PEACE ON EARTH TO ALL CELEBRANTS OF GOOD WILL

For the last couple of years, conservative Christians have been claiming that there is a "war on Christmas" being conducted by those (including the First Couple) who send "Season's Greetings" cards, or wish their friends and customers "Happy Holidays" or call the school vacation over Christmas and New Year's "Winter Break." On the other hand, many Orthodox Jews not only refuse to have anything to do with Christmas, but decry the fuss being made over Hanukkah, which, they insist, is only a "minor holiday." The current hoopla over Hanukkah, they claim, is merely a first step on the road to assimilation.

As a Jew, I have some rather strong opinions on the institutionalization of a Christian holiday so that all of us have to celebrate it in some way whether we like it or not. But I'm also an American, steeped in the culture of Dickens, Peanuts, and George Friedrich Handel. Not to mention heavy-duty British holiday cooking (I like fruitcake, plum pudding, mince pie, and hard sauce, the harder the better.)

Even more significantly, I live in a northern climate. By late December, what I see and feel around me is cold, gray, damp, and depressing. Like many northerners, I get at least mildly depressed by the long nights and short days. Coming home from work in the dark makes me feel as if I have worked longer and harder than I really have, and therefore feel tireder than I really am.

The wisdom of our northern ancestors, I think, has to override the traditions of our Mesopotamian and Northern African forebears, for the sake of our own sanity. All of us, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu, who now live in the cold frozen (well, okay, given the trend to global warming, the cold slushy) north, need a winter holiday!

That holiday should emphasize light and warmth and companionship and family and good food and music. It should give us an excuse to shut down from work for a while and stop fighting the elements to do business as usual. Above all, it should give us a chance to recognize that we are all in this together, regardless of the religious or cultural gloss we put on our individual celebrations. Giving presents to our fellow workers, dropping money into the red kettle at the mall, sending cards to friends and family, are partly a way to touch bases every year and reassure ourselves that we have made it through another year. But more important, they are a silent pledge that if your car is stuck in a drift, I will help you get it out, and if I slip on an icy sidewalk, you will help me up, and if we are all blizzarded in, I will check to see if you need anything when I go out for provisions. If our respective religious and cultural traditions do not require this, anything else they do require is merely "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals," as Paul would say to the Corinthians.

So I like Winter Solstice celebrations, since all of us recognize this cosmological event. I like celebrations involving fire and light and good food and good music. So far, nobody seems to put out Winter Solstice cards. But this year, as I made my last shopping foray for cards and gifts, for the first time I found a bunch of Happy New Year cards, and picked up a couple of batches. I found that they said, to my friends who do not observe Hanukkah, what I really want to say: I am glad you have been in my life this year, and I hope next year is better for all of us. Keep warm. Peace and light.

PHONE BOOK TIME AGAIN

As I walked out of our building the other day, I passed a stack of new phone books in the vestibule. The next day, a couple of them were gone. Since then, nobody has removed any of them. I haven't taken any, partly because, having busted a couple of ribs, I'm in no shape for heavy lifting right now. I don't know what everybody else's excuse is. I'm not sure I would bother with them even if I were physically up to it, so why should my neighbors?

Why should anybody? What use are they? I read someplace a while back that, at least in the Chicago area, roughly one-third of the information in our phone books is either inaccurate or outdated. The Bureau of the Census says that every year, 20% of us move. So we're starting out with 20% of the information being inaccurate for at least part of the year, assuming that they got it right in the first place. Which they don't, necessarily. Their spelling is questionable, especially with non-Anglo-Saxon names or odd business titles. (My favorite veggie restaurant, the late lamented Mama Peaches, was listed by Directory Assistance as "Mama's Peaches.") Sometimes the numbers are transposed, much to the dismay of, for instance, perfectly respectable customers who discover their numbers are listed under "phone sex" or "pizza."

Most of us these days can check out phone numbers online at home or work. Those unfortunates who need to call from someplace else won't be able to find a phone book anyplace else anyway. Certainly not at pay phones (a rapidly-disappearing convenience.)

