Russell Frank

I used to envy people who could take that sentimental journey back to the old home place.

My dad got into a little fender bender down in Dallas recently and knew at last, the way an aging slugger who whiffs at a pitch he used to wallop into the cheap seats knows, that it was time to call it quits.

I tried to cheer him up. “How old were you when you got your license?” I asked.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“You’ve been driving for 76 years!” I said. “Think of how many miles you’ve driven! Think of how many cars you’ve driven!”

That got him reminiscing about his first car, a Ford Model A with a canvas top. Playing the suave young suitor, he drove from the Bronx to Brooklyn to take his future bride and in-laws out for a night on the town. It rained. The canvas top leaked. Everyone got soaked.

That got me reminiscing about “The Magnet,” a finned, two-tone ’57 Dodge that was fatally attracted to other cars. As bad as The Magnet’s white-and-gold factory paint began to look, Dad made it worse when he tried to hide the dings and dents under a hideous light-blue-and-dark-blue cut-rate paint job.

The Magnet was one of a series of crummy cars that adorned our driveway in my youth: I also remember a ’58 Buick, black and massive as a Humvee; a sporty but past-its-prime silver-blue ’63 Pontiac Tempest; and a dowdy forest-green ’66 Buick Special. The ’58 Buick might have been the one that crushed my green tricycle with the streamers flowing from the ends of the handlebars. All of them broke down or got flat tires on a regular basis.

“I had no luck with cars,” my dad concedes. Nor I with trikes.­

You’d think his knack for acquiring unreliable vehicles would have made him cautious, but Dad was the quintessential New York driver: quick to honk, slow to brake and constantly chiding the “nuts” in the adjacent cars who were forever thwarting his progress or demonstrating their unfitness to share the road with him.

Dad’s worst driving habit was to stop so close to the car in front of him that he was practically sitting in its backseat, and then berate the driver for failing to spring to life the instant the light turned green.

“It’ll never get any greener,” was one of his favorite taunts. Or occasionally: “What’samatta, you don’t like the color green? Is there another color you would like better? Sky-blue pink, maybe?”

He wouldn’t yell any of this stuff out the window. The performance was for us, his amused and captive audience. He never sounded mad.

In any event (as he likes to say), the Dallas fender bender was a best-case scenario: He got the message that he was no Mario Andretti without hurting himself or anyone else in the process. (My sister might disagree: It was her car that bore the brunt of the lesson.)

Still, as we all know, driving is a powerful symbol of freedom and independence in American culture. So the loss of one’s driving privileges is a bitter pill. And for Dad, the losses are piling up. Last year, he and my mom gave up their condo in Florida and moved to an “independent living community” in Dallas, near my sister. Last summer, his bride, as he still calls my mom, died at the age of 89 – three months shy of their 70^th anniversary.

Wrap your mind around that number. To return to baseball metaphors, we’re talking the marital equivalent of DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or Ted Williams’ .406 batting average – numbers we may not see again.

Before my parents’ generation, the odds were not great that both members of a couple would live long enough to celebrate seven decades of wedded bliss. These days we’re not likely to get married young enough or stay married long enough to get within range of a diamond anniversary.

Mom fought hard to make it to the big milestone. Her doctors didn’t think she’d be around for her 69^th anniversary.

Ah, well. My stock answer when people express their condolences is that Mom didn’t get cheated: She lived a good, long life and was married to a good, loving man – except when he was driving.

I always thought south Florida, where my parents used to live, was the scariest place I’d ever driven because the roads were crammed with ex-New Yorkers like my dad who were still aggressive but no longer skillful.

“These people should not be driving,” I’d say. But will I recognize myself as one of “these people” when the time comes?

Well, I’ve never found driving relaxing. I blame my adolescent experience with the family lemons. Even now, I can’t drive without listening for untoward noises and sniffing for untoward smells. And I’m already shying away from night driving, especially in the rain.

So I’d like to think it’s not going to take a fender bender to get me out of the driver’s seat. But I’m probably fooling myself. I saw how hard it was for my mom to go gentle into that good night during the last two years of her life. A month before she died she told me she thought she was getting better.

