Abe Lester, a retired high school teacher, learns that his life-long buddy Larry, a frustrated photographer, has suddenly vanished a week before his divorce is to be finalized.  Abe stumbles upon a journal left behind by Larry, which details Larry’s disturbing descent into a delusional world peopled by colorful characters. Police detectives and forensic psychiatrists try to help Abe unravel the mysteries of his friend’s journal and disappearance.

The book can be purchased at http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcover/the-11th-man/14321912

As you all know, Abe Lester has been going to the same physician, Dr. Schwartz, for the past twenty years.  It was Dr. Schwartz who first diagnosed Abe with mitral valve prolapse.  It was Dr. Schwartz who saw Abe through two hospital admissions, for food poisoning and cellulitis, and innumerable cases of bronchitis.  It was Dr. Schwartz who prescribed statin drugs for Abe and reduced his cholesterol to acceptable levels. 

Through all those years, Abe Lester showed unflinching loyalty to Dr. Schwartz, the proof of the pudding being that even though Dr. Schwartz was not in Abe’s medical insurance plan, Abe was willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for the doctor’s services.  

But today, Abe Lester has to make a decision, perhaps the biggest decision in the history of HMOs and PPOs.  Abe has to decide whether or not to stay with Dr. Schwartz or switch to a new doctor that is in his medical insurance plan.  CNN has decided to air Abe’s decision during this special presentation of “Larry King Live.”

How are you feeling, Abe?

Abe:

Not too bad, Larry.  I still have a little cough from a bout with bronchitis. 

Larry King

First of all, Abe, tell us how you came to making this decision.

Abe

Well, it wasn’t easy.  I really like Dr. Schwartz.  I trust him.  He’s seen me through a lot of bad times.  But you see, Larry, I just retired from my job and I get a pension.  But the pension isn’t too much…

Larry King

Would you mind telling us exactly how much your pension is?

Abe

Well it varies.  There are cost of living adjustments, taxes, loans to pay off…let’s just say it’s quite a bit less than I made at my job.  The good thing is that I still get medical insurance.  While I was working, I never wanted to use a doctor in my plan since I was doing so well with Dr. Schwartz, but recently I started to wonder if I can really afford him anymore.

Larry King

So the decision is basically between money and loyalty.  Have you told anybody what your decision is going to be?

Abe

Only a few people.  You can count them on one or two fingers.

Larry King

Did you ask anybody for advice, Abe?

Abe

Yeah, I talked it over with a few people.  My mother gave me the best advice.  She’s 85 and has five or six different doctors.  She said to me, “Abe, your health is the most important thing.  If you’re dead, you can’t spend the money you save anyway.”  She also said, “Do what’s good for you, not what’s good for the doctor.”

Larry King

Wise words from a wise woman.  Tell me, Abe, when exactly did you finally decide?

Abe

I was still deciding in my sleep last night, Larry.  I had a dream that I was in cardiac arrest, shortness of breath, pain in my left shoulder.  I managed to get to a phone and call Dr. Schwartz.  But he said he couldn’t help me because I didn’t pay the last bill.  Then I woke up and knew what I had to do.

Larry King

So are you ready to tell America your decision, Abe?

Abe

Yes, Larry.  I decided I am going to switch to Dr. Applebaum.  He’s in my insurance plan.  All he takes is a $15 co-pay for each visit.

Larry King

Dr. Applebaum!  You just made his day, Abe.  We have a live feed up from his office.  Look at the nurses and file clerks dancing in the waiting room!

Abe

Yeah.  That’s another reason I picked Applebaum.  He has great nurses who really know how to draw blood and handle urine samples.  They all work as a team.  I think I can work with them and stay alive another twenty years. 

Larry King

Abe, I’m sorry to say this, but we’ve just received reports that Dr. Schwartz has burned your medical files.  What do you say to that?

Abe

Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Larry.  I still love Dr. Schwartz.  I would recommend him to anyone who needs a prostate exam.  But put it this way, Larry.  Let’s say Dr. Schwartz called me up one day and told me he didn’t want me as a patient anymore.  Would that justify me and my wife  burning down his office?

Larry King

Well, we’re out of time, Abe.  Thanks so much for sharing your decision with us.  And by the way folks, revenues from this special will go to AARP and the Cleveland branch of the Over the Hill Hoopsters.   Congratulations to you Abe and to Dr. Applebaum.

Abe

Thanks, Larry.

Still it’s not easy getting old, no matter what century you live in.  Getting out of bed in the morning becomes an arthritic ballet in which you dare not make a false move.  The stiffness in the joints and the ache in the muscles must be worked out gradually or you pull or twist something and suffer the consequences with days of debilitating pain.  In a few years, it will get even worse and the stiffness and pain will last all day long.  I can tell by the way very old people move.

