Two Parties: Both Dysfunctional in Different Ways

For several weeks after President Biden's disastrous debate performance, it looked like the Democrats might, through sheer inertia, end up running an election with a candidate who was clearly not mentally fit to run a campaign, much less a country. But in the end, the party leadership won, and Biden reluctantly announced that he would not seek reelection. Over 48 hours the party rapidly converged on a new consensus that rather than have any kind of new primary process or open convention, everyone would endorse Vice President Harris, and now here we are with a Trump/Harris race instead of a Trump/Biden race.

One line that some writers have tried is: In an era of weakened institutions, the Democratic Party still functions. They were able to push Biden out when it became clear that he was too debilitated to win, thus showing themselves a more functional organization than the Republican Party, which went from assuming in January 2021 that Trump was over in public life to having him nominated, yet again, to the chagrin of many careerists inside the GOP.

I think, however, there's a more interesting contrast to draw, because both parties are broken, though in very different ways. In both cases, there is increasing estrangement between the traditional party base and the elites (elected officials, professional operatives, and staff.)  Both parties are undergoing a re-alignment.  But in the case of the Republicans, it is the base that is running away with the party and losing their elites while with the Democrats the elites are changing the party and in danger of losing or fracturing the base.

There is an extent to which the Trumpification of the GOP has been a unique phenomenon.  I do not think most commentators give sufficient credit for Trump's success to the fact he was already a famous businessman and reality TV star before he came down the golden escalator to announce his bid for the GOP nomination.

But that takeover was made possible by a long term dissatisfaction with the party elites on the part of the base. The long term dynamic in the GOP was that the staffers and operatives and elected officials were to the left of the base, particularly on cultural issues. 

Sure, Republican elites liked lowering taxes and decreasing regulation. But most of them like the idea of abortion still being quietly available if some respectable girl got pregnant too early in life. They thought it was fine if two men got married. They went to Church but thought of it more like the Rotary Club than a means of salvation. They found gun rights activists a bit embarrassing. At root, they had mostly gone to the same colleges and law schools as their opponents across the aisle, and they had more culturally in common with elite Democrats than they did with their base of voters.

Some things worked. The judicial philosophy endorsed by the Federalist Society of reading laws to mean what they say (and not what the judges thought they ought to say) would eventually lead to the overturn to Roe v. Wade and of some of the country's most restrictive gun laws.

But the GOP base knew that it was not respected by its elites. Sometimes it came out egregiously, as with Romney's pathetic attempt to portray himself as "severely conservative" when his actual record was of a Harvard trained private equity executive who had governed as a decidedly liberal Republican during his time as governor of Massachusetts. 

This simmering dislike and distrust of the party elites by the base made it easier for some people to talk themselves into the idea that Trump (also hated by the party elites) was a good tool to use against them. For these Republicans, Trump became a protest vote not just against the Democrats (who happily labeled any GOP nominee including Mitt Romney and John McCain as a crypto-fascist radical) but against the party elites themselves.

The fact that so many party elites didn't want to work with or for Trump ended up letting further-right staffers (including some very good Christian conservatives) get more prominence in the White House during Trump's first time. So in one sense, the fact that the base nominated and then elected a candidate the elites hated (because they considered him ignorant, embarrassing, and ill-suited to governing) did actually lead to a fairly conservative administration, despite the fact that Trump himself clearly does not care much about most conservative issues (as shown by the new GOP platform pushed through by Trump which stakes down "moderate" positions on keeping abortion and same sex marriage legal.)

And now, of course, there are the MAGA ideology grifters, busy inventing some sort of program to peddle as the old elites are squeezed out. But in general, there's a policy and expertise vacuum now in the GOP due to the base's embrace of Trump.

On the Democratic side, as in the pre-Trump GOP, the elites are to the left of the base. But while with the old GOP this mean that the elites were near the center of the ideological spectrum while the base was off to the right, for the Democrats this means that professional Democrats are way off on the far left of the country's range.