I think of the ritual exchanges between my dad and me when he’d hand me the key to one of those beater cars back in the 1970s.

“Be careful,” he’d say. “Lotta nuts out there.”

To which I would reply, “Lotta nuts in here, too.”

The key to surrendering the key is recognizing when you’ve gone from being one of the nuts in here to one of the nuts out there.

Russell Frank is a former Sonoran who now teaches journalism at Penn State.

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors Magazine

Russell Frank

I don’t know what kind of winter you had in the Sierra, but in central Pennsylvania the weather gods became my personal trainers. They would summon me to my morning workout through the good offices of the local school district, which would robo-call me just after 6 a.m. to tell me our schools were on two-hour delay.

That’s how I knew it was time to get up, suit up and man up – which in central Pennsylvania means shoveling my walk and driveway before my snow-blowing neighbors beat me to it (people with snow blowers would gladly clear Interstate 80 from New York to San Francisco if called upon to do so).

Two of the crazier things I’ve done in my life: leave temperate Sonora to return to the chilly Northeast, and buy a corner house, which makes me responsible for clearing the snow on two streets instead of one.

Let me be precise about this: I have 50 sidewalk squares to shovel, each 5 feet long, which easily works out, if you add the front walk and the driveway, to more than the length of a football field.

It’s a great workout, but at my age, I can’t help picturing myself gasping, collapsing and being hauled, half-frozen and ghastly gray, to the ER, where they would know what happened just by looking at me: another middle-aged snow-shoveling heart-attack victim.

A little voice in my head says, “Don’t overdo it,” but a bigger voice in my head says, “The faster you shovel, the sooner you’ll be done.” My old pal Bub Dambacher, black sheep of a Gold Rush family, used to call me “one of them overeducated idiots who don’t know which end of a shovel to use.” Well, I’ve learned which end of a shovel to use, but otherwise, guilty as charged.

Thinking about snow and Sonora inevitably calls to mind the birth of my daughter Rosa in February 1990:

I am working in the Jamestown office of the Modesto Bee (a lot of my stories begin with my working in the Jamestown office of the Bee). The phone rings. Disgruntled subscriber wondering why he didn’t get his grocery coupon inserts? Disgruntled reader wondering why the Bee won’t get rid of that Russell Frank and hire a real reporter? Pregnant wife: “Have you looked outside?” Me: “Not lately.”

I peer through the slats of the Venetian blinds: snowing like crazy. “I think you’d better come home while you still can,” says pregnant wife. I concur. My car fishtails up Shaws Flat Road, but I make it back to Banner Drive, heart pounding.

It’s one of those wet, heavy snows that the foothills get from time to time, the kind that cause tree branches to lean on power lines. “I bet we’re going to have an outage,” I say. Amazingly, I find the flashlights. Even more amazingly, I find some fresh D batteries. I feel like a genius, for at the very moment I am unscrewing the base of a flashlight to swap in a fresh power supply I see a flash of blue light through the kitchen window and the house goes dark. A wire dangles over the driveway. Now what?

“I think you’d better read the chapters on home birthing in the baby books,” says ever-practical pregnant wife. I scoff. But then I begin hearing the noise of snow-laden trees and branches cracking and crashing to earth. One falls across the intersection of Banner Drive and Shaws Flat Road. Another blocks our path up Banner to Springfield. Twapped like a wat in a twap, as Elmer Fudd would say. I begin my home birthing tutorial. Fortunately, precocious not-yet-named-Rosa determines that this is not the most propitious time to exit the warm and comfy place where she has spent the preceding nine months.

Next morning, power still out, we dine on thawed French fries and melted ice cream. I set aside the baby books in favor of work gloves and spend the afternoon clearing downed branches from the yard while all around me, chainsaws munch through the trees blocking the roads.