 Then there’s the state of my internal organs.  Like most men my age, my prostate is enlarged, causing problems with urination.  I usually have to get up twice during the night to go to the bathroom.  This is especially annoying when I’m in the midst of a pleasant dream and I don’t want it to end.  Sometimes I dream that I have to go to the bathroom, but there isn’t one around.  I take two different pills every morning that are supposed to help treat the prostate and aid in urination.  I also take a plant extract that the Mayans used to urinate better.  The Mayan priests practiced human sacrifice, but at least they didn’t have to run to bathroom all the time.  I really don’t know if it works, but so far I haven’t gotten prostate cancer, so I don’t dare discontinue it. 

Then there’s my heart.  Both my parents had bypass operations, which is a big genetic strike against me.  I had a heart scan done a few years ago when the procedure was barely out of the experimental stage and they found plaque beginning to form in my arteries.  It shows up on the heart scan as little white scratches against the black vessel walls.  Ever since then, my doctor has had me on statin drugs to reduce my cholesterol.  Today, I’m on the maximum dosage so the doctor had to augment the statin with another pill.  My cholesterol is under control, but my triglycerides are 190, which is 90 points over what they should be.  I don’t even know what triglycerides are, but the doctor says 190 is way too high for someone with risk factors like mine.

So I finally decided that I should eat healthier and lose a few pounds.  My wife just found out her cholesterol was high, so we decided to diet together.   The first thing we did was to order a large pizza with extra cheese.  This was our farewell bad meal, crispy crust, spongy mozzarella, pools of fat and oil staining the box.  I’m sure that the four slices I had raised my triglycerides to an even 200. 

The next day we went shopping for diet foods.  It turns out that diet foods today are not the foods we were told were good for us in the past.  Bread, rice, and pasta, for example, are now considered bad for you.  They put on pounds, which I always suspected but was afraid to say in public.  The official government food pyramid was gospel and grains were at the base of the pyramid.   Now we know that carbs are good for you if you’re going to run a marathon the next day because carbohydrates give you quick energy, but if all you do for exercise is walk the dog and carry the laundry up the stairs, then carbs are out. 

The diet mantra today is “get lean with protein.”  Lots of drastic diets today consist of mostly protein drinks, which taste like frothy wallpaper paste, but real foods, like meat, chicken, fish and eggs are good-tasting protein sources that help put muscle in place of fat.  Fruits and veggies, of course, are still considered healthy and, since they are low in calories, you can eat lots of them at a time.  So my wife and I, in our diet frenzy, bought tons of fruits and vegetables.

Almost every big diet no-no begins with the letter “c”: carbs, candy, cookies, cake, and (ice) cream.  Chocolate is my particular weakness, but I know it’s bad for me because it begins with a “c”, just like cholesterol.  In the past, I was always able to justify eating an extra-large Chunky Chocolate bar because soldiers are given chocolate in their field rations.  If soldiers eat chocolate to fight better, it can’t be that bad.

I love my Chunky Chocolate bar and I love bread, especially the crunchy end piece of a hot, slightly well-done Italian bread, but I know that if I am going to halve that triglyceride number, I’ll have to give up these pleasures.  What I simply can’t give up are my Blow Pop lollipops. 

I don’t care what the experts say about sugary treats and weight gain and diabetes.  I know from experience that Blow Pops help me lose weight.  I don’t know how many calories there are in each one (I’m afraid to look), but I can go through ten Blow Pops while reading or watching a baseball game and I gain no weight.  They assuage hunger, satisfy my oral craving, and make me happy.  A Blow Pop for me is like a cigarette to a smoker.  And like nicotine, it helps in dieting.

I haven’t done any research on why Blow Pops cause weight loss, but I do have an hypothesis.  I think it has to do with the considerable energy one expends in the ingestion of the Blow Pop.  First, the Blow Pop is globular in shape, so that one is forced to use the entire mouth to suck on it, rather than just the tongue, as you would in licking a normal disc-shaped lollipop.  The combined licking and sucking action burns more calories than just licking.   Then, of course, once you have sucked away all the candy coating, you are left with the gum, which you can chew without losing taste for as long as another fifteen minutes.  Again, a considerable number of calories are expended in the mastication process.  (Note that the major adverse side-effect of Blow Pop use is loss of fillings in the teeth, especially if the candy coating is bitten into before it has been completely sucked away.) 

So while my wife wasn’t looking, I grabbed a bag of Blow Pops and hid them beneath the apples in the shopping cart.   The big problem with Blow Pops is that they come in an opaque white bag and you can’t see which flavors you’re getting.  I like strawberry and cherry the best and sour apple the least, but I invariably pick out a bag with more sour apple than strawberry.  However, I recently discovered that if you hold the bag up to the fluorescent light of the supermarket, you can see the different colored lollipop wrappers through the bag.   If I see pink-colored wrappers, I know I’ll get at least a few strawberry lollipops.  So if you see a 59 year old guy in the supermarket aisle holding a bag of Blow Ups over his head and squinting, don’t panic and call Homeland Security.