Given the way that the left has entrenched itself in academia and the media, they feel like they are right in the middle of the spectrum, because they are very much in tune with the elite colleges they went to, the elite media that cover them, and other Democratic activists. But compared to the Democratic base which has in recent decades consisted of Blacks and other racial minorities, union workers, and lower income families, agenda items like sex changes for kids are decidedly out of the mainstream.

So far, however, the elites seem to be holding on in the Democratic party. Their roots in academia and upper middle class meritocratic culture seem to cause certain dysfunctions, in particular the extreme representationalism and "it's my turn now" dynamics which have controlled recent primary processes. Most Democrats seem to agree that Kamala Harris is not the most talented politician among the crop of governors and senators who would normally be considered.  However, the value system of Democratic elites is such that passing over a Black woman when it is "her turn" due to having been the Vice President (a job which, in turn, she got because Biden had pledged to pick a Black woman and she was the candidate available who fit that description) is virtually impossible.

For the very online, mostly female, upper middle-class group which has increasingly become the noisy and dominant sector of the Democratic coalition online, having Kamala Harris as their candidate is a meme come true. For the rest of the party, it's at least a huge relief to have a candidate who is lower on the actuarial tables and capable of stringing several sentences together competently.

This cautious, highly managed Democratic party, deeply convinced that they are the smartest and best people to be running the country if only the voters would shut up and get in line, is the one which just brought us the unnerving spectacle of a president whom people are now willing to admit was not fully functional for the majority of his term as president. 

At first, when news of this broke, people were actually willing to get on the air and argue, "Sure, our guy is stumbling and mumbling and clearly not able to govern, but it's not really about him, it's about the whole team." Translation: Just vote Democrat and let us figure out who is going to actually be in charge.

Some on the Right have tried to argue that selecting Harris as the nominee after all the primary elections are over is a violation of democracy. Perhaps in some procedural sense it is, though it's worth noting that the modern primary system wasn't put in place until the 1970s.

While one can see why they'd prefer to run against Biden, I think their outrage is misplaced. It's not the party changing its selection process to swap in Harris which is the violation of the democratic elements of our republic. The massive problem here is that Biden was not much up to the job of governing when elected and became less able to govern through his four years, up to the point where it's pretty clearly not Biden running things. And yet, rather than admitting the president was no longer capable and letting the vice president succeed him in office, the administration chose to cover this up and let unelected staff increasingly run the country. Not only were they not elected to that task, but they no longer were held in check by a chief executive who was up to determining they were out of line and firing them.  And despite the fact this was clearly something at least tacitly known by many among the government, they were fine to prevent a real primary from taking place in hopes they could coast to a second term -- until they got caught by the debate.

This is not how our system is supposed to work, but for portions of the Democratic base, this was just fine. Is it enough of the base of the Democratic coalition to hold together?  That remains to be seen. Over the last eight years the share of unmarried college educated women voting Democrat has skyrocketed, while at the same time the working class (particularly men -- even some Black and Hispanic ones) has been drifting towards the GOP.  Who would have imagined twenty years ago that the head of the Teamsters Union would be speaking at the Republican convention rather than the Democratic one.

Where we sit is that we have one party where the base has turned out to re-nominate a candidate who denied the results of the 2020 election and tried to hold on despite having lost. (Though he did so incompetently enough I don't think there was much danger of his succeeding.) And the other party which was quite happy to turn the running of the country over to unelected staff while concealing that the elected president was effectively unable to govern.

It's not a good spot to be, and both parties seem determined to go further in this direction until something pulls them back.

What Is A Price?

If you think about running a pricing consulting company some day, it might help to have a book about pricing which you can talk about and give to people to show that you know a lot about pricing.

And if one of your interesting resume items is that you one managed pricing for Wendy's and can tell everyone all sorts of things about how fast food pricing works, you might just consider entitling your book Drive-Thru MBA: Everything You Need to Know About Pricing I Learned in Fast Food 

And if you were writing such a book, you might decide that between the introduction, where you talk about your pricing career and how you took the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger off the $0.99 menu, and the chapter where you dive into price consultant talk and explain why taking a 1% price increase will increase your profits more than getting a 1% increase in sales or a 1% reduction in cost, you should have a Chapter One where you say some interesting things about what a price is in an engaging way.