Still, not-yet-named Rosa sits tight for another 24 hours, just to be on the safe side, then makes her glorious debut at the birth center, under professional supervision. And now here she is, 21 and in college while her proud papa’s heart, fortified by all those years of parenting, has withstood another winter of shoveling snow. Up next: circling the house with an extension ladder to clear the last leaf-glop from the rain gutters before thunderstorm season – another activity not recommended for us alte kakers (Yiddish for old farts). Here, the little voice says, “If you reach too far for another handful of glop you’re going to fall and break your back.” Only to be drowned out by the big voice that says, “If you can grab another handful of glop you won’t have to climb up and down the ladder as many times.”

I have friends my age who wouldn’t dream of shoveling their own driveways or clearing their own gutters. I also have friends my age who wouldn’t dream of hiring somebody to shovel their driveways or clear their gutters. I operate in the muddled middle, dreaming of hiring, but too stubborn (or cheap) to do so. Ever the overeducated idiot.

Russell Frank teaches journalism at Penn State University, where he can be reached at rbf5@psu.edu.

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors

Russel Frank

This is not my situation, but it is, thank goodness, my big sister’s. When my 88-year-old mother had a health crisis last winter and my 92-year-old father was the only family member within 1,000 miles, we, their three children, began to gently suggest that perhaps it was time for them to plan for the moment when they would no longer be able to live on their own.

“Your father and I have always managed,” was Mom’s response.

“True,” I said, “but you’ve not always been 90 years old.”

The conversation went nowhere. Six months passed. Then came the breakthrough. M&D, as we call them, confessed to feeling lonely and isolated in their Florida condo. They needed more help, more care. The question was, where to get it?

Denver, where my sister Wendy lives, was too high. Pennsylvania, where I live, was too cold. Dallas, where my sister Meryl lives, was just right.

The timing was perfect. It was mid-September. Meryl was retiring at the end of the month. She sprang into action, finding an independent living facility near her place, arranging for a real estate agent to look at the Florida condo, trying to shame the car dealer into releasing our 92-year-old pop from his five-year lease commitment.

The five of us gathered via conference call to discuss these and other logistics. Suddenly, Mom felt like things were moving too fast. She hit the brakes. They were  fine where they were. OK, we said, but what happens when you’re not fine? They would cross that bridge when they came to it. We thought they were already at the toll plaza.

I felt the emotional temperature rising. “Let’s stop,” I said during the second hour of the call. “Let’s all just think about it for a day or two and then talk some more.”

The next day, Mom called to say she would agree to whatever we thought best. Three days later, she dug in her heels: not moving. The day after that, it was back on. This was maddening, but understandable. They’d lived in their condo for 20 years. They were giving up a chunk of their independence.

A few days later, my children and I flew down to help them pack and discard. Mostly this entailed wrapping a sheet of newsprint around each item in their gigantic collection of glass and ceramic vessels and putting it either in the “take” or “toss” carton.

It was painful. Buying, restoring and selling collectible vases and teapots and the like had been my parents’ principal activity after my dad retired. They haunted yard sales and rummage sales and flea markets, buying items for a nickel here, a half-dollar there.

At home my mother would look up each one in her antique guides and find out where and when it was made and how much it was worth.  She took particular pleasure in repairing chipped, even shattered ceramics so that you couldn’t see the cracks or where she reproduced interrupted patterns or glazes.

And then the two of them would load merchandise and folding tables into a van and try to sell the stuff at antique shows. As a business, it brought in a little money. As a hobby, it gave them a lot of pleasure. Now it was time to liquidate.

I fretted that my mom would feel like she was attending her own funeral. Even for me, disposing of stuff was harder than I expected it to be. I would see one of my mom’s handwritten labels on the bottom of a pitcher or a bowl and it felt like a desecration of all her care and hard work to consign it to the Goodwill box. The kids, less connected to the history, functioned more like movers. They’re the ones who got most of the work done.  Plus the pleasure of seeing them distracted my parents from the great dismantling that was going on around them.

But at dinner that night, Mom dropped the brave front. “I’m scared,” she told us. “Everything scares me at my age.”

I’m scared too, when I think about being my parents’ age. I don’t want my kids spending their retirement taking care of me in my retirement, just as I’m sure my parents didn’t want us to have to take care of them.