As pay phones vanish, phone books grow and multiply. These days, they aren't necessarily produced by the same people who provide your phone service. After all, the wisdom of deregulation has brought us multiple phone service providers. Some of them produce books, some don't. And some independent companies, who have nothing to do with providing phone service at all, do produce books. In the Chicago area, there are at least two separate and more-or-less identical sets of phone books stacked up in our hall every year.

And that's just counting information for phones within the Chicago city limits. There are something like 248 municipalities in the Chicago area. They get grouped into three supplementary sets of phone books, for the north, south, and west suburbs. (We are fortunate in that Lake Michigan occupies the space that would otherwise contain the east suburbs.) We city-dwellers have to special-order the suburban books, and pay for them. And provide space for them. People who do a lot of business in the suburbs probably have no choice, especially since Directory Assistance is utterly useless for finding suburban phone numbers unless you happen to know which suburb contains the place you're looking for. But the rest of us generally choose to do without and take our chances.
The alternative, after all, is three Chicago phone books (white pages, consumer yellow pages, and business-to-business yellow pages), plus white and yellow pages for three sets of suburbs. That's 9 very large books, total, weighing approximately 5 pounds each. A pain to store, a pain to lift, and increasingly difficult to use, given that the print keeps getting smaller (no, that's not an illusion caused by aging--publishers are trying to save paper and delivery costs, and one of the ways they do it is by either shrinking the print size, or cramming the letters closer together, or both.)

The only commercially produced phone books that are really any use are the small neighborhood and local suburban books; they're no more accurate than their big brothers, but they are a lot easier to store and to use.

Making phone books, of course, requires cutting down trees. Roughly 17 of them per ton of paper. At 45 pounds per household, that's roughly 75,000 tons a year, killing roughly 1,275,000 trees. Plus all kinds of minerals (mostly toxic) for the ink. Plus the water it takes to sustain the forests.

Once you're finished with the phone book, you have to figure out what to do with it. It's yet another serious burden on the ecosystem. For some reason, phone books don't biodegrade. They last forever. They make up roughly 20% of the contents, by volume, of the average landfill. They are made from a low grade of paper that must be "downcycled" into lower grade recycled products. And they're contaminated with toxic minerals, plastics, and magnets that mess up the recycling process.

So, like an increasing proportion of people all over the world, including apparently most of my neighbors, I have decided not to bother picking up this year's new phone books. I will throw out my old ones wherever the city recycling authorities mandate, and use the space for something more interesting.

TO SERVE AND--WHAT?

Last week was another tragic lawyer-shooting in Chicago. This one had no connection to family law--the intended victim was an intellectual property attorney who had handled a patent case for the shooter (the inventor of a toilet for trucks.) The intended victim, another attorney in the same office, and a clerical worker were all killed, and a paralegal was wounded. The shooter was also killed--last I heard, nobody was sure whether it was by his own hand or by the SWAT team which finally turned up a bit too late. The shooter was apparently yet another person who had anticipated the legal system solving his problems, who expressed his disappointment with a gun when it didn't.

There will undoubtedly be more commentary on that part of the story, both in and out of the profession. For the moment I'm concerned about the requirements of yet another "profession," namely "building security." The shooter entered the building at the only available entrance, which was covered by security officers. They asked for his ID and checked at the law office to see if he had an appointment. Finding out that he didn't, they sent him away. But he came back with a gun, which he pulled on the security guard. The guard then took him up to the law office.

Like all the rest of you, I have spent lots of time waiting to be allowed into buildings in which I had perfectly legitimate business, so that "security officers" could check me out and decide I was an acceptable visitor. Being female and not especially big, I probably didn't make any of them nervous enough to stop me. But if I had, I would have put up with it, because like just about everybody else, I was willing to sacrifice a certain amount of convenience and freedom so that other people could be safe.

