Tom Wolf’s stay at home order hasn’t been much of a hardship for me. I am fortunate to spend my quarantine with my best friend, my wife Glenda. We have been married almost 48 years and there is no one I would rather spend time with. The love and kindness she shows the world makes the Dalai Lama look like Oscar the Grouch by comparison.

This morning, I saw her run out to the street as our garbage man was approaching. I thought that she wanted to throw a last minute bag of trash into this week’s garbage, but I was wrong. Since it was hot and humid, Glenda was taking the driver a cold Coke. She told me, “I felt bad for him, he has no helper and had to jump in and out of the truck to throw in the garbage.” 

I believe ours is one of the great love stories, but it started on a rather shallow basis. My wife and I went to different elementary schools, but we have known each other since Francis McClure Junior High School. We were in many of the same classes from the seventh grade until we graduated high school. She paid me little mind for the first few years, I was a shy nerdy kid. I started feeling my oats in high school and she began to notice me—she grew to detest me in our junior and senior years. I can’t blame her, I was loud and full of myself. 

Because of the prominent birthmark on my face, I had been bullied since kindergarten. As I look back on my life, I now see this as a fortunate thing, it gave me a profound understanding and compassion for the oppressed and turned me into a book worm.

At the time, I didn’t see these collateral benefits, I just felt like Charlie Brown, “why is everybody always pickin’ on me?” Finally, I’d had enough, I started lifting weights and bought a Marine hand to hand combat book out of an Army surplus catalog. I started working out and taking no abuse. I was quick with my fists and used my wits to tear down those who dared to come after me. I got a job and a car and considered myself a genuine badass.   

My future wife did not like my belligerent smartass ways. She liked the “peace loving flowers in your hair hippie” boys. Other than giving her a lift home after school along with a few other kids, we didn’t have much contact until college.

We both chose to go to “Renzie U,” which was what the locals called Penn State Greater Allegheny. We didn’t have any classes together, but I noticed her in the hallway of the classroom building almost every day. To tell the truth, what I noticed was her long blonde hair and the way she filled out the sweaters she liked to wear. What can I say, I was a red blooded 18-year-old American boy.

One day, I mustered my courage and asked her if she wanted to attend a folk music program that weekend at the Student Union. She smiled and told me she had other plans. At that point in my life, I didn’t know enough about women to know she was blowing me off. She did not know when I started college, I had decided to change my ways and transform myself into a modern day version of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Because I did not read her “not if you were the last man on earth” vibe, I asked her out a second time the following week. Much to my surprise, she said yes to a movie that Saturday night. 

We went to a double feature of Wait Until Dark and the Out of Towners at the old Eastland Theater. After the movie we went to the King’s Country Shoppe (now King’s Family Restaurants) to get a bite to eat. Over King’s famous apple pie with cinnamon ice cream, something clicked. Neither of us ever dated anyone else and we became inseparable. Almost fifty years and two kids later, we’re still together. I like to tell people that we have a strange and wonderful relationship, I’m strange and she’s wonderful, but somehow it works. 

It seems that I wasn’t the only shallow 18-year-old on the date. After we had been together for a couple of years, I asked her why she changed her mind about going out with me. Glenda hem-hawed a bit and then said, “I liked your car. I’d never ridden in a sports car.”

It seems that one day she saw me flying out of the Penn State parking lot in my blue MGB with the top down and the wind in my hair. She thought that it would be “cool” to ride in that car, so she said yes. That car had wire wheels, twin Stromberg carburetors, a luggage rack and a leather tonneau cover. It could turn and stop on a dime and could handle curves like a dream. I didn’t know that it would also bring me the love of my life. 

Today, my wife said this would be our last normal day. She gets her first round of chemo for her pancreatic cancer tomorrow morning. We don’t know what that or our future will bring. She will probably lose that beautiful hair that caught my eye so long ago. I may lose her and I don’t know what I will do.

All I know is I will love her for as long as I live whatever may come. 

- Jim Busch       

May 26, 2020

Jack’s peonies bloomed today. Two of their tight buds burst open to reveal their frilly ivory blossoms. Although he had seen this happen for fifty plus springs, Jack never lost his sense of wonder at how buds the size of Tootsie Roll Pops could transform overnight into double blossoms five-inches wide. It has been more than forty years since he divided his peonies and gave me two for the yard. Like Jack, the way they explode into bloom every May still amazes me. 

I wondered what Jack would have to say about the Coronavirus crisis. I am sure that he would have bought into one or more of the conspiracy theories making the rounds on the internet about the disease. Jack was married to my wife’s mother’s cousin. Most people thought he was crazy. Jack literally lined his hat with aluminum foil to protect himself from the “rays” he was convinced the Feds were beaming at him. He wore a cardboard sign around his neck that read “Federal prisoner since 1966.”

I always liked Jack. He made me think of something another Jack once said. I agree with Jack Kerouac who said, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.”  I knew Jack for years and I can certify that he never ever said a commonplace thing.

A lot of people thought that Jack’s craziness came from receiving too many electrical shocks in his life. Jack had opened a radio repair business before World War II and after he came home, he switched over to fixing televisions.

The problem was that Jack was always somewhat absent minded and a bit clumsy. He often forgot to unplug the set before fiddling with them. He lived next to the shop and his wife would often hear him scream and then find him sitting on the floor with a scorched screwdriver still in his hand. Despite this, he ran a successful business for many years.

His electronics expertise was at the root of his war with the Feds. Jack was past draft age when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was married and owned his own business, but he was still drafted into the Army. The rapid buildup of the military had created a severe need for radio operators and repairmen. Jack spent three and a half years carrying a radio in the infantry as they fought their way across Europe.

After living overseas for a year, Jack got a letter from his first wife saying she wanted a divorce. Another letter from a relative at home told him she was pregnant to another man. Jack always blamed the Feds for ruining his marriage and his life. 

When he came home, he married my wife’s Aunt Ruth. Although Ruth was a cousin, rather than my mother-in-law’s sister, they were very close, so the title fit. Jack and Ruth were very close. She called him “Pidge” and he called her “Bun.” They were older and never had children, they were both eccentric and they drove each other crazy, but they were deeply in love.

Ruth was inconsolable when the FBI raided their home and took Jack away in handcuffs. It seems that Jack had built a high powered transmitter to jam KDKA when he disagreed with some of their editorial policies. The Feds confiscated his radio and let him off with a warning, as long as he promised to cease and desist.

Most people stayed away from Jack because they didn’t want to hear his rants about the government. I learned that I could easily get him to change the subject by asking him a question about one of the many subjects he loved. Jack was an amateur botanist who taught me a lot about wildflowers, garden plants and trees.

Jack was a walking archive of local history, he told me many stories that I would not have learned otherwise. This is how we got on the subject of the peonies. He told me they were over a hundred years old and had come from my wife’s family homestead. He felt my mother-in-law should have them.

I never missed a chance to talk to Jack and I think he appreciated my interest. I found him to be a gentle soul and a highly intelligent man. Sometimes, I would even listen to his rants about the Feds.

On several occasions, he almost convinced me to start wearing foil under my hat. Jack died on Easter in 1985 when the weather was cold and it snowed flakes as big as silver dollars. Jack left instructions that his obituary would not mention his military service and that there would be no flag at his funeral. Jack didn’t want to give the Feds the satisfaction.

Jack has been gone for 35 years now, but his memory comes alive every May when the warm weather and the longer days tell the peony buds it is time to burst into bloom.       

- Jim Busch

May 25, 2020

Today is Decoration Day. This holiday is listed as Memorial Day on my calendar, but I grew up knowing it as Decoration Day. I read that the name of the holiday was officially changed in the 1880’s, but my family was never much for keeping up with trends. I celebrated the day in my family’s traditional manner, by planting flowers. 

It might sound odd, but some of my favorite childhood memories took place in cemeteries. The holiday was known as Decoration Day, because that was the day that you decorated the graves of your loved ones. In our family, this task fell to my father. 

He was raised in a family of eight children, two girls and five brothers. My Uncle Luke died on my first birthday and my father’s other siblings all moved away from Western Pennsylvania. My Aunt Gert married a man from Texas and owned a ranch on the Red River, a fact that I found extremely cool when I was a child.

Westinghouse transferred my Uncle Emil, first to Maryland and then to California. My Uncle Charlie moved to Detroit during the war, started his own heat treating business and became very successful. He recruited my Uncle Bill, my Uncle Henry and my Aunt Mildred’s husband. He offered my dad a job as well, but my dad was happy to stay in White Oak and work at Westinghouse. This left my dad as the sole caretaker of the family graves. My uncles would send him money for flowers, along with a little extra beer money to compensate him for this task. 

My dad was a hardworking man. I didn’t see a lot of him when I was growing up. He worked second shift as a machinist at Westinghouse’s East Pittsburgh works. He was heading off to work when I got home from school and usually asleep when I left in the morning.

In the summer when I was on vacation, he had a second job with a friend’s landscaping company. I would see him for a few seconds in the morning before he left for work on the “toot-toot.”

“Toot-toot” was what I called Cliff Wanderly’s red Ford truck full of lawnmowers. The name came from the sound of the horn letting my dad know he was there.  On Saturday, my dad was busy with errands and he and my mother always went out on Saturday night, leaving me with my grandfather.

Because I saw so little of my dad, I treasured any time that I got to spend with him. I loved accompanying him to run errands on Saturday afternoons and spending time with him on family vacations.

I especially enjoyed helping him on projects. My dad was proud to be a working man and I liked showing him that I was one too. This is why I enjoyed the lead up to Decoration Day so much. My dad would take a day or two off work to “fix” the family graves. I was his assistant and got to spend a couple of days with him.

We would start by loading up the tools we would need. I would help him by carrying them from our shed to the car. We would then go to my grandfather’s greenhouse to get flowers for the graves. Graveyard flowers had to be tough and able to survive without much attention. Petunias and other tender plants would not do, so we loaded the station wagon with rugged geraniums and ageratums that would thrive in poor soil and required little water. We had to knockdown the back seat of the wagon to fit them all in the car.

The first stop on our cemetery tour was St. Mary’s German Cemetery on Grandview Avenue. My dad would park the car and my first job was to take the galvanized bucket to the water tap and fill it. Then I would use a wooden scrub brush to clean the bird poop off the stone. I liked how the water made the grain of the smooth stones pop out and I admired the beautiful texture of the stone.

My next task was to take the red grass shears and trim the grass away from the stones. The cemetery staff would mow the grass, but did not trim. I had to stretch my child sized hands wide to use the big scissor like shears. In the meantime, my dad had spaded up a bit of ground at the head of the grave and worked some compost we had brought from home in a galvanized tub into the soil.

It was time to plant the flowers on the grave. My dad would say, “Give me a geranium.”  I would pick up a plant and like he had shown me, I would hold my hand flat and put the stem with two fingers on either side, then turning the plant upside down and give the clay pot a sharp whack with the palm of my other hand. This would dislodge the plant from the pot, so I could give it to my dad. He would plant it and then ask for another. Our standard planting was a geranium in the center with an ageratum on either side of it.

When all the graves were done, I would pick up the tools and the stacked pots, put the trimmings and weeds into a burlap sack and take them to the car.

It was usually lunchtime when we finished at Saint Mary’s. My dad would take me to the Cozy Tavern on Versailles Avenue. We feasted on big pink shrimp steamed in beer and fresh cut French fries. My dad had a beer and I drank an ice cold Mission Orange soda, I felt very grownup sitting on the barstool next to my dad at the bar and peeling the shells of the delicious shrimp. After we ate, we did the McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery. The people buried there were not relatives, but graves my dad did for one of his lawn care customers. 

We finished the day at Saint Joseph’s Cemetery on Route 30. This is where my dad’s parents were buried. I always felt bad because another grave held the body of one of Uncle Charley’s children who had died when he was just a few months old. My dad always told me stories about his mother and dad while we did these graves.

Since my dad’s siblings had moved away, they sold two of the plots to my maternal grandparents. When I was twelve, for the first time I helped tend a grave of someone I knew. My mother’s father had died that February and I held back tears as I trimmed the grass away from his headstone. 

My dad continued tending the graves until he retired and moved to Myrtle Beach. He never asked me to take over this chore. I doubt that anyone has visited them in decades. Today, the holiday has become more about parades, shopping and cookouts. My parents are buried in South Carolina and my in-laws chose cremation, so I have no graves to “fix.”

This evening I went on to the cemetery’s website and used it to locate my grandparent’s graves. One day this week I will go there and although cemetery rules no longer allow the planting of flowers, I will clean their stones.       

- Jim Busch

May 24, 2020

Today, I did something I have not done in several months. I went shopping for something other than groceries and basic household needs. Now that Governor Tom Wolf has loosened the restrictions on many retail businesses, some of them are opening with safety protocols in place. When I learned that the popular arts and crafts store, Michaels, was open for business, I masked and gloved up and drove to their Monroeville store.  

I have had an idea for a painting burning a hole in my creative soul. I haven’t been able to act on that urge due to a lack of supplies. My supply of acrylic paints ran dangerously low during the shutdown period. I’ve been bombarded with solicitations from Michaels, Artists and Craftsman Supply Company, Blick Art Materials and other online artist supply companies, but I was not tempted by these offers. I like to look at the colors available and ponder how I will use them. I am not sufficiently skilled to picture what I need unless I have the options right in front of me.  

I had read that the store was encouraging social distancing and was restricting admission to their store to just twenty patrons at a time. I expected a long wait outside the store, but was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at the Holiday Center shopping plaza. I was able to walk right into an almost empty store. I doubt that there were more than eight or ten shoppers in the store. I am a regular at Michaels and when I walked in, several of their employees welcomed me back. The store is usually busy and it is always jam packed on holiday weekends.

The store’s eerie silence struck me as extremely odd. I imagined that a lot of creative types had, like me, run out of supplies long ago. Apparently, I was wrong.

Perhaps, most people are more comfortable with online shopping than I am. Or, perhaps, they had a bigger stockpile at the beginning of the lockdown than I had collected. Maybe I need to become an artistic “prepper,” stockpiling ammunition, dry beans and oil pastels in my personal bunker and studio. 

I purchased a new set of acrylic paints and was able to quickly check out. I managed to resist the great clearance prices on Easter baskets and the 80% off marshmallow bunnies and peeps. 

Another one of my favorite stores is located next door to Michaels in Holiday Center. I told my wife that I probably would not go to Half Price Books. They would be too busy on the weekend, especially with access to their store restricted. Their website said that only one customer at a time would be allowed per “alcove.” Their alcoves are the box canyons of bookshelves, this design is not compatible with maintaining six feet between shoppers. I imagined that my favorite alcoves such as art, woodworking and history would be busy and require a long wait. Again, I was pleasantly surprised, this store was even less crowded than Michaels. My favorite spaces, including the bargain book section in the back of the store, were empty.  

During the lockdown, I really missed the variety of magazines available at Barnes and Noble. The selection at my local Giant Eagle was largely restricted to home decorating, cooking, exercise and firearms magazines. I live in White Oak, an area with an extremely low crime rate, but for some reason the store’s magazine section looks like something from Hell’s Kitchen or Fallujah.

They have over twenty magazines with titles like Personal Self Defense, Concealed Carry and Home Defense. Since I am more interested in reading about history, the arts and psychology, than on choosing a new laser sight for an AK-47, their magazine shelf was not very helpful in filling the gap in my reading list. At Half Price Books, I was delighted to find a number of out of date magazines more to my liking for just fifty cents each. 

On the drive home, I thought about why these stores were not crowded. I am sure there is a pent up demand for their products. I know people want to get out of their homes and see something beside their own four walls. I think people are still afraid to go out, still afraid of contracting Covid-19 despite the safety protocols.

I think they may have become accustomed to using e-commerce and may now prefer it to the hassle of putting on a mask and standing on X’s taped every six feet apart on the floor of a retail store.

This leads me to believe that we’re still a long way from getting back to normal. I think the next year is going to bring a lot of new changes. I think a lot of our familiar stores are going to disappear.

It’s going to be a long time before the aftershocks of this pandemic go away.     

- Jim Busch

May 23, 2020

Like a lot of people, I like to talk about what I have accomplished during the Coronavirus lockdown. We all like to talk about our creative endeavors, the home remodeling projects and what we’ve done to become better versions of ourselves. While I have managed to complete a few projects, I have also watched a fair amount of television. 

Because I have a reputation for being a bookworm, people are surprised when I tell them I like watching TV. They expect me to be one of those people who condescendingly comments, “Oh, I don’t own a television” and then waits for them to be in total awe of my intellect and erudition. They forget that I am a baby boomer, we grew up in the glow of a cathode ray tube. I love stories in any form, and television is a great way to tell stories. 

In my defense, I am a very discerning TV viewer. Even as a child, I preferred Omnibus and Alfred Hitchcock to The Beverly Hillbillies and The Gong Show. I used to go through the TV Guide and circle shows that I thought might be worth watching. Nowadays, I have a DVR service and I plan my viewing for the week every Saturday night. I scan through the channels and set up my recordings for the week. I record all the programs my wife and I watch together, shows that she likes to watch and of course, programs for myself. 

I watch a lot of programs that my wife says are hypnotic because they immediately put her to sleep. I record lots of shows on Book TV and History TV. I enjoy the author talks and programs on Civil War and cultural history. Although a lot of TV is and has always been mindless, I think dismissing it as the “Boob Tube” is wrong.

I trace my love of Shakespeare to watching Orson Welles perform on the Dean Martin Show. I can remember seeing him put on make-up and talk about Sir John Falstaff as he slowly became the character. When he performed the soliloquy of the merits of sherry from Part Two of Henry IV, I was hooked. 

Classic movies and TV shows make up a good part of my weekly viewing. I recently turned my 14-year-old grandson on to the Twilight Zone. We watched the episode where Agnes Moorehead fights off a tiny flying saucer with an ax. Like I was at his age, he loved the plot twist when we learned that the flying saucer was an U.S. Air Force space mission and Moorehead’s character was really a giant alien. I’ve also begun introducing him to classic films from the Marx Brothers and Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. 

I am surprisingly consistent in my viewing tastes. My favorite show when I was ten years old was Have Gun - Will Travel. I wanted to grow up to be the show’s protagonist, Paladin who was played by the husky-voiced Richard Boone. I still want to grow up to be Paladin.

Boone’s character was unique and 180 degrees away from today’s shoot first, ask questions later antiheroes. Paladin was a man of mystery and every episode revealed another fact about his life. We learned that he was a son of a wealthy family who disowned him when he killed a man in a duel over a fallen woman. This is why he never reveals his real name and took the name Paladin after the best knights in Charlemagne’s court. He was a polymath who spoke several languages, quoted freely from Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius. He was a West Point graduate and Civil War hero. A gourmet and an aficionado of fine wines, he was also an accomplished chef and a skilled musician and painter. 

Paladin lived in a suite of rooms in San Francisco’s Hotel Carlton. When at home he wore custom tailored suits, attended the opera and pursued the fairer sex with abandon. He made his living as a professional gun fighter and detective. His work clothes were a black western outfit. His custom made Colt 45, his rifle, gun belt and Stetson all featured his trademark chess knight cast in polished silver.

Paladin traveled the west solving his client’s problems for the enormous fee of a thousand dollars. When asked to introduce himself, he would pull out his card, embossed with his chess knight as the soundtrack played four dramatic notes for emphasis. A man with a strong sense of justice, Paladin often provided his services to the poor and oppressed at no charge, perhaps the only gun fighter in history to work pro bono.

The biggest difference between Paladin and today’s heroes is that he actively tried to avoid violence. Though he was unmatched as a gunman, he tried to use his brains rather than his weapons to resolve matters. He always tried to get the warring parties to talk to one another and come to some sort of compromise. In many episodes of Have Gun - Will Travel, Paladin never fired a shot and used his understanding of human nature to earn his fee. On the occasions when Paladin did have to kill, he expressed regret and remorse. He never gloried in the death of anyone, good or bad. 

I think Have Gun - Will Travel will be the next classic program I will introduce to my grandson. Most movies and television programs today feature heroes who are virtually indistinguishable from the villains they fight. I think it’s time again for a hero who values learning and culture, who is courteous and kind, a hero that doesn’t think that the solution to every problem is a shower of bullets. 

I think it is time for heroes like Paladin to make a comeback.        

- Jim Busch          

May 22, 2020

One of the most visible signs of the Coronavirus lockdown is the shagginess of my fellow citizens. When I am out walking or at the grocery store, the people around me are sporting hairdos much like those I would expect to see in a medieval Viking village.

The color schemes on the top of many folk’s heads is quite reminiscent of the two tone paint jobs popular on ’57 Chevy’s. The old Clairol hair color ad, “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hair dresser knows for sure!” no longer applies. We know what you dyed last summer.

For once, my unkempt mop doesn’t make me stand out in a crowd. I hate to get haircuts. I’ve always hated getting haircuts. There’s something about having someone fuss over me that I just can’t stand. I am blessed with very robust follicles, my hair grows quickly and hasn’t thinned as I’ve grown older. The baby picture that sat on my mother’s TV showed that I was born with a full head of wavy hair. She thought it was cute and let it grow until I was more than a year old. Perhaps, this early conditioning is why I avoid the barbershop to this day.

It was my dad and not my mother who decided it was time to shear my curly locks. They were shopping in downtown McKeesport, when they ran into an old friend of my father. When the friend’s wife looked at me and said, “Oh, how pretty. What is HER name?” my dad decided it was time his son got a proper boy’s haircut.

Until his dying day, he liked to tell the story of my first haircut at Fess Little’s barbershop. “I had to sit in the chair and hold him in a bear hug. He kept squirming to get away and old Fess had a hell of a time. A hell of a time I tell you. A boy’s first haircut supposed to be free, but I paid him double and he earned every damned nickel of it.”    

Until I was into my teens, my parents dictated my hairstyle. They favored the same look favored by NASA’s astronauts. A tube of “butch wax” was a fixture on my dresser. The wax kept the slightly longer hair above my forehead stand at attention, just like John Glenn’s high and tight Marine cut.

I was always thankful to the Beatles for making long hair popular. I did not adopt the long haired hippie look as a political or cultural statement, but simply because it stretched the intervals between haircuts. I worked in retail through high school and college, so I never had “Woodstock” hair down to the middle of my back, but it was a lot longer than any astronaut’s.

During my business career, I pushed the limits of a business haircut. Usually, I only went to the barber when either my boss or my wife suggested I needed a cut. Now that I’m retired, I usually get my hair cut only three or four times a year. 

When the lockdown was announced, I was about to get my spring shearing. This means that I am long overdue for a haircut. At this point in time, I have the Michael Landon’s Little House on the Prairie look, but I am quickly heading toward full Willie Nelson/Sitting Bull braids.

I’ve never fretted over the appearance of my hair. My haircare regime consists of a quick shampoo in the shower and running a brush through it once in the morning. I usually don’t touch my hair again during the course of the day. I don’t carry a comb and the last hair product I purchased was a tube of butch wax in 1966. Only recently, I’ve thought about getting my hair cut because the weather is getting hotter and more humid.

As I get older, I take great pleasure in watching how the world turns around and around. I remember when, back in the 1960’s, long hair was a sign of rebellion. Young men let their hair grow over their shoulders to express their nonconformity and independence.

The first article I ever had published was an essay on the political divisions in the country entitled, The Longhairs and the Hardhats. I was delighted to see a byline with my name in the McKeesport Daily News. This is why I find it so amusing that a fresh haircut has now become a symbol of noncompliance to government regulations and a way to assert one’s rights.

To the protestors demanding that the restrictions on the economy be lifted immediately, a buzz cut is a form of civil disobedience. Texas Senator Ted Cruz had his hair cut on national TV to demonstrate his solidarity with the “give me a little above the collar and trim the sideburns or give me death” crowd. 

Though I still don’t like haircuts, I hope the barber shops open soon because I really need a haircut. My hair is long and the floor at Cost Cutters will be covered with drifts of curly white hair. I think like my dad did so long ago, I will have to pay double for my next haircut, and it will be worth “every damned nickel of it.”   

- Jim Busch

May 21, 2020

It was 61 degrees when I woke up on my 60th birthday last Friday.

I wasn’t expecting much, because we are in the middle of a global pandemic. I felt like I already had a birthday gift because Southwestern Pennsylvania began its yellow phase on my special day. It will take time to achieve normalcy, as people continue to social distance and wear face masks. Some businesses are opening from the shutdown, but are required to have safety guidelines in place during Covid-19.

On this beautiful morning, I decided to treat myself by brewing a package of breakfast coffee from the Mother’s Day gift my oldest daughter Trina sent me, as well as eat one of the lemon muffins my middle daughter Holly baked for me.  

I looked forward to wearing my heather grey birthday t-shirt. Emblazoned on the front was: 2020, with toilet paper rolls instead of zeros, Hello Sixty, with a face mask in place of the O, and quarantined. I considered my shirt perfect for the occasion. 

I found dozens of photographs on the dining room table. Elyse, my youngest daughter, had arranged them in the middle of the night. Images of my parents, grandparents, siblings, husband, three daughters and granddaughters tugged at my emotions. Tears welled up in my eyes and warmhearted memories flowed through my mind.

My husband ordered takeout food from Tillie's Restaurant when he arrived home from work. Our daughters planned a virtual surprise 60th birthday party which included a drive by parade and group chat later in the evening. I appreciated all the kind words and birthday wishes from friends and family. 

It was an amazing day. Best of all, I received framed photographs of my three granddaughters.

Sadly, Trina and my granddaughter Addy, were not here. It’s not the same when they are unable to participate in person. My husband and I wanted to visit them in Maryland during Easter, but the trip was canceled due to the virus. 