Anyway, we’ve been on the diet for the past three days and we’ve both lost five pounds each.  The Blow Pops make it easier for me, but I still have intense cravings for bread and chocolate.  This afternoon, I was so desperate for something crunchy, besides a celery or carrot stick, that I cracked and ate a walnut that had been sitting for months on our pantry shelf.  Somehow it tasted like the crust of a fresh Italian bread.

 I dislike July 4^th mostly because of the fireworks, especially the illegal ones my neighbors set off when I am sleeping.  Even the spectacular pyrotechnic displays put on by local towns rub me the wrong way because they simulate and glorify war.  Am I the only one at these patriotic celebrations who can’t help but imagine the intense horror felt by soldiers during war being bombarded by exploding shells?

July 4^th has become Barbecues and Blown-Off Appendages Day, instead of what it should be, a celebration of one the greatest documents ever written in human history, the Declaration of Independence.  The ideas so beautifully expressed by Jefferson were not invented by him.  They evolved in Europe during a time period appropriately known as the Enlightenment Era with philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire.   Instead of focusing on the Revolutionary War, we should be hailing the revolutionary idea that “all men are born with inalienable rights.”  This was not accepted truth in the 18^th century world ruled by monarchs who legitimized their power by “divine right.”

Jefferson further enumerated those rights: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  This is very similar to John Locke’s phrase, except Locke said we all have a right to property instead of happiness.  How much loftier is Jefferson’s phrasing!  Take note that we don’t have a right to happiness, but rather a fair chance to pursue it.  If we had a right to happiness, the government would be compelled to issue Valium to all citizens.  A fair chance to purse happiness includes the opportunity to seek out and possess those material goods necessary for health and welfare.

July 4^th should be a celebration of these momentous ideals, but also a time to reflect on how far we have come towards achieving them.  If we are honest with ourselves, I would suggest that we still fall very short of these goals.  Take the most essential of our inalienable rights, the right to “life.”  The phrase “right to life” has been co-opted by anti-abortionists in support of their belief that life begins at conception, but what I think Jefferson meant was that a person has a right to live his life free from the fear that someone else can arbitrarily take it away.  Though Jefferson was a slave owner, his expression of life as a right can be applied to arguments against slavery, unjustified imprisonment, and even capital punishment. 

In today’s world, I think the right to life has taken on another meaning, one that Jefferson could hardly have imagined.  As Al Gore has put it, the “inconvenient truth” is that we, as citizens of the earth, have altered this planet so drastically that our right to life is threatened.   Ironically, in our immoderate pursuit of happiness, we have poured so much carbon into the atmosphere that there is no returning to life as we once knew it.  The environmental activist Bill McKibben sums up the effects of global warming caused by burning of fossil fuels:

“The planet we inhabit has a finite number of huge physical features.  Virtually all of them seem to be changing rapidly: the Arctic ice cap is melting, and the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed.  The oceans, which cover three-fourths of the earth’s surface, are distinctly more acid and their level is rising; they are also warmer, which means the greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful.  The vast inland glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, and the giant snowpack of the American West, are melting very fast, and within decades the supply of water to the billions of people living downstream may dwindle.  The great rainforest of the Amazon is drying on its margins and threatened at its core.  The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years.  The great storehouses of oil beneath the earth’s crust are now more empty than full.  Every one of these things is completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilization…We have traveled to a new planet on a burst of carbon dioxide.”

Who is to blame for creating this new earth that jeopardizes our inalienable right to life?  It’s too easy to point fingers at politicians and huge corporations.  Of course, politicians, who should have been listening to the warnings of scientists as far back the 1970s, listened to the big oil and car companies instead.  But politicians simply followed the lead of the people, who demanded more cars and an ever-growing economy.  It turns out that we are all to blame.  We the people are giving away our right to life on this planet.

I am amazed by the hypocrisy of finger-pointing for the BP oil disaster.  It seems obvious that greed trumped precaution in the deep-drilling decision-making process, but the more basic cause of the worst environmental disaster in history is that we have finally come to the point at which we are forced to drill deeper and deeper into the earth to find new sources of oil.  We are addicted to oil, to our cars, and to the idea of perpetual economic growth.  I don’t think Jefferson could foresee how our right to pursue happiness might lead to the potential death of the planet, but that’s exactly the prospect we are now facing. 