If I were in fact working on such a project, this might be the draft that I came up with.

What do you think, would you read this book?

Chapter One: What Is a Price?

The question at first seems so basic as to be nonsensical. We see prices all the time: On the shelves at the supermarket. On the windshields of cars at a dealership. On an Amazon page. On the drive thru menu board.

Prices tell us what it will cost to get the product or service on offer. For us as customers, we often think of this limited definition and go no further. But I would like to suggest that prices do so much more. When a business offers us a price, they offer us a chance to render judgment on their entire business model in a package so simple, so easy, that we often don’t think what a powerful tool is in front of us.

How so?

Say I arrive at a restaurant for lunch.

Do they have a comfortable dining room with padded seats and a decorative fireplace, or do they have a few basic tables with plastic chairs?

Do I pick up my food from a service window, or do they bring it to me?

Is my food made to order or is it prepared in advance and sitting under a warming light?

Perhaps we could imagine a truly choose-your-own-adventure world where customers made each of those decisions.

You’ve reached the door of the restaurant. Do you want the dining room to be cheap and utilitarian? Pay one dollar and enter the basic dining room. Do you want it to be comfortable and well decorated?  Pay three dollars and enter the nice dining room.

Do you want your food brought to your table by a pleasant server? Pay three more dollars for service. Happy to carry the food to your own table on a tray? Pay fifty cents for the self-serve option.

But of course this is not what we see.  Instead, the price of all these elements is bundled together in the price you pay for the product. When you get a chicken sandwich from McDonald’s or your funky local bistro, the price for the different levels of service and experience offered by those two establishments is bundled into the price you pay for the sandwich.

It’s entirely likely that the difference in the cost of the actual sandwich between McDonald’s and the local bistro is just a couple dollars. The reason you might pay $4.99 at McDonald’s and $12.99 at the bistro is that the bistro has other costs that it needs to cover. 

The $12.99 chicken sandwich doesn’t just pay for the sandwich, it also pays for the dining room, the staff, the plates and cutlery: all the things which might make you enjoy the experience of eating that sandwich enough to pay more than twice as much as the fast food alternative.

When you decide whether to pay the price for a product, you decide whether the value you would receive is enough to justify the price.  But that term “value” doesn’t just cover the product itself. It covers the entire experience of buying and using the product and even the way that you found out about it.

Value, in this case, is every factor you consider when you decide how much you are willing to pay for the product. When considering the value of a chicken sandwich, the factors may be different on different occasions.

If I am driving from one appointment to another, and I have only fifteen minutes to pick up some food that I can eat in the car along the way, I don’t assign any value to how nice the dining room is.  I want a place with a drive thru which is on my route. But confronted with a McDonald’s and a Chick-fil-A, I will pay the slightly higher prices at the latter (even knowing the piece of chicken is often slightly smaller on their sandwich) because I think the taste is better.

On the other hand, if I’m meeting a coworker for lunch, I would happily pay the $12.99 price at the local bistro. To some extent, that’s because the food is better. But it’s mostly because the bistro offers a nice dining room where we can have a conversation in good surroundings. If I had to choose between two bistros, one with better food but a dining room like a Chick-fil-A, and the other with acceptable food but a very nice dining room, I might well pick the nicer dining room for a lunch meeting. In that case, the dining room and service is a major part of the value I’m willing to pay for.

In yet a third case, if I’m picking up lunch to take back to the office and eat at my desk, all I care about is the best food. I might still happily pay bistro level prices, but I’d be willing to do it at a hole in the wall or food truck with better food over a bistro with a gracious dining room.

What these examples show is that different products and companies offer different value propositions to different customers in different circumstances.

To be successful, a business does not need to be the best value to all customers at all times. But it must be a good enough value at its current prices to enough customers that it can sustain itself.

The cheap and easy food of middling quality, the bistro with the congenial dining room, the hole in the wall with amazing food – all of them offer value in different ways, and for the right place should be able to sustain themselves. But the reason each restaurant survives is not simply the value of the sandwich they sell as a sandwich, it is the overall value of the experience they provide: sandwich, location, speed, dining room, service, etc.