It has been almost a year since we saw them, and it has been very difficult. Next opportunity we have, we want to go on a big family vacation. My granddaughters were old enough to appreciate each other’s company on our last vacation. They found out they adore each other.

The girls and I miss our time together. As a grandmother, it’s depressing not being with my grandchildren, but we are lucky to have modern day technology to help us stay connected.

Two of my granddaughters live nearby and came to visit since it was my birthday. It was like sunshine after the rain and a breath of fresh air to see them play in the yard. We had not seen each other for weeks. We remained cautious by not hugging, kissing and keeping space between us.

The oldest granddaughter is at the age of feeling too grown up for kisses, but still likes a hug. The younger one still enjoys a hug and kiss from Grandma. I remind her that I love her even though we can’t hug. She understands because she is very wise for a six-year-old. 

I hope we all stay healthy while scientists discover information and a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. When this is over, my granddaughters can expect a bear hug and a kiss on the forehead or cheek.

Well, no kisses for the oldest. I respect her desire for maturity.

Always remember, you are braver than you believe,

Stronger than you seem, and

Smarter than you think.

- Unknown

The girls will always know they’re loved because that’s what grandmas do best!

 -  VICKIE BABYAK

______________________________________

I like to start my day by watching the CBS This Morning news program. This morning they announced the U.S. teacher of the year, Tabitha Rosproy. Ms. Rosproy runs a preschool program in Winfield, Kansas.

The unique thing about her program is that it is housed in a retirement community. This allows her to enlist the seniors who live there to help her with the children. The residents read to the children and comfort them when they’re upset. This not only benefits the children, but also gives the seniors a sense of purpose. 

Watching the news report made me think about my own life and how much I miss my grandson Max during the quarantine. Because of the need to shelter in place, many older Americans have not seen their grandchildren in months. I’ve only seen my grandson once, on Mother’s Day, in the last eight weeks.

I miss spending time with him and watching him grow into a young man. We have a very special relationship and in many ways he mirrors my personality. This is surprising because his father favors my wife and is very different from me. I thought this was my ego making me see things, but my wife and even my son sees the similarities. This is a bit irritating to my son because like most boys he’s spent most of his life trying not to be me. 

My son is a good father and does a good job with Max. They spend a lot of time together and share many common interests. My son is a very accomplished and intelligent man who is a good role model. Max’s mother is very involved in social justice and community service activities, so she has helped him develop into a good citizen.

Although he is fortunate to have good parents, my wife and I still have a lot to offer him. We have a different perspective on life and have a lifetime of experience to draw on. We know what it is like to be a kid and how it feels to be a parent, so we see both sides of the story. 

My wife and I both grew up with grandparents in the home. I grew up with my grandfather in the next room and my other grandparents less than a block away. My wife grew up with her maternal grandparents in the house and her father’s father just down the hill.

This experience shaped both our lives. My father worked several jobs when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. From one grandfather I learned about gardening and the natural world, from the other I learned woodwork and the joy of telling tall tales.

From my Irish grandmother I learned a love of language and chocolate covered graham crackers. I stopped to visit her every day on the way home from school and she would serve me these treats while we watched Queen for a Day. All my grandparents told wonderful stories from the “old days.” These stories gave me an appreciation of history and my place in the world. 

My two children also had the benefit of growing up with their grandparents. Early in our marriage, my wife and I moved in with her parents for a few months and 44 years later we’re still here. Originally, my in-laws helped us and later we helped them. We lived in a western Pennsylvania version of Walton’s Mountain, a multigenerational family living on the old family homestead.

It was this experience that introduced me to the wisdom of comedian Sam Levenson, “The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.”  Whenever my children didn’t like our parenting decisions they could easily appeal them to a higher court. Though we sometimes didn’t like the interference, in retrospect most of their decisions were right. 

Having two sets of adults in their home broadened my children’s horizons. My mother in law was a wonderful, feisty woman who would engage my kids in delightful spontaneous activities. My father in law was a genuine war hero who had been torpedoed three times and took a landing craft onto Omaha Beach on D-Day.

He was a very different role model for my son than his nerdy dad. They indulged my children, instructed them and could be more generous with their time than my wife and I could be as harried young parents. I think my wife and I did a good job as parents, but I am absolutely sure that my kids are far better people because they grew up with their grandparents. 

I hope there are some children out there who are quarantined with their grandparents. These are the lucky kids, grandparents are the ultimate educational resource. They are a bottomless repository of stories, traditional wisdom and unconditional love. Grandparents have more to teach than all the videos on YouTube and all the meetings on Zoom.

They teach the most important lesson - how to live a good life.    

- Jim Busch  

May 20, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has compressed our physical worlds into little boxes. We now spend most of our time in our houses or apartments with time off for good behavior and groceries.

Some slight compensation for this loss of freedom in the real world is the expansion of our digital worlds. Now, more than ever, the internet has become our connection to the wider world. This is especially true for people like me who grew to adulthood before computers became home appliances. We actually had to go to the library to do research and pick up a book in order to learn something or spin a record to listen to music. 

In my younger days, our video options were limited to three network channels and a part-time public TV station. Unimaginable to my grandson and his peers, we had to watch television in real time. He will never know the pleasure of sitting up late on a weekend to watch a favorite movie and falling asleep before the end.

We were at the mercy of the television broadcast schedule and there were no do overs or rewinds, if you missed something it was gone forever.

By the time my children came along, a trip to the video store on a Friday night was a big deal. My son and daughter had the luxury of picking out a movie that they wanted to watch. My forty something kids and my grandson are now accustomed to downloading virtually anything they want to watch or listen to at any time. Until the pandemic struck, I was hopelessly stuck in the world of CDs and DVDs. My kids found the red Netflix envelope on my TV stand quite amusing. 

The quarantine has dragged me kicking and screaming into the world of digital downloads. Cut off from the library’s stock of movies and music and with the theaters closed, I was forced to expand my computer skill set. Prior to the current crisis, YouTube was something my grandson showed me on his phone.

I have to thank The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for introducing me to downloading their art videos from The Barnes at Home series. My tool purveyor, Woodcraft Supply, tuned me into Facebook Live. I often spent my pre Covid-19 Saturdays at their store watching their staff demonstrate woodworking techniques. Since they had to close their store for the duration, they now do these demonstrations online. It’s not the same, but I’ve been forced to adopt an “any port in a storm” approach to life. 

The Tube City Writers introduced me to the wonderful world of Zoom. I still miss walking up the stairs to the second floor of the old Daily News building in McKeesport to see my writer friends. At least on Zoom I can see their familiar faces and hear them read their work.

It can be a bit chaotic at times, but again it’s still storming and Zoom offers the closest port. I often feel like Phil Hartman’s recurring Saturday Night Live character The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, “I am frightened by your modern world.” The familiarity with the Zoom platform I gained from my writer’s meetings gave me the courage to take part in a fascinating program with political cartoonist Rob Rogers.

Tonight, my wife and I dove headlong into the digital pool and the water was fine. We went to the theater without leaving the comfort of our couch. We watched City Theatre’s Bat Kitty, an original play by Amy Staats. The actors were all safely ensconced in their homes and performed their roles via Zoom. This created the impression that we were watching a table reading of a Brady Bunch script.

I was very skeptical that they could pull this off, but since leaving a digital play in the middle of the first act wouldn’t insult the cast, we decided to give it a try. I was amazed at how engaged we were in the performance which lacked costumes, sets, scenery or even physical contact between the members of the cast. As in all good theater performances, we experienced a “suspension of disbelief,” we were transported by the story and the sincerity of the actors.

We were like the groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe, carried back to ancient Rome by the bard’s Julius Caesar. We imagined the sound of tearing paper when the central character ripped an imaginary poster from her wall and felt the boyfriend’s pain when she “punched” him. We even accepted that the title Bat Kitty was a child’s drawing of a cat.

Perhaps, Zoom Theater will be the new art from that emerges from the Corona Era. It may become a cultural icon of this era in our history, just as Kabuki Theater is an icon of medieval Japan.    

It is easy to focus on what we’ve lost during quarantine and what’s been taken away from us by the coronavirus. We shouldn’t forget that during this same time, we’ve all learned new things and learned to experience life in new ways. The profits and losses of this time may not balance at the bottom of the ledger page, but that doesn’t mean this time has to be marked down as a total loss in the final tally of our lives. 

- Jim Busch

May 19, 2020

Today, I listened to an interview with Dan Harris, the author of 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works.

I was interested in the Harris interview because my daughter had recommended his book to me. Harris talked about the tools people can use to reduce stress and manage their mental health during the pandemic. The tools that he talked about included different types of meditation techniques such as gratitude and loving kindness practices. The tools I use to manage my stress are much more tangible as they are made of hardened tool steel. 

I am an endangered species, a handyman, I still know how to work with my hands. Years ago when I worked for the Pennysaver, we were in danger of missing a shipping deadline because an inserting machine had broken down. I walked back to the shipping area to see if I could help. The maintenance guys rolled their eyes when I asked to take a look. They nearly fell over when I spotted the problem and quickly fixed it. They were absolutely amazed that one of the “suits” actually knew his backside from a hole in the ground. After that I was treated with a lot more respect from the blue collar guys.    

This afternoon I grabbed my “Go Bag” and went to my daughter’s home. To a survivalist a “Go Bag” is a bag packed with emergency supplies, often including a firearm that they can grab at a moment’s notice when a crisis happens.

My Go Bag is a bit more mundane and doesn’t include a Glock. My bag is a black canvas tool tote with lots of pockets. I’ve packed it with all the tools I need to handle most repair jobs. The bag holds a hammer, a set of screwdrivers, a variety of pliers, some adjustable wrenches, some measuring tools and a few other essential items. When I need to do a repair away from home, all I have to do is grab it and I have everything I need to handle the great majority of jobs. 

Although I’m not a healthcare provider or a first responder, my family considers me an essential worker. I do the family’s lawn work, plumbing, electrical, automotive and carpentry work. Occasionally I dabble in bricklaying, masonry work and very reluctantly, roofing.

Today, I cut my daughter’s grass and did some pruning and trimming. My daughter who is working from home saw me trimming the walk and said, “You make that look so easy.” I told her that after tending lawns for sixty years, I have a lot of practice.    

The lawn work done, I put on my mechanics’ hat. I checked the fluids on her wife’s car and discovered that the hood latch was sticking. After using some penetrating oil to loosen the rusted parts, I lubricated the sticky parts with white lithium grease.

My next chore was assembling a new office chair. Since she has been spending so much time in her home office, she decided it was time for an upgrade. Of course, the chair was missing some bolts so completing this project necessitated a quick trip to the hardware store. Before leaving I repaired a decorative flagpole which had snapped off in a recent windstorm. 

I love doing this kind of work. It is so simple and satisfying. You start with something broken and end up with something made right. Something either works or it doesn’t, there’s no nuance, no grey areas. You can see what you’ve accomplished and how it makes things better.

I once spent two hours repairing an antique desk stapler that I bought for a quarter at the flea market. I still have that stapler in my studio and I smile every time I use it.

I can’t stop the pandemic and I can’t bring the economy back. I can’t make my wife’s cancer go away, but I can make a few things right in this world. I will celebrate these small victories and find a little satisfaction wherever I can.

What else can I do?      

- Jim Busch

May 18, 2020

Today, a friend posted on Facebook that she was coming out of retirement to help her former boss’s business recover from the Coronavirus quarantine. She was flying to Florida to help him to motivate his marketing staff sell advertising in his local magazines.

She is in her sixties, a bit overweight and a Type 1 diabetic, so she is at greater risk for contracting Covid-19. Her job will require her to accompany salespeople when they call on potential advertisers. I posted that she should be careful and wear protective gear.

I was very surprised at the response I got from her Facebook friends. They attacked me for being a “libtard” and for attacking the president. I had someone say they would “pray for the scales to be lifted from my eyes to see the truth.” I was told that not opening the economy would kill more people than the disease.

Although I am a lifelong liberal, I did not intend to make a political statement, I was simply concerned for my friend’s wellbeing, but apparently in our hyper politicized nation this is not allowed. 

Curiously, none of the numerous people who joined in on the post expressed any concern for my friend who had made the post. They were more interested in sharing their political viewpoints. When this crisis began, I had hoped it would bring the country together like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 had done.

I hoped that Americans would adopt a “We’re all in this together” attitude and forget their petty differences. This hope evaporated with people hoarding toilet paper and trying to profiteer by selling critical supplies at greatly inflated prices. Instead of pulling together for the common good, mobs of angry, shouting people dressed in camouflage and carrying military style rifles besiege our capitals demanding the right to get a haircut. 

I am afraid our country is infected with a disease far more dangerous than Covid-19. We are infected with selfishness. We are only concerned with our own needs and the needs of the group that we identify with. We circle the wagons and anyone outside of our own circle is the enemy.

Democrats hate Republicans and vice versa. We call the other party’s members names and insult their intelligence. We attack people whose skin tone does not match our own and distrust those who don’t share our particular religious beliefs. 

We’ve lost the age old concept of the “commons.” Towns used to set aside an area devoted to the common good. These “commons” or “liberties” were for the use of all, rich and poor. People could graze their animals or pick the fruit in these areas according to their needs. We’ve become a “skybox” society.

For most of the 20th century, people going to a baseball game all sat in the bleachers on a first come, first serve basis. Bankers sat next to laborers. Now the wealthy watch the game from luxury skyboxes and enjoy catered food, while the less fortunate sit in the cheap seats.

More and more people are sequestered with people who share their social standing, they sit in first class seats on airplanes, jump the lines at Disney World and live in gated communities. Some people are even moving to areas to live where people share their political beliefs. 

My dad was a machinist, a working man. Mr. Johnson, who lived in a house much like ours, was a vice president of engineering at Alcoa. His kids went to school with me and he sat with my dad at the legion hall having a beer. This is my idea of America.

Today it struck me as odd that one of the few things in America that is shared by all is the Coronavirus. It has infected the homeless and it has struck down people who work in the White House. This virus is an equal opportunity infector.  

I am encouraged by the people who have stood up to help others in this time of need, but they seem outnumbered by the selfish and the greedy. Perhaps, the fact that this disease has carried off the rich and the poor, the young and the old and people of all races and creeds will teach us to appreciate everyone whether they are like us or not.

Perhaps, we will come to appreciate the wisdom in the old Italian proverb which goes, “At the end of the game, the pawn and the king go into the same box.”

- Jim Busch

Picture this - envision yourself as an Ironman triathlete about to start a race filled with consecutive long-distance swimming, biking, and running. Stand on the shore of the ocean with the first wave of swimmers. Close your eyes and smell the ocean, the pleasant stench of your wetsuit and slick waterproof sunscreen.

Squint your eyes over the horizon and search for the buoy and visually map the miles you will swim. Let the cool breeze that is gently blowing in your direction raise your goosebumps and try to get loose enough to compete.

Will there be seaweed brushing against your skin when you run in? Is there sea life that will graze your hands on the pull motion to freak you out?

You feel anxious and your muscles begin to get tight, so you shake your sillies out, but gently so that you don’t hit any of the hundreds of other athletic, lean bodies standing near you, also shaking.

There is at least a ten yard sprint to the water and it is almost time for the horn. Bend your knees to prepare for the sprint. Take a deep breath and …

Four months ago,  I had a plan to pursue the coveted Ironman medal. Let me be clear about a few things: 1) I hate to run long distances, especially for fun. 2) I also cannot swim very well, as far as I’m concerned. 3) I am ridiculous enough to try just about anything for a cool medal. 

To obtain this medal, and to do so honestly, would mean that I have conquered sports in a totally new way. I am confident that I can beat a person with a ball, of course, or with a helmet and pads, but I’ve never beaten a person with just my physically conditioned body. 

Hell, I don’t think I have ever believed that I needed to be in shape to beat anyone. So, I put together a plan that involved several races, generally increasing in distance for the year, with the goal of pursuing the beautiful Ironman medals the following year. 

I went to sleep one night having hit all my February goals, increased my running distances and steadily decreased those times, shaved minutes off my mile swim time in the pool, and put good miles on my bicycle. I was rolling! Up at 6 a.m. everyday, I started training and eating better. I felt cleaner inside and it showed in my output. 

Then the world broke.

By March, my goals were shot. Gyms closed. We were told to stay inside. Society created an unnatural shortage of toilet paper and water. Bike shops closed. Sports shut down - NBA, NHL, and MLB stopped playing games. No March Madness? Guess what else? Races got cancelled or postponed. Triathlon clubs cancelled events. Even Marvel Universe pushed back the release of the Black Widow movie that I was seriously looking forward to. Over time, my motivation waned even more. 

It is now May now and 43 days ago I developed a new routine to get back on track. My “eat whatever and do nothing” lifestyle has probably set me back a month in training, but with regularity, I can get back to it (except for swimming since I don’t own an Olympic size pool or can access a lake). 

There are commercials on TV and radio that speak of us all adjusting to the “new normal” while we wait for (fill in the blank - a cure, or a savior, or a mutation, or our last stand, or whatever you believe we are approaching).

I guess these commercials are supposed to sensitive to our current times and, of course, ask for our money. Instead of coming off sensitive to the times, they fill me with rage. It is not normal to avoid contact with people you love. It is not normal avoid your friends, to remain segregated, to unsuccessfully search five stores for toilet paper, to have all the businesses you frequented a month ago to be closed, or to be forced to watch actual TV because ESPN has little to nothing to highlight. I reject this “normal” you speak of!

THIS IS NOT NORMAL. I DO NOT ACCEPT THIS VERBIAGE FROM YOU.

Normally, however, I try to better myself. I believe in growth. So, while this apocalypse may be irregular, it is causing my schedule to remain open and allowing me to train harder. I kind of wish I had seen it that way last month and trained less in PlayStation and more in endurance. My PlayStation skills are WAY up!

When this is over, and it will at some point be over, races will resume. I need to be ready for that day. I put my bike on the indoor trainer and I also need to start running again. I have reinstated my 6 a.m. regimen, although I’m still looking for that healthy eating motivation from February. That is not new, but it is absolutely normal.

Let’s try more normal things. Get up on time and do something productive. Make plans for your future. Find that fight inside you and get back to normal. Don’t be new. New is not normal.

- Kie McCrae

May 17, 2020

This is an unusual diary post for me. Most days I report on what I’ve accomplished during the day. Today, I have nothing to report. I guess one could say this is my Seinfeld post. When he originally pitched his autobiographical sitcom about his life to the networks, comedian Jerry Seinfeld described it as a “show about nothing.” This is a “post about nothing.” Today was one of the very few days in my adult life when I’ve done absolutely nothing.

I was raised to value hard work and activity. I pride myself on being productive. With the exception of a few days when I was seriously ill or injured, I have tried to accomplish something worthwhile every day of my life. I try to complete some small task or make some progress on a larger project.

Thomas Jefferson’s advice to his daughter has been burned into the very fabric of my soul. Jefferson told her, “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.” It was not a wonderful day for me.

Today, I slept in late, and once up, barely left my couch all day long. I watched some old movies on television and made some desultory attempts at reading. At one point, I put on my jeans and a shirt with the intention of going for my daily walk, but failed to follow through on this plan. The only practical thing I accomplished all day was to move some young garden plants into the sunshine in the morning and to return them to my garage in the evening. 

All in all, it was a wasted day. I have turned the biblical verse from Matthew inside out. In my case, “The body was willing, but the spirit was weak.” I was not physically ill. I had no aches or pains, but I simply was not motivated. This fact filled me with a strong sense of guilt.

I felt like my grandfather or my dad would come back from the grave to kick me in the backside for wasting a beautiful sunny day. Today was the rare day when I simply couldn’t motivate myself to do anything.

I think my lethargy today stems from the culmination of all the problems from the last few months. Everything weighing on my brain finally got the best of me. Like everyone else, since January I have been following the frightening progress of the Coronavirus as it cut a deadly swath around the globe.

Although for some illogical reason, I did not fear for my own health, I feared for my family members and friends. The disease upended my life and kept me from doing the things I like to do. Just this week, I learned that several annual events that I greatly enjoy have been canceled.  The Poor Yorick players will not perform Shakespeare in the Park this year and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts annual Yart Sale, an annual art flea market, have been cancelled for 2020. 

I think I could have endured the anxiety and inconveniences of the Coronavirus era, but then life sucker punched me with the news that my wife had an advanced case of pancreatic cancer. This diagnosis is a virtual death sentence and promises to take away the love of my life. I’ve tried to keep a smile on my face.

This is how I’ve been taught to behave in the face of trouble. I feel like staying positive for my wife and my children is part of my job description as a husband and a father. My promotion to grandfather reinforced this belief. I mean what would Grandpa Walton do?

Today, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had to take off the mask for a while. I hope I am able to pick it up and put it back on tomorrow. People need me to be my usual productive and positive self. I need me to be my usual productive and positive self.

In an effort to snap me out of my temporary, I hope, funk, my daughter reminded me that her grass needed cutting. Tomorrow, I will mow her grass and any other chores that I notice need done. I will get off the couch and I will smile and tell some bad jokes. I will roll up my sleeves and get back to work.

Tomorrow, I will be the person my family needs me to be. To tell the truth, I never liked Jerry Seinfeld very much anyway. I am more of a Frasier kind of guy.  

- Jim Busch

May 16, 2020

After two months of quarantine, I decided that my wife and I needed a date night. The problem is that all our regular haunts were still locked down. An article in the Pittsburgh City Paper came to my rescue. The story announced the reopening of the region’s drive-in theaters. 

We have not been to a drive-in in decades. They were a big deal in our youth. I remember going to the Rainbow Gardens Drive-In Theater in White Oak with my parents as a child. I particularly recall one rather odd double feature which included a showing of Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion paired with The Long Ships starring Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark.

I was dressed in my pajamas and the plan was for me to go off to sleep after the kid’s film and my dad would enjoy the Viking adventure film. Things went pretty well except that I wasn’t sleepy and I fully enjoyed The Long Ships with my dad. I still watch it whenever it runs on television. 

Years ago, we would have had a lot of choices for in car movie viewing. We could have gone to the Greater Pittsburgh Twin Theaters in North Versailles, Blue Dell-in North Huntingdon, Woodlawn in West Mifflin or the Monroeville Drive-In. At their height, there were over 6,400 Drive Ins scattered across the United States.

Today, there are only some 300 still in operation. I learned this bit of entertainment trivia from a PSA shown at the Riverside Drive-In in North Vandergrift imploring us to patronize the snack bar to keep this great American tradition alive. 

An hour’s drive away from our home, Riverside is one of two drive-ins left in the Pittsburgh area. The other one is the Dependable Drive-In near the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. We elected to go to Riverside because they were showing The Wizard of Oz, a classic film my wife and I both love.

We found that the drive-in experience has changed quite a bit since we were young. First, the price has increased quite a bit. We used to pay five dollars per car for a station wagon filled with everyone from the kids to their grandparents. Today, the price is nine dollars a person. Another revelation was that we had to reserve our tickets online, something that we could not have imagined in the days of convertibles and tailfins. 

On the way to the drive-in, we stopped at Lackey’s Dairy Queen on Route 66 in North Apollo. We have traveled this section of 66 a thousand times as it was the route we took to our cabin in the north woods. Lackey’s has been a family favorite for five generations. If we ignored the masks on their faces and the distance between the patrons, the place has not changed a bit.

After enjoying our ice cream, we drove to the drive-in a few miles further north on Route 66. Riverside is a small single screen drive-in, well maintained and nestled into the hillside across the highway from the Kiskiminetas River. It looked much like the theaters we remember with a big white screen at one end and a squat concrete block building in the middle housing the projection booth and the snack bar.

One big difference was the absence of the grey metal speakers hanging from poles adjacent to each parking space. Today, the movie’s sound is now broadcast over the FM radio. We came prepared with a battery powered radio so we didn’t have to run our car’s engine or drain its battery. 

Swap out the minivans, SUVS and Toyotas for Impala and Town Squire station wagons and the scene could have been out of 1966. Boys and girls ran around playing tag between the cars before it was dark enough to start the film.

A Frisbee bounced off the hood of our car and they came up to apologize to us. A happy birthday banner hung from the roof rack on the car next to us. A young boy was celebrating his birthday eating pizza and making memories with his friends. We saw young lovers walking hand in hand back to their cars from the snack bar with a tub of popcorn and their whole lives ahead of them. We did feel a little sad for these young couples as contemporary automotive design with a console between the seats would keep them from enjoying some of the pleasures that drive-in movies offered us in our younger days.

Before the movie, the theater played the Star Spangled Banner and most people stood next to their car with their hands on their hearts. After the anthem, they played a series of delightfully retro promotional films, “Let’s all go to the snack bar, let’s all go to the snack bar!” and some poorly produced ads for several local retailers.

As always, we really enjoyed the feature. When Dorothy opened the door of her house and revealed Oz in all its Technicolor glory, I remarked to my wife, “Oh my, I did not KNOW this movie was in color. What a surprise!” 

We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and the experience. It brought back a lot of fond memories of better times. The show was a tornado themed double feature, but we decided not to stay for the second movie, Twister. Because there were still a few children running around fueled on a sugar high by snack bar candy, we carefully drove to the exit, turned left on Route 66 and made our way back home.

Not a lot of good has come out of the Coronavirus quarantine, but I have to thank the virus for providing my wife and I with a thoroughly enjoyable “date night.”      

- Jim Busch       

May 15, 2020

Today, I took my wife to see her chemotherapy doctor at Allegheny General Hospital. In normal pre-Covid times, I would have gone in with her to see the doctor. The worst case scenario is that I would have been relegated to the waiting room while she had her appointment. With the lockdown, only patients are allowed beyond the hospital doors. I had to sit in our car and wait for her to come out. 