The first item I heard on the news this July 4^th morning was that a man shooting off a mortar to celebrate the holiday accidentally shot off  his arm instead.  What a perfect metaphor for what we are doing to our own earth this July 4^th 2010.  Have a safe holiday.

Why is this happening?  There are two main reasons. First, and foremost, it has to do with money.  Whichever team lands Lebron is guaranteed sold out arena seats for years to come.  Second, there is a great deal of prestige for the city that Lebron decides to call home.  If he helps that city to a championship, all the better.  So when money and civic pride are at stake, you know that politicians have to get involved.  They are standing in line like Louis XIV’s courtiers hoping to get a chance to tie Lebron’s sneakers.

Not that anyone of importance cares, but I personally have a problem with this obsequious behavior on the part of the men we’ve elected to represent us.  After all, Lebron James is not really a king.  He’s simply a very large, strong, and agile guy who can toss a ball very effectively through a hoop.  But for some reason, in our society, a man who possesses those attributes becomes like a king.  If Lebron James had discovered how gravity is united with the electromagnetic forces of the universe, most people wouldn’t know who he was and music videos would certainly not be produced by politicians to woo him on behalf of their constituents.  In other words, this free agency circus with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake simply reflects the sad state of our values as a society.

I have to admit, before I go on, that I don’t like basketball.  I also don’t like soccer and hockey.  I think that has to do with the fact that I hardly ever played those sports when I was young.  Today, I follow baseball and football avidly, which are the two sports I loved to play as a boy.  Soccer and hockey were rarely played in the projects in which I grew up, but basketball was a very popular sport.  Why didn’t I play it much?

The answer is simple.  I was too short.  We always had to line up in size places in grade school, and I was first in line for many years.  Not until I reached junior high was there a boy in my school shorter than me.  His name was Dennis and he would pick fights with me all the time to prove that though he was half an inch shorter, he was still tougher. 

You can’t really be an asset on a basketball team when all anyone has to do to defend against your outside shot is lift his arm.  Even if I managed to sneak under the boards unnoticed, which I could easily do since the opposing players hardly paid attention to me, the basket seemed impossibly high over my head.  I would often miss shots that taller guys could effortlessly tap in.  You get tired of team captains always picking you last and sensing their exasperation at being burdened with a useless player.  So I stopped playing basketball.

Yes, I admit having a bias against basketball due to deep-seated childhood inferiorities.  Maybe I wouldn’t be accusing NYC politicians of groveling if they were petitioning Albert Pujols to sign with the Mets.  But let’s take an example of a sport towards which I have no resentment, but only apathy: soccer.

When the French soccer team finished without a single victory and last in their division in the first round of the World Cup, the coach was ignominiously summoned to a close-door parliamentary session to be grilled about the team’s terrible performance.   French President Sarkozy  summoned an emergency meeting on French soccer and announced a national symposium this coming October to rethink how soccer is run in his country.  One French lawmaker said, “This isn’t just about football, it’s about France: It’s our honor that’s at stake.”

Maybe I don’t really appreciate the importance that Europeans place on soccer, the most popular sport in the world outside of the United States.  But isn’t it going over the top to summon the coach to Parliament as if he was general who had lost a war.  Roman Polanski, who had allegedly committed a much more heinous crime than going winless in the World Cup, was never summoned before Parliament and, in fact, is still being supported by Sarkozy’s administration.  Not only is the French government’s involvement in soccer a misplacement of priorities, but it’s also a misuse of authority.  It has led FIFA President Sepp Blatter to warn that the French team risks suspension from global tournaments if authorities intervene in the running of the national football federation.  It would be equivalent to the U.S. Congress deciding to investigate the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints if they lost a game to a Canadian football team.

When the U.S. Congress did get involved in America’s national pastime by holding hearings on the steroids issue, there were many who questioned this intervention of government into sports.  In that case, as in past baseball antitrust legislation, I believe that government intervention was justified.  The Federally Controlled Substances Act regulates the use of performance enhancing drugs, including steroids, and, therefore, falls under the jurisdiction of Congress to at least hold hearings, if not to prosecute.  Unfortunately, when lists emerged and individual players were asked to testify, the hearings took on a prosecutorial and even inquisitional tone.  It turned into a witch-hunt instead of an inquiry.

I don’t think politics and sports make a good marriage.  Elected officials should be focusing on more pressing issues instead of trying to gain popularity by feeding into the populace’s fixation on sports and sport’s figures.  Our president has to deal with a stagnating economy, a horrific environmental disaster, and an increasingly deadly war.  Why is he wasting his time lobbying for Lebron James to sign with the Chicago Bulls?

My friend is proud of his gun collection.  He has about two dozen rifles, shotguns, semiautomatic handguns, and even a flintlock musket, all neatly displayed in two mahogany gun closets.   He meticulously explained the operation and purpose of each type of firearm and the various sizes of ammunition.  He opened drawers at the bottom of the cabinet and showed me over two hundred boxes of bullets. 