If a business does not provide the right combination of things to offer enough value to enough customers at its current prices, it will not make enough money to survive.

So what is a price?

Price is the way we discover whether we are delivering enough value to the customer to sustain our business.

If that sounds important, it is.

If you aren’t providing value to your customers, that’s not a lot that pricing can do to help you. In the long run, a business can only be successful by providing customers something they want.

But if you are providing something that customers want, finding the right price to capture your share of that value can be the difference between a successful business and a failing one. 

How can you find the right price?  Stay with me and we’ll find out, one hamburger and chicken sandwich at a time.

No, It's Not 1933

 I've seen it online and I've had people express the concern to me in person: I'm really worried that if Trump gets elected, it could be the end of democracy in America.

Or as a Facebook status I saw being shared around stated it somewhat more bombastically: "If you ever wondered what you would have done if you had lived in Germany in 1933, you might find out come November."

I've been on record since 2016 on why the Nazi analogies show zero understanding of what Weimar politics were actually like (multiple parties with violent paramilitary wings battling it out openly in the streets, in a country with very few functioning institutions of classical liberalism.)

The first Trump presidency had some distinctly positive results and also some bad ones. Trump's full dive into conspiracy theories to argue that he had not actually lost the 2020 election was perhaps its worst hour, ending in the bathos of MAGA protesters storming the Capitol building.

With that as the final note, and the ground that Trump has covered since, I don't think we have reason to think that a second Trump term would be any better than the first, and some good reasons to think it could be worse. There are legitimate reasons to worry about Trump being elected. (There are also extremely legitimate reasons to worry about Biden being elected.)

But all of this "what you would have done if you had lived in Germany in 1933" talk is, frankly, far more dangerous than either candidate.  Nor is it only happening in odd corners of social media.  Here's the latest cover of The New Republic:

And every few days a newsletter from Yale historian and best selling author Timothy Snyder lands in my inbox informing me yet again that the US is on the brink of a complete fascist take-over.

Back in 2016 there was an essay which was much discussed in conservative circle entitled The Flight 93 Election.  It's basic contention was: If Hillary is elected, the US is over. Totally over.  She is like the terrorists who took control of Flight 93 on 9/11. It's possible that if we fight her and take over the plane, we'll crash. But if we don't, we're absolutely going to crash. So we need at all costs to elect Trump, even if he may himself destroy the country, because it's the only slim chance we have of the country not being totally destroyed.

I thought it was a bad argument then, and I continue to now.

However, with all this "it's 1933, what will you do?" talk across the left, I'm concerned that Flight 93 has become the dominant paradigm for partisans on both sides.

This is incredibly dangerous. Why?

Say that someone really thinks it's true that if Trump is elected he will turn the US into a fascist dictatorship along the lines of Nazi Germany. Isn't it a constant trope of ethical dilemmas and fiction that stopping Hitler justifies...  pretty much anything? Overturning an election. Attempted assassination. Civil war.

So either these claims of "this is like 1933" are a massive exercise in irresponsible hyperbole (in which case people should stop) or they are a way of saying that people really should overturn elections and commit violence if necessary in order to keep Trump out of power. After all, isn't that what people would do to stop Hitler?

This would be increase the danger to our country even if the GOP under Trump really is pretty dangerous and bad.  Why?  Because once one side of the political spectrum starts engaging in force instead of politics, things can head into a death spiral where the only way to win is to be more successfully violent.

Look at Spain as it spiraled into the Civil War, or Germany as it plunged into chaos at the end of WW1. Back in 1919 (14 years before the Nazis came to power) just as the German Republic was trying to pull itself together, the Spartacist Uprising ended up with the Social Democrats and the Communists fighting it out in the streets of Berlin -- not just with small arms but with machine guns and field artillery. Around the same time the attempt to create a Bavarian Soviet Republic ended in similar street fighting.  In both cases the government ended up seeking and getting the support of veterans paramilitary organizations which, over the following fourteen years, would be integrated into the support of the Nazi party.

So to put it simply: one of the things that caused Nazism was upending the political order to try to defeat the right.