I understand that when we view ourselves or each other as burdens we are reducing our relationships to economic transactions: We’re either contributing resources or draining resources. I told my kids their visit to Florida had been a mitzvah – a Jewish word that weds good deeds to sacred obligations. Taking care of those we love is a mitzvah.  Allowing our loved ones to take care of us is also a mitzvah.

Still, when we were sorting the ceramics and glass at the condo I told Mom the standard should be that you have to love it, love it, love it to keep it.

“I love it,” she said of this or that item, “but I don’t love it, love it, love it.”

Out it went.

Former Sonoran Russell Frank teaches journalism at Penn State University, where he can be reached at rbf5@psu.edu.

© 2010 Friends and Neighbors

Russell Frank

It was my dad on the line, obviously distraught. He thought Mom might be having a stroke. I asked if he had called Simone, the woman from the elder-care service we had contracted with last year. He hadn’t thought of Simone. He thought of me.

I told him I’d get there as soon as I could – in 12 hours. The problem: I live in a small town in Pennsylvania. My parents live in Florida. Getting there entails a two-hour drive and two flights, plus hurry-up-and-wait time in the airports.

My sisters might have been able to get there a little faster, but they don’t exactly live around the block either. One lives in Colorado, the other in Texas. None of us were thinking about a day like this when we spread out across the continent in the 1970s.

* * *

Here is what my world map looked like when I was a child: We lived on Long Island, just over the New York City line. One set of aunts, uncles and cousins lived a few blocks away. Two other sets lived in the Bronx. Grandma lived in Brooklyn. In other words, just about my entire extended family lived within an hour’s drive (depending on the traffic).

We saw our fellow suburbanite relatives all the time. We usually saw the Bronx relatives on holidays and special occasions.

And then, in the ‘70s, with New York crumbling in the rearview mirror, we left – not together, but separately, bound for wherever opportunities drew us or the wind blew us. When I lived in Southern California, my parents lived in Colorado. When I lived in Northern California, my parents lived in Southern California. One sister settled in Denver, but the other bounced from Colorado to Wyoming to Houston to Dallas.

At one point, my parents considered leaving pricey San Diego to join me in Sonora, but I didn’t think my moving days were over. They decamped for Florida instead. Wise move: I soon left California for a job in Pennsylvania.

It sounds like we must have been trying to get away from each other and stay away from each other, but that is not it at all. We are far-flung, but close-knit. My parents set the tone: They have been happily married for a mind-boggling 68 years. My memories of our household are mostly warm and fond.

So why did we disperse the way we did? A partial explanation is that the world had shrunk. When we were growing up, most New Yorkers vacationed in the Catskill Mountains, a few hours north of the city. The lucky few flew to Disneyland, Las Vegas, Florida or Hawaii. Then the interstate highway system was built and air travel became more affordable. The jet-setters had to make room on the plane for a huge wave of middle-class travelers. My sister studied in Spain. During college, I drove out west with friends, camping along the way. After college, I backpacked around Europe.

My family was among those who felt that we could go anywhere, that we could live anywhere. And if we wound up in different towns or time zones – no biggie, we could hop on a plane or jump in the car and come visit. The world was one big neighborhood.

Of course, there were a lot more nonstop flights in those days. And no airport security. And cheap gasoline.

But cheap and easy travel alone cannot explain my family’s wanderings. Plenty of other families we knew back in New York stayed put. I was judgmental about it: We were the worldly, adventurous ones. They were provincial, tradition-bound.

* * *

It was only when I became a parent that I began to appreciate the advantages of families staying in tight little clusters. I envied friends who could regularly count on their folks to take care of the kids, and not just because it was free and trustworthy babysitting. I thought it would be nice for our kids to spend time with their grandparents, nice for our parents to spend time with their grandkids.

Then air travel got less convenient and, for me, with my own family of five, less affordable. Over the years, members of my original immediate family have seen each other about as often as we saw the extended family when we were kids – once or twice a year, usually to celebrate a birthday or a birth, a wedding or a wedding anniversary.

These reunions are delightful affairs. When we say goodbye at the end of a long weekend together someone always wishes we could see each other more often. Everyone else agrees.