I told him that I was a gun virgin, that I had never shot a gun in my entire life.  I think he was amazed.  He had been brought up with guns and was hunting with his father by the age of ten. He asked me if I wanted to try it out.

I explained to him that I thought that all guns should be outlawed.  He responded with the usual pro-gun arguments, but neither of us contended with much vehemence.  In the face of his two filled gun cabinets and all the filled gun cabinets throughout this vast country, my position seemed very naïve.  I knew that it was time that I acknowledged certain facts of life.  It was time to end my maidenhood.

So we took two long guns and two pistols and a couple of boxes of ammo from the gun closet, climbed into my friend’s truck, and went off to his father-in-law’s property, where my friend insisted it was safe to shoot.  His wife, my wife, and our dog followed in my car to witness this curious phenomenon of a 59 year old city boy firing his first gun.  We drove to his father-in-law’s property, where there was a field adjacent to a steep forest.  We set up facing the forest, which was about fifty yards away, and my friend explained that we would shoot harmlessly into the trees.

He loaded the 22 mm rifle and took the first shot, which was frighteningly loud.  Then he reloaded and handed me the rifle.  I rested the butt against my shoulder and pointed into the trees, anticipating a huge kickback.  I carefully lined up the sight, pressed the trigger, and fired.  Again the loud bang, this time like a firecracker going off by my ear, accompanied by the simultaneous, but surprisingly weak recoil against my shoulder.  It was quite a thrill, but it was hard to believe that I had just shot an instrument of potentially fatal force.  It felt more like a toy than a deadly weapon.  I turned with a smile toward my wife, who was holding on tight to the dog’s leash, and my friend’s wife, who was snapping photographs of me to document the momentous occasion.  Later on they said that I looked like a little boy who just completed his first bicycle ride.

The second firearm was a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun, or turkey gun, as my friend called it.  The shotgun shell is huge compared with a bullet because it contains little lead balls, or shot, that spread out after the shell is fired.  Apparently that makes it good for hunting birds.  My friend put a single shell into the barrel and then tried to click it shut, but it wouldn’t close.  He tried several times and almost gave up, but then he pressed a tiny pin down with his finger and it finally snapped shut.  He had no idea why the pin stuck, but he handed me the shotgun and said it was okay to shoot.   I was a little skeptical, wondering if it would explode in my face, but I took his word that it was safe to shoot and fired the gun.

The recoil was enormous, just as Newton’s third law of motion predicts.  The explosive action of the heavy cartridge propelling forward caused an equal and opposite reaction that jolted my shoulder back with almost painful force.  All I could think of was a turkey’s beautiful plumage being ripped to shreds and little lead balls embedded in the Thanksgiving meal.

The third gun was a silver semi-automatic pistol.  They’re called semi-automatic because bullets are loaded into the chamber automatically after each shot so you can shoot multiple bullets in succession by pressing the trigger each time.  It was fairly light and small, only five inches long, and easy, perhaps too easy, to hold in your hand and wave around.  In fact, that’s what I mistakenly did.  

After being handed the gun, I raised it up immediately in the direction of my wife.  Everyone  screamed out at once. “Don’t do that!”  My friend calmly explained that I had broken the first rule of gun safety, which is not to point the gun at anyone.  He should have explained that to me before putting it in my hand.  I apologized and turned towards the trees, this time with the gun pointed down at the ground.  Then I raised it again, aimed, and boom, boom, boom, fired off three shots in succession. The kickback was not great, but each time I shot, I involuntarily lowered the barrel so that the last shot skimmed off the grass at the end of the field.  I realized that it requires a strong, steady hand to shoot accurately in succession, especially with a light handgun.

The last gun I fired was a .357 magnum revolver.  It was longer and heavier than the semi-automatic, and more reminiscent of the pistols carried by the gunslingers in the Old West.  My friend’s eyes seemed to light up as he told me about this gun. 

“This is a stopper,” he said.  “It can take down a bear.  If you fire it at night, a huge flash of light comes out of the muzzle.” 

“Okay, I’ll remember that the next time I hunt bear at night.” 

“Hold it with two hands.  It has a strong kick,” he advised.

He loaded six bullets in the revolving chamber and snapped it shut.  Then he shot three times.  The explosions were almost deafening and I could see his hands recoiling each time.  Then he handed me the gun.  I fired once and was astonished by the powerful kickback.  This was obviously a very deadly weapon.  I fired it again, trying to imagine the incredible force of the bullet tearing through a torso.  The third, and last time, I fired it with one hand to feel the full impact of the recoil.  Then I handed the gun back to my friend, pointed down, of course, and thanked him for the initiation. 