Not only did these kinds of breakdowns in political order make people willing to support an apparently strong man to restore order, the repeated use of political violence and intimidation and fear of those by both sides is what created the permission structure for civil strife and then oppression.

Fanning political division by telling your side that they're going to be destroyed and oppressed if the other side wins makes it more likely that both sides will resort to violence and oppression.  It is a no win tactic, and it is the tactic most likely to lead to violence and oppression.

This is the number one thing I think Americans need to learn about the actual history of oppression. It's not some sneaky thing where after everything has been quiet and normal for years you suddenly wake up and realize that you're living under a vicious dictatorship because you weren't awake enough to notice it coming.

Rather, oppression is invited in because people think they need it on order to protect them from the other guys who are even worse. And the real, bloody, heavy handed oppression is enabled when people enter into a war footing. That might be an external war: oppression under the Nazis was worse and bloodier in the territories they conquered than in places like Italy that still had semi-functional government. Or it might be an internal war. The most oppressive left wing and right wing governments of Central and South America during the Cold War and since mostly sprang from long simmering civil wars in which one side was trying to root out the side's militias.

So am I some sort of Dr. Pangloss insisting that everything will be fine?  What should someone do if they really think that if Trump wins in November he may try to do illegal or oppressive things?

No, I'm not simply being sunny. I'm not saying that people should be calm simply because I don't think anything bad will happen.  I'm saying that even if it's true that Trump is absolutely terrible and bent on doing evil and illegal things, the best things to do would be:

- Vote for someone else
- If he wins, remain peaceful
- Make legal challenges to illegal actions (remember that despite all the attempts to undermine our courts from the political left, they stood as a bulwark against both the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and other Trump over-reaches)
- Vote against his party in the next elections

What you should not do is engage in this kind of behavior or make excuses for it:

And what you should also not do is push the entire situation to become more extreme by upping the rhetoric. When either side claims that this is a Flight 93 election and the country will be destroyed if the other side wins, they increase the danger for all sides.

We are all in this together, and the only way to go from being a two party state (where the other side always has a good chance of winning) to knowing your side will always win is by yourself becoming the dictator. 

New Phone Who Dis?, or, The Apple Divorce?

Sorrows Altar, Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio. From Wikimedia Commons

I spent two days without a phone, and I have to say it was everything I hoped it could be.

There's a freedom in not being tethered to one's phone, and it breeds a jaunty attitude toward time and space and directions. I took my daughter and a friend on a birthday expedition to a shrine an hour out in the countryside, equipped as the Neanderthals with only printed-off directions. Getting there wasn't difficult. The shrine is invested in getting pilgrims from the highway to the parking lot, so the signage is clear and easy to spot. We spent a hour in the cool environs of this minor basilica improbably set in a small town in the midst of Ohio fields. The girls explored the lower church with its tributes of crutches and braces, and costumes for the famed statue of Our Lady, while I sat in blissful uninterrupted silence in the upper church. At the Sorrows altar, I prayed for everyone I know who's suffering, and for those I don't know are suffering, and I gazed at the massive windows, all red and blue glowing in dense patterns, without expecting my pocket to buzz with a text or a missed call.

And we got lost finding our way out of town. Twice we went wrong directions and had to turn and retrace our route to the Shrine. On the third try, we found our way back to the highway. I haven't been lost driving in a long time, thanks to Maps and directions and a computerized Irish voice telling me to go past this light, then turn right. But you have to rely on your common sense when your phone dies.

 With no provocation, the screen of my five-year-old iPhone 8 stopped working Wednesday night. I was a bit miffed, I must say -- I had not recently dropped the thing, my kids are all too old to plunge it in the toilet (as happened to a previous iteration), and though it had stopped holding much charge and my screen protector was flaking off little splinters of glass, there was nothing to indicate that it was about to give up the ghost. Darwin took it to be inspected by geniuses while I went on pilgrimage, and the geniuses were baffled and quoted a higher price to fix the screen than it cost to replace it with a comparable model. Common sense dictated the latter course, particularly as the old phone held less and less charge. 