There are a row of spaces in Allegheny General’s James Street parking garage reserved for the hospital’s cancer center. I parked there and watched my wife disappear into the bowels of AGH. Sitting in my car, I noticed that I wasn’t alone in the “wait and worry” section of the garage. Since patients undergoing chemo are not in any condition to operate a motor vehicle, all patients need someone to drive them to their treatments. Like me, none of the other drivers were allowed into the hospital, so we all sat there in our Chevys, Toyotas and Subarus. We listened to our radios, played with our phones and stared into space. 

I read the book I had brought along for the purpose and started to think about my fellow ladies and gentlemen in waiting. I was there for a while, so I got to see the special parking spaces change hands. I saw people come and go as they went in for treatment and come back afterwards. I paid attention to the wistful looks on the drivers’ faces as they were left alone.

It was clear that they wanted to be with their loved ones instead of being forced to wait in the concrete catacomb of the parking garage. When their passengers returned from their treatments, sometimes on their own power, sometimes in a wheelchair, the look of concern on their faces was heart wrenching. Though they tried to manufacture a reassuring smile, their distress showed through this mask like a silhouette on a backlit window blind. I knew how they felt.

The car next to me was driven by an older man wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. He made no attempt to amuse himself and just sat their staring at the wall with a scowl on his unshaven face. In the space to my left, was a middle aged African American lady wearing a stylish animal print jacket and reading a magazine.

After a short while, a nurse rolled a wheelchair up to her car. For some reason I had expected her “patient” to be male, probably her husband, but I was wrong. The attendant was pushing a younger woman who looked much like the woman behind the wheel of the waiting car. The woman in the wheelchair was probably her daughter, which added poignancy to the scene.

In short order, her parking slot was occupied by an older couple who kissed before she opened the door and got out of the car. The old gentleman watched his wife as she made her way to the hospital with faltering steps, silver cane in hand.   

A few months before, we all would have been herded into a waiting room and supplied with piles of old magazines with the addresses ripped off the cover for our entertainment. For a while, we would have listened to the TV news channel on the television hanging from the wall trying to escape the inescapable boredom.

At this point, I would find an excuse to strike up a conversation with someone. I would comment on something on the TV or make a joke about the vintage magazine selection. Perhaps, I would complement something the person was wearing. Anything to open the door to conversation, to find a way to connect with them. 

There is a reason that a certain type of person chooses a career that requires them to constantly talk to strangers. I’ve always maintained that the best salespeople were the worst children. We are the grownups that bad little children grow up to be. We are the ones who didn’t listen to our mothers when they told us to be quiet, not to ask too many questions and especially, “Don’t talk to strangers.”

I think I was a good salesperson because I’ve always been curious about other people. I want to pop open the hood and see what’s going on inside their heads. The best way to do this is to ignore my mother’s warnings, talk to strangers and ask about their lives.

Some of the most interesting conversations I have had in my life have been with perfect strangers. The janitor who was cleaning my office who told me about being one of Merrill’s Marauders in World War lI Burma.

The upholstery shop owner who explained how he wound up on a Georgia chain gang when he was 16 years old, because he trusted his ne’er-do-well older brother. The Indiana store clerk who was James Dean’s prom date and had the pictures to prove it.

I believe that the greatest compliment that you can pay anyone is to really listen to them, to give them space to tell their story. Thomas Jefferson said, “The man who is universally interested, will be universally interesting.” Because I am interested in the stories of everyone I meet, people are eager to share their stories with me. 

For the last several months, social distancing has robbed me of the opportunity to talk with strangers. Usually, I get to talk to people when I’m waiting in line, in a restaurant, and folks I meet on my walks. Since museum and library patrons are generally articulate and intelligent, I have always enjoyed wonderful conversations in these venues.

Not long before the shutdown, I was at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University, I told a fellow visitor how much I liked a particular work. To my surprise, she thanked me. It turned out that she was the Brazilian artist who had painted the work I admired. She went on to tell me about her work and life as a botanist in the Amazon rainforest. Sorry, mom, talking to strangers is cool! 

I could use a haircut and I would love to wolf down a piping hot plate of Rey Azteca’s cheese enchiladas, but what I really hunger for is human connection. My soul longs for human connection and my mind craves a new supply of stories.

I can’t wait for this quarantine to end. I want to disappoint my mom again by talking to lots of strangers and asking them lots of prying questions.   

- Jim Busch  

May 14, 2020

Editor’s note: YouthCAST students share some thoughts about how the pandemic has affected their lives. These students developed this writing through the weekly workshop Wednesdays with Mr. Matt. 

When the virus calms down the first thing I would do is hang out with friends. That is because hanging out with your friends is better than just playing video games online with them. Also, they’re going to put the hoops back up so everyone will be at the courts. Lastly, the football field will open back up so I can play football there with my friends. That’s one thing I would do when the virus calms down.

 Another thing I would do is lift and workout. This is because football season is around the corner and I need to stay strong for the season. In 9th grade, there’s no weight limit so I can not be weak for the season. Also, that is when recruits start looking at highschool players so everyone will go 100%. So, that’s what I would do after this pandemic.

This virus has stopped me from making plans with friends, so FaceTiming them and playing video games with them makes the day go faster. Usually, I’ll be up until 5:00 am talking to them on the phone. Before this was going on, I would go to sleep at 12 am. Now, I go to sleep at different times every day.

 Also, it postponed the football season so it’s gonna be a long time until I practice with my teammates. So I’ll start using my speed ladder at my house to keep my footwork in check. Also I play on the defensive line so when I walk around the house I’ll do moves when I go around objects just to practice my skill set. That’s how this pandemic is affecting me.

Since I was little football was my life. I knew when I was around 10 years old I wanted to be in the NFL some day. I’ve played the offensive line all of my life so I am more than experienced at that position. I’ve went to camps in the past. For example, I went to NFL Star  Aaron Donald‘s camp last summer in Penn Hills. That’s how the coronavirus has taken away something I love doing which is playing football.

 This virus has not really affected my mom. The only thing she couldn’t do now is shop at the mall. We still shop online. Also, she works at home so she’s still comfortable. The most uncomfortable thing for her is when she shops with a lot of people in the store. That’s how the virus affects my mother.

- JaydAn Keys

This quarantine was something expected but never expected for this long. I’ve spent a lot of time in the house, not doing much of anything. Most days I wake up, eat breakfast, workout some days and do school work some days. 

 I spend my days watching Netflix, shows like “The Office,” “Kim’s Convenience,” “Greys Anatomy,” “Dead to Me” and “After Life.” I feel like I’ve watched everything there is to watch but I know I haven’t. I can’t wait for the quarantine to be over. It’s so different when someone is making you stay home than you having the choice to stay home. 

 When this is over I plan on going back to soccer practices. I miss my friends from both teams I’m on, along with practicing together as a team, playing games on weekends, along with the two tournaments we were supposed to participate in. I also miss school still, seeing all my friends is very important to me, the social aspect of school plays a huge role in life. Being able to see people and talk to everyone on a daily basis was very fun and enjoyable. I’d still go back despite the school work. 

Doing work outside of school is NOT fun nor can I focus. There are so many other distractions like Netflix and staying on track. I’ve been practicing new hairstyles and if it’s easier to do my hair a certain way. On Friday nights I listen to music and clean my room. At least my sleep schedule is still the same somewhat, the latest I stay up most nights is 10-11 PM. 

I would continue to play sports because if you are sick chances are you won’t be playing in the game anyways. I’d keep going to school because online is the worst and I get a lot more work online than I would in school. I’d also continue to have friends over and go over friends houses because I’m not one to have many people over ever and I know my friends are the same way. 

 However I would not continue to go to baseball games unless extra precautions are taken because people come from different states all the time to see teams play. I also wouldn’t go to large gatherings with people who are not family because you never know who someone has been around or where they are from and their area could have gotten hit harder with the virus and you’d never know. 

• - Calise Johnson

I have used this time to do a lot. I have gotten better at video games. Done some work in terms of basketball. I have played video games more than I thought I ever would’ve, but at least I have people to play with though. I play “NBA 2K,” “Minecraft,” “Call of Duty,” “Fortnite” - anything you can think of. Sometimes my dad comes upstairs and I beat on him in “2K.” I miss it though. I miss hanging out with my friends. 

 Now that I have the time I have taken it to do and learn things I never had the time for. I am learning Spanish. I am rebuilding with past friends through Xbox. I thought I was ready for it. I thought it would be a great experience. I am getting used to this life. It's like clockwork. Wake up, eat, do schoolwork, play Xbox and sometimes go outside. This quarantine has made me feel very anxious. But I have never felt this close with my family before. 

 I am still staying active and working out everyday. But I would like to be able to talk to people who aren’t my family and not online. I am ready for it to be over but I’m not at the same time. When it’s over I will have to go back to school back to life as usual.

 Since playing soccer with other people is not available I have had to resort to playing soccer by myself. Here’s how I do it. I start by going outside. For some reason I always start with keep-ups - I always have. I watch as the ball hits my foot while doing a perfect spin as it rises level with my eyes. I am getting better at it but am no master yet.

I have never been one to do speed drills or drills in general, just the dribble of the ball does it for me. I then stand in front of my backyard fence and kick the ball as hard as I can. I then back up farther and farther until the ball goes over the fence. I hate it when that happens, but I can’t escape the inevitable. I wish I could play with other people though. I wish I could go to practice. I wish everything was back to normal.

- Isaiah Johnson

_________________________________

 During the last several months, most Americans have been forced to stay home to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. Some people have become couch potatoes using their time to veg out, play video games and watch TV. Others have opted to use this time to take on new projects and learn new skills. Though I’ve spent a few days in front of the TV during the quarantine, most days I’ve tried to be productive and creative.

Today, I took on an ambitious project - I tried to raise the dead and bring it back to life. No, I’m not a mad scientist, although after seven weeks of quarantine I have the hair for it. I don’t spend my nights scavenging for parts in local graveyards and I don’t have an oversized lightning rod on my castle roof. The life I am trying to restore is my mother-in-law’s heirloom tomatoes. 

Ellie, my mother-in-law loved to garden. She liked getting down on her knees and planting seeds or vegetable plants. When she got too old to handle this chore, she took on the role of overseer.

She would sit in an aluminum folding chair and supervise my work in the garden. I am sure if Job looked down through the Pearly Gates of Heaven and watched me plant our garden to Ellie’s specifications and satisfaction he would say, “Man, oh man, that Jim Busch is the most patient dude I’ve ever seen.” 

My mother-in-law loved every living thing. She once put a kitchen chair in the middle of our sidewalk to keep anyone from stepping on the tiny ants who had decided to build their home in between the paving bricks. She loved plants and any weeds which she decided were interesting enjoyed her protection.

Though she has been gone for almost six years, our yard still has a number of giant mulleins, a roadside weed that I have left unmolested in her honor. Ellie loved flowers, but she had a special spot in her heart for vegetable plants. She had fond memories of her father’s big vegetable garden that got her family through the lean years of the Depression. 

There was a special place in her heart for tomatoes. In the summer time, she loved nothing better than walking up to the garden, picking a big one, cutting it into thick slices and making a tomato sandwich on her fresh baked bread.

I have to admit, you’ll never find a tastier meal at any gourmet restaurant anywhere in the world. Ellie liked old time heirloom tomatoes, Oxhearts, Marglobes and San Marzano’s for sauce. Her absolute favorite tomato was her “Big Pinks.”

The Big Pink tomato was a big misshapen tomato. They came from the mountains of North Carolina. While on vacation in the Great Smokies, Ellie and her husband, John, made friends with the couple that ran the campground where they were staying. Ellie admired their garden and especially their tomatoes. That fall our first Big Pink seeds came in the mail from my in-laws new southern friends. 

As its name implied, these tomatoes never turned red even when dead ripe. They weighed up to two pounds each and grew on huge vines that required some serious engineering to stake. We grew these tomatoes for years.

Every fall, my mother-in-law would pick out some of the biggest fruits which I would cut in half and squeeze out the seeds. I would carefully wash the seeds to separate them from the pulp and then dry them on coffee filters. Once dried, I would put them in envelopes to save until it was time to start them under lights in the basement the following spring.

Nothing lasts forever. Ellie became too infirm to even supervise my work in the garden. Wildlife became a problem with deer, groundhogs, raccoons and possums treating us as their personal caterers. I took on more responsibilities at work and my wife took on the role of caregiver for her mom. Eventually, our garden shrank to a few salad tomato plants, some herbs and salad greens in the spring. 

My mother-in-law passed away in 2014 and we forgot about her Big Pink tomatoes. This week, I was going through some old papers and found a white business sized envelope marked “Big Pink Tomatoes - Saved 2010.” I carefully opened the envelope and found a large number of small tan colored disc shaped seeds. I have always been fascinated by seeds. They are the lifeboats of the plant kingdom, preserving life from one season to the next. These tiny desiccated seeds carried the promise of big gorgeous plants, luscious fruits and tomato sandwiches in their DNA.

I knew that seeds should only be saved for a year or two, but I had to try. I washed several plastic eight-packs and filled them with a mixture of compost and potting soil. I tamped down the soil and placed some of the senior citizen seeds in each compartment. Because I wasn’t sure how many of the seeds would still be viable, I planted them much more thickly than I would with fresh seeds. I topped the pots off with a quarter inch of sifted soil and once again pressed everything down to make sure the seeds were in full contact with the soil. I moistened the soil with a spray bottle, slipped the pots into a plastic bag and set them under a grow light on my workbench. 

All I have to do now is watch and wait. If I see tiny green leaves appear above the soil in a few days, I will raise my arms in the air and exclaim in my best Dr. Frankenstein impersonation, “It is alive!”

I hope not only to resurrect these great tomatoes, but I also want to revive the memory of a great woman who loved tomatoes almost as much as she loved her family. I think this is a good way to spend my days in this time of quarantine, illness and death.       

- Jim Busch

May 13, 2020

After my two previous appointments were canceled due to the Coronavirus lockdown, I finally got to see my optometrist today. A year or so ago he detected the onset of glaucoma which has been kept in check with eye drops. Every few months, he has to check my pressure to make sure the medication is working. Fortunately, despite the delay, everything was fine. 

My appointments with Dr. Fontana always take a bit longer than they should. We’ve known one another since high school and he’s been our eye doctor for many years. We always begin my appointments catching up on one another’s lives, our health, our kids, grandkids and our wives.

This meeting started off a bit awkwardly, instinctively we both extended our arms to do the customary handshake. As soon as we stuck out our hands, we both realized that shaking hands in the post corona world is a “no no!”

Simultaneously, we turned our bodies moving our hands past one another like the Blue Angels doing a precision maneuver. We actually ended this bizarre looking old guy pirouette by bumping elbows. To his office staff, this must have looked like the secret handshake from the Loyal Order of Chipmunks Lodge.

Our meeting took a somber turn when Dr. Fontana asked about my wife. When I told him that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer his body physically slumped like a blow-up toy with a slow leak. His usual jovial manner turned serious and his voice dropped an octave or two. He has also known my wife since high school and has been her optometrist for years. My wife and his wife like to talk about their families and swap recipes. He was shocked and saddened by the news. 

He went ahead and checked the pressure in both my eyes, a task made more difficult by the mask I was wearing. After giving me a clean bill of ocular health, he again expressed his concern and told me to call on him if there was anything he could do. The people behind the counter echoed his sentiments and said they would pray for my wife. 

My wife and I have been hearing this a lot lately. We decided to be very open about her cancer. There is nothing shameful or embarrassing about being sick. We didn’t anticipate how it would change our relationship with the people we interact with as we go through our day.

Like most people, just about everybody we’ve encountered are nice folks who are always kind and polite. As we have turned grey and moved into the “Sir” and “Ma’am” period of our lives, we’ve noticed that younger people are a little more solicitous of us. Since Covid-19 has put us seniors in its crosshairs, this “be extra nice to the oldsters” attitude has become even more prevalent. We just did not realize how weird the pity and concern would make us feel as people hear my wife has cancer. 

We like being ordinary. We’ve always tried to pull our own weight and take care of ourselves. Both of us come from solid blue collar working class families. We are not fly first class, sit in a skybox at the ballgame, V.I.P. kind of people. Every day our mailbox is full of beautiful get well cards and my wife is in more prayer chains than the Pittsburgh Steelers two weeks before the playoffs.

We are hearing from people we have not seen in years. It is not that we don’t appreciate all of the concern people have shown and a few extra prayers could not hurt. We are very grateful for their kind thoughts, but it feels odd to be the center of attention. We don’t want people to pity us, this is just a part of life, an extremely lousy part, but a part of life nonetheless. We don’t say anything to them, they all mean well.

The way people treat us is just one more thing we need to get used to in a time when there are so many things we need to get used to. 

- Jim Busch         

May 12, 2020

To tell the truth, I have been socially distancing since I retired just over four years ago. After a lifetime of working in crowded offices, calling on client’s businesses and speaking to large groups, I’ve had a lot of alone time since I left my job. Some people dream of spending their retirement traveling or lying on a beach. My retirement fantasy centered around a workbench and piles of sawdust.

My first priority when I retired was building my dream workshop and art studio. During the Coronavirus quarantine, this space has been a Godsend for me. Tinkering in my workshop has given me something to occupy my time, my hands and my mind during the Covid-19 lockdown. My shop provides a welcome distraction from the pandemic raging outside its doors.

Today’s project was building a salad table for my wife. She saw one in a catalog and said, “I’m sure you could build a better one than this for a lot less money.” She knows me and how to play me like a Stradivarius. She knew I couldn’t resist a challenge that involved working with my hands and being a cheapskate.

A salad table is a small raised planter used primarily to grow salad greens for the kitchen. This design saves the gardener’s back and raises the lettuce and other greens to a convenient height for harvesting. We saw an additional benefit in that an elevated garden would prevent the ravenous hordes of woodchucks that roam our backyard from getting to these tasty morsels before we did.

I am still concerned that our local deer herd may look at this table like a drive up window at a fast food restaurant. A convenient way to grab a bite when they are on the go and don’t have time to stop and bend down for a normal meal. We hope that placing the salad table on our patio just outside our kitchen door will keep the Bambis at bay.

I am not sure if the salad table I built was better than the one my wife saw in her catalog, but it was certainly cheaper. The total cost for the project was a handful of screws and nails from my hardware stash. The rest of the materials I needed came from my neighbor’s trash and discarded pallets from local businesses. The planting tray was the bottom half of a broken car top carrier box. A wooden crate that held a new drive shaft for a neighbor’s 4 X 4 truck was cut up for the legs and pallet lumber formed the frame work and bracing.

Recycling lumber has become a bit of a cottage industry lately. Clever creative people show off their pallet creations on Pinterest and other social media. Do-It-Yourself magazines feature articles on how to make planters, furniture and other useful items from pallets. A quick search on Amazon will list the titles of many dozens of books on using recycled lumber. 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was a trailblazer for this lifestyle trend. As a child, my grandfather would pay me a nickel for every orange crate I brought home from the local grocer in my red Radio Flyer wagon. Once home, he and I would knock them apart and use the wood to make planting flats for his greenhouse. We even took the recycling one step further, straightening out the nails from the crates to reuse them. 

Working with my grandfather gave me an appreciation of using recycled lumber to save money on projects around the home. He also taught me that turning something that most people think is useless into something useful can be very satisfying. I can remember Grandpap saying, “I’ve been making something out of so little for so long that pretty soon I reckon I’ll be able to make anything out of nothing in no time at all.” 

Though I may salivate over a $600 piece of African bubinga wood or a slab of Philippine mahogany at Rockler Woodworking Supply, I don’t know if working with them would be as satisfying as crafting something from a prized piece of American castoff wood.

After spending a few hours in the shop, I ended up with a serviceable salad table and some rare peace of mind. For a while, my only worry was losing a finger to the spinning blade of my table saw. Instead of thinking about the number of people suffering from Coronavirus, the only numbers that mattered to me were printed on the bright yellow surface of my tape measure.

Spending time sawing, sanding and nailing is much more productive and far more relaxing than spending an afternoon worrying, whining and stressing out. During this crisis, my workshop is my island of peace in a crazy world.   

- Jim Busch

May 11, 2020

I took part in an online discussion of techniques people are using to maintain their mental health balance during the Coronavirus crisis tonight. In our information saturated world it is easy to be overwhelmed with the news of the day. This constant barrage of bad news can make us want to take a sharp left turn off the middle of the Westinghouse Bridge.

A steady diet of negativity can poison the spirit, just as a steady diet of junk food can poison the body. In either case, the antidote is to seek out nutrient rich foods to feed our body and our souls.

I received my prescription for the antidote from Dr. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He prescribed: “Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music and if possible say some reasonable thing.” Just for good measure, I add a daily supplement of humor. My medicine cabinet is my “Daily Reading” shelf in my office bookcase. This shelf holds four calendars and a stack of books suitable for anecdotal readings. 

The largest calendar is a page-a-day calendar featuring a color print from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This, plus a book titled 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die, helps me reach my minimum daily requirement for beautiful pictures.

A volume titled, A Poem a Day meets my poem requirement. Aesop’s Fables adds a story to help me maintain a healthy appreciation of folk wisdom and the proper use of metaphors.  A short essay from Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way Every Day builds an artistic attitude and strong creative bones. 

Since I naturally have low levels of wisdom, I raise my “W” count with a blend of thoughtful words from three books. These include, The Daily Stoic, a collection of wisdom from three noble Romans, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and a quote a day calendar.

I also read from The Friendship Book of Francis Gay. My current edition of this vintage British book dates from 1989. Last year’s copy was from 1987 and each year I search the used book sales and online vendors for one of these delightful books which were printed from the 1960’s to the 80’s. I like their combination of Bible verses, teaching stories, saccharine poems and quotes. I also keep a calendar of Zen quotes in my workshop in case I need a quick fix of wisdom when I’m there. 

I believe that the healthiest things we can do for our spirits, and probably our bodies, is to smile and to laugh. On my office wall I have a vintage cartoon of a statue with a sign on its plinth reading “Liberte’-Egalite’-Frivolite.” I’ve always loved cartoons and this one struck me as a good way to live life.

Every day I read the comics in the paper, plus I have several cartoon calendars. My current collection includes one featuring New Yorker cartoons on my shelf and an Argyle Sweater cartoon on my dresser. These not only make me smile, but also sometimes helps me see things from a different perspective. 

Each evening at the close of a busy day, I turn to my “Daily Reading” shelf. I look at the paintings and study their composition, themes and use of color. I do my readings and ponder their meanings. Sometimes I will share a reading or an image with my wife. I tear a page of my calendars revealing the next day’s quote or cartoon.

This ritual gives me a respite from the day’s stress. The distractions offered by the artworks, poems, epigrams and stories provide a mini vacation from my daily life. They center and relax me, helping me settle in for a good night’s sleep. They are helpful in ordinary times and absolutely necessary to my sanity in these troubled times.   

- Jim Busch

May 10, 2020

Today is Mother’s Day, and my wife and I both received a wonderful gift. We got to spend time with our two children and with our grandson. In the eight weeks since the governor ordered Pennsylvanians to stay at home, we have had only limited face to face contact with our daughter and none at all with our son and his family. This is hard for any parent, but this has been especially hard for my wife, who recently learned that she has stage four pancreatic cancer. 

My wife’s diagnosis has added a degree of urgency and poignancy to every aspect of our lives. She and I have discussed this only briefly and other family members completely avoid the subject. Though no one wants to discuss my wife’s illness beyond the obligatory, “I am so sorry” or “How are you feeling?”

The possibility that we may lose her injects itself into everything we do.  The cloud of her cancer envelopes our family like a cold fog.

Although neither my son nor my daughter has said so, they both know that this could be the last Mother’s Day they get to spend with their mom. During their visits, their voices were respectful and soft, as if they were sitting in a sick room. My 14-year-old grandson who is very close to his grandmother, carefully avoided making eye contact with her. He is a kind and compassionate kid who is always going out of his way to help others. He is in the habit of befriending his classmates who are bullied or struggle to fit into middle school society. We could tell he was struggling to maintain his composure.  

In normal years, Mother’s Day is the busiest day of the year for restaurants. Lots of families celebrate by giving mom a day off from her kitchen duties. This has never been part of our tradition, my wife loves to cook and enjoys feeding her family. For her, cooking is an act of love. As far as we can remember, we only went out to eat once for this holiday. I took her to the Dairy Queen for footlong hotdogs and a banana split for her very first Mother’s Day.

Learning that she would get to see her “chicks” this year, she pulled out all the stops. She baked fresh blueberry muffins, made her mother’s baked bean recipe, two kinds of potato salad, pickled beets and eggs, corn on the cob and barbecue beef sandwiches. For dessert she prepared strawberry shortcake, fudge brownies and Rice Krispy treats. She made more than enough for them to take leftovers home when they had to leave. 

So far, the only symptoms my wife has experienced is severe nausea and some pain, which she has been able to control with medication. Though she has been very tired, she has continued doing the things she enjoys.

We are living examples of the precipice principle. When you stand near the edge of a cliff, none of the steps you take toward the edge make much difference in your condition until you reach the edge, at this point your next step changes everything as you plunge over the precipice. In most cases, we can’t see the edge of the cliff, in my wife’s case, we can see how close the edge really is. 

We have had a great life, an ordinary life, but one we have both greatly enjoyed. That life changed forever with a conversation with her doctor, but we are both trying to hold on to that life as long as we can. We are holding out hope that we can beat the cancer and continue our ordinary life, but we know that is not for us to decide. 