“I didn’t realized how powerful they are,” I said, which summed up only part of my feelings.  What I didn’t say to him was that after firing his guns, I was even more convinced that they should all be outlawed.

I thought about the husband temporarily deranged after discovering his wife’s disloyalty, or the enraged kid after being insulted, bullied or humiliated, or the lonely and depressed guy rejected by his girlfriend and looking for a quick way out of his misery.  I thought about how many guns there are out there, how easy it is to get one, and how easy they are to use when overwhelmed by rage or depression.  I recalled having three students of mine die by gun fire, two of them accidentally.  I know that hunters consider hunting a constitutional right and that there are many good people who need personal protection against bad people, but over thirty thousand people a year are killed by guns, the majority of them being suicides. 

I’m glad I finally got to shoot a gun.  My anti-gun position is no longer just an intellectual one.  I now have felt the frightening power these weapons have.  Hopefully, I’ll never be forced to witness someone being shot.  And hopefully, when Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court is approved, recent decisions that have eroded the powers of local governments to control guns will be reversed.

The Sunday puzzles always have a theme, which is hinted at in the title of the puzzle.  If you can figure out the underlying concept hidden in the title, you are on the way to figuring out the handful of words or phrases that anchor the rest of the puzzle.  Frequently, the title is a play on words and the double entendre becomes evident after you’ve figured out the first anchor clue.  But sometimes the underlying concept is not that easy to figure out, as was the case in today’s puzzle.

The title of the puzzle was “Flag Day” and the anchor clues were the colors of national flags.  One clue, for example, was “Country with a blue, white and red flag.”  The answer is France. Even if you didn’t know or remember national flag colors, you could eventually figure out the answers by solving the clues in the vicinity.  So I was pretty confident that would quickly solve this puzzle.

But it soon became apparent that in this puzzle many clues other than the anchor clues would not yield to easy solution.  For example, “1959 #1 hit for the Fleetwoods”  was only a three-letter word beginning with “m.”  Not only had I never hear of the Fleetwoods (not Fleetwood Mac, circa 1967), but I thought it unlikely that they would release a song with a three-letter title.  As I continued with the puzzle, I soon realized that there were other three-letter clues that made no sense.  Something was fishy.

After about two hours of frustration, I had most of the anchor clues figured out, but only a small portion of the puzzle completed.  I knew that I was missing the underlying concept of the puzzle.  It had to be about something more than just national flag colors. If I could just figure out one of the seemingly impossible clues, then everything would fall into place. 

At this point, my past experience in solving New York Times crossword puzzles came to my rescue.  Sometimes, what ends up fitting in an individual box in the puzzle is not a single letter, but several letters which complete the words going both down and across.  This had to be the case in this puzzle.  One four-letter clue, for example, was “bring up from the past.”   I knew it had to start with the letter “d” and the only word I could think of was “dredge”, which is six letters in length.  If I put the three letters of the word “red” in the second box, it would fit. 

That’s when it hit me.  The eureka moment.  Alexander Fleming couldn’t have been more exhilarated than me when he realized that something in bread mold was killing staph in his bacterial cultures. 

The “red” in the second box of the answer “dredge” corresponded to a flag color.  I immediately looked at the unsolved the three-letter clue directly to the left, “Bleaches.”  The answer, of course, was whitens, with the word “white” in the first box and the “n” and the “s” in the second and third box.  Then I solved the three-letter clue to the left of that, “Not as experienced.”  The answer was “greener”, with “green” in the first box and “e” and “r” in the last two. 

At this point, I looked at the fourteen-letter word or phrase going across.  I knew that three boxes in the middle of the word somehow corresponded to the colors “green”, “white”, and “red” reading from left to right.  This is when the second eureka moment came.  Imagine, two eureka moments in one puzzle!  I felt like Einstein taking a mental ride on a light wave and coming up with the theory of special relativity.

Here was the underlying concept of the puzzle.  The three colors of the Italian flag, green, white, and red, stood for the word “Italy”, since those were the colors of the Italian flag.  If you put the letters of the word “Italy” into the fourteen-letter word going across, it should fit.  The clue was “Modern school keepsakes.”  This is what I had come up with up to that point:

                                                _  _  _ (i t a l y) e a r b o o k

The answer to the clue, “modern school keepsakes”, was the phrase “digital yearbook.”  The letters “d”, “i”, and “g” fit perfectly in the three down clues and I knew the puzzle had finally yielded its secret.  These are some other clues in which country names corresponding to flag colors completed the clues:

“Frances Bean Cobain”     (France)

“Acquire land”                  (Ireland)

“Minimalists”                    (Mali)

“Sanguine about”              (Guinea)

It took me about three hours to complete the entire puzzle.  Some puzzles in the past have taken me longer, but none have provided so much revelatory pleasure.  By the way, the three-letter 1959 Fleetwoods hit was “Mr. Blue,” with “m” in the first box, “r” in the second”, and the word “blue” in the last box.  Live and learn.