Alas, it turns out that I don't use a phone as intended, which is charging it nightly so it can update, and backing it up regularly. Darwin and I have a shared Apple ID, which predates either of our personal email addresses. From that ID I can back up some shared functions (though not necessarily under my own name or with my own data), but some contacts and messages on my old phone, some dating back years, seem to be lost in the ether. "Is it time, after all these years," Darwin mourned, "for us to get an Apple divorce?"

As Quintin Tarantino said in Pulp Fiction, I don't want to get f*cking divorced. I don't want another account. I don't want to create another password. It's miserable enough trying to remember the passwords I already have as I reinstall apps on my new phone. On the other hand, I went to text someone I really need get in touch with, only to find that my entire message history, and indeed the contact itself, is gone. I synced my phone with iCloud and recovered... five messages from December 2021. Photos, it seems, do sync. I am not a notable photo historian, but it's nice to know that all my boys' videos of jumping off the couch and karate-chopping Lego creations are still extant, taking up all our data. 

Not only do I not want to get divorced, I don't even want to be on my phone that much. A year or so ago, I deleted the one social media app I use, though I still checked it through the internet browser (with a time limit). On my new phone, I haven't opened a browser tab for it. What do you know -- after looking at my email and playing my daily Wordle and checking the weather, there's not much reason for me to be clicking around. I want to click around. I want to fill five or ten or 30 minutes with dopamine hits. But now, there's no dopamine source. Let's keep it that way.

Will I have to establish my own Apple ID? I guess there are good reasons to do so. It won't bring back my lost messages, though. Some of them I can access through the messenger app on my computer, though some, like the 14-person family chat, seem to be lost to the mists of time. I don't know that anything of value is gone -- only the time I spent messaging, perhaps. 

I recently read something I'd written 19 years ago, and felt the severe and mortifying lash of the Total Perspective Vortex. Frankly, if some digital catastrophe destroyed everything I'd ever written before the age of 30, maybe 35, I'd count myself fortunate. Lord have mercy on us, and may we learn humility a gentler way than reading our own past writing. But may it be there when we want to read it.

Ten Price Commandments

Much of my time at work the last few months has been taken up with a profitability project.

Up until recently, we suffered from a problem a surprising number of mid-size companies have: we knew overall how profitable we were, and how profitably various product lines or manufacturing plants were, but we didn't have good data on what individual items cost, and thus on which items and customers were more and less profitable.

Over the last six months, we did a major project to get that item level cost data, and so now for the first time we have good, detailed information on which items and customers are profitable and which are not.

You might think that this would make it easy to increase our profitability: just take the stuff you're losing money on and increase the price or (if the customer won't accept the higher price) stop selling it.  Ta da!  Higher margins.

But everyone can come up with all sorts of excuses for why this just isn't possible: This is a strategic loss leader!  If we don't match (money losing) competitive pricing on this product, customers won't buy our other profitable products.  If we win this business (at a loss) it will lead to winning other (profitable) business, or maybe we'll build up enough sales volume that our cost of producing it will drop.

On and on it goes.

Those of us in the finance department decided it was necessary to put together a clear and short summary of what rules we needed to follow around pricing and profits.

"We need a ten commandments of pricing," I joked.

"Yes, that's exactly what we need," the CFO replied.  "Can you write one?"

I cheerfully signed up to write a pricing decalogue. After all, I write all the time, often about religion, and I'm a pricer, so why not?

Then I found myself staring at a blank page and feeling like everything I wrote was just variations of "don't lose money".

In the end, my solution was to think about how the actual ten commandments are structured.

The first three commandments are a basic statement of what is true: There is one God. We should worship him and no others.  Then the following seven commandments explain how we should live in relation to others due to those truths.

I tried to structure my pricing commandments the same way.  The first three attempt to sum up what is true about pricing and profitability.  The following seven then describe how we should conduct business based on that truth.