My wife will begin her first round of chemotherapy this week. We have no idea how this will change our lives. We don’t know how she will react to the drugs and how it will affect her ability to continue doing the things she enjoys. We will probably be forced to drop our charade of normalcy in the coming weeks. Whatever comes next, we will face it like we have faced everything else - together.  

- Jim Busch

May 9, 2020

Being forced to stay home during the Coronavirus crisis has given me a new appreciation of windows. I do get outside for walks, but I find myself spending more time inside our small home. The most clichéd metaphor used to describe television, films or the internet is they are a “window to the world.” 

 Like most clichés, this cliché became a cliché because it communicates an idea so clearly. Without windows, our homes would be like medieval hovels, dark and confining. Windows bring light and nature into our homes making them, well, more homey.

One of my favorite poets is Robert Service who is known as the poet of the Yukon. I like his strong rhymes, driving cadences, his sense of humor and his rugged “man against the wilderness” themes. He might not be as eloquent as Byron or Wordsworth, but he is certainly more entertaining.

Reading a Robert Service poem is like watching a John Wayne western, not exactly high art, but always entertaining and satisfying. One of my favorite Robert Service poems is A Rolling Stone. It contains a line that I feel describes me perfectly, “Sun libertine am I.” I love the light and warmth of the sun. Windows bring the blessed sun streaming into our homes.  

One of the best investments I ever made in my life was buying a big five-foot square picture window for our kitchen. I found this treasure in the old Green Sheet want ad paper thirty years ago. The seller was asking $50 for a secondhand wooden framed, double pane Anderson picture window. Although this was a reasonable price, after a bit of haggling I bought the window for $30. It barely fit inside my father-in-law’s van, but we got it home safe and sound. It was loaded so precariously that we had to drive at a snail’s pace inspiring a great deal of horn blowing, shouted profanities and hand gestures from our fellow motorists. 

The following weekend we cut a huge hole in our kitchen wall for the new window. The size of the opening meant we had to build a sturdy header to support the rest of the wall and the roof. Once the opening was reinforced, we carefully inserted the window, nailed it into place and caulked it in. Sitting next to our kitchen table it seemed to make the room grow to twice its former size. 

This window faces the backyard, our flower gardens and the woods beyond. We installed a wide, shelf like windowsill which has served generations of cats as a popular observation deck. I am not sure who gets more pleasure from watching the birds and chipmunks on the stone retaining wall outside the window, the cats or myself, though they do tend to lick their chops a bit more than I do. 

 In recent years, the local wildlife population has grown to include deer, woodchucks and the occasional raccoon. At times the view through our picture window resembles a scene from a Disney film. 

Today was unseasonably cold, so I stayed inside a bit more than normal. Looking out my big kitchen window I saw a sight of rare beauty. Although we are well into the merry month of May, it snowed today. During the warmer weather of the preceding weeks, our crabapple trees were covered with thousands of delicate pink blossoms. Having completed their mission of attracting pollinators to the tree, they had begun to fall to the ground. The cold wind that accompanied the snow accelerated this process. 

I looked out the window to see something that I had never seen before, a multicolored snow storm. The white flakes of the snow mixed with the soft pink of the spent crabapple blossoms looked for all the world like confetti at a parade. Nature was putting on a show to celebrate the change of the seasons.

Winter was giving a farewell performance before leaving the stage and introducing its successor, springtime.  The swirling flakes and petals gave my backyard the appearance of a Paul Signac or Georges Seurat painting. The tiny splashes of pink and white looking like the dabs of paint on their pointillist paintings. All I needed was a few men with top hats and a few ladies with parasols and bustles to recreate Sunday in the Park with George. 

I know during this crisis people are spending a lot more time peering at their screens. I hope that they occasionally look up from their electronics and take a good long look at the world just outside their window.         

 - Jim Busch

May 8, 2020

Today, Governor Wolf announced that Allegheny County will go from the “Red” to the “Yellow” status this coming week. I will admit that I don’t know exactly what that means. The state guidelines say that many retailers, such as clothing and jewelry stores, will be allowed to open. Gyms, nail salons and beauty salons will not. Since I don’t often shop for clothes and never shop for jewelry, these changes won’t have much of an effect on me. 

I am hoping our state considers libraries to be “retail establishments.” Just a few days before everything was locked down, I went to the library and picked up a number of books and requested a number of others through interlibrary loan. I plowed through these in a few weeks and they are now stacked in a big canvas bag waiting to be returned.

I miss browsing the “New Books” shelf and I am a month behind on the magazines I read at the library. Of all the things that I haven’t been able to do in the last eight weeks, I miss my trips to the library the most. To me the library certainly meets all the requirements of an essential service, but I fear they may not open until we reach full “Green” status. Lacking the profit motive and possessing a genuine concern for their clients and staff, they may wait to open until the state declares the Pandemic over.

Having dinner with my wife at our favorite Mexican or Chinese restaurant would also be nice. A warm bagel slathered in cream cheese for breakfast on our way to run errands would be delightful. Sitting at a tiny table, loading up on carbs and discussing our plans for the day with the woman I love is a simple pleasure that I’ve missed for the last few months. As much as I long for the library stacks and a pleasant meal at a restaurant, I am not sure how anxious I am to go back to these happy places. 

Tom Wolf may be able to declare the state of Pennsylvania open with the stroke of his gubernatorial pen, he has no authority over my state of mind. Red, yellow, green or shocking pink, it is all the same to me, this disease still frightens me. Until science delivers a knockout blow to this evil microbe, I don’t want to put myself or my family at risk. I really want a burrito or a schmear, but they’re not worth dying for. I just can’t see myself putting this all behind me and pretending it never happened. 

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. We’re all a bit gun shy, or germ shy, after months of hiding from this virus. Yesterday, I had to go to the grocery store. The sight of shoppers picking out bananas wearing masks and gloves like a surgeon no longer strikes me, or anyone else, as odd.

Even if we switch off the evening news with its stories of rising death tolls and videos of people hooked up to machines and clinging to life in the ICU, we all will be constantly reminded of this clear and present danger.

Human beings are “chicken” by nature! Psychologists studying human motivations have found that we are naturally loss adverse. We put much more emphasis on the fear of loss than on the hope of gain.

This is why if we find a five dollar bill on the street we smile and move on, but if we misplace a fiver, we become obsessed with finding it, ransacking our house like the DEA looking for a drug dealer’s stash.

This is also why people are so slow to leave a job or a toxic relationship that is no longer satisfying. The fear of the unknown is much stronger than our hope for a better life. As much as I would like to go to a restaurant, I am far more afraid of ending up in the hospital, or the cemetery.

Ray Bradbury once wrote a story about a travel agency in a dystopian world of the future. They offered tours to the happy past to give people a vacation from their unhappy present. Until we can book a bus trip to 2019, I don’t think we will be going back to the “normal” world we knew just a few months ago.   

- Jim Busch

May 7, 2020

This is my 50th daily dispatch for The Corona Diaries. Because we have ten fingers and ten toes, benchmarks that end in a zero have special meaning for us.  We divide our lives into decades. Yesterday was day 49, today is day 50, it is just one more day since I have been sequestered at home and have been recording my thoughts. But somehow 50 days sounds much longer than 49, it is a nice round and very significant number. 

In the seven weeks since I have been writing this diary, tens of thousands of people have become sick and thousands have died. Stores, restaurants and theaters have been shut down. I have seen people hoard toilet paper and clean out grocery stores.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and our children have been locked out of their schools. We’ve learned how to cook our own meals, bake our own bread and how to amuse ourselves.

Many of us have learned to use our computers and phones to work from home and to help our kids learn their lessons. Wearing masks and gloves when we leave our homes has become normalized. “Zoom” was a word used by children playing with toy cars on the floor. After millennia of shaking hands at almost every meeting, we discarded this habit like it was a used Kleenex. 

On a personal note, since I started writing these entries I learned that my wife of 47 years has stage four pancreatic cancer, the most devastating blow I have ever received. I am looking at a future far different than I had imagined just a few weeks ago.

We got married when we had just turned 20. I went directly from my mother and father’s home to living with my wife. I have never been alone except for three or four days on business trips. It may sound a bit cliché, but my wife is not only the love of my life, but she is also my best friend.  Now I am facing the possibility of losing her.

We are lucky to live in the Pittsburgh of 2020, a town where hospitals and medical research has replaced factories and steel mills. We have some terrific doctors and hospitals on our side in the coming fight. We will fight this to the end, but the odds are against us and I may have to live out my days alone. 

Since this is a diary, I am expected to report on my daily activities. Though this is just the first week of May, today I started preparing Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a bit early to thaw the Butterball, but I did get the stuffing started. Today I planted several sage plants in pots on our patio. With the proper attention, by midsummer they will grow to be robust plants oozing with the essential oils that give stuffing its flavor. When they are at the peak of flavor, I will cut sprigs from each plant and tie them in bundles with bakers twine.

I will hang these from dowel rods along with bunches of thyme and lovage leaves. When they are properly dried, I will strip the leaves from the stems and store them in glass jars where they will patiently wait for turkey day to arrive. 

Later this month, I will plant flowers and tomatoes. I will retrieve the Dahlia tubers and gladiola corms from the garage, where I stored them last fall. I will divide and sort them, planting the healthiest ones in the beds in the front yard where they have bloomed every year for decades. 

Though I don’t know what the future holds for me, I was raised to be a gardener. Gardeners know that much of what they plant will not flourish. The groundhogs, the bugs, diseases, hungry rabbits, hailstorms, droughts, frosts, cutworms and the odds are against us. Still we turn the soil and plant our seeds. We look forward to the harvest and hope for the best. What else can we do?    

- Jim Busch

May 6, 2020

One benefit of the Coronavirus crisis is that I received a reprieve on paying my taxes. Since I usually owe at the end of the year, I was not in a hurry to file them. Today, I took all my records to my accountant. Usually, we have a friendly meeting with our “tax guy” talking about his new child and catching up on what has transpired in the past year.

This year, we were given an appointment time with his assistant, Tara, to drop off our paperwork. My wife and I drove to his office and waited for our appointed time to go in, so we didn’t violate his social distancing rules.

A sign that the crisis is slowly winding down is that PennDot has called back their employees and has resumed road work throughout the state. A repair crew was working on the Parkway East and had restricted the lanes to do their work. This led to a slight traffic backup. It was so nostalgic, so much like the “good old days” on the Parkway that I began to get a little choked up.  

Our accountant has several offices, but due to the crisis, only the South Hills office is open. We had never been to this office before or met Tara, who was to take our documents from us. She wore a mask and sat behind a high counter. About four feet in front of where Tara sat was a narrow glass topped table, the kind that is usually found behind a sofa, with a pen on it.

We laid our packet of papers on the table and stepped back. She emerged from behind her counter and inspected our documents. Assured that everything was in order, Tara laid a form on the table for us to sign and then she stepped back. For all the world, this felt much more like signing a ceasefire agreement between two warring nations than having my taxes done. I stepped up to the table, signed the “treaty” and stepped back. Tara stepped up, perused my signature on the paper, and after disinfecting the pen with a Clorox wipe, thanked us. 

As my wife and I turned to leave, I pointed out the framed poster on the wall and said to my wife that I liked its design. The art was a framed cover from the June 1937 edition of Fortune Magazine. I am a fan of graphic art and commercial illustrations, so it had attracted my attention. I started telling my wife what I liked about the print. Tara, social distancing be damned, came near to listen to what I was saying. 

I explained that I liked the complexity of the image. The cover featured an image of a twisted, jumbled mass of old time ticker tapes. The design ran off the page and looped through the letters on the magazine’s masthead. It was expertly shaded to create a three dimensional effect. It was an illustrator’s and printer’s masterpiece of art.

Tara was completely engaged in my comments. When I stopped she asked me, “What is a ticker tape?” I explained to her that in the B.C. Days, before computers, ticker tapes were used to deliver up to the minute stock reports to brokers. Reaching out to the poster, I pointed to a place on the illustration that read “GE 52 ½, telling her that this meant General Electric stock was selling for $52.50 a share in 1937.

We talked about how one of Thomas Edison’s early inventions and how Wall Street generated so much ticker tape that it became a tradition to throw it out the window during celebratory parades. She thanked me for explaining it to her and stood and looked at the picture for a long time.

I am not sure how long Tara had worked in that office, but she had never really looked at the poster hanging only a few feet away from her work station. Tara was the embodiment of French novelist Marcel Proust’s well known statement, “The real voyage of discovery consist not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

I have always believed the greatest gift that life bestows on us is a healthy sense of curiosity. Perhaps being forced to shelter in place will help people find “new eyes” to appreciate the things that are close at hand.  

- Jim Busch

May 5, 2020

I was well prepared when Governor Tom Wolf ordered the people of Pennsylvania to stay at home and begin social distancing. I had read the training manual on social distancing, in fact it is one of my favorite books. The manual gives detailed instructions on how to live a rich life while maintaining a safe social distance from our neighbors. The book’s author was expert in the subject and had hands on experience in living apart from society. I am referring to Henry David Thoreau and his seminal work, Walden.

Thoreau taught me many lessons about how to be self-reliant and to live independently. Along with excellent instructions on home construction and growing a bumper crop of beans was this gem of advice, “That man is richest who pleasures are the cheapest.”

By Thoreau’s definition I am downright wealthy, my pleasures are exceedingly cheap. I like to take long walks in the woods. I enjoy simple foods and singing old folk songs. Watching hawks circling in the sky or maple leaves turn their leaves up before a rainstorm brings a smile to my face. 

My greatest pleasure only requires a scrap of paper and a pencil or a giveaway ballpoint pen. I like to draw. Making marks on paper brings me great joy. I carry a small sketchbook/notebook with me and a drawing instrument of some kind at all times. When I hit a flat spot in my life and have nothing better to do, I start scribbling.

During my business career, this habit helped me maintain my sanity during endless meetings. I’ve read that those who doodle during meetings actually have a better grasp of the material covered because multiple segments of their brains were engaged. This may be true, but I was just trying to keep myself awake. Anytime I have nothing to do and there is a scrap of paper handy, I start scratching away.  

I am not an artist, I am not skilled enough to deserve that title. Also, I don’t draw to please others or to communicate my ideas. Drawing for me is a completely selfish act, I draw because I like to draw. I am far more interested in the process of drawing, rather than in the finished product.

Over the years, I have refined my skills, I am far better at capturing something than I used to be. I work hard to capture each line and shadow, then when I’m done, it means nothing to me. I keep some of my pieces as a way to gauge how my skills have improved, but most of them end up in the recycle bin. 

I don’t much care about what I draw. I’ve drawn buildings, people, landscapes and trash cans. Whatever is in front of me is a potential subject. Sometimes I just play with lines and create abstract designs or I will experiment with mediums like markers, dip pens, charcoal or pastels. I am often surprised of what I find at the end of whatever tool I happen to be using. 

One of the things that my mark making addiction has taught me is that the secret of drawing isn’t found in the hand, but in the eyes. In order to create a likeness of something, we must look at it. Really look at it. I have learned to see things that those who do not draw would miss. I have learned to notice how shadows give things shape and volume. How lines create patterns. I squint to get a sense of values, contrast and shadings between lighter and darker areas. 

My drawing helps me to understand my world better. It informs my writing, adds richness to my description. When I am drawing, time stands still, my worries go away when I am trying to capture the light in the leaves of a tree.

My investment in a few sketchbooks and a handful of pencils has paid immense dividends. When I am drawing, there is no Coronavirus, there is no cancer, there is just me, a pencil, a piece of paper and a drawing coming alive before my eyes.

The act of drawing makes me a very rich man indeed. 

- Jim Busch

May 4, 2020

We are no longer takeout food virgins! 

This is a weight off my chest. Unless, of course, we get the coronavirus from it. During this time of the pandemic and social distancing, from March 12th until today April 29th, we have not ordered  takeout in any form. Forty-nine excruciating days with no buffets, no milkshakes, no tacos. Not one forbidden scrumptious, mouthwatering, decadent, nothing. Nada!

At first it was fine. I can cook well enough. Nothing fancy, but there will be no danger of turduckens or soufflés served to you in my house. Occasionally, I will get a bug up my butt and try something new. I made walnut bark a few weeks ago which was surprisingly easy. Last week I cooked two large racks of ribs on different days in my crockpot. 

Although after 49 days you just want to scream. I remind myself there are  people  starving in third world countries. We have it pretty good here in America, despite the fact that people panicked early on and hoarded all the food. I can now occasionally find chicken thighs. Wow, I won’t take the ability to walk into Walmart and pick from a half dozen or more containers of chicken thighs for granted again. 

For the past few weeks and even if you went early in the morning, there was not  much to choose from. We have not had lamb in weeks. I wonder if the meat plants and the supply chain has anything to do with the availability of lamb? 

My mind wonders, how sad is it that I don’t know where lamb is processed or how it gets to the store? We have been blind consumers, hastily purchasing and hurriedly cooking things for our family. We currently have a lot of time on our hands to appreciate what other people do for a living. How critical some jobs are and how sadly some people turn their noses up at them. 

I want to hug and thank the grocery store stockers and cashiers. I want to hug all the nurses and doctors. The postal workers are in fear of what their future holds. I want to embrace the truck drivers and all the folks that have been working so hard to keep us fed and safe. 

You may ask what drove me to the edge? I got tired of eating my own food. I also got tired of microwave dinners. I have eaten so many Saffron Road tikka marsala, and chicken biryani dinners that It is probably what my insides look like right now! 

I have eaten hundreds of eggs. Despite having one of the best neighbors in the world who has chickens and delivers delicious organic, free-range eggs to me, I have grown so weary of it. In the beginning I was terrified of all potential ways of getting the coronavirus. I  want to support all of the local businesses and I mean all of them, because I really love to eat.

I am so tired of the same flavors and the same repetitive meals.  My double sink is filled with a towering pile of dishes. It just set me off. I had had enough. I need a break. 

Surprisingly I was able to order and pay online pretty quickly and there was no need for contact. I drove up to the side door of Chilli’s, and low and behold, this wonderful woman brings me a giant bag of tasty goodness! Chicken fajitas, salads, and a cookie dessert for my spouse. 

Damn you Celiac disease. You did have to butt in there. Always ruining my fun. Note to self, my next trip should be for a  gluten-free dessert!

My daughter and I took the spoils home and on our back porch I held the containers while she scooped chicken and peppers onto plates. We were cautious just in case.  A grateful shoutout to all those people who make YouTube videos to guide us. It tasted so good, you have no idea. 

I am  very thankful for the food and the people who prepare it for me. I hope  when this is over that I will still be mindful of what other people do for a living. I will read more about the meat industry tonight. I am lucky that I can work from home at the moment, while others have lost their jobs. 

We can choose to focus on fear, or we can choose to focus on learning more and being satisfied with what we do have. I plan on cooking for my family tomorrow. I believe it will help me appreciate the animals, the farmer who raised it, the person who  processed and packaged it. 

Now if only someone else would do the damn dishes!

- Jennifer McCalla

_____________________________

Okay, this Coronavirus lockdown thing has gone entirely too far. 

First, I had to wash my hands every five minutes.

Then, I had to stay six feet away from other people.

Next, I had to start wearing a mask.

After that, they closed the library.

The museums closed.

And the movies theaters. 

Even the churches were shut up tighter than a drum.  

Finally, almost every retail store was closed down.

Groups of more than ten people were verboten.  

People had to learn to cook because the restaurants were all padlocked.

The governor ordered us all to shelter in place in our homes.

I went to the grocery store and all the toilet paper, all the eggs and all the popsicles were gone. I mean, who hoards popsicles?

I couldn’t sit down with my friends and family just to chat.

People began to lose patience. Angry mobs in camouflage gear and toting assault rifles waved signs demanding that the restrictions be lifted.

But, I remained patient. I stayed home and did my patriotic duty to protect others by social distancing myself.

But today… today they have gone too far. 

They have placed the final straw on the camel’s back.

Tonight, Jeopardy was a rerun.

The Coronavirus lockdown stopped the gameshow that keeps me sane.

It is the one constant in my life. Alex Trebek’s banter with the contestants, his bad jokes, Double Jeopardy and then… drum roll, please, Final Jeopardy. Easy questions, harder questions, and then the big question. Three people are tested, but only one will remain. 

I miss playing along. I miss believing that I am smarter than the contestants on TV. 

This is madness! The governor has to do something! The president should declare Jeopardy an “Essential National Resource” and order the 82nd Airborne to take charge of the game board. It is time for the Pope to call in a favor and request a miracle from on high!

“I’ll take disasters for $400, Alex.”

“It’s the best way to keep Americans sane!”

“What is watching Jeopardy every night, Alex?”

“You’re on the board.”

It has only been one night and I already find myself going into withdrawal. I feel my brain cells beginning to shrivel as one of the few mentally challenging shows on television is no more. 

They may make us wear masks! They may take our normal lives! They may take our freedom, but they will never… NEVER… take our Alex Trebek!

- Jim Busch

May 3, 2020

Dear People of the Future,

My name is Maria Palmer and I was 26 years old when I wrote this letter.

I wanted you know how everyone suffered during the cursed Year of the 20. The reason I call it a curse is because every 100 years when the century reaches the 20th year, something bad happens.

 it all started in 1720 when the first plague happened. One hundred years later in 1820, a cholera pandemic broke out. The next epidemic that happened 100 years later was the Spanish flu in 1920. Now 100 years later in 2020, a virus broke out all over the world called the Coronavirus.

 I had just started to my new job at a Giant Eagle bakery in March 2020 when we were told to stay in our homes. The virus shut down a lot of places. Even the Carnegie Science Center where I volunteer was shut down. I I volunteered at the Carnegie Science Center for nearly a year and a half.  Only certain places like the Giant Eagle grocery store was kept opened and restaurants had to learn how to do take out.

A month later I got a call from Kennywood Park telling me that I was rehired for the summer. I was so happy and excited to know I was going to be working at the Parkside Café at Kennywood Park again. But everyone had to wait to see how much longer the park was going to remain closed. 

 Everyone in the nation had to wear face masks in public places, constantly wash their hands and the grocery stores aisles could only be in one direction. We had to wear gloves and had to learn how to do social distancing which means people had to stay six feet apart from each other.

The children didn’t go to school for the rest of spring. Instead kids and adults had to learn to how to take classes online using video chat apps like Zoom which was usually only for conferences. The people also had to learn how to video chat using the Facebook app too. 

 All events were cancelled including weddings and high school proms. I even remember holidays getting cancelled too. The St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Pittsburgh was cancelled and during the Easter holiday, children could  only see the Easter bunny from a distance in a car parade or a drive through. 

 I remember that living indoors was not all bad. Some communities came together to enjoy a concert on their porches. The nation was also teaching young kids how to write letters to someone they missed and if there was a celebration, a parade would happen.

Drive-in theaters were making a comeback. A drive-in theater is where you watch a movie outdoors from your vehicle when it is nighttime. I still remember when I went to a drive-in theater. It was the best. I still remember the movie, Muppets from Space.  I enjoyed watching the movie and looking at the night sky. 

I must admit being stuck in the house for a month was not easy and the only time I was allowed to go out was to go to work at Giant Eagle. We had to get use to the new normal.

I am hoping you will prepare when you read this letter. I want you be ready for the next epidemic that may come your way when the cursed Year of 20 happens again after another 100 years. Please beware of the Year of 20 Curse. Who knows what kind of epidemic will come to you in the Year of the 20.

Signed, Maria Palmer

Born June 7, 1993

Graduated June 8, 2011 from McKeesport Area High School 

- Maria Palmer

____________________________

I spent a good bit of the afternoon social distancing in my workshop and listening to the radio. I like the block of information and public affairs programs that NPR runs on weekend afternoons. Today, at 3 p.m. they aired a radio play based on the oral histories of participants in the Kent State shootings.

Tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of the tragedy at Kent State. I have arrived at an age where I have a personal memory of historical events. I was a high school senior when the National Guard opened fire on the student protestors. The people on both sides of the firing line were just a few years older than I was at the time.

I learned about it while in German class. There was no announcement over the PA system. The news spread through our school like a fast moving storm. In a blue collar town, where a lot of kids would not be going to college, Vietnam was as close as the graduation ceremony at the end of that month.

There was a commotion in the hall as students spontaneously walked out of school on that Monday afternoon. Fraulein Verner, my German teacher for three years, stepped out to see what was happening. When she stepped back into the room, her face was pale and her lips were quivering.

She told us that troops had fired on some students and with tears in her eyes, said some were dead. Several of my fellow students stood up, collected their things and joined the exodus. Soon the entire class, myself included, was leaving. I went home, many students gathered for an informal rally at the nearby Renzie Park. Like the assassination of President Kennedy and 9/11, it is a day that is burned into the memories of people of my generation. 

Listening to the dramatization on the radio, I thought about the college kids who were shot and killed that day. Maybe it is the daily death toll from Covid-19 on the nightly news or maybe it is the life threatening disease my wife is fighting, but I’ve been thinking about mortality in recent days.

I wonder how many students who survived the shooting five decades ago, got ill and died from the coronavirus. They would be in the at risk group today. How ironic to survive a storm of 30 caliber metal jacketed bullets and only to be felled by an invisible virus.

I have been thinking about the four students who were not so lucky on that fatal day. What would their lives have been like? Would they have found love like me and raised a family? Become grandparents? Would they have died from a drug overdose, not uncommon at the time, or died later from HIV?

There is no way to know. I think of all that I have done, seen and experienced since that day. I’ve married, raised a family, traveled, had a rewarding career, and made good friends. I’ve seen many beautiful things, read many good books, listened to sublime music and generally enjoyed life. I’ve had my problems and worries, but on balance, I’ve been a lucky man. 