In the past year, though, we began to see the more painful consequences of not having made living near family a priority. Dad turned 91, Mom, 87. They needed help. The elder-care service has worked well. Simone cleans, repairs, chats. My parents are crazy about her. But now that there’s a crisis – Mom’s supposed stroke quickly led to a cancer diagnosis – they need us and we’re not there. We’re not anywhere near.

The decisions my sisters and I made before we had kids and when Mom and Dad were in the prime of life seem shortsighted now. Where are the teleporters we were promised by the futurists of the past?

Former Sonoran Russell Frank teaches journalism at Penn State University.

Finally, a light came on and a groggy guy stumbled down the steps and opened up.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I thought you weren’t coming home.”

Getting locked out of my own house by my passive-aggressive roommate was the last straw. I vowed I would never again live with someone I didn’t love.

That was 25 years ago. For most of the time since then this was an easy vow to keep: I lived with my family. Last fall, though, the second of the three children flew the coop, which meant I would be paying for – and heating — a four-bedroom house occupied by two people.

The obvious solution was to downsize. Ah, but you haven’t seen my attic or my garage or my basement. They’re filled with foam, wood, cardboard, paper, metal and fabric objects that I saved because I knew that some day we’d need them for a robot-dude-from-space Halloween costume.

Any year now, I’m going to rent chutes and trash bins and empty the place out. Then I’ll move into a very tiny house with a yard so small I can cut the grass with my mustache-trimming scissors. For now, though, I’ve gone into the rooming house business.

It came about this way: I live in a town that’s a lot like Sonora except it’s got 40,000 college students, which makes for a rather fluid housing market. So now my 15-year-old son and I are playing beer pong and doing Jell-O shots with our college-aged housemates.

Just kidding. What really happened is that I heard through the electronic grapevine that one of the many post-doctoral researchers who pass through the university every year was looking for a room in a house. A grownup, in other words. I got in touch, we sized each other up, concluded we could stand each other, and agreed on a price.

One year in, here are the advantages: David, a New Zealander in his 30s, essentially pays my heating bill for the year, gives me someone interesting to talk to when my son is out with his friends (which is most of the time) and makes a killer risotto.

The disadvantage: When my daughter, now out of college and living on her own, came home for spring break, she found someone sleeping in her bed. Unlike Baby Bear, she took it well (it helps that she can stay with her mom, who lives just a few blocks away).

I’m sorry not to have her there for morning coffee when she’s in town, but she understands that organizing my living situation around the couple of weeks per year when she returns to the nest is a luxury I can no longer afford.

Things have worked out so well with David that I’m thinking of renting out my other daughter’s bedroom to another post-doc this year. With two boarders I’ll practically be living for free.

Many of you, I suspect, will read this and say, “I could never do that. I value my privacy too much.”

I might have said the same thing a few years back. But when my marriage busted up and the kids began moving out, I found I had, if anything, too much privacy. After 20-plus years of family dinners and after-dinner wiffleball games and evenings around the dining room table with homework and newspapers, I was coming home, most days, to an empty house. It was lonesome.

Now I’ve got someone to talk with and someone to eat with and, above all, someone to help with the household bills. And I’m not the only one who’s renting out rooms. An old friend from Sonora who had arrived at the same stage and station in life gave me the idea. I’ve heard of other people who have taken on boarders as well. If, after sending your kids to college, your bank account is as empty as your nest, you should seriously consider it.

Eventually I’ll make the move to a tiny house or maybe even an apartment. For now, though, having a roomie beats clearing out all those never-used Halloween costume parts.

And don’t worry, I have the key to the dead bolt in this house so there’s no chance I’ll have to pound down the door to gain admittance at 1:30 a.m.

Of course, at my age, I’m never out that late anyway.

Russell Frank used to live in a two-bedroom house in Sonora with his wife, three kids and a dog. He now teaches journalism at Penn State University, where he can be reached at rfrank@psu.edu.

© 2009, Friends and Neighbors Magazine

In other words, forget retirement. We’re gonna bop on down to the salt mines until we drop.