And here they are:

1. A good price is lower than the value of the product to the customer (better than the price of the next best alternative plus the difference in quality/service) but higher than our cost to produce the product and run our business
2. Price is the way we discover whether we are delivering enough value to the customer to sustain our business
3. We as a business exist to turn a profit: if we are selling below cost, we are not paying for our people and our owners
4. A market segment where we command strong margins is a segment the market is telling us to be in. A market segment with low margins is one where we are not currently delivering value.
5. Customers who offer us high margins want us. Customers offering low margins do not. Believe them.
6. New business that starts at low margins must come with a business plan for how it become higher margin and checkpoints at which we see if we followed the business plan
7. Never sell below product cost (cost of material + manufacturing before fixed overhead): sales at negative product margin do not help with absorption or overhead, they are a deadweight loss
8. We should seldom sell at a product margin below our SG&A rate
9. Acquiring business by pricing at low or negative margins buys us bad business: we want new business at accretive margin rates
10. Retaining business by matching a competitive price which brings us to low or negative margins retains bad business: sometimes we need to let go

Readers

 "In your forties," the eye doctor tells me as he jots down what magnification I should look for, "your eyes can change suddenly." Early- to mid-forties, says Dr. Google, is when presbyopia kicks in, a fancy word for age-related farsightedness. I am mid-forties exactly, 45, and sure enough, this past year I've started to notice that it's harder to focus on things close up. My eyes are remarkably healthy, says the eye doctor, good nerves and 20/20 for distance (which must mean that I was formerly more acute than 20/20, because it seems like distance isn't quite what it used to be either). 

For someone just starting in on presbyopia, drugstore readers are good enough ("buy a pack," says the doctor, "you'll lose one pair") at a mild 1.25 magnification. And what do you know, suddenly my phone screen is crisp, and the paperwork at the table, readable before, is now comfortable. "Dawg, you look like an old granny," howls my tall, suave 15yo son, who has never been old or fat a day in his life. Dawg, I feel like an old granny. I don't need my eyes to tell me that I'm aging. I feel old. I miss the days when my veins and ankles didn't puff at the mere thought of eating something salty. I envy the boundless energy of friends who always seem to be on the go. I am not always on the go, but I'm always pulled in seven different directions. 

This evening, I sat down on the couch with my readers and my almost 7yo son, who can sound out letters just fine but scornfully resists all my attempts to trick him into helping me read a book. I sat, I say, but quickly found myself drifting off to sleep between pages. I'm not the only snoozer in the house. My oldest has spent most of the week since surgery napping, and my second daughter, down with strep, has also been asleep all day. They have not been reading in their waking hours, mostly, but watching Columbo or other vintage mystery shows. Columbo is a show the whole family can get into, gathered in the living room, tucked on couches or a college beanbag which is absolutely not going to take up permanent residence on my floor. "Oh, just one more thing," we all chant dutifully as Columbo bumbles back into the room to deliver the coup de grace to the perpetrator, who always deserves it.

It's about my speed right now. I want to read something real and essential, something that sharpens my intellect. On my nightstand is The Cloud of Unknowing, which I'm dipping into in small bits. I started reading James in my Bible the other night, and fell asleep. Best I can do a lot of days is the Office of Readings -- just the readings, not the Psalms as well, because I often get interrupted. And then, this evening, when the heat and the humidity finally balanced out to something endurable, I took a walk with my daughter, who turns 14 on Friday, and we passed a Little Free Library. Among the books was one I'd read a review of in the Wall Street Journal, an escapist beach read, and friends, I almost picked it up. I don't even know myself anymore.

"Mom," said my daughter, "do you know in the books section at Kroger they have something called Amish Romance? Why do people even read that? What are they about?"

"I have never read an Amish Romance," I said, truthfully. "I think people are looking for stories about love and connection and happiness, and they feel like something that seems old-fashioned is more wholesome."

"And there are the books with guys with no shirts on. Why do people read those?"

"People read those kind of romances because they're bored or lonely, or because they just want to read about sex."

"That's gross," proclaimed my daughter, who is in a pious phase. "Why do people want to read about that?"

"People sometimes look for a neatly-packaged thrill in fiction, because real life is often messy and tedious and has the added complication of being real."

"I think it's weird. Mom, look, that house is for sale. Mom, do you like that house? Someone I know said that someone she knows said that her mom said that houses were too expensive here. I think her name was Megan, or maybe it was something else..."