There is a quote, often attributed to Dr. Seuss that says, “Don’t be sad that it is over; rejoice that it happened at all.” It is printed on t-shirts, coffee mugs and plaques and is meant to cheer us up in times of loss. I’m not buying it. All endings are sad, whether they come at age 20 or 120.

Endings take us away from our friends and our families, away from the beauties and pleasures of the earth. I am certainly glad it all happened, that I experienced all the joys of living, but I refuse not to be sad when it comes to an end. 

• Jim Busch

May 2, 2020

I know exactly where I was on September 8, 1966. I was sitting on my parent’s living room floor with a yellow metal can of Charles Chips barbecue potato chips and a 12 ounce glass bottle of Coca-Cola. That night was the first time that I went to explore “Space, the final frontier” aboard the Starship Enterprise.

I’ve been a fan of the show ever since. My wardrobe does not include a Starfleet uniform and I don’t have a set of pointy Vulcan ears, but I know much of the dialogue from the first two series by heart.  

Some of my favorite Star Trek episodes are the ones where they visit alternate realities. Universes that are very similar to the crew’s own, but just different enough to make everything feel odd and alien. Today, I got a sense of how Captain Kirk, Bones and Mr. Sulu felt when this happened because I was transported to the alternate universe of the post Covid-19 Costco Warehouse. 

When my wife and I arrived at “Bizzaro Costco” it looked like the store we knew on our own world. It was a big, squat concrete block building painted in bright colors. The parking lot was filled with familiar vehicles, mostly SUVs. Here and there were metal corrals holding shopping carts the size of small pick-up trucks. Things seemed quite ordinary until people began exiting from their vehicles wearing masks over their faces and with gloves on their hands. 

In my reality, Costco encouraged as many customers as possible to visit their store. Bizzaro Costco strictly limited the number of people who could enter their building. They had set up a sort of cattle chute to herd those who wanted to enter into a single file. A masked sentry was posted at the entry portal to ensure only the allotted number of shoppers entered this sacred temple of consumerism.

The sentinel was also charged with making sure that no more than two people entered at a time. In this universe, groups of three or more violate the Covid Taboo and would invite the wrath of the Corona Gods. Once we were allowed to pass through the great gate, the sentinel performed a cleansing ritual on a shopping chariot with a sacred Clorox wipe and presented it to us.

Once within the temple walls, we began our quest. Everywhere we looked, we saw people dressed as we were, as it displeases the shopping gods to expose one’s mouth or nose within. In our universe, Costco is a giant retail machine designed to entice shoppers to buy as many items as their wallets and trunk space would allow. In Bizzaro Costco, large signs strictly limited how many items we could purchase, because to the Costcoans, greed and hoarding are considered mortal sins. 

We must have been pure of heart for we were able to collect everything we sought in our quest including toilet paper and sanitizing wipes. I noticed many things were missing from the Bizzaro Costco. There were many items from the shelves and the families that usually wander the aisles together were nowhere to be seen.

Most of all, I missed the sample maidens. In our world these blessed women, and a few men, post themselves throughout the store to offer sustenance to the weary pilgrims wandering through the canyons of consumerism. Standing at their stainless steel altars and wearing their ceremonial hairnets, they offer tiny bites of new products to all who pass by their toaster ovens. The Bizzaro Costco is a place for ascetics and fasting is enforced by the absence of the sample maidens, churros and the $1.50 hotdog and a soft drink snack bar deal. 

Our shopping quest was finished, but we had one more labor to complete. We had to pay for our treasures without touching the acolytes of the cash register. In Bizzaro Costco, they are untouchables protected from the shopping castes by Plexiglass shields and mandatory distancing. We parked our cart and they laid hands on our items and scanned their barcodes before returning them to my cart. I put some money in the collection plate and we were on our way.

Before leaving, the sacred objects we collected had to be inspected by the keeper of the exit portal. The inspector was encased in a clear plastic box which made him appear for all the world like a mechanical fortune telling machine in a penny arcade. 

In my favorite show, the crew of the Enterprise always managed to find their way back to their own reality. Spock would make some calculations and Scotty would jump start the dilithium crystals after warning Captain Kirk, “I cannot hold her, sir, she’ll never stand the strain.” 

 I am afraid that we will never find our way back to our old pre-Covid world. I fear that we will be stuck in this mask wearing, social distanced reality for ever. Whether we like it or not, we are all going where no one has gone before. The post coronavirus world is our final frontier.  

- Jim Busch

May 1, 2020

The day after my wife’s cancer diagnosis, I asked her what I could do for her. She gave me an abbreviated “honey-do” list with just three items on it, fix the broken lattice on our porch, sweep the patio and write her obituary.

I am usually good about completing these lists, I jump right on them. I completed the first two tasks but put off the third.

For many years, my wife has been my first reader, she is my editor and makes sure that my writing makes sense. I tend to use a “damn the grammar, full speed ahead” style of writing. She describes me as comma challenged.

After all the years together, she knows how my brain functions and how it tends to make odd connections that most normal people would not make or understand. She reins in my writing when it is wanders too far outside of the box. She is my critic, because we love one another she is the one person who can look me straight in the eye and say, “This is absolute garbage!” 

Most of all she is my biggest fan, she had faith in my ability to write, long before anyone else did. This is why she wants me to write her obit. She knows I know her better than anyone else and will correctly tell her story. I have always deluded myself that author Richard Bach was right when he said, “True love stories never have endings.”

Now she wants me to write the ending of our story.  She wants to be able to read and approve it. 

Like everything else she has done in her life, I think this is rooted in her selflessness. She knows that I am not good at talking about my feelings and that writing is a way for me to bring them to the surface. She wants me to do this not for her, but for me.

I wrote pieces when my father died and again when my mother passed away. Some of the best writing I've ever done came to me when each of her parents, whom I loved deeply, passed away.

After fifty years together, I have enough material stored in my brain to write a love story about my wife that would make War and Peace look like a pamphlet, but the words just don’t come.  I am choking up as I write this and I am not sure that I will be able to complete this assignment.  I desperately want at least a few more chapters.

I want to write a story with a happy ending.  

- Jim Busch

April 30, 2020

The safety protocols imposed by the Coronavirus are usually annoying. They force us to change our routines and inconveniences us. Sometimes, the restrictions are heartbreaking such as keeping people from their loved ones when they are fighting for their life in the hospital is cruel.

I got a taste of this heartbreak today myself. I had to wait in the car while my wife saw her doctor in Allegheny General Hospital. I had taken her there for tests the previous week and she was to receive the results today. The doctor’s manner after the test led us to fear that we were about to receive bad news and I wanted to be with her. Nearly 48 years ago, I signed on for better or worse and in sickness and in health. I have always taken these vows seriously.        

Sitting in the dingy parking garage, I never felt so useless in my life. I wanted to know what was going on beyond the door, beyond the guards and the quarantine barrier. Time seemed to crawl by and I kept looking at my watch. I watched people come and go through the door that was closed to me. Finally, my wife appeared and I could tell immediately that the news wasn’t good. 

I had to start the car and start driving because we were running late for yet another doctor’s appointment. In a way, I was glad to have something mundane like driving to focus on my attention. As we spiraled down through the garage, my wife told me what the doctor had said, she had inoperable stage four pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was not good. We sped off to the second appointment and discussed treatment options.  

Again, I couldn’t be part of the conversation because of the current crisis. The doctor in the second appointment was a bit more optimistic, but we were still facing a long haul with a very uncertain outcome. We were sent off to another hospital for blood work. Again, I found myself sitting alone with my thoughts in my car in an empty parking lot. 

Though my wife’s illness had nothing to do with the Coronavirus, I hated Covid-19 almost as much as I hated the cancer. I am not sure what I would have said had I been in the doctor’s office with her. I am sure that there is nothing I could have done, as I am neither a surgeon nor a miracle worker. I am certain that had I been in the room, it would have been the most distressing and saddest moment of my life. Despite all this, I wanted to be in that room, I wanted to be with my wife, more than I’ve wanted anything in my life. 

This coming October will be the fiftieth anniversary of our first date, we saw a double feature of The Out of Towners with Jack Lemon and Sandy Dennis and Wait Until Dark starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin at the old Eastland Theater. We enjoyed the movies and we enjoyed each other’s company.

We never looked back after that first date and in the last five decades we’ve shared everything in our lives, both good and bad, with one another. Today, the virus kept me from being there with her and I didn’t like it one little bit. I wanted to channel John Wayne and kick in the door and swagger into the doctor’s office. But I sat in my car, alone, and waited. 

I know a lot of people are living through tragedy right now. I know that the Coronavirus is taking people’s loved ones. I know this disease is keeping them away from the most important people in their lives during their most desperate moments. But today, my concern for the human race was put on hold. I feel like this is just between me and the Coronavirus.

This is personal.

- Jim Busch

_____________________________________

Editors Note: We asked YouthCAST members for what they want keep from their lives during the Covid-19 lockdown and what needs to go after the ban is lifted. YouthCAST is youth leadership program for McKeesport middle and high school students.

Here are their responses:

After this pandemic I would still play video games. That’s because there is no consequence from playing it. Another thing I’ll keep doing is going to parties. This is because it’s always a good time at anyone’s party.

Lastly, I would still travel places because I want to see things other than Pittsburgh. I would also still play sports because I love it. Things I won’t do would be going to buffets. That’s because you can’t really trust people nowadays with that. You never know what they will do. Another thing is not going to Sandcastle. You’re too close to people when swimming, and kids are unsanitary there.

• JaydAn Keys

I would continue to play sports, because if you are sick chances are you won’t be playing in the game anyway. I’d keep going to school because online schooling is the worst and I get a lot more work online than I would in school. I’d also continue to have friends over and go over friends’ houses because I’m not one to have many people over ever and know my friends are the same way. 

 However, I would not continue to go to baseball games unless extra precautions are taken because people come from different states all the time to see teams play. I also wouldn’t go to large gatherings with people who are not family because you never know who someone has been around or where they are from. Their area could have gotten hit harder with the virus and you’d never know. 

- Calise Johnson

I want to keep playing soccer because it’s my favorite thing to do. I want to keep playing Xbox because it’s calming and fun. I want to keep playing with my friends because it's my only way to have social contact. I want to keep working out because I want to be in shape.

 I want to stop being in my room all day but it’s really all I can do. I want to stop eating junk food because it's not good for me. I want to keep eating healthy because it is good for me. I want to keep going for runs.

- Isaiah Johnson

April 29, 2020

Today, I got into an online debate with a friend from California. She maintained that the coverage of the Coronavirus is too negative. She posited that the news should “accentuate the positive” and report that the real story is the “survival rate for the Coronavirus in the U.S. is 98.59%.” She felt that talking about the deaths, rather than the survivors, spreads panic. 

I consider myself an optimist. This is practically a requirement for salespeople. The only thing that enables us to put up with daily doses of rejection is our confidence in ourselves and faith in the future. As a manager, one of my sales people once told me that, “If I had been captain of the Titanic, I would’ve pointed out that ‘At least we won’t run out of ice for the bar!” Despite my upbeat outlook, I’ve always tried to be a realist, as well as an optimist. 

I strongly disagree with books like “The Secret” and “Think and Grow Rich” that teach if we truly believe in something, the universe will realign itself to make our wishes come true. They completely discount the place of luck and hard work in this equation. George Custer really, truly believed he could defeat any number of Sioux warriors—“how that work out for you Georgie?” Optimism is important, but it doesn’t change one single atom of the universe, it just puts us in a better position to deal with whatever the universe throws at us. 

In answer to why the media only prints the deaths and not those who recover, I told my friend about “Negativity Bias.” This is psychology’s answer to why the news has always followed a “if it bleeds, it leads” policy. People are naturally more interested in negative stories than in positive ones. Research has found that information of a negative nature has a significantly greater impact on our psychological state and our processes than positive events.    

There is a reason we put more weight on negatives than on more pleasant things. Our ancient ancestors lived in a dangerous world. The hunter gatherer who paid too much attention to how pretty the flowers were, might find themselves hunted and gathered by a lion or a bear. Our forebearers needed to pay serious attention to the existential threats all around them or we might not rule the planet today. This is a habit that has been ingrained in our blood and our brains for millennia. 

Although we are no longer likely to encounter a pack of hungry wolves on our way to work, paying attention to the things that can seriously hurt us still makes sense. Not so long ago I saw a T-shirt that read, Paranoids live longer, and I wholeheartedly agree. I know people are desperate and want to get back to work. I know small businesses are at the end of their ropes, but it doesn’t pay to leave the cave until we know the sabertooth cats are not still lurking just outside licking their chops.

PMA (positive mental attitude) will not make the Coronavirus go away. Our attitude does not determine our attitude like my old sales manager used to say, “I have a feeling that it also has very little to do with our immunity.” I think it is good that we know about the risks this disease presents.

Fear is a very useful emotion as long as we don’t let it paralyze us. Our ancestors eventually developed strategies to deal with and eliminate all the big nasty animals who wanted to eat them for dinner. They did not will this to happen by wishing that the bears and lions would disappear. They accomplished this by working together and using their brain power to overcome the dangers they faced.

This didn’t happen overnight, it took a while and they had to remain vigilant until the threat was gone.  I believe this approach will also work on the much, much smaller virus that is stalking us today.   

- Jim Busch     

April 28, 2020

My mood is sad today. Very early this morning my pet guinea pig Lucas died. I adopted Lucas and his brother Marcus last year from a friend who was no longer able to care for them. They were two cute fur balls with long whiskers, pink noses and timid dispositions. They made me feel like I was needed.

Lucas was primarily black and white with brown patches and Marcus was brown with patches of white. I adored the two guinea pigs immediately.

A week before Lucas became ill, Marcus had a stuffy nose causing him to snore, but he continued to stay active and eat normally. He’s a feisty little guy with a stubby leg, so he tilts slightly to one side when he walks or runs around the cage like corn popping. We thought he might have an allergy or a slight cold that would improve with time.

Lucas began breathing abnormally on Thursday evening. I told my family that I was going to find a local veterinarian who cares for small exotic animals. I wanted my guinea pigs to feel better, so I planned to call pet clinics on Friday morning because it was already late at night.

I pulled out a Vicks steam inhaler from my bedroom closet hoping it would help them breathe easier, but Lucas’ condition continued to decline throughout the night. He was gasping with each breath. I began to hear crackling sounds inside his small body. 

Lucas kept climbing on top of Marcus and nuzzling him as if he was looking for comfort. I picked him up, rubbed his nose and gently petted his back. I hoped with all of my heart that he would survive.

Around 1:00 a.m., I decided to take a shower. I felt helpless in assisting Lucas to feel healthier. I thought about how unfortunate the circumstances were for my little guinea pig. He has always been an enjoyable pet and I continued to hope for the best outcome.

I checked on the brothers after my shower and found that Lucas had crossed the Rainbow Bridge. My initial feeling was sadness, but I quickly proceeded in spreading paper bedding over the second floor of their enclosure. I call their large two-story wooden rabbit hutch the Guinea Pig Apartments because it has two enclosures and with a cage positioned on top which allows for a penthouse. Marcus and Lucas lived in the penthouse and my hairless guinea pig Sunflower lived on the first floor.

Marcus was standing next to a motionless Lucas. He looked at me as if he knew something was wrong. I scooped him up and placed him in the second floor of the hutch and provided him with a clean environment. I washed their water bottle and food dish for Marcus to use in his new space.

I gave him a carrot to chew on because guinea pigs love fresh vegetables. I believed this would distract Marcus from any fear of being relocated to a different area or the stress from suddenly being alone. I felt relief when he nibbled on the carrot. 

I could not leave Lucas lying in the cage, so I made a shoe box coffin for him. I took his limp body out of the cage and put him in the box with his wooden chew toy.

The shoe box was the perfect size. I covered the box with its lid and used a black Sharpie to write his name on the top. My husband would know what happened when he wakes up early and sees the shoe box with his name. I know he will give Lucas a proper burial.

I couldn’t sleep even though it was 3:15 a.m. and I was exhausted. I felt broken over my pet’s death. People may think it is silly to cry over a rodent. Maybe it is, but Lucas was my fur baby. Especially with him dying during these uncertain times of social distancing, quarantining and fears about thousands of people losing lives to Covid-19.

This week has been tremendously challenging. Lucas’ death feels like the straw that broke the camel’s back. My flood of tears will not stop. There is a tiny space inside of me that aches over the loss of Lucas. It has prompted me to think about the worldwide pain experienced by my fellow humans as they lose loved ones to the pandemic.

Marcus has a Saturday morning appointment at the East McKeesport Animal Hospital. He is active and eating, but he still sounds congested. I believe he has a good chance to recover if he receives antibiotics needed to clear up his respiratory system.

I believe there is a flicker of hope even for the smallest of creatures and I hope that light shines on my cute little guinea pig Marcus.

- Vickie Babyak

  ______________________________________

Earlier this week, an editorial cartoon in the Mon Valley Independent featured two people walking on either side of a path practicing proper social distancing. The man says to the woman, “This new normal is starting to get old!”

This is very true. The “new normal” is rapidly becoming simply “normal.”  Though a handful of people are resisting the changes imposed on us to fight the spread of Covid-19, most people are getting used to wearing masks and gloves in public and keeping a safe six feet away from others. 

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood said it best, “Humanity is so adaptable…it is truly amazing what people can get used to as long as there are compensations.”

In this crisis, the primary compensation is not getting a horrible disease and possibly dying. Several states have made steps to begin to try to return to the “old normal.” Despite the easing of restrictions, people did not immediately forget their fears and return to their old ways. 

Some business people chose not to open up their shops because they feared getting sick or putting their employees at risk outweighed their desire to return to profitability.

Those who did open found that their customers did not come streaming back. They also decided that staying healthy was more important than going out for Taco Tuesday and a Margherita.

Although it seems we are an exceedingly adaptable species, once we make a change we don’t seem to be willing to revert to our old ways. 

In less than two months, I will celebrate my 68th birthday. This means that I am an old dog who is not anxious to learn new tricks. I try to be spontaneous and to avoid getting into ruts, but the older I get the more I find myself falling into habitual patterns.

Psychologists say that it takes 70 days to permanently change a habit. We are well over half way there. I find that I’m not missing my favorite restaurants as much as I did a few weeks ago. I have taken up new activities to replace the ones I can no longer pursue. I find that I’m spending less money and getting healthier as I am exercising more than I did in the “old normal” times. 

I am not sure that if science found a cure for Covid-19 today and eliminated this scourge completely, that I would return to my old patterns of behavior. Like most people, I was driving down the highway of life, listening to the radio and singing along without a care in the world. Then suddenly, the Coronavirus ran out into the street chasing a red rubber ball. I jammed both feet onto the brake pedal causing everything to come to a screeching rubber burning halt.

Bracing for a crash, I saw my whole life pass before my eyes. Still clutching the wheel in a death grip, my heart was pounding and I found myself trying to catch my breath. Once I realized I was safe, I vowed to drive slower next time, to pay more attention to my surroundings, to do things differently. 

I have heard some people compare being in self-quarantine to being in prison. I think for many people the lockdown was more of a retreat. A time to break away from the hustle bustle of our day to day existence and think about, or meditate, if you will on what brings meaning to our lives.

Our culture has evolved into a giant marketing machine, cleverly designed to tell us what we should desire and what is supposed to make us happy. With the machine switched off and the noise damped down a bit, we can hear our own authentic voices.

Once we’ve stepped off the hedonic treadmill where we are constantly running off to buy more things to clutter up our lives, I’m not sure we will want to jump back on. We may realize that spending more time with those we love is more valuable than working overtime to buy things to show them we love them.

The pandemic has caused a lot of pain and suffering. It has forced us to make major changes to how we live our lives. Perhaps part of the compensation for being forced to adapt so rapidly will create a new awareness of what really matters in our lives.

Perhaps the reward for being locked up in our homes is a new appreciation of the simple joys of life and of the people we share them with. 

- Jim Busch

April 27, 2020

Though the Coronavirus lockdown has put a serious dent in our social calendar, my wife still invites the neighbors over for lunch almost every day. They don’t wear masks, some come formally dressed in elegant fur coats and others wear gaudy colors. This isn’t a concern, because they are naturally inclined to socially distance themselves from us and their fellow diners. 

Our guest list includes Mrs. Woodchuck, the Grey Squirrels, the Chipmunk twins Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal, the Blue Jays and several of their smaller avian cousins. I must say while their presence brings a lot of enjoyment to my wife and myself, they can put off their fellow guests with their atrocious table manners.

Rather than passing the food to the guest to their right, they ignore or even argue with them and try to eat everything on the table all by themselves. 

The menu for our daily lunch never varies very much, but our guests don’t seem to mind. My wife starts with an appetizer of pecan halves, a particular favorite of The Chipmunks. The main course is a generous serving of fine Virginia peanuts served in the shell. The dessert course is a serving of Sunmaid raisins. 

Each of our guests enjoys the buffet in their own way. The Blue Jays are our Foodies. They consider the selection of peanuts like a wine connoisseur choosing a vintage from his cellar. Rather than simply grabbing the first peanut they find, these blue feathered gourmands pick up and drop the nuts until they find the heaviest, and presumably the most delicious, one in the pile. With a squawk of delight, they then fly off to our blue spruce to enjoy the carefully selected morsel undisturbed. 

The Chipmunks are real stress eaters. The dart to the table and fill their cheeks with nuts and bolt for their hole in our stone wall. This is excusable because they are bullied by almost everyone else at lunch.

This, plus the fact that they occupy the bottom rung of the food chain, would make anyone a bit paranoid. They zig zag their way to the goodies, stopping every few seconds to stop, look and listen. They wave their tails in the air and make a chirping sound, probably to reassure themselves.

If a robin or a dove flies over them, they don’t wait to see if it might be a hawk, but immediately dive for cover. My wife takes pity on these anxious critters and hides some nuts in the rocks where only their tiny bodies will fit. 

Like relatives from different ends of the political spectrum, Grey Squirrels are prone to family squabbles at the table. If one squirrel is eating and another approaches, they start arguing in a loud chatter punctuated with violent gestures of their puffed up tail.

Usually, this ends with the smaller squirrel backing down. Occasionally, when the two opponents are well matched, the argument is moved to the trunk of our pine tree where they chase one another around and around in dizzying circles.

When they are able to dine in peace, the Grey Squirrels are discerning diners. They eat the raisins right away, holding them in their nimble forepaws like a kid eating an apple. They instinctively know that these soft delights will not last until the winter.

They do the same with the shelled pecans, but take the peanuts home in a doggy bag. This they carry away and bury around my backyard. Though we serve the neighbors lunch throughout the year, the Grey Squirrels aren’t willing to take a chance on our continuing charity. They like to have a little extra “squirreled away” for the winter. 

The Cardinals like to dine together. The brilliant scarlet male sits and watches his more subdued lady love eat and then she returns the favor. Their peaceful dinner turns raucous when another male shows up at the tableside.

Male Cardinals are jealous types, they are not interested in sharing their girlfriends or their lunch with other males and they often square off with their rivals. They hop around in circles staring one another down and flapping their wings until one tires of the game. 

Mrs. Woodchuck’s behavior at lunch puts the hog in Groundhog. She is on a gluttonous mission to consume as many calories as physically possible. She needs to do this because she probably has two, or possibly three, Chucklings (perhaps the cutest baby name in the animal kingdom) at home in her burrow.

She is the Falstaff of our luncheon guests, dominating the table and elbowing everyone else aside. She consumes the nuts like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. She holds the peanuts in her front paws and opens them up like a can of Pringles.  

Unless disturbed, she will polish off every last nut. When she is done, the only thing left on the flat rock that serves as our dining table will be fragments of peanut shells and hungry, disappointed chipmunks and squirrels. In a few weeks, she will be bring the children to lunch with her and we will have to put out a lot more groceries for our friends. We will have little Chuckling mouths to feed.

While we’re trapped in the house during this crisis, watching our friends through the picture window brings us a great deal of pleasure. We find their antics far more entertaining than anything Netflix has to offer. The best part of this wonderful show is that a ticket costs, quite literally, peanuts.

- Jim Busch

April 26, 2020

Dear Future Person,

Today is April 20, 2020 and the weed jokes abound, but nobody is celebrating in the way they envisioned. The days feel hazy all by themselves. Time seems to move agonizingly slow. The smallest moments feel frozen and immediate, like seeing a car drive by. You wonder if the person inside is ok, where they’re going, if they lost someone important to them, if they’re sick or if they’re struggling.

The trees are starting to unfurl and bloom. Tiny pops of color appear where yesterday there was barrenness. The world seems that way as well. The humanity that we sometimes felt we were losing and was being suffocated by the long winter of capitalism, is peeking out of the cracks as spring arrives.

This pandemic has amplified the innate compassion and care we have for each other, but were too busy and bogged down to act on. Now, there’s no choice, since everything has come to a grinding halt. It’s like we’ve been flailing around in quicksand, and have exhausted all our energy to the point where we physically have to be still. But in that stillness, we can begin to get unstuck. 

We are being forced to take a good hard look at what is not working, at what is keeping us all in the quicksand in the first place. We have to take a look at who is suffering the hardest. We have to patch the disintegrating support structures that aren’t working for everyone who needs them. 

Everyone is dealing with the isolation, the fear and the uncertainty in different ways. The people who would be vocally protesting injustice in the streets are now showing solidarity through sheltering in place to slow the virus’s spread.

The people who would stay home for a protest in the past are now endangering their neighbor’s safety by gathering in the streets to reclaim their constitutional rights. The irony abounds. But still, I can see their pain and their fear around not wanting the government or institutions to control their actions or their rights.