One afternoon, after the mid-day news, I happened to be watching a popular game show, which I shall refer to as “Who Wants a Zillion Dollars.”  I found that I could easily answer almost all of the multiple choice questions on the show.  This is easy, I thought.  All I have to do is get on this show and win a zillion dollars and my budget problems will be over. So I went on line and registered, thinking that I’d never get an audition.

Amazingly, two days later, I received an email, telling me to come on down.  I was given a date and time to show up at the TV studio, located in Megalopolis, and told that I would have to take a brief written exam.  If I passed the exam, I would then be given a video interview.  Considering the caliber of questions on the show, I thought that I could easily pass the written exam.  But the video interview worried me. 

When I look into the mirror, I don’t see a videogenic person staring back at me.  If I were to choose a TV character that I resemble most, it would be Uncle Fester from the Addams Family. I also don’t have the kind of bubbly personality that they like on a TV game show.  I am so morose and depressing that viewers might actually turn off the TV if I came on the show.  My son advised me to get drunk before the interview if I were to have any chance of being chosen. But I went to take the test anyway.

I took the bus into Megalopolis and got to the studio a little early.  About a hundred people were waiting on line and chatting away with the effervescence and conviviality one might expect of prospective TV game show contestants.  Two young and attractive attendants with headsets went up and down the line with their clipboards checking off  names and making bad jokes, which everyone dutifully laughed at.  

Then, precisely on time, we were ushered into a large room resembling a cafeteria and seated at tables.  On each table there were a pencil, blank answer sheet, and envelope containing the thirty-question test.   I was seated with three others, two women and a man, all about my age.  The man had taken the test once before, so he became the resident expert.  He started prepping us with questions from previous shows and I thought surely he had the best chance of the four of us to pass the test.

The feeling I got was of being back at school again, as a student, not a teacher, before a big exam like the SATs or the GREs, but without the gut-wrenching anxiety that those do-or-die tests always produced.  I actually felt pretty confident, although I knew my weakness was popular culture, and there would be several questions about pop stars I had never heard of,  reality shows  I had never watched, and celebrities who had never done anything significant in their life except become famous.  While waiting in the dermatologist’s office, I sometimes pick up People Magazine and see the same dozen or so celebrities over and over again every week, so I figure there can’t be all that much arcane trivia to trip me up on the test.

Boy was I wrong.  The ten minute multiple choice test started and right off the bat there was a question about the name of Sean Ditty’s daughter.  At least, I knew that Sean Ditty is a senator from Alabama (just kidding), but I had no idea what he or his wife named their daughter. I guessed Jesse James.  Then there was another question about a reality TV couple named the Goslings.  Apparently they had eight children and the question was about the gender ratios of those children.  I had no idea, so I guessed five girls to three boys, since girl children are more entertaining on reality shows than boy children.  Later, when I got home, I looked up the answers and found that I had guessed right on both questions.

But when the test was over, I really wasn’t sure about how I had done. I felt confident about the questions that had nothing to do with pop culture.  I knew that Neptune was considered the farthest planet from the Sun after the dethronement of Pluto.  I knew that a division was the largest armed forces unit amongst the given choices.  I even knew that “Hail Columbia” was the tune played for the public appearance of a vice-president.  But I was not sure about the children of Sean Ditty and the Goslings.

There was a ten minute break while the test sheets were scanned.  During the break, it was announced that out of one hundred applicants, seven would be chosen.  The lucky seven would then proceed to the video interview and the rest of the applicants would have to quickly exit the building. One guy raised his hand and asked what I realized later was an excellent question: “Are the seven chosen based upon the best score on the test?”  The attendant immediately gave a prepared answer that she had probably given a hundred times before: “Our policy is not to reveal the way the test is evaluated.”

During the break, the four of us at my table conferred.  The man who I thought was so smart, didn’t know the answers to many of the questions of which I was certain.  The two women were also at a loss about several questions and were disappointed when I told them their guesses were wrong.  Now I was feeling more confident.  I thought I had obviously done better than my table-mates. 

The break lasted barely five minutes.  The winners were announced and, to my shock and  subsequent bewilderment,  my name was not one of them.  I was not one of the chosen.

This would have been completely understandable.  There could certainly have been seven people in that room smarter than me.  But it turned out that one of the women chosen was at my table!  It seemed to me that I had scored better than anyone at my table, yet this woman was chosen over me!    