And now I learn that all I had to do to get personally escorted wherever I was going was to pull a gun on the security guard. Excuse me? Aren't these guys being paid, and armed, and trained, to prevent attacks on building occupants? Shouldn't the guard have done something at the lobby checkpoint, like pull a gun, or mace, or a taser, or at least alert one of the other guards before going upstairs, or jam the elevator once they got in? Something other than escort the killer into the office of his victims and then (so far as I know) go back downstairs before the shooting started?

Yes, I know that the guy was not a real police officer sworn to serve and protect and put his own life on the line to do it. Yes, I know that he was probably "temporary" and/or "part-time" with no benefits, and was getting paid maybe 5% of the hourly pay of the attorneys he allowed to get shot. But nonetheless, he was uniformed, trained and at least in some fashion armed, to provide the building's occupants with the illusion of safety.

And, apparently, nothing else. This is not a position the building management should have allowed itself to get into. If there is one thing lawyers know how to do, by definition, it is sue. The friends and families of the decedents in this case will probably go after every asset of the building management and the owners who hired them. And those of us who have given up ever-increasing amounts of convenience and freedom to "building security" personnel will be sitting in the stands cheering them on.

TIME (LIKE LIFE AND FORTUNE) MARCHES ON

A couple of weeks ago I turned 65. I've spent the last month getting acquainted with the implications of that. First, there are the benefits. I won't get full benefits if I apply for Social Security retirement before next August (the age of official retirement has been creeping up for a while, unnoticed by most people.) But I do get Medicare, which is terrific, since I have had no health insurance for the last three years. Now I have an insurance policy that gets me all kinds of useful things. I can pay for prescription meds, instead of relying on my doctor and the kindness of strangers in pharmaceutical companies for samples. I can get on the bus for half-fare. When I do, people get up to give me a seat (usually, by the way, women--interesting, isn't it?)

One of the benefits that came with my insurance was a free membership at the local Y. With which comes one of the drawbacks of getting older--last week, I slipped on a wet floor in the locker room and broke a couple of ribs.

In the course of dealing with this, I discovered an Urgent Care facility in my PPO network, a block from my office. For a mere $10 co-pay, I saw a doctor and got a set of X-rays. What that gets me in practical terms is limited. There isn't much they can do for broken ribs. It all has to do with managing symptoms (especially pain, of which there is a lot.) "If wrapping yourself in an Ace bandage makes you feel better, do it," says my doctor. "Don't do anything that hurts. No pain, no pain." I have a prescription for painkillers, which I try to take as seldom as possible.

This creates certain practical problems. After 10 days of not taking out the garbage, I begin to feel like Shel Silverstein's Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout (read the poem if you haven't already.) So I call a friend who very kindly comes over and deals with the garbage.

I can't do heavy lifting, so now I get the groceries delivered. When the house gets intolerably dirty, I will enlist the very nice woman who cleans the office. In the meantime, when I see a dust bunny on the floor, I just leave it there and try not to think about it. Aging may be easier on men, who don't have the "If I don't clean it up now, I'll just have to do it later" reflex.

I need to get a bone density test; osteoporosis runs in my family (not just the women, either--my father had it.) Are the ribs the beginning of a trend? If so, I may not be able to use many of the current standard meds, since they can aggravate my ulcer. Thus I get introduced to yet another problem of aging--the tendency of multiple medical conditions to get in the way of each other's treatment. This is, presumably, how even young gerontologists get gray hair.

I'm getting used to the fact that I am now too old to die young. I feel as if I'm in a biological free fire zone.

But on the other hand, like many lawyers my age, I feel entitled to cut back on work a bit. Lawyers don't generally retire, but they do cut back. One of my colleagues just turned 96, and he's still practicing. I come in to the office later on days when I don't have to be in court. When I'm in the office, I work as hard as ever (maybe even harder, to make up for the late mornings), but I don't feel quite as driven.

I contemplate having spare time, and doing things with it. I'm on the board of my congregation, and have taken on the congregational library as my special project. So I need to learn about software for cataloging books. This can be fun. (I remember my father saying he was busier after he retired than he had been when he was still officially working.)

Am I the only senior citizen blogger? Probably not. Peace and light to you all.