 I worry that in order to quell the pandemic and try to force a return to normalcy, rights and freedoms will be suppressed and people will not be able to speak out against it.

I see that while people are focusing on the pandemic, desperately trying to keep up with stats and deaths, that laws are being changed and rewritten that likely would not fly if people were not distracted. The writing is on the wall that the world will potentially look much scarier even after the virus is no longer as large of a concern.

The artificial barriers between people have become more tangible: a phone screen, a laptop, a mask. I never thought I would miss the crowded, sweaty pandemonium of a concert, the bodies pressing in on you almost oppressively.

I never thought that the memories I would yearn for would be so seemingly simple. The close confines of an airplane, a bustling city block, an intimate restaurant where you’re seated at the same table as a quiet couple and a group of friends. A house party where you cook and eat together. A group hug, a lovers’ tryst, a wrinkled hand of an elder and mentor clasped in friendship that bridges generation. For the time being, these are only memories. 

I hope that you cherish these moments of close contact and pray that they never get taken away from you. I hope, wherever you are, that you find yourself on firmer ground. I hope things have changed in the world you’re living in. I hope that the leaders in positions of power actually reflect the values of a democracy.

I hope that people have built structures of mutual aid and support, that you care for your own and those who don’t look like you, that creativity and resilience and the power of the human spirit are allowed to flourish.

I hope that I can say that my actions played even the tiniest part in building the better world that you now find yourself in.

I hope that you write your own letter to your successors in 2220 and let them know the lessons of your present, their past, and a shared future.

- Aviva Gersovitch

________________________________

My wife and I are experienced at sheltering in place. When we were first married we lived in a cabin in the midst of the Allegheny National Forest. We had no neighbors, central heat or plumbing. It was all very Walden Pond, except that we lacked the pond and had to carry our water from a spring. The closest pizza or Big Mac was a little over thirty miles away.         

Winter made social distancing particularly easy as we were often snowed in. We parked our truck along the side of the paved road and dragged any supplies we needed in on a sled down our rutted dirt road. During the summer months, we spent much of our time in the woods gathering firewood for the winter. I worked ten hour shifts in a Titusville machine shop, forty miles away, so my wife and our infant son had to entertain themselves. 

On Sundays, we would roast hot dogs in the fireplace, read and play with our son. When we tell people about this time in our lives we get one of two possible reactions. Some people can’t get over the idea of living without plumbing, using an outhouse and bathing in a galvanized wash tub. To them, our mountain home sounds awful, like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. I never realized how obsessed our culture is with tile floors and running water. 

More romantically minded people think our sojourn in the woods sounds idyllic. They think our time was like on vacation. They pictured us chasing butterflies through a field with flowers in our hair. To tell the truth, our life in Forest County fell somewhere in between. It was quiet and peaceful. We were surrounded by beauty and there’s something to be said for stepping outside your door to pick wild blueberries for your morning pancakes. On the other hand, it required a lot of hard work and getting out of bed on a sub-zero morning when the fire had burned out overnight will wake you right up.

My wife and I agree the years we spent in the woods were some of the best in our long marriage. It brought us closer together, we had no one to rely on but each another. Once when we were gathering firewood in the forest, the battery on my old truck died. There was no one around for miles, and cell phones were yet to be invented. We could do one of two things, we could wait for a ranger to happen by in the next few days or we could get out of this fix ourselves. Since we only had a little water and a couple of diapers for our son, failure was not an option. 

I cut down a young locust tree to use as a lever and my wife found a big rock. My wife got in the driver’s seat and put the truck in neutral, I put the locust under the back bumper and braced my shoulder against it. My wife got out of the truck and picked up her rock. Using my entire body, I pushed the locust log moving the truck forward a foot or so. My wife quickly chocked the wheel with the rock. I took a breath, reset my pole and we did this all over again. We moved the truck about a quarter of a mile up the hill using this inchworm technique.

At the top of the hill, we loaded my son and wife into the truck. I gave the truck a nudge with my shoulder and jumped in as it started rolling down the back side of the slope. I quickly caught the truck in gear to start it up. This is a much more effective relationship building exercise than painting the kitchen together. 

Today, we relived a much happier memory from that time. The night before I took a book off my “read some day” stack and fell in love with the language the author had used. I stayed up to 3 a.m. reading, unable to put it down.

When I woke up in the morning I told my wife, “You’ve got to hear this” and read her several chapters from the book. In our “back to the land days” I often did this. This is what happens when you are trapped in a cabin with an English literature major.  Fortunately, my wife enjoyed my readings and quite honestly there wasn’t much else to do in the woods.

When we decided to rejoin the world to give our kids more opportunities in their lives, our lives got much more complicated. We acquired cable TV, went to movies, and eventually bought computers and attached ourselves to the internet.  Our weekends filled up with shopping trips and movies, so my reading sessions grew fewer and farther between. 

Today’s revival of this practice brought back happy memories of our first days together. The book that impressed me so much was The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg. I bought this book some time ago at a library bag sale. I didn’t know the author, but the cover grabbed me so it went into the bag and on to the shelf.

When I picked it up last night I realized that this book had a lot to say to those of us experiencing this crisis today. The author had suffered through World War II in her native Italy. I found her thoughts on how living through a traumatic experience changes things especially interesting.

This is what she had to say: “We shall not get over this war. It is impossible to try. We shall never be people who go peacefully about their business, who think and study and manage their lives quietly… Something has happened to us. We shall never be at peace again.”

I’ve come to think of the message of this book like it was a beautiful butterfly, lying dormant in a chrysalis waiting for me to crack it open during this crisis. I am thankful that the crisis helped me to discover this gem and that it helped me to resurrect an enjoyable part of my life.         

- Jim Busch

April 25, 2020

My wife was taking a nap, so I used the opportunity to slip off and see Blue Eyed Mary. I’ve pursued a love affair with this gorgeous lady for over five decades. This is not as salacious as it might sound.

My wife not only knows about my love for Blue Eyed Mary, but shares it. Blue Eyed Mary is a wildflower that grows along Braddock’s Trail in North Huntingdon. Most years I get to spend some time alone with them, but the Coronavirus has gained her many new admirers. 

Normally, when I pull into the parking lot at the entrance to the park, there are one, maybe two, cars in the lot. Today, there were over twenty vehicles there and I had to park along Robbins Station Road.

The combination of a beautiful sunny spring day and the closure of the majority of businesses and entertainment venues brought a lot of new people to the trail. It seems that the wonders of nature is America’s recreation of last resort.

I set off down the hill and into the woods. Blue Eyed Mary didn’t disappoint. Drifts of blue and white flowers adorned the hills on both sides of the trail. Blue Eyed Marys are what botanists call “winter annuals.” This means they bloom in the spring, are pollinated by insects and then they drop their seeds in the fall.

The seeds fall into the leaf mold and germinate over the winter. The number of blooms is dependent on many different factors, the severity of the winter, how rainy the previous summer had been, and the thickness of the leaf canopy.

Some years there are just a few of them in the park. All the stars must have been in perfect alignment this year because there had to be hundreds of thousands of the blue eyed beauties in every direction. 

I have to confess, my intention was to take a walk, but I wound up taking more of a “sit.” I wanted to slow down and take in all the beauty around me.

I would stroll along and then take a seat on a convenient rock, stump or log and just let my eyes drink in the beauty. I have seen the Grand Canyon, the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies and redwood forests of California. All of these places were beyond description, but Braddock’s Trail was the equal of any of them. 

Blue Eyed Mary is a very generous lady. She shared the spotlight with Wood Phlox, yellow Dog Toothed Violets and Solomon’s Seal. A handful of late blooming Trilliums, both red and white, were still present, as were some Trout Lilies.

The sun shining on the umbrellas of the Mayapples made them seem to sparkle against the dull burnt umber brown of the leaf litter. I stopped along the way to take photographs and take in the scene. 

It was odd that there were so many people on the trail. I saw trail runners, people walking their dogs and families on outings. One young mother had packed a picnic lunch and was sharing it with her two daughters astride a log surrounded by wildflowers. All they needed was a bottle of Coke and it would have made a perfect TV commercial. 

I engaged several people in conversation at a safe social distance. Probably because I was taking pictures, several people asked me about the flowers, particularly the Blue Eyed Marys.

I told them the names of the plants and a little about them. I talked to several people about how the limestone geology under the trail made the soil sweet and this accounted for the variety and proliferation of the flowers here.

I am a retired trainer, so this allowed me to revisit my old role as a teacher. It also was in alignment with advice from the poet Mary Oliver:

“Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.” 

This beautiful day and nature’s bounty made following her instructions quite easy. 

Three different people told me although they lived in the area, they had never visited the park before. This made me think that at least one good thing would come out of the Corona crisis, at least it is introducing people to the natural beauty outside their back door.

I hope that once the movie theaters, restaurants and stores reopen that they don’t forget to come back and pay their respects to Blue Eyed Mary.

- Jim Busch

April 24, 2020

According to my calendar, I am supposed to be teaching classes in Orlando, Florida today. This appointment has been in my book for over two years.

For the last twelve years I’ve taught advertising seminars at the annual Association of Free Community Papers (AFCP) conference. The AFCP is a national organization which supports small community papers and shoppers like the Pennysavers around the United States and Canada. Of course, this year the event had to be cancelled.      

For once, the universe has punished me for being proactive. Though I was never a boy scout, I like to be prepared. I like margins, I like to have a financial cushion in the bank, I never let my gas tank go below a quarter full and I like to arrive early for appointments.

I had my lesson plans completed and my PowerPoints finished by the middle of January. If my crystal ball hadn’t been in the shop, I would have known not to be in such a hurry to finish them. Technically the conference is postponed, but I am fairly certain that it will eventually be canceled. 

When I retired from my job four years ago, I tried to back away from my volunteer work with the association. The board of directors got together and convinced me to stay on for just one more year.

The next year they gave me a special award recognizing my work for the industry, and of course begged for one more year. The next year they began paying me for my services. I knew I was destined to be a lifer.

I feel a bit sad about missing out on this year’s conference. These conferences allowed me to take my wife on some very nice vacations. They have taken us to a lot of places that we probably wouldn’t have visited otherwise.

We’ve been to San Francisco, Palm Springs, Atlanta and San Antonio. We’ve watched the sun set in Key West and marched in a third line parade in New Orleans, mostly on the association’s dime.

Last year’s conference was in Las Vegas and we used this as an excuse for a cross country road trip across the plains and over the Rocky Mounties. We were looking forward to going to Orlando as our daughter was going to accompany us this year. 

Mostly I’ll miss seeing my friends. As the curriculum director for the association, I work with a team of trainers to plan the educational content of the conference. Though we only see each other once a year, we’ve become a very close knit group.

Last night we would have been together for dinner. Normally we would spend several enjoyable hours catching up on each other’s lives and reconnecting. In addition to my training team, I have made many friends among the usual suspects, the people who attend the conference every year. 

I will also miss teaching my seminars. My sessions are usually filled with young sales people and junior managers. Their energy and enthusiasm is contagious and I actually feel pumped up after a long day of teaching. I find working with these people very satisfying and makes me feel like I still have something to offer. 

Like many other businesses, the free newspaper industry is sure to take a hit from this virus. Members of the AFCP serve the many small businesses that have been forced to close due to the imposed lockdown.

I am afraid many of my friends will lose their newspapers some of which have been in their families for generations. Even worse many of them are older and live in small towns with limited access to major hospitals. I hope that I do not lose any of my friends to the pandemic. 

There is an old proverb that says, If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. The conference committee has been planning the Orlando conference for three years. I had my first planning meeting with the training group a year ago and started working on my part of the program six months ago.

God is having a big belly laugh at all of us right now. My crystal ball isn’t back from the shop yet, so all I can do is hope and plan for next year.

This is all any of us can do.      

- Jim Busch

April 23, 2020

During the Coronavirus lockdown many people have taken on new roles. Parents have become teachers. Some good people have found themselves in the business of manufacturing medical face masks. Lots of people accustomed to eating many, if not all, of their meals in restaurants, have become reluctant chefs. I have also found myself with a new occupation—designated shopper. 

My wife usually does the family food shopping, in fact she handles pretty much every aspect of feeding our family. We got married when I was three months into my twentieth year. I went straight from my mother’s cooking to my wife’s.

This was a definite upgrade since my mother was a terrible cook and my wife is a culinary prodigy. I never went through a bachelor kitchen phase of development, so my food preparations skills are very limited. I can only manage rudimentary campfire cookery involving sharpened sticks, hot dogs and the occasional marshmallow. I’m not even very good at that hallmark of American manhood, the backyard barbecue grill.

I should explain that my wife and I are among the last practitioners of “Ozzie and Harrietism.” Our lifestyle is a 21st century version of a 1950’s sitcom. For more than 40 years, I went to work and she stayed home and took care of the house and our children. This was a conscious decision on our part. We both agreed that having a full time parent on duty was better for our children. 

At the risk of being taken out by a squad of feminist ninjas, I have to admit that I have never done a load of laundry and have changed perhaps five diapers in my life. I am not some macho hillbilly who wanted to keep my wife under my thumb. My wife was on board with this plan from day one. She was and remains convinced that caring for a family and raising children is the most satisfying and important career on the planet.

This choice required sacrifices. I worked two jobs for years and when I became a commissioned salesman, 12 hour days were the norm. We shared my in-laws home to keep expenses down and we’ve only bought one new car in our lives. Mostly we drove old “beaters” that I bought cheap and fixed up. I kept a big garden and did all our home and appliance repairs myself. 

Our anachronistic lifestyle was based on a division of labor and careful matching of individual skills to the job. We believe our strategy was quite successful, we have two wonderful adult children. My wife deserves full credit for this. She fought the school board to ensure they received a good education, was involved in all of their school activities, was a scout leader and gave them an immense amount of unconditional, no holds barred, completely selfless love. 

As my career developed and our kids grew up, I attempted to shoulder more of the load at home. My wife wanted no part of this. Once she got out of a sick bed with a fever and gave me a body block worthy of the NFL player because the clinking of dishes told her I was cleaning up the kitchen. I am not allowed to do “her” dishes because she told me that “I do them too slowly.” I did not know that dishwashing was a timed event.

On the few occasions when I have attempted to cook a meal, she accused me of “wrecking her kitchen.” The only appliance I am allowed to use in “her” kitchen is the toaster. She said I might get to use the microwave in a year or so, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.

Recently she and my daughter went out for the day. Since I sleep late, she left a bagel for me to toast for my breakfast in her absence. When I took the bagel, which she had sliced for me, to the toaster, I found a yellow post-it note on its shiny surface. The note reminded me to use the “Bagel Button” and to carefully watch the bagel so it didn’t burn. I have run milling machines and engine lathes but apparently operating a toaster is beyond my meager ken.

Like most great cooks, my wife is very particular about the ingredients she uses. She likes to do her own shopping but we decided that I should take over this chore during the current crisis. She has had some health problems in the past and I am blessed with a robust constitution. She hates me doing this, but these are perilous times. I am a bit anxious about taking on this chore, not because I fear the virus but because I know I am doomed to screwing it up. 

Today my wife gave me a shopping list. This is not the typical “Bread, eggs, milk, butter” list. It looked more like a treasure map directly out of Robert Louis Stevenson. When I looked at it, my favorite Long John Silver quote came to mind, “Yaaar … them that dies will be the lucky ones mateys!” Each item came with detailed instructions. “10 Navel oranges—medium size with thin skins—pick the heavy ones.” 

 I can count to 10 even with gloves on and I guess I can judge their weight, but how am I supposed to measure the thickness of their skin without a dissection kit? Every item on the extensive list had similar choosing instructions plus GPS like directions describing their location in the store. Yaaarr - go 12 paces to the south of the hangman’s tree, turn to starboard, go 11 paces and their X will mark the spot where ye will be finding the black olives.

I put on my mask and my gloves and set sail for Giant Eagle. I chose a square rigged shopping cart and using my map and the stars to navigate, I found all the items on my list. I exchanged a few doubloons for my victuals and loaded them in the cargo hold of my vessel and set a course for my home port in the SS Subaru.

When I brought everything into the kitchen my wife inspected each item. Though she looked askance at several of the oranges, perhaps their skins were a few millimeters too thick, she gave me a smile of approval. I felt a strong sense of satisfaction in completing my task, but I will be happy when the quarantine is lifted and I don’t have to stress over picking proper produce ever again!  

- Jim Busch

April 22, 2020

While driving to the credit union along Route 30 today, I saw a funeral procession in the far lane. Of course, I could not know any of the details about the deceased. I didn’t know if they had died from Covid-19 or from other causes. I didn’t know if they were young or old, had died suddenly or after a long illness. I could not tell if the Coronavirus had an impact on the deceased person’s life, but I did know that it had affected his or her afterlife. The funeral procession was very short, consisting of just a silver grey Cadillac hearse, a matching limousine and just one car with its headlights on and a magnetic Funeral flag on its left fender. 

The social distancing requirements implemented to stop the spread of Covid-19 has made conducting our culture’s normal funeral rituals impossible. We no longer gather to view the body of our deceased family and friends to say goodbye.

We are forbidden to get together to share a meal and our memories of the departed person. The short funeral procession was a result of taking social distancing all the way to the graveside. We can no longer be there to watch the body to be interred.

Though they have changed in recent times, our funerary practices have long served as a means for us to deal with the loss of a loved ones. I wonder how the inability to follow the prescribed steps of mourning will affect those left behind when someone passes from the Coronavirus or other causes. 

Continuing on my journey, I drove past the Penn Hills Post Office. Seeing the funeral procession had me thinking about the rituals which surround the loss of life. This is why I noticed that the flag in front of the post office was flying proudly at the top of its pole.

I wondered why the flag hadn’t been lowered to half-staff. The tradition of lowering the flag goes back to the 17th century. Folklore says that the lowering the flag leaves room for the invisible flag of death at the top of the pole. The current number of Americans who have lost their lives to Covid-19 now tops 46,000 people. If there is ever a time when death’s flag should be flying at the pinnacle of our flag poles, it is now.

I find it odd that the Coronavirus has garnered far more attention than its victims. Except in the case of a few notable victims, there has been very little coverage of those who have died. Perhaps it is the very scale of the deaths. The numbers are so large that we can’t wrap our heads around them.

The news gives the big picture, the big numbers. This weekend it was reported on television that the Boston Globe’s obituary section ran a full sixty pages, but didn’t mention one single name listed there. We did not see one single photo featuring the face of the fallen. 

After the 911 attacks we saw photos and profiles of the people who fell with the towers, at the Pentagon or aboard Flight 93. We saw them die in real time and then we saw their faces and heard their stories. The victims of Covid-19 are largely anonymous.

It could be the creeping nature of their deaths. On 911, the deaths came quickly, they all died within just a few hours. Death came dramatically with the collapse of great buildings, fire, smoke, sirens and clouds of dust. Covid’s victims drown as their lungs fill with fluids. They die alone without video cameras or even a family member to tell how the story of their lives ended.

I hope when this disease is put under control and the dying is finally done, we will find a way to honor these people. They deserve it and the people they left behind need it. We need to lower our flags and visit the graves that hold the ones we still love. The people we will miss forever. We need to mourn and we need to remember.

Only then will we be able to move on.     

- Jim Busch

April 21, 2020

The first thing my wife and I received this morning was a text from our niece. She sent us a video created by her daughter Seneca.

Seneca is six years old and overflowing with joyful exuberance. I find her absolutely delightful. Whenever she visits us, she always wants to go to Uncle Jim’s house which is what she calls my workshop and studio. I sit her down at my drawing table, hang my shop apron around her neck, take out a huge pad of newsprint and give her a box of multicolored markers. 

Seneca loves to draw and I love to watch her process. She picks out a color that pleases her and quickly makes a mark on the paper. After intently staring at the line for a while she gets to work. She uses the time to decide what her first mark looked like. It might remind her of a bird, a house or a flower. Once she knows what she has drawn she completes the picture.

It is a very Zen process. For a first grader, she is a very good artist. She likes using my grown-up art supplies and appreciates the fact that I don’t try to tell her what to do. 

The video she sent us was all Seneca. Like every other American kid, Seneca is doing her schoolwork at home. Her Earth Day assignment was to build a simple birdfeeder with her dad. They made the small table like feeder and placed it in the yard and filled it with seed. Seneca stationed herself at the bathroom window which offered the best view of her creation. 

When the neighborhood grackles discovered the handout she got so excited and decided to capture the moment on her mom’s cell phone. She couldn’t contain her excitement so the video jumped around like a GoPro film of a pogo stick competition. She kept shouting, “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness” over and over, interspersed with little girl giggles of pure joy. My wife and I watched the video several times and it made our day.

We normally visit my wife’s sister and her three kids and their extended family about once a month. They live in Mercer County and with the social distancing requirements we haven’t seen them since January. This morning’s video made me realize how important our devices have become during the Coronavirus crisis. They are the thread that keeps us connected with one another. In the last few weeks in addition to regular phone calls, I have held Facetime conversations with family members, received videos from friends and have participated in several Zoom meetings. 

This is a difficult thing for me to admit. I am inclined to be a Luddite. I am the kind of person who carries a sketchbook and watercolors on vacation rather than a camera. I own an impressive array of power tools, but tend to use my grandfather’s handsaws, chisels and planes for most jobs. I am the customer who prefers to go into the bank instead of using the ATM because I like chatting with the tellers. 

The fact that I have become so dependent on my electronics comes as a surprise to me. I like to experience the world directly, without it being filtered through any sort of device. Despite this, I find myself becoming addicted to craft lessons from the store where I buy woodworking supplies.

Almost every day I take time to watch the Barnes Takeout: Your Daily Serving of Art video on YouTube. These programs from the Barnes Foundation, an art museum in Philadelphia, help fill the hole in my life created when the local museums closed. I enjoy being given a personal tour of a masterwork by a curator. 

Because of my reluctance to embrace modern technology, my kids sometimes call me “the unfrozen caveman.” For a long time they were convinced that I was an Amish infiltrator working undercover to destroy the modern American way of life.

If a techno-curmudgeon like me can become addicted to his electronic devices, how will our society’s reliance on them impact the post Covid-19 future?

Will people question why they need to report to an office when they can work from home? Will movie production companies continue to invest in theatrical releases when they can make more money streaming films? Will people still go out to restaurants when they can order their meals online? 

Like so many things about the Coronavirus crisis it is Film at 11! We will have to wait for the answers to these questions. One could argue that millions of years of face to face interactions have conditioned us to need being with our fellow humans.

Will a few months of isolation reset our instincts? It’s hard to say, perhaps using Skype is enough to satisfy our innate need to sit around the campfire with the other members of our tribe. Maybe future anthropologists will talk about how primitive humans living in 1 BC (before Coronavirus) had quaint superstitions about living what they called “in real life”.         

- Jim Busch           

April 20, 2020

I was feeling a bit hemmed in by the Coronavirus quarantine, so I decided to take a little trip. I walked out my backdoor, sat down in my reading chair and set off on my journey around the world. My journey took me to France, Greece, Italy, Japan and England. Along the way I stopped by Egypt and India. My total cost for this trip was $1.99 and didn’t require reservations, a passport or even a face mask and gloves.

The magic carpet that carried me on my journey was a book titled How to Look at Sculpture by David Finn. I bought this beautiful book at a library sale last fall. Since then it has been languishing on my “read when I have time pile.”

For the first time in a long time this pile is starting to shrink. I have read a couple of books per week since I was in grade school but being under Coronavirus House Arrest has given me more time to read. 

The closing of the libraries has also forced me to tap into my strategic book reserve. I am a power user of the Carnegie Library system. Though I have trouble remembering my family’s birthdays, I have memorized my library card number.

In my defense, birthdays only come around once a year, while I type my card number into the Carnegie website several times a day. I not only order books from the Carnegie’s inventory, but also use them to borrow books from library systems around the country.    

Like Oscar Wilde, “I can resist anything except temptation.” One of the biggest temptations I face is the library’s New Books shelf. Even though I have a wonderful stock of books to read at home, the siren call of new books entices me. I always seem to find several new volumes that I simply “have” to read. Since these books must be returned in a couple of weeks they move to the top of the stack like first class passengers on a plane. I plow through them while cobwebs form on the books I actually own. 

I am glad circumstances forced me to pick up the David Finn’s sculpture book. Finn is a writer and photographer who specializes in high end books about art. He has published over 60 books on art, so his reputation proceeded him. This gave him extraordinary access to some of the most beautiful art in the world. His photographs in this book were so well done that it was like I was with him in Florence or in the Louvre. I was glad to have him for my tour guide.

Like everyone else, I am starting to show signs of severe cabin fever. My book stash may not be a cure for my desire to go out and experience the world first hand but they help. Like an aspirin, they can’t cure the headache but they make it bearable.

To help those who don’t have a stash of books to fall back on, I’ve been leaving the books I’ve read in the Little Library box by the grocery store. If this goes on too long, I may have to resort to rationing my books.

I took inventory of my collection and then made some calculations carefully accounting for my accelerated rate of book consumption. I now know how long I can hold out before having to buy a book from the destroyer of book stores, Amazon.

If I got the math right, my book supply will run out in 154 years, three months and 17 days.     

- Jim Busch

April 19, 2020

I have never been the most focused person. I have always had a lot of interests and have spent my life flitting from one to the other. Since the Coronavirus lockdown began, many of the activities I normally pursue are currently off limits. One of the activities that I can still indulge in is my love of nature, particularly botany. 

It seems to me that the spring wildflowers are particularly beautiful this year. I am not sure if this is actually true or if it just seems this way because I am spending more time in the woods. We did have a very mild winter, so perhaps this is one of the few benefits of global warming. I also know that the bloom is heavier in some years than in others. These things run in cycles. 