The attendants quickly ushered the ninety-three losers out of the building.  They obviously didn’t want to deal with anyone’s disappointment or frustration.  I’m sure that in the past they must have had applicants who made a terrible scene after losing.  I actually thought that some mistake had been made and I wanted to ask them to double check my exam sheet.  I left the place in a state of mild disorientation.  I didn’t even get a chance to bomb out on the video interview.

As I was walking away through the crowded streets of Megalopolis, trying to make sense of my failure, the other woman at my table, the one who didn’t win, appeared at my side.

“I thought you were going to win,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “I’m disappointed.  And it was all over so fast.”

“I know.  It was all a blur.  I traveled all the way from Maryland for this audition.”

“All the way from Maryland,” I said. “Just to answer some stupid question about Sean Ditty’s daughter.  I don’t think you have to be smart to answer these questions. You have to be stupid.”

She laughed aloud, but I was not in a good mood and I wanted to be left alone. Yet this woman from Maryland kept following me down the street and talking.  Either she was trying to prolong what she expected to be a more rewarding experience or she wanted me to invite her for a drink.  At the first corner we came to, I turned off in a direction towards which I guessed she would not be going and wished her a nice day.

So what is the solution to the mystery of getting on a game show?  I really don’t think they want anyone on the show who is too smart.  The self-proclaimed expert at our table told us that there have hardly been any zillion dollar winners. Why would they want to be giving away a zillion dollars every week?  They also don’t want anyone who is too stupid and might miss the first few easy questions.  It is possible that the pat response given by the attendant about test evaluation is revealing.  It may not be the best score that gets you a video interview, but some lower score, or, perhaps, a some other score based on pre-determined questions.

Whatever the answer is, I am determined to take the test again and get on that show.  I’ll purposely get questions wrong if I have to. They have me hooked.  And I need that zillion dollars to stay happily retired.

It is a rational system, but it has its drawbacks.  One problem is trying to remember if a particular Thursday is a glass/cans/plastics day or a newspaper/paper products day.  An annual schedule is mailed to each household at the beginning of each year, but it always seems to disappear by February.  Most likely someone in the household conscientiously disposed of it on a Thursday. 

It is not uncommon to find people disposing of the wrong recyclable on a given Thursday.  Many people, after having lost or misplaced their schedules, wait until other people on the block have put out their recyclables in order to determine which type to leave on the curb.  One time I put out my cans and bottles early and everyone else on the block followed suit, only to find out it was paper products Thursday.  The sanitation crew must have gotten a kick out of that.

Another drawback is that sometimes holidays fall on a Thursday.  In that case no pick-up is done for one type of recyclable for a whole month.  Paper products accumulate and take up valuable storage space in the home, but that is no way as upsetting as what happens when glass/cans/ plastics day is skipped.  There are so many soda bottles, jars, and tins accumulated in a month’s time, they overflow the diminutive town-issued recyclable container and have to be stored in two separate bins.  In the summer, they begin to smell and attract flies, raccoons, and cats.  One time I went out to dispose of an empty bottle of rum and a possum leaped out of the recyclable container and waddled its way up the street.

When you’re working full-time, you’re exhausted and just want to relax, so you delay putting out the trash, or the week goes by in a blur and you forget what day it is.  But when you’re retired, there is no excuse for neglecting household chores. In fact, chores become the mileposts on the road of weekly existence. You discover that if you complete chores in a timely manner and on a given schedule, you actually have lots of free time available for more pleasurable pursuits and an unbothered mind with which to pursue them.

But even the most well-planned schedules are subject to the vagaries of those who execute them, and, sometimes, the sanitation men are especially capricious when it comes to the the time of day they pick up the trash.  Sometimes, I am woken out of a deep sleep by the distinctive whine of the hydraulic valves, the crunching sound of the compactor, and the screeching of the brakes as the garbage truck works its way up my street.  If the sound is suddenly close by, I have to run out in my boxer shorts and quickly move the garbage cans to the curb.  Other times, the garbage sits by the curb untouched until late in day. 

It all depends on the route within my sector that the crew has decided to take.  The streets of Plainburg are, for the most part, laid out in a grid, so one might assume that the crew would service them in a consistent manner, but this isn’t the case.  The route varies from pick-up day to pick-up day and, consequently, the time of pick-up varies.  I can think of two possible reasons for this variance.  If times were consistent, then households in one part of town would always get their garbage picked up late.  The eyesore of trash cans sitting on the curb all day wouldn’t be fair to them.  Or maybe it’s just that the sanitation crew is so bored, that any variety in their routine is welcome.

I am sometimes tempted to ask one of the sanitation workers about their schedules when I’m standing in my boxer shorts and handing them my garbage cans, but I don’t want them to think I am a wise guy.  Make an enemy of the sanitation man and risk having your emptied cans thrown haphazardly on your lawn, or, even worse, being ignored completely on glass/cans/plastics pick-up day.