Which is fine by me, actually.  It’s not that I’m a workaholic. Far from it. I’m as lazy as the next guy. Maybe lazier.

A week off is lovely. I’m enjoying one as I write this, in fact. A month off is bliss. After that, though, I get antsy. I suspect most of us do. I don’t care how much you love to fish, golf, scrapbook or stage Crimean War battles on your dining room table. Do it every day for long enough and you’ll be bored silly.

I’ve known this since childhood. School would let out. For the first happy month of summer vacation we would play all day: baseball in the backyard before lunch, board games in the basement after lunch, with the occasional game of dodgeball in Arthur’s pool or stickball in the street. At night we’d entomb fireflies in mayonnaise jars and slurp Fudgsicles from the ice cream truck that came around the neighborhood after dinner. Good times.

Then, toward the end of July, we’d start to pick fights with each other, cheat at our games, provoke vicious splash fights in the pool – sure signs that we were sick of each other, weary of our games, fed up with our moms’ peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. We’d never admit it, but going back to school had begun to look pretty appealing.

We humans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward work: On one hand, we believe in it. We distrust idleness and disapprove of laziness. We see work as ennobling, virtuous, character-building. We respect those who earn their wealth more than those who inherit it.

On the other hand, we resent work. In Judeo-Christian culture’s foundational story, work is punishment. Adam and Eve nibble the forbidden fruit and God pretty much says, No more living off the fat of the land for you two – get busy!

Work is the opposite of both play and leisure. Work is drudgery, labor, toil. The rat race. The daily grind. TGIF.

The result of this ambivalence about work is a culture where people both complain and boast about how hard their noses are pressed to the grindstone. Where, ironically, a massive industry is devoted to entertaining us when we aren’t at work (and sometimes even when we are). Where the new president mentions work eight times in his inaugural address and then attends 10 inaugural balls.

We seek balance, of course. All work and no play, etc. Or, if we’re lucky, we do work that feels like play. I fear, though, that more and more of us are subscribing to the anti-work ethic than to the work ethic. Our goal: earn maximum money (or leisure) for minimum exertion.

President Obama invoked this mindset during his inaugural address when he railed against greed, irresponsibility, shortcuts and “those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.” Later in the same speech, he said, “…   there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”

That was the keeper quote, in my book, yet it got very little play, probably because it sounded so boringly puritanical. (While playing a clip from President Obama’s inaugural address, a glum-looking Jon Stewart let a party blower droop from his lips. When he finally exhaled, the blower unfurled forlornly: The call for “a new era of responsibility” just didn’t fit the party mood.)

So many of us, myself included, have been given such cushy lives that work feels like an imposition. We want to devote our energies to having fun, not busting our humps.

But it has slowly dawned on me over the years that as much as I like hard crossword puzzles and easy bike rides, as much as I like live theatre and dead poets, as much as I like wandering among strangers and socializing with friends, I feel best about myself when I kick myself in the butt and get something done.

That doesn’t have to entail clocking in somewhere, of course. There are plenty of useful things to do around the house, to say nothing of painting that masterpiece you always knew you had in you.

But a job does some other underappreciated things for us: It gives us someplace to go, something to do and someone to talk to.

I may not want to put in a 40-hour week when I’m 85 – and we as a society need to become more flexible about taking advantage of the wisdom and expertise of those who only want to semi-retire – but if my health holds out, I predict that I am going to want to keep working, no matter how much money I’ve been able to sock away.

That way I’ll still have vacations to look forward to.

Russell Frank, 54, worked at The Union Democrat from 1985 to 1988. He earned a doctorate in folklore and in 1998 began working at Penn State University, where he is an associate professor of journalism. Email him at rbf5@psu.edu.

© 2009, Friends and Neighbors Magazine

Russell Frank

My dad turned 90 this year. He still drives (though if you’re heading for South Florida I can tell you which streets to avoid), still reads the paper and gets riled up about the state of the world (though he doesn’t yell at people on street corners), and still thinks he can tote that barge and lift that bale (he spent his birthday moving furniture so the carpets could be shampooed).