Today I parked my car at the Twele Road on the Great Allegheny Passage bike trail and walked about four miles upriver toward Dravo. At several spots I was so struck by the beauty around me that it took my breath away. I don’t believe I have ever seen a year where the trilliums were so prolific. I saw hillsides covered with the white three lobed flowers. They seemed to be perfectly placed like the pattern on a fine oriental rug. In one spot they flanked either side of a small waterfall which provided a soundtrack for the scene. 

A little further down the trail, I came to a patch of young ferns. Some had leafed out but most were still unfurling their foliage. Pennsylvania’s forests provide the ideal habitat for these ancient plants. I am not sure if it is true, but I’ve heard that our state has more varieties of ferns than anywhere else on the planet.

They add a lushness to the forest floor that I find delightful. In my grandfather’s day, fiddlehead ferns were a springtime food staple. The name fiddleheads comes from their resemblance to the carving on the head of a violin and they were a much needed source of vitamins and greens in the time before refrigerated railroad cars put fresh salads on American tables year round. 

The graceful spiral of the fiddleheads is an expression of the Golden Ratio. A proportion that is found in natural phenomena from the whorls of seashells on the beach to spiral galaxies in the heavens. I stopped to admire them as they reach toward the sun. 

On my way back to the car I found a small patch of red Trilliums. These are much rarer than their white flowered cousins. Their crimson petals are smaller and more delicate than the white blossoms. I have gone entire seasons without seeing a single red trillium. They seem to only grow on the river side of the trail. Perhaps the red flowered variety prefer a wetter microhabitat than the more common ones.

 As I drove home, I thought about a Frank Lloyd Wright quote, “The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.” I wondered if this is why nature seems so vital to me this spring. It could be due to all the time I am spending alone in the woods since the rest of the world locked its doors.

Maybe like Wright, my advancing years has simply made me more appreciative. Perhaps the daily tally of deaths on the evening new is helping me to appreciate life more. When asked if he believed in God, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, Of course I do, I just spell it N-A-T-U-R-E. Perhaps Wright’s God is just putting on a major show when we need it most. 

- Jim Busch

April 18, 2020

It was fortunate for me that the Coronavirus crisis hit the United States in the late winter and early spring. By the time the lockdown took effect the weather was starting to get warmer. I say this is fortunate because I am inclined to be a wanderer.

During these three friendlier seasons I tramp through the woods and along the rivers. When the weather is too cold or too wet, I abbreviate my nature walks and wander through more civilized spots. With all my winter wandering spots closed, I wouldn’t know where to go. I guess I’d just have to get some artic explorer gear. 

In the winter, I will go to the library and wander the stacks or to the museum to wander the galleries. I particularly like to wander secondhand stores. I find going to the St. Vincent DePaul store, the Goodwill, the Center for Creative Reuse or Construction Junction intellectually stimulating.

Poking through the jumbled piles of the flotsam and jetsam of our society is far more interesting than going to a store where everything is carefully arranged in neat rows curated by type, color and size. I embrace the clutter and randomness of secondhand shopping. I often find something that triggers a forgotten memory from my younger days. Something that reminds me of my parents or my grandparents. 

Not long ago I found a copy Big Book of Arts and Crafts for Children by W. Ben Hunt. I adored this book as a child. Often I will find a book that was new to or discover an author that I never knew existed .

Some of these have become personal favorites. Secondhand shopping also allows me to be a philanthropist on the cheap. I often find books or other items that I know a friend or a family member would enjoy. For a few pennies I can make someone I care about happy. A ceramic frog for my sister’s collection for $1.25, but seeing the smile on her face is priceless.   

Used objects have stories to tell and require a bit of imagination. When I see a collection of souvenir spoons or hand bells, I know someone’s life has taken a turn for the worse. These inexpensive mementoes from tourist spots like Atlantic City and Branson, Missouri were once personal treasures. They were collected on vacations taken in happier times. A collection of ceramic chickens or knickknacks emblazoned with apples may have been birthday or Mother’s Day gifts from children and grandchildren. 

At one time these items had an honored place of pride in someone’s home. Now they are thrown on to a shelf next to a Miracle Egg Cooker purchased during a weak moment from a late night infomercial.

Perhaps these treasures followed that person from a large home, to a cozy apartment to a nursing home room. These kitschy memories were not given away willingly. They may have been the last ties their owner had to a long lost loved one or to a time when the future was still bright and happy.

When I see these items I know that the person who loved them could no longer hold on to them. They have been forced to leave their home or their health or mind may have failed. The old saying, “you can’t take it with you” applies to bric-a-brac as well as your stock portfolio. Sadly many items find their way to the Goodwill store when the person who loved them has died. 

I wonder when this crisis passes and the secondhand stores reopen, if the shelves will hold even more collections of these sad treasures than they normally do. Will a shelf full of ceramic poodles mark the passing of a beloved grandmother? Will a collection of vintage Jim Beam bottles mean that a crazy bachelor uncle will no longer be around to tell his wonderful stories?

Only time will tell.    

- Jim Busch

April 17, 2020

This is the 30th daily account I have written for the The Corona Diaries. There is no end in sight for this crisis. Although things seem to be leveling off, there are still new cases every day and sadly, people continue to die from Covid-19. Several incidents today, one on television and one I saw for myself, made me wonder if people are starting to experience “Corona fatigue.”

The television news reported a number of protest rallies around the country demanding the governors of Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia open their states for business. These protesters gathered in large groups with only a handful of people wearing masks or gloves. They waved American and Confederate flags while holding signs saying that they are being deprived of their civil rights. These movements style themselves as liberation movements and believe that social distancing mandates take away their freedom to live as they choose.

I can understand how these people feel the way that they do. The restrictions imposed to contain this disease have put great financial and emotional pressures on many families. People want to get back to work and dream of a return to normalcy. They want to go to a tavern or a restaurant and they want to spend time with their friends and families.

The success of the social distancing protocols may have lulled people into a false sense of security. If they aren’t directly impacted by having someone close to them contract Covid 19, they may minimize the danger. Like a person who lives next to a highway who has grown accustomed to the roar of the traffic, they may tune out the daily reports of new cases and deaths. 

These people seem to have forgotten that individual rights always come inextricably bound to individual responsibilities. The classic example of this relationship is that freedom of speech does not include the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater.

A person who does this would endanger others who could be harmed trying to evacuate the crowded hall. We have a responsibility to protect those around us from harm. Prematurely relaxing the stay at home restrictions could cause a resurgence of the disease endangering us all. I stay isolated and wear my protective gear not only for my own safety, but also because I have a responsibility to not harm anyone else. 

I also question the economic sense of ending the restrictions too soon. “Dead men buy no pizzas!” If people get ill or die from a resurgent virus, they are removed from the workforce and their productivity is lost to society. If relaxing the rules early causes a new wave of deaths it will deliver a stunning psychological blow to our entire nation.

People who wrongly believe it is safe to return to their pre Corona lives and venture out only to be driven back by a new wave of infections may become afraid to leave their homes when things eventually get better. We may produce a generation of people who are afraid to participate in society. 

I noted the other sign of Corona Fatigue while picking up my dinner. My wife was not feeling well so I decided to treat myself and pick up dinner at Luciano’s Italian restaurant. I called ahead and ordered a calzone. I donned my mask and my gloves and headed off to get my food.

I have to give credit to the restaurant for establishing a very efficient way to conduct their business without putting anyone at risk. Using tape to mark out 6 foot intervals between customers, they created a one way path in and out of their shop. Customers went in one door, paid their money and a clerk wearing a mask slid their food across a wide counter eliminating the need for physical contact. Food in hand, they walk through the empty restaurant and out another door to the parking lot. 

What disturbed me was that I was the only person in the long line wearing a mask. Most were not wearing gloves. After a month of constantly being told to wear protective gear, I was surprised to see so many ignoring these warnings. I could understand this if wearing a mask was expensive or painful. I could see not wearing one if it was moderately uncomfortable, but none of these potential excuses hold water.

Everyone has a handkerchief or a scarf at home. The truth is that people have become bored with complying with the guidelines. 

Dying from a global pandemic is a tragedy. Dying because people are tired of not going out for wings or too lazy to take a second to put on a mask is tragic, absurd and shameful.          

- Jim Busch

April 16, 2020

My family is solidly blue collar. I am the only person in my generation to earn a college degree and I am the only one who held a white collar job. This, plus a reputation for being a bookworm, led me to being drafted as the host of “Uncle Jim’s Homework Hotline.”

For years, my nieces and nephews would call me when they had to write a report or if they needed help doing their homework. As they grew older and graduated high school I was able to shut down the hotline. After a hiatus of ten years or so, I had to reopen and rebrand the entire operation. It is now “Great Uncle Jim’s Homework Hotline.” With the shutdown of the schools due to the Coronavirus crisis and parents taking on the role of teachers, business has never been better. 

This morning we got a call from my wife’s nephew Adam and his daughter Addison. Addison was studying history and needed some help. She was doing a lesson on the Texas War of independence. I am sure Adam had studied this in school, but apparently he had actually forgotten the Alamo.  They needed help putting the events of 1836 in the Lone Star state in the proper order. This particular subject wasn’t much of a stretch for me. I’ve been fascinated with the Alamo since reading 13 Days to Glory: the Siege of the Alamo by Lon Tinkle in the sixth grade. 

Via Skype, I helped Addison complete the assignment. One of the reasons that my hotline is so popular is that I offer what marketing types call a “value added” service. I always go the extra mile for my young clients.

In this case, I told Addison about the time her great aunt and I visited the Alamo and how it was guarded by Texas Rangers with big guns on their hips and wearing big white cowboy hats. We told her how the Alamo was a special place and the rangers would stop anyone from speaking louder than a whisper. 

Addison is only in fourth grade, so I gave her the popular history version of the Alamo. I told her about the brave men who stood up against an entire army to free their country. I even sang her a few verses of the Johnny Cash song, Remember the Alamo:

Grieve not little darling my dying, if Texas be sovereign and free.

We’ll never surrender and ever with liberty be.

Hey Santa Anna, we’re killing your soldiers below!

That men wherever they go will remember the Alamo.

I spared her the grown up facts behind the story. The fact that the “liberty” the Texans were fighting for was the right to own slaves. Almost all of them came from the pre-Civil War southern states.

I didn’t tell her that the Alamo’s defenders disobeyed an order to evacuate and that their sacrifice served no tactical purpose. I believe in teaching children the legends. I want them to absorb the ideals hero stories are meant to teach. I know that George Washington never cut down his father’s tree, but I want children to believe that telling the truth is a good thing and that there are honest men in the world. There is plenty of time for them to learn the sad truth about mankind or man-unkind.

I wonder how the legendary history of the Coronavirus crisis will read. I imagine it will be filled with stories of brave doctors and nurses fighting a noble battle against an unseen enemy. It will be about brilliant scientists who were struck with a sudden insight that produced the cure for the dreaded disease.

Of course, the noble scientist shared their miracle cure freely with the world with no thought of personal gain. A big part of the story will be how people pulled together to help one another get through the crisis.

Only scholars working from original source materials will know, or care, about scuffles over toilet paper, about greedy profiteers or of bad actors who intentionally coughed on the produce in grocery stores. Missing from the books will be stories of frightened people dying alone in hospitals and people who were too selfish to follow medical safety protocols. 

This is how we like to tell the stories of our past. We always think the golden age was the one just before we were born. My mother-in-law, who was born in 1925, used to tell me how much better things were when she was a child. To this I replied, “Back in the good old days, when you had wonderful things like breadlines, polio and Nazis!”

I am not sure why nature has installed a filter in our memory circuits to screen out the worse parts of the past, but there is no doubt that we have one. I can’t wait to romanticize the “Great Coronavirus crisis of 2020, when everyone was brave and we all pulled together,” because it ain’t much fun right now! 

• - Jim Busch

April 15, 2020

Emerson Elementary School in West Mifflin closed in June 2019. It’s about a seven minute walk from my house. 

I have frequently ventured up there in the past, but it has become my safe go-to place during the pandemic.  This sort of just happened. It wasn't a conscious choice.

There are a lot of long curving sidewalks for walking and a large grassy area. There is a small, but nice playground that is currently closed. They recently got rid of the trash cans, but they are still maintaining the property. I have been walking up there since the beginning of this mess.

My favorite Ginkgo trees are across from the lot, close to the new-ish Dollar General. Once upon a time, Edison Middle School occupied the space where the Dollar General currently sits.  Those trees have been there as long as I can remember. 

I can remember playing in the piles of leaves when my husband and I were dating. I also remember photographing them, but back then it was with a camera that required 35mm film. The trees were tall then, so I am guessing those trees have been there a really long time. Perhaps longer than I have been alive.

My daughter didn’t attend  school there, despite its close proximity to our home. I decided to send her to Propel McKeesport because I liked how they worked with children on an individual basis. My daughter could read on her own at the age of three, so she needed to be challenged. I have voted there from the age of eighteen, until they closed the school. Our Girl Scout meetings were also held there until the girls finished eighth grade. 

Last fall I took some nice photographs of the ginkgo trees again. The lighting was just perfect! I get enthralled with their beauty every single fall.

Somehow I find myself going up there almost daily for a walk to find some comfort. To clear my head. To stop the constant stream of thoughts. 

I even Skyped with my close friend in Denmark from up there. It was great to see her and her family. It was a little bizarre because we are separated by a time difference of six hours and an ocean, yet we are experiencing  the same pandemic. We took art classes together when she briefly lived in the United States. She was a very talented artist, but became an engineer. We kept in touch all this time because we share a love of the arts and a childlike sense of humor. 

It was noisy at my house earlier in the day.  My husband is working from home and he frequently has long meetings. My daughter had a Zoom meeting for her history class. I had a doctor’s appointment through Zoom, as well.  I decided to walk up there and have my appointment there. I prefer to text, but since we are socially distancing it is nice to see people’s faces.

Following my appointment, I walked back home and went through the motions of the day. I felt like I needed more fresh air and it was about to get dark, so I decided to walk up to Emerson again.

The air smelled so clean, crisp and fresh. I walked around for a really long time. I watched how the light changed. I watched the sun set from the steps near the closed playground.

Then it was dark and I sat on the curb where the kids would normally step out of school to board their buses to go home. I’m not sure if it was the beautiful brooding indie playlist on my phone, or just my surroundings. It was very calming and I ended up lingering there for another half hour. Pensive music seemed to amplify how I was feeling. I was soaking it all in. Being present in the moment allows me to feel hopeful and connected to my surroundings.

Lately It has been pretty cold, so I haven’t been up there for two days. I plan to walk  there tomorrow and visit my exercise spot, my office space, my appointment place.  

It is my ever changing whatever it needs to be space.

- Jennifer McCalla

____________________________

Today for the first time in a month I spent a significant amount of time with another person beside my wife.  I took on the role of social distanced nature guide. I took my daughter’s friend Gabe to Deadman’s Hollow to take photographs.

Gabe went to college for photography and after a rough patch is trying to get his life back together. He is assembling a portfolio and trying to sell some work online. During my walk yesterday I realized that the hollow trail would offer him an excellent opportunity to capture some interesting images. 

I picked Gabe up at noon. In the car we both wore masks which made communications difficult as Gabe is almost completely deaf due to a hereditary defect. After a short drive we parked at the Boston Recreation parking lot and set off down the trail. We stayed at a safe distance from one another. I believe that the other people on the trail must have thought we were arguing as I had to speak to Gabe in a very loud voice while looking him straight in the face from six feet away. 

Gabe grew up on the South Side and has little exposure to the woods. I pointed out some of the trailside plant life and answered his questions about the river. When we got to Deadman’s Hollow he was fascinated by the ruins of the old ceramic pipe works. He took photos of the brick portals of the kilns still black with the century old coal tar baked on their surface. I explained the layout of the site and pointed out the circles where the old dome shaped ovens once stood. 

Gabe shot the roofless main building with its cast concrete walls and trees growing were the workmen once formed terracotta drain pipes. He photographed from every angle inside and outside the building. I enjoyed seeing this familiar place through the eyes of another person. I was interested in the plant life, geology and industrial history of the area. Gabe was drawn to the colorful graffiti covering the walls. He made me look at them in a new way. 

We moved up the hollow and I showed him a spot covered with trilliums growing between mosses covered logs and rocks. I showed him tiny hepatica flowers and the last blood root of the season. He got down in the stream bed to capture the light on the rippling water. We discussed composition and how the light changed in the narrow space between the high tree covered hills. 

Before leaving Deadman’s Hollow, I took Gabe to meet two old friends. The first was a tortured box elder tree. Like a weatherbeaten old person with a bent frame and a craggy face, this tree exudes character.

Only about twenty feet high, the elder’s twisted trunk was covered with warty burls and pockmarked with fist sized holes. It wore patches of green moss like a torn garment. Despite its near death appearance this tree was not only sprouting soft green leaves, but had delicate flowers on the ends of it branches.

Box Elder flowers look like tiny yellow green strings of pearls. Gabe was as enthralled with this old forest veteran as I am. I explained the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, a term he had not heard before. In Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi expresses a love for the beauty of transient and imperfect things. 

After shooting multiple photographs of the Box Elder like it was a runway model, I showed Gabe the biggest tree in the hollow, a massive American Sycamore.

Sycamores are among my favorite trees. Tall and sturdy, they are usually well balanced so that they look like a tree in a child’s story book. They have an unusual flaky bark which leaves most of their smooth white trunks exposed. In the sunlight they standout and shine like a lighthouse in the dark forest. They are magnificent trees and this particular tree was an exemplar of its species. Sycamores are the divas of the forest and I told Gabe about a poem I once wrote about them with the title Sycamores are never subtle.

Since I was already breaking the social distancing rules by taking Gabe along on my walk I decided to break another rule on the walk back to the car. I stopped and picked a tiny bouquet of violets for my wife.

In the Victorian language of flowers, Violets represent undying everlasting love. I picked about twenty of the tiny blossoms, framed them with violet leaves and twisted a paper napkin from pocket to form a crude little bouquet, This violated my personal “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” policy, but they were so lovely. I justified this bit of larceny because they are very prolific this year and violets are far from endangered.            

After I dropped off Gabe, I had to pick up a few items from Giant Eagle. I learned that I was not the only scofflaw living in White Oak. The store had instituted a “one way” policy in their grocery aisles.

In the interest of social distancing, they posted do not enter signs at one end of the aisle and one way signs at the other end. The theory is that if everyone is traveling in the same direction it would be easier to stay six feet away from our fellow shoppers.

I noticed that only a small percentage of the people in the store paid any attention to this new rule. I have two theories on why this. Perhaps people were so intent on getting the items they needed that they didn’t notice the new one way signs.  The other possibility is that when you make everyone wear a mask, they naturally start behaving like outlaws!  

- Jim Busch

April 14, 2020

I spent a good bit of the day in my workshop/art studio today. This building is my “Retirement home.” I had a freestanding two car garage constructed behind my home when I left my job several years ago. This gives me a spot to exercise my creativity and relax. It is outfitted with all the tools and art supplies I have been collecting since I was just a child. Having this space to retreat to has been my saving grace during the Coronavirus pandemic. 

In addition to tools and art supplies, I collect bits and pieces of things that I might use for a project in the future. Today I was working with a piece of a black cherry sapling I had cut out of my daughter’s hedges a few weeks ago. Its dark speckled bark and branching form attracted my attention. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it when I collected it, but I knew I’d find a use for it.

Today I looked at it and decided it looked like a miniature version of a mature black cherry tree, all it needed was a bird to complete the illusion. I grabbed a piece of paper and started to sketch out a pattern for a Pileated woodpecker. After several iterations I managed to produce a drawing that satisfied me. 

The next chance I get to work on the project, I will cut a blank out of basswood or clear pine, carve it into the shape of a woodpecker, sand it down, paint it, and then mount it on the stick which will in turn be mounted upright on a base. I can picture each step of the process. This is what Stephen R. Covey called the “First Creation,” creating something in the mind before it is created in the real world. 

I like working this way. Taking something and turning it in to something else. Something either useful or beautiful, or ideally both. What I can do is limited by the materials I have before me. This is what is known as artistic constraint. Having to work within limitations gets the creative juices flowing. Some artists impose limitations on themselves to enhance their creativity. Some artists will limit the colors they use or the materials or their subject matter to challenge themselves.

A few years ago I saw a large portrait across a gallery at the Orlando art museum. It looked like a large format black and white photograph. When I got closer I realized that it was a painting made by pressing the artist’s thumbs on to an ink pad and them touching them to the canvas. The delicate shading was accomplished by pressing his thumbs down repeatedly until the ink was exhausted. The artist chose to limit his tools to his two thumbs and a black ink pad to see what he could do with them.

This amazing portrait was done by one of my favorite artists, Chuck Close. Close knows something about constraints. He lost his father when he was just 11 years old, he struggled in school because he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia and had a neurological condition that made it painful for him to walk. At the age of 48 he suffered a spinal arterial collapse which left him paralyzed.

He has been confined to a wheelchair for the last 32 years. On top of all of these challenges, Close suffers from prosopropagnosia, also known as face blindness. Close is neurologically unable to recognize and remember faces. He cannot recognize even his own wife until she speaks, a serious problem for an artist who specializes in portraits. In spite of all of these problems, Chuck Close continues to be one of the most productive and respected artists in America today. 

The stay at home order imposed to fight the spread of the Coronavirus is a constraint. It limits where we can go, what we can do and what we have to work with. This can be seen as a hardship or as a creative constraint. We can complain or we can use our creativity to find ways to remain productive and engaged. There is nothing we can do to make this situation go away but we can make the most of what we have. Perhaps we will come out of this crisis as better and more creative not in spite of the constraints we’ve been subjected to, but because of them.    

- Jim Busch

April 13, 2020

My weekly copy of The New Yorker arrived in the mail today. Close to a 100% of the copy in this week’s edition concerned the coronavirus. Even several of the magazine’s famous cartoons dealt with the current crisis. Every other media outlet shares this same obsession. The television news, online feeds and newspapers are all Covid-19, all the time. Journalists dissect every aspect of the story, the scientific minutiae, the political ramifications, the economic impact and projections of how long the current crisis will last. 

For the first time in living memory every game has been canceled, so we don’t even have sports to distract us. Even during World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared baseball a critical war industry. He knew that the nation needed something else to think about rather than the war.

I agree with Chief Justice Earl Warren who said, “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures” I’ve never been much of a sports fan, so I count on the comics for my source of positive news. This week even Sunday’s color comics were tinged with strips about the virus.

Given the singular focus on the Coronavirus, I wonder what else we are missing. What other stories are languishing for attention while we are laser focused on the health crisis.

I can understand why this story looms so large, it has killed so many people and affected us all very directly, but what is happening in the periphery?

I know people are still dying from opioid overdoses. I know veterans and depressed teenagers are still taking their own lives and children in hospital beds are fighting cancer. 

Just the other day I was returning from one of my walks when I got stuck in a traffic jam on Route 48. I was surprised to be caught in traffic since so few people are venturing from their homes. When the cars started moving I discovered the source of the congestion was a serious accident between a small SUV and a lawn service truck. In the next day’s paper I learned that the driver of the SUV had died at the scene. 

This person’s death was an all too common story. He went out to go to work or to run some errands, something he probably had done a thousand times before. He never imagined that in a few hours he would be dead. A death completely unrelated to the Coronavirus. I wondered if the soon to be deceased driver of the SUV was thinking about the Coronavirus when the fatal moment interrupted his thoughts. 

In The Right Stuff, his book about the space program, Tom Wolfe repeated a phrase he learned from the test pilots and astronauts he profiled, “It can go at any seam.” This was their way of saying that there were a thousand ways for a jet plane or a rocket to fail. A thousand ways for them to die a fiery death. Faced with the daily possibility of death these men were not morose or withdrawn, they were driven to enjoy every moment of their lives and lived life to the fullest. 

Despite the Coronavirus’s domination of the news cycle, even during the height of the crisis it was not the leading cause of death in the U.S. In fact, it ranked number three behind heart disease and cancer. For all of us, at any time, it can go at any seam.

During the renaissance period and age of enlightenment, scholars kept a skull or a painting of the grim reaper in their study as a “memento mori”, a reminder of the inevitability of death. A reminder of why they should live their lives to the fullest.

I hope the terrible news of the coronavirus and its toll will serve us as a memento mori, a reminder that we should live every day to the fullest. 

- Jim Busch

April 12, 2020

Today is Easter Sunday. Due to the Coronavirus quarantine, my wife and I spent the day home alone. The only time we stepped outside of the house was to pick up the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from the sidewalk.

I even skipped my walk today. We watched television, took a nap, read and talked. The highlight of our day was exchanging Easter cards and baskets. We ate dinner and grazed on Easter candy.

Toward evening, my wife remarked what a nice day it had been. After almost five decades together, we still enjoy one another’s company. We are still each other’s best friends. This makes the stay at home mandate much easier to bear. We are very different people, but like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, we fit together perfectly. 

Not long ago, I was getting out of my car for a walk at Indian Lake Park. A couple about the same age as my wife and I got out of the car next to me. As soon as they left their vehicle, she plugged a headset into her phone and plugged the white buds into her ears. Her husband put on an old school bright yellow headset radio with a silver antenna sticking up above his right ear.

Without exchanging a word or even a glance at one another, they set off side by side at a brisk pace. Apparently they were carrying the concept of being “together apart” to the extreme. In step and out of touch all at the same time. Their devices said that they had no intention of talking to one another during their walk.