We strolled on, our evening constitutional untroubled by silence.

Perhaps an inexpensive pair of reading glasses from a chain drugstore is the magic bullet that suddenly removes all barriers to reading, and magnifies my energy and attention span along with the print on the page. I'd certainly read that neatly-packaged fiction. I expect, however, that my readers will go missing as often as my laptop and phone do, and I'll find the same culprits fooling around with them because it's funny to make things look bigger. "Look, Mom!" they'll say. "Mom, look. Mom, did you know..." And so we grow, in age, and, perhaps, in grace and wisdom, and eventually, time will make readers of us all, even the almost 7yo.

Silver-Plated

I am told by Google that 23 years is the Silver Plate Anniversary, a faux finish for a year without a nice round sound like 20 or 25. I haven't come across anything silver-plated lately, unless it was an item in the nirvana that is the local college theater's props lockup (where we hunted for Music Man decor). For us, 23 years is the Show/Recovery/Surgery/Wound Care anniversary, with the attendant exhaustion that goes along with all that.

The Music Man had a fabulous run. We nearly sold out every show. Audiences were enthusiastic, and well they should have been. Our excellent cast put on a marvelous production and broke all box office records. The final run-up to the show went so smoothly that I didn't have any stress dreams at all during tech week, which, as any director can tell you, is an anomaly dearly to be wished.

Not so much the week afterward. Every night I shook awake, dreaming of props and missed cues and notes to give the cast, and wondering whether we were going into the Saturday night or Sunday matinee. Perhaps it was delayed stress, or perhaps it was other stress manifesting: on Tuesday after the show closed, one of our college daughters had surgery to drain an awkwardly-placed abscess which was draining through a fistula.

The medical saga here is one that many people will recognize. Our daughter has been feeling increasingly poorly since the beginning of the semester, yet we couldn't get anyone to look at her. The college clinic passed her on to a specialist, who couldn't schedule her until right before graduation. She was increasingly unable to sit or even lean on anything, was dropping weight, was fainting, and so I drove up and took her to the ER in the nearest big city. The doctor didn't even examine her. "It's not life-threatening," we were told. "Take over-the-counter remedies." The GYN looked at her, but passed her on to a GYN in our city, who didn't have an open appointment until July. The week after she came home, I took her to our primary care doctor, who suggested that she could be seen by the surgeons at the local hospital, if she wanted. 

And finally, she saw the surgeon, and the surgeon saw her. Actually looked at her on an exam table, and diagnosed her immediately. I was never so glad to hear that someone needed surgery. There was a real problem, not just in my daughter's head, and it could be repaired! 

The abscess, as it happens, was larger than the surgeon had expected, and the corresponding wound care is rather intensive. It is in a location which is almost impossible for the patient herself to tend. It must be dressed and repacked daily, surgical packing nudged with a q-tip into a gaping incision, accompanied by murmurs of, "I'm sorry, honey," and "Okay, we'll take a break for a second." This kind of procedure makes me wonder if I squandered my education on theater, when I knew from freshman year I was going to get married, and consequently could expect children. Why did I not go into nursing or pre-med? 

This is generally a daily process, but yesterday we unexpectedly had to change and repack twice, an unhappy process. It is perhaps providential that this surgery didn't happen while she was in college. How could she have recuperated from this away from home? How could she have rested like she needs to during the semester? Which of her group of friends (a nice set of young people, to be sure) would have been willing or able to pack a wound in an exceedingly awkward location? How would this work, even at home, if there was not someone whose job was the household and its concerns? It's not that I'm trained to this kind of work. It's that I'm available to do it, and in the right sphere of intimacy to assist this particular vulnerable human body.

This is my 23rd year in this role of our marriage partnership. It is a partnership, and we are a team. Marriage is many things, love and friendship and companionship and affection, but it's also an operation, and we are operating partners, keeping things running in our areas of competence so our family has a stable foundation on which to thrive. We work and build and repair, and we don't just patch over the weak places in our foundation so that it looks good from the outside. We do the painful and boring work of chipping them out and making them stronger, of packing wounds in intimate places from the inside so that they heal properly. No silver plating here.