At his birthday party I presented some fun facts about 1918, the year he was born: It was a bad year for tsars and kaisers, a good year for the Red Sox and the Spanish Flu, Daylight Savings Time began and a gallon of gas cost 8 cents.

I also revealed the secrets of the guest of honor’s longevity: sugar on grapefruit and salt on everything else, canned fruit in heavy syrup, chopped liver and pickled herring, and a steady diet of bad puns and old songs. For exercise he recommends taking a walk around a glass of water.

Then I got serious. The real secret, I said, is that the man has no meanness in him. I asked the assemblage of family and friends and my mother to think about it: Had they ever seen my dad act nasty to anyone? No one had.

I summed up my pop’s approach to life by recalling something that happened in 1975:

We are living in New York. My friend Mikey has borrowed one of the two lemons in my family’s automotive stable and is calling us from a phone booth in Brooklyn Heights.

The car has died.

On the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the pouring rain.

So my dad and I get in the other lemon and drive to the rescue. It’s a jumper cables situation.

Mikey has ample reason to be unhappy because it’s hard not to feel like it’s your fault when something that does not belong to you breaks when it is in your possession.

My dad has ample reason to be unhappy because it is his car.

I have ample reason to be unhappy because as the liaison between my friend and my father, I feel obliged to get soaking wet also.

So naturally we stand on the bridge in the rain laughing our heads off.

This, my dad has taught me, is the proper response to most non-life-threatening situations.

The only people who don’t have problems, he likes to say, are in the cemetery.

One way we think about the soul is as a parallel metaphysical self, on which emotions like anger or anxiety have the same corrosive effects as acid on the physical self. We talk of how these feelings consume us or poison us or eat us up.

I’d like to think my father’s long and mostly cheerful life is evidence that our ideas about destructive emotions are more than just metaphors — that the sweet-natured soul has a better chance than the sourpuss at a many-candled cake and a birthday greeting from the White House.

And yet we baby boomers obsess far more about our cholesterol than our souls. When I had a colon cancer scare a couple of years ago I asked my surgeon if there was anything I could do diet-wise, to prevent a recurrence. (I’m not a pickled herring man like my dad, but maybe I needed to go easy on the everything bagels.)

Oh, he said, everyone will tell you to eat more whole grains and less fat, but between the two of us, when it comes to colon cancer I don’t think it matters what you eat.

Now this may have been non-holistic western medicine talking – prevention is not the surgeon’s department – but maybe a better question was whether there was anything I could do attitude-wise to prevent a recurrence.

Well, I’m a nice enough guy, though maybe not as sweet-natured as my pop. What I decided I needed above all things, was more beauty. I don’t mean that I began applying Rogaine where there wasn’t hair and Grecian Formula where there was. I mean I began paying more attention to the beauty that is all around us – to flowers and flowing water and light and shadow and the tiny sound a leaf makes when it hits the forest floor.

Last summer I returned to Tuolumne County after a long absence and backpacked through some of the most rugged terrain in Yosemite Park. It had been decades since I’d hiked with a heavy pack so I was feeling pretty good about myself until I saw the gaunt and sinewy chaps at the Tuolumne Meadows Grill who looked like they had hiked down from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before breakfast.

But then, as I sat on a rock with my pancakes, warmed by the morning sun and coffee, I remembered the obvious: what matters is not how far or how fast you go, or that I’d be in better shape if I ate less and moved more.

What matters is appreciation: appreciation that I am hale and hardy enough to be out there at all, and appreciation of the dazzling beauty of the place.
It would be lovely to still be hiking and biking when I’m my dad’s age, assuming I even make it that far. But that’s not my goal. I just want to remain alive to the beauty to be seen on a walk around a glass of water.

Russell Frank, 54, got his first journalism job at the Union Democrat, where he worked from 1985 to 1988 covering the City of Sonora and its old-timers. He then spent seven years at the Modesto Bee and two years as an editor at a small newspaper in Pennsylvania. In 1998, he began teaching at Penn State University, where he is now an associate professor of journalism. Email him at rbf5@psu.edu.