 I wonder how the Coronavirus will impact relationships of the people stuck together in lockdown. The enforced togetherness, plus the pressures of unemployment is sure to stretch many relationships to the limit.

I know couples whose lives are like the parallel lines we learned about in geometry class, they go on forever, side by side, but never intersect. People who share a life, a home, even a bed, but never actually talk. Their conversations never reach below the surface. Their interactions consist of two individual monologues in search of an audience. 

The problem with pretend intimacy is that it is extremely stressful to maintain. Without the distractions provided by going out in to the world, some people are going to snap and relationships are going to fray. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of divorces will spike in the coming months. 

To paraphrase Nietzsche, that which does not kill a relationship, just might make it stronger. The slower pace of life, the cellmate intimacy and the absence of distractions due to the stay at home order may bring some people closer together.

Being compelled to make dinner together or having the time to actually talk may make people recall why they came together in the first place. In addition to the spike in divorces, there may be a corresponding spike in the number of couples renewing their vows.

One thing is certain, after all this is over, many relationships will be changed forever.   

- Jim Busch

April 11, 2020

My wife spent the day cooking up a storm for tomorrow’s Easter feast. She baked a huge ham, prepared three varieties of deviled eggs, and made a veritable vat of scalloped potatoes. She made strawberry Jell-O pretzel salad, roast asparagus, Brussel sprouts, baked beans and pickled beets with eggs.

Like her mother before her, my wife delights in making big holiday meals for the family. The only problem is this year we will not be getting together for our traditional meal because of social distancing. Looking back, we realized that this will be the first time in our 47 ½ year marriage that we will eat our Easter dinner alone. 

My wife is not the kind of woman who’ll let a little thing like a global pandemic stop her from feeding her “chicks.” At Costco, she purchased a variety of restaurant takeout containers and foil pans. She used these to prepare Easter care packages for our son and daughter’s family, my sister and her son, plus our next door neighbor. By mid-afternoon our kitchen looked like the headquarters of a very successful catering concern. 

In addition to our family’s favorite Easter dishes, she created special Coronavirus Easter Baskets for our children, their spouses and our grandson. She had decided not to bring our usual baskets down from the attic, fearing that their wicker construction would provide hiding places where the heinous virus could lurk. In their place, she used large zip lock storage bags filled with chocolate eggs, magazines, gift cards and other items individually selected for its recipient. 

All that remained was to arrange the logistics of delivering the meals and Easter Basket-bags. She called our children and offered my services as the family’s designated Uber Eats driver. Both of our children opted to come pick them up, either because they thought I would demand a generous tip or because they wanted to see their mother. I’m not sure which. With the skill of a train dispatcher trying to avoid a collision, she scheduled pick-up times, so that they would not overlap.

My wife delivered a “heat and eat” Easter dinner to our next door neighbor who is an 80-years old bachelor. He usually eats most of his meals in local diners. Since the lockdown began, my wife has been making sure he has plenty to eat. I made a delivery run to my sister’s apartment. I placed the food on her kitchen table, and visited for a while with her in the living room while I remained in the kitchen.

We had to forgo our usual hug and I left my mask on for the entire visit. My sister is 79 and a lung cancer survivor, so she is at greater risk from this disease which preys on those with impaired respiratory systems.

My son was the first to pick up food for his family. My wife and I visited with him for over an hour, but at a safe distance. We each sat in separate corners of our kitchen, like prizefighters resting between rounds.

He told us how our grandson was getting on with his schooling and how they were spending their time. Not seeing our only grandchild is one of the most difficult parts of abiding by the rules imposed by the Coronavirus quarantine.

After he left, my daughter arrived with her wife and their friend who has been living with them until he gets back on his feet. Again, we all retired to our individual corners and caught up on the latest family news. My daughter came bearing a gift, the “ears” of an Easter Bunny cake. These cakes have been a family tradition since she stood on a kitchen chair to help her grandmother decorate the “Bunny” when she was just a toddler. Even though my wife talks to her several times during a typical day, being in the same physical space seems to make the conversation flow better. Again, we had a good conversation from our neutral corners of the kitchen until it was time for her to go.

After our kids were gone, our house seemed strangely quiet. My wife and I have lived alone here since my mother-in-law passed away almost 6 years ago, but the idea of spending the holiday alone seemed to amplify the silence.

I know we were both thinking about the raucous holidays of the past when our little house was packed to its seams with family and chaos. We remember the year our kids started a food fight with “Jell-O Jiggler” eggs and hit my wife’s elderly Aunt Ruth with one.

My wife and mother-in-law were appalled, but Ruth laughed and said she hadn’t had so much fun in years. Our house has sheltered four generations of the family and every square inch of it is soaked with memories. My wife and I will dine alone tomorrow, just myself, my wife and the ghosts of Easter’s past.  

- Jim Busch

April 10, 2020

The morning started with a long phone conversation with my close friend Ralph. Ralph and I worked together and we discovered we had many things in common. We’re both mill town kids, he grew up in Rankin which is down the river from where I grew up outside of McKeesport. Despite our blue collar roots, we share an interest in history, philosophy and art. 

Since we retired, we’ve gotten together every few weeks for conversation and the preservation of our wives’ sanity. We usually meet for a late lunch, because we often spend three hours sitting and talking at a restaurant table. Arriving after the lunch rush means we don’t tie up a table needed for another diner. This strategy and a healthy tip keeps us welcome at our favorite Mexican restaurant. 

Back in the B.C. years, Before Coronavirus, we would visit some of the local galleries and museums. We’ve been to lectures and other art events. I find Ralph’s company delightful, as he is an enthusiastic storyteller and exudes an enthusiasm for life that I find rejuvenating. One of the first things I intend to do when the all clear siren sounds at the end of the Coronavirus crisis is get together with Ralph for a long, long lunch.

As old men are wont to do, we reminisce a bit about our younger days. Like they say, “The older I get, the better I was!” Today is Good Friday, so we talked about how our hometowns marked this event back in our day.  The immigrant communities we grew up in were largely Catholic and most families spent Good Friday afternoon in church. The businesses locked their doors and the business world ground to a halt. We both remarked that the Coronavirus quarantine is an eerie echo of those days. 

Of course, we talked about what we were reading and watching. I had some books I wanted to send him, so when we hung up I packed up several books to mail to him. Our conversation left me feeling nostalgic, so on the way to the post office, I drove up Olive Street to the site of my old church, St. Mary’s German.

The last time I was there it was a vacant lot strewn with shattered shards of the church’s red bricks. Today, a small apartment building styled to look like a white New England bungalow occupies the former footprint of the sanctuary. The old parochial school building that looked like the one in Bing Crosby’s Going My Way film has become a parking lot. The last building remaining from the old church complex is the 1950’s school building. 

The spot across Olive Street where the brown stone protestant church was located is now a vacant lot, planted in bright green grass. I honestly don’t remember the name of the church or even what denomination it represented. All non-Catholic churches, whether they were Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist were protestant churches in our Catholic family.

The only exception were the Greek and Russian churches with their onion domed steeples which were lumped together under the label of Orthodox. All I knew about them was that my friend, Dave Tamudy’s family celebrated Christmas and Easter twice, once for gifts and goodies and again in their church a week later. 

I always enjoyed Good Friday as a child. There was no school, so I could play outside in the morning before getting cleaned up and dressed for church. I liked going to church especially on Good Friday.

Saint Mary’s German, we always had to say the full name with strangers to avoid confusion with Saint Mary’s Polish church on Versailles Avenue, was a magnificent building. It had a tall square brick steeple topped with the same red roof tiles that covered the main part of the church. It was considered a masterpiece of Romanesque church architecture and it is a shame it couldn’t have been saved when McKeesport fell into decline.

Like the mills where most of the male members of the church worked, its interior was a long narrow space with a high ceiling. Instead of a dark mill bay, the space was flooded by light from the double row of stained glass windows along both walls. The exposed beams of the ceiling, the pews and the choir loft were fashioned from a dark, very Germanic wood.

Four-foot tall bronze lanterns with smoked glass panes hung from the dark ceiling on long chains. These always reminded me of something that would hang in the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle in Robin Hood. The sanctuary was lined with stone columns supporting roman arches that added to the castle motif. 

I am sure my love of art first took root at Saint Mary’s. The walls were covered with frescoes portraying scenes from the bible. The nave behind the altar was ornamented with a twice life sized painting of the holy trinity and Mary. Angels hovered above this painting near the high ceiling.

I especially liked looking at the Stations of the Cross set into the walls around the perimeter of the sanctuary. These three dimensional polychrome plaster sculptures were created by Bavarian craftsmen and shipped to McKeesport from the old country. I remember staring at them when I was supposed to be listening to the priest’s sermon. I found the story they told far more interesting. 

Everything about our church said it was built to stand for the ages. It was a tangible symbol that the German speaking immigrants who had built it were here to stay. My grandfather remembered the church being built. He was impressed that Father Bell, the parish priest, exchanged his long black cassock for workman’s overalls, climbed the scaffolding and laid bricks alongside the laborers. It is a tragedy that Saint Mary’s lasted only about a century, a victim of both economics and the exodus to the suburbs. 

The best part of the Good Friday church services for me was the reading of the passion. I never saw a play until I was in college and we seldom went to the movies, my mother thought it was a waste of money when TV shows were free.

The reading of the passion was the closest I got to theater as a child. Mr. Rodman, the leader of our church choir had a voice that would put James Earl Jones and Luciano Pavarotti to shame. He was a mill worker like everybody else in our world, but U.S. Steel’s gain was Broadway’s loss. I loved how his deep baritone voice made the words of St. John come alive. 

My religious views have evolved and I no longer belong to any organized religion, but I am glad that Saint Mary’s German was a part of my upbringing. It was there that I learned to love art and to respect the power of the spoken word. The church building is long gone, but I still carry part of it with me in my heart.    

- Jim Busch      

April 9, 2020

Every morning for the last four weeks, I have started with a Morning Check In meeting on Google Hangouts with my team. As the Marketing Director, it's my responsibility to keep us connected and productive during our work-from-home time. In-person check-ins seem to be the best way to make that happen.  

While these check-ins can run from really work-related to more focused on what-did-everyone-have-for-dinner-last-night as the crisis rolls on, they have been an awesome opportunity to get a closer glimpse into my teams' lives. 

We have a social media manager who has a wild dream every single night. Yesterday, she did her check-in hangout unknowingly below a light blue, feathery dream catcher. Who can beat that coincidence? She also shared a spectacularly easy and delicious banana bread recipe and got us hip to ginger bug starters. 

Our marketing project manager has a new ginger-colored Goldendoodle puppy named Disco, who we can hear yipping playfully in the background and who energetically jumps into the picture every once in a while. Her boyfriend is just finishing law school and is hoping he will be able to take the bar exam this fall as scheduled. 

The events and content coordinator has been tirelessly training for the marathon, but it was cancelled. That doesn't stop her from training, so we get to hear about her runs. She also made homemade hot pretzels from scratch last week.

Pretty impressive.

Our designer loves being at home and has recently built a sand beach for her hamster on their coffee table. She's incredibly talented, but incredibly sleepy, and does most of our hangouts in a reclined position. 

Each day, we end with a Check Out which I was apprehensive about doing at first. Until I found that it creates a swift, distinct ending to each day, so our work doesn't needlessly drag into the rest of our lives. 

-Jill Beiger Frederick

To protect ourselves from the Coronavirus, my family has embraced social distancing and personal protective equipment. This includes Hooten, our faithful watch owl.

Since many families aren’t lucky enough to have a watch owl, let me tell you a little about Hooten. Hooten is a molded plastic sand filled owl about twenty inches tall. He has been a member of our family for decades.

Hooten is a rescue, he was abandoned at the Norwin Goodwill store. I spotted him while shopping there and brought him home for just a $1.50. I mean who could resist those big eyes. 

Hooten’s original job was to shoo birds away from our vegetable garden. He bravely took up a position on a fence post and tried his best. The birds soon grew accustomed to his presence and began perching between his pointy ears. It seems that Hooten was a lover, not a predator.

To protect his pride and dignity, we allowed Hooten to retire from his agricultural duties. He took up residence on the porch opposite our kitchen door where he has lived ever since.

Hooten soon became a full-fledged (pun intended) member of our family. We sometimes regale younger members of the family with tales of Hooten’s adventures. As we got to know him, we learned that Hooted loved holidays. He throws himself into every event on the calendar, dressing as Santa or one of his elves for Christmas, as a Pilgrim for Thanksgiving and as Uncle Sam for the Fourth of July. This past St. Patrick’s Day, he dressed as a Leprechaun and we learned that his full name is Sean Patrick Hooten Owl’Shaughnessy. In the age of social media, Hooten has developed a loyal following on Facebook.

This year in addition to donning his traditional Easter bunny ears, Hooten is sporting a protective face mask. He has also requested that everyone respect his space and stay at least six feet away from him. We tried to assure him that there is no evidence that owls can contract COVID-19 and that he had nothing to fear. His reply, “I don’t give a hoot. The mask stays!”

I know how Hooten feels, I’ve been careful to wear my mask whenever I go out. It is uncomfortable and hot, but if it helps to protect me, my family and my neighbors, I’ll wear it until this crisis passes. The most distressing thing about wearing a protective mask is that it hides my smile.

I am a big believer in the power of smiling. Maybe Davy Crockett implanted this idea in my head. When I was a child I loved watching Disney’s stories about the “King of the Wild Frontier.” I begged my mother for a real coonskin cap, but was told they carried lice. This didn’t stop me from creeping through the bushes in our yard with a toy flintlock rifle and an old purse of my mother’s slung across my shoulder as my “hunting bag.” To this day when I’m walking through the woods, the show’s theme song plays in my head.

“Off through the woods he’s a march’in along.

Spin’in a yarn an’ a sing’in a song.

Itchin’ fer a fightin’ an’ rightin’ a wrong.

He’s ringy as a b’ar and twice as strong.

Davy, Davy Crockett, the buckskin buccaneer!”

In one of my favorite episodes, Davy, played by Fess Parker, attempts to grin a bear into submission. He explains the process to his Commander Andrew Jackson saying, "there ain’t nothin’ so absotutely irresistible as old fashioned natured grin like this.” At this point, Parker gave Jackson a big toothy smile. I’ve been “grin’in the b’ar” ever since. 

When I’m out and about in the world, I try to smile at everyone I encounter. Store clerks, waitresses and perfect strangers. I often give them the one two punch by greeting them with an enthusiastic “Howdy” followed up with a broad smile. The old fashioned cowboy form of hello almost always evokes a smile. It catches people off guard in a good way. 

I practice this even when I’m feeling down, why should I infect innocent others with my gloomy mood. My smile soon fools my emotions into perking up, “Something’s wrong here, the mouth is smiling. That’s only supposed to happen when we’re happy. We must have missed the memo, quick everybody cheer up ASAP.”

I read an article in Psychology Today magazine some years back that said that smiling releases more pleasure inducing chemicals into the brain than eating a chocolate bar. I believe this is true, but just to be absolutely sure, I like to eat a Hershey’s bar with a big smile on my face. 

The best thing about smiles is that they are far more contagious than the Coronavirus. When I walk down a street with a smile on my face, I can see people’s faces light up. It may be my age, but people seemed to be happier when I was young. Maybe it’s the go go pace and stress of modern life, but so many people seem to walk around with a scowl on their faces. I’ve made it my mission to “grin ‘em into smiling. 

When I smile at people, most smile back. It may only last a second, but at least I give them a micro vacation from their sullen moods. Reinforced with a howdy or a compliment, a smile can work wonders.

The problem is it is impossible to smile through a mask. It’s like a lead barrier that blocks Superman’s x-ray vision. When people need a smile more than ever before, they’re imprisoned behind impenetrable walls of cotton or paper. 

When this is all over, the world and our spirits are going to need a lot of repair. We will be able to take off our masks and give one another a big smile. We will be able to grin our problems in to absolute submission. Like the great Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, “Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.”

- Jim Busch

April 8, 2020

I woke up to distressing news this morning. A close friend I never met died today. On the news, I heard that John Prine had died from complications of Coronavirus. The news called him a folk singer and a songwriter, but I think of him as a true poet. 

I‘ve been a big fan of his words for decades. I say words because, truth be told, he didn’t have much of a singing voice. I don’t know much about music, I have a tin ear, but I don’t think that his music was particularly sophisticated. He was basically a “three cords and the truth” kind of guy, but oh, what truth he expressed. 

John Prine’s words always made me stop, cock my head and say “Wow!” The next thought was, “How does he do that? I wish I could write like that.”

Prine had the ability to express complex thoughts and emotions with simple words. His mind worked like a party game where you put words in a cardboard cup, shake them up, dump them out and try to make a sentence. The words that came out of John Prine’s “cup” were always unique and unexpected. He was never trite or lazy. 

A John Prine song was like an old time crazy quilt. It was cobbled together from scraps and pieces that were never intended to fit together. The old quilts not only kept people warm so they could sleep peacefully, but they were indescribably beautiful. John Prine’s songs worked the same way, his words didn’t seem like they should fit, but when he stitched them together with his pen, they were both meaningful and beautiful. Only John Prine could write a stanza like this:

“So what in the world’s come over you?

And what in heaven’s name have you done?

You’ve broken the speed of the sound of loneliness.

You’re out there running just to be on the run.”

I never met John Prine. I never even saw him perform live, but I feel like we were friends. His words touched me. He seemed to know what was going on inside my head. Perhaps this is one of the illusions of our age. We form relationships with the people who live inside our devices, their faces beaming from our screens. We think we know the sports figures and celebrities who are paid to entertain us. But John was more than a two dimensional moving image, his was an authentic voice. His words burrowed their way deep into my being.  

John Prine never wanted to be a celebrity. He always thought of himself as the mailman that he was when people began listening to his songs. He never wore stage clothes or make-up. Like Walt Whitman, he was endlessly curious about other people. He wanted to know what they thought and how they felt. He took this information, ran it through his very creative brain and then told us more about what makes us tick than we will ever know about ourselves. 

This virus has silenced so many beautiful voices. Losing people like John Prine is a true tragedy. I will miss his words and I will miss his sense of humor. At least John Prine left us a store of wonderfully wise words to help us make sense of all we’ve lost: 

“That’s the way the world goes ‘round.

You’re up one day and the next you’re down.

It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.

That’s the way the world goes ‘round

- Jim Busch

April 7, 2020

I am a lifelong apothegmatist. No, I am not a member of a weird religious sect and I don’t cast spells trying to turn iron into gold. An apothegmatist collects apothegms.

This is a fancy way to say I collect quotes. The dictionary defines apothegm as a concise saying or maxim; an aphorism. I have been collecting quotes since I was in grade school writing them down in a school-issued tablet with a map of Pennsylvania on the cover.

I was fortunate to grow up in a family that respected learning and had a natural facility with words. While I was growing up, if I wanted a toy or sweets it had to come from my allowance or from the money that I made working for our neighbors such as cutting grass or shoveling snow. The one thing I could get just for the asking were books. My parents never said no when I wanted a book.

I would see something at the Book Sale store next to the railroad tracks on Fifth Avenue in McKeesport and my mother or dad would buy it for me. My parents were not great readers, but they knew books had great power.

They wanted me to grow up to be a teacher and saw books as the tools of my future trade. From an early age I wanted to harness the knowledge and power found in books. I wanted to make this power to move people on my own. My notebooks were a sort of storage battery system for powerful words and ideas.

My family was not well educated, I was the first male in my family to graduate high school. They did have a remarkable store of folk wisdom. This knowledge was passed from generation to generation packaged in saying and proverbs. All through my childhood I heard things like “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Or a “Stitch in time saves nine.”

The main message my grandmother taught me was contained in a simple phrase, “If we are not kind to one another, where is the evidence of God’s love in the world.”  My grandfather who believed a man had to deal with whatever life threw his way. He was fond of saying, “You’ve got to bloom where you’re planted.” 

My dad had a unique and colorful collection of sayings, many of which are not suitable for polite company. He was a machinist so when I was about to say something stupid he would caution me, “Be sure brain is engaged before mouth is set in motion.”

Or when I wanted to quit something I didn’t enjoy, “The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.” He also warned me about the perils of hanging out where I could get into trouble, “You never hear of anybody getting stabbed in a library fight!” 

In high school I learned about Shakespeare and the wonderful things he said. Whenever we would set out on a hike or to do a job, my Dad would say, “Lay on, MacDuff.” I was amazed to learn that this was a line from Macbeth. I asked my father if he knew this and he wasn’t. I adopted this phrase with my own children but expanded it using the entire line, “Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

During this time is when I fell in love with Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. I don’t think any of these men were capable of ordering lunch without saying something that should be remembered and repeated throughout the ages.

The same could be said for Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. I was absolutely delighted when an elderly neighbor gave me a worn copy of Roosevelt’s Strenuous Epigrams. I was amazed at what these people who died long had to say to me before I was born. 

One of the best things my Dad ever said to me was, “If you want people to believe what you’re saying, tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.” With this in mind, quotes started slipping into my conversations and into my school papers. My Dad was right. Dropping a quote here and there made me sound wise beyond my tender years. 

I continued this practice when I entered the business world. I learned to use quotations in my business presentations and meetings. When I became a manager, I shared a weekly motivational quote with my team. Before long, other teams were asking for a copy and I recognized an opportunity for some serious and shameless self-promotion. I started sharing them with the entire company.

A few years later, I began speaking at national conferences. Of course, my sessions were liberally peppered with quotes so my “quote list” grew. Every Monday I sent out a bit of borrowed wisdom, first by fax and then by e-mail. This is a practice I continue to this day.

This week I received several e-mails thanking me for this week’s quote. With the Coronavirus crisis reaching a crucial point and most of my friend’s businesses suffering, I wanted to choose a quote that was neither too upbeat nor too dark. This is no time to be a Pollyanna or a Debbie Downer. Our choice of words is very important in times like these. 

The quote I chose for this week comes from Cheryl Strayed, the best-selling author of Wild and the Ask Sugar advice column. I believe this quote is the perfect expression of how we should think about our current situation. She said it far better than I ever could. This is why I am a devoted apothegmatist.

Here is the quote: ”This is not how your story ends. It is when it takes a turn you didn’t expect.” 

• - Jim Busch

April 6, 2020

I grew up watching the Lone Ranger on TV. Until today I never thought the answer to “Who was that masked man?” would be “Oh, him. Jim Busch, he’s just shopping for groceries.” 

Today in compliance with the governor’s request, I decided to wear a face mask when out in public spaces. I have to admit it felt a bit odd, sort of like a crackpot who wears aluminum foil under his hat to keep out the “Alien mind control rays.”

Looking around, I saw many people wearing some sort of mouth covering. I saw everything from homemade cloth masks to the Black Bart stage robber bandana look. I wore a paper dust mask from my workshop. Like anything else, I soon became accustomed to wearing the mask. After awhile I forgot I was wearing it, except for the warm moist air I was breathing. 

I had to pick up a prescription and on the way to the pharmacy, I noticed a sale on baby wipes. I picked up several packages and felt like Galahad when he found the Holy Grail. Only a chivalrous knight, pure of soul would be successful in his quest for Little Huggies Wipes. Now all I needed was the Lady of The Lake to reach up from the depths to present me with a glowing 24-pack of Charmin. 

To dream the impossible dream

To find the unfindable tissue

To bear with unbearable sorrow

Not finding the paper we need when we have to go!

This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.

As I headed to the cash register to pay for my treasures, I saw a rack displaying t-shirts, or should I say TP - shirts, bearing the message, “I Survived the Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020.” Even though these shirts were priced at a very reasonable $5.00 each, they weren’t exactly flying off the rack. 

Perhaps they are a bit premature, “survived” is in the past tense after all. This is a little like trying to sell Custer an “I Survived the Little Big Horn” t-shirt. One has to applaud the optimism of the shirt’s designer. This is America, there is no crisis severe enough that some entrepreneur won’t be able to boil it down to a witty statement on a t-shirt.

If a huge meteor was hurtling toward the earth, somebody would be wandering through the distraught crowd to sell shirts featuring an image of a young Bob Dylan and the message, “Everybody must get stoned!”

I actually considered buying one of these shirts as a historical artifact. The wisdom of America’s philosophers is carved not in stone, but printed on a cotton polyester blend. I often thought that someone should establish a museum using t-shirts to tell the story of the last 50 or so years.

At the entrance would be a white t-shirt adorned with a hand painted peace sign from an antiwar rally in the 60’s. After standing in quiet reverence before this “ur-shirt,” you could move on to “Hell No, I Won’t Go” shirt sharing a display case with a 1968 “Nixon’s the One” tee. We could move on through the “A Woman Need a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle” feminist collection to the Ford era “WIN - Whip Inflation Now” shirts and on to the “Save the Whales” shirts in organic cotton.

We would see displays of “These Colors Don’t Run” flag shirts, and various versions of “Che” shirts picturing the Cuban revolutionary leader. Shirts reading “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People” will hang on the same wall as John Lennon tees.

The tragedy of 911 will be remembered on shirts showing the fallen towers and those bearing the logo of the FDNY. I could proudly hang my Toilet Paper shirt in the current events gallery.

Of course, to exit the museum one would have to pass through the gift shop. Here you could buy mugs, post cards and, no surprise, shirts emblazoned with the slogan, “This Place Fits Me to a TEE!”

I think a visit to the National T-shirt Museum would not only be educational, but uplifting. It would show us that although we have our differences and our issues, they always seem to pass.

We forget today’s problems and find some other existential issue to stick on our bumpers and to wear on our chests. In a few years, a kid will find an old “I Survived the Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020” t-shirt in the back of a closet and ask her mother “What does this mean? What’s a toilet paper crisis?”         

- Jim Busch   

April 5, 2020