Life at DrTom's: Mostly Humorous Anecdotes by a Mostly Retired Cornell Professor

By Thomas A. Gavin

"Life at DrTom's" is a diverse collection of easy-to-digest anecdotes about human behavior, wildlife, children, wives, and more from the perspective of a retired Ivy League professor. DrTom taught classes in biology and conservation at Cornell University for almost 30 years, and he conducted research on birds and mammals in the U.S. and abroad. But he has found that observing humans and describing the human condition are as interesting as the study of wild animals. DrTom writes with a somewhat cynical view about his own species in a way that will make you say "hey, I never thought of that."

Spanning six decades, DrTom describes the colorful experiences that vary from studying squirrels on a cattle ranch in Idaho, living in the rainforest of Costa Rica, attending a geisha-like party in Korea, playing tennis for Ohio State, to smoking a cigar while sipping a scotch in the forest surrounding his New York home. These moments have sharpened his power of observation and informed his impression of what makes human behavior so curious. But this life-long exploration of what makes life interesting has generated the tangible he celebrates the mostâ the memory of these rich encounters.

Readers will have no difficulty relating to DrTom's observations and conclusions about the experiences he shares. You will see yourself in many of the uncanny situations in which he has found himself as a father, grandfather, husband, teacher, and retired baby-boomer. Regardless of your age, gender, or educational background, the prose will make you laugh, or pause, or think more deeply about what you see around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456602109

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DEDICATION

To Robin, who always has my back even though she is always at my side. I don’t understand how she does that physically.

PREFACE

There is a lesson to be learned in nearly everything we do. Now that I am retired, I have the time to reveal and ponder what those morals of the story are. Regardless of whether you are planting a garden, sitting in a bar alone, cutting firewood, observing chickadees at a bird feeder, or reading what people write on a social networking website, observing human and non-human life can be entertaining, provocative, and humorous. When you are not hard-pressed by deadlines and goals imposed from the outside, you can savor the little pleasures more and, with time, you realize that these are really the important pleasures. I now spend a great deal more time with cigar books and cookbooks and Hemingway than I do with bird books and ecology books and Darwin. Oh, how our lives can change.

I was a university professor for nearly 30 years---conservation biology, behavioral ecology, mammalogy, ornithology, ecology. It is impossible for my view of the world not to reflect what I learned from all that time spent looking at nature as a product of natural selection and the evolutionary process. Humans are basically little different than other mammals, except we carry cell phones. But observing people is easier than watching other animals, and it can be done anywhere. Fortunately, humans are not strictly nocturnal and we don’t live in a hole in the ground.

This book focuses on the idea embodied in that old expression about taking the time to smell the flowers as you go through life. The natural world is intensely rich; there are hundreds of biological stories unfolding around each of us every day. But you have to slow down and tune your senses to hear their messages. Exactly the same is true for the human story. I’m not here to advise or instruct anyone about how to slow down and savor the world more. You probably have a thousand reasons why you can not do that. However, I can share with you some experiences, most of them from the past few years. If this works out well, these anecdotes might cause you to sit outside in a forest, or in a public place with the cell phone off, just absorbing what comes at you.

This book is a collection of my recent essays, many of which originally appeared in my Life at DrTom’s blog. They have been rewritten, expanded, and shaped to focus on what life can teach us if we really observe. Watching and listening are the techniques, and the memories that result is the goal.

Chapter 1: Retired and Clueless, But Loving It

(DrTom preparing to go to work as a census enumerator)

I’m so lonely that Jehovah’s Witnesses are welcome

We live 10 miles out of Ithaca in the small village of Danby. Our house is in the woods and we can't see any of our neighbors, which are few and far between. Almost no one visits the house, the kids are grown and gone, and my wife is working almost non-stop in her office at one end of the house. The bottom line is--I'm lonely. In fact, if I was a religious man, I would have altered the Lord’s Prayer as Mark Twain did: Give us this day our daily stranger.

I know I am lonely because two days ago a small, beige car drove up the driveway, parked at an awkward angle, and sat there for a moment before anyone got out. I knew then exactly who they were. A nicely dressed man and a teenage girl got out of the car, and began walking piously toward me carrying something in their hands. You guessed it. They were from Jehovah's Witnesses and they had their usual copy of the Watchtower to offer me. Normally, I brush off strangers in a New York minute who come to the house trying to sell me anything. But in this case I was never so glad to see another human being. We had a pleasant talk for about 15 minutes, about everything in the world except religion. At several pauses in the conversation, the man shook my hand, but then I thought of another topic I wanted to cover. The guy must have shaken my hand at the end of what he thought was the finale of our conversation at least three times. I honestly believe that he thought I was trying to convert HIM. I realize now, they were anxious to leave.

I have taken to walking down my country road and talking to any neighbors who make the mistake of venturing outside at that moment. The letter carrier woman speeds up past our mailbox if I am in the driveway, but I know she has mail for us. The UPS guy tosses our packages from his moving truck as he passes by our garage. The electric company lady checks our meter in the dark with a flashlight. It is amazing how hard of hearing she is. She must hear me calling as I run after her little white pickup in my pajamas. And when telemarketers call, they eventually have to cut ME off.

But I think I am solving the problem. I have joined Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xomba, Helium, SheToldMe, ISayToo, Squidoo, and Moli. I have worked my way through my old grade book going back to 1980, and invited every former student I can find to be my online friend. I belong to four social chat rooms and three stock trading message boards. We actually have two landlines (with a phone in every room except the bathroom, but I'm fixing that this weekend), a cell phone, and a fax machine and, of course, I have email, Skype, and several instant messaging accounts. If you get a busy signal, try another device. If you are in Ithaca, just drive out.

On the bright side, I have been spending a lot of time with myself, and I've gotten to know me pretty well. All things considered, I’ve known worse.

Retirement and a lapse of personal hygiene

Since Management and I started working at home (I retired, she changed jobs), we have gotten a little careless about our personal hygiene and appearance. We don't shower as often, I don't shave like I should, and we tend to wear the same clothes until they holler out wash me!. This slippage just happens, almost as soon as you no longer go to an office where you have to encounter co-workers, or customers, or students. I think the mechanism works like this: because I rarely shave, I almost never look in the mirror in the morning, and I don't see how frightening I appear. When I finally do look in the mirror after a few days, at first I don't recognize who I am seeing and when I realize it is me, I become horrified and then do something about it.

Of course, Robin and I have to look at each other as we pass in the hallway or meet for lunch, but we know that if we criticize the other, they will retaliate and we will both have to do something we don't want to do, like shave our legs. So we tend to remain silent about the shaggy appearance of the other, like the days when the U.S and the Soviet Union each had lots of nuclear weapons, but neither would dare use them first.

Sooner or later, we invite someone to the house and we clean up our act. Surprise visitors.......well, they just get a surprise. When the Jehovah's Witnesses showed up last week, I had a 4-day beard, I was wearing sweaty clothes from working in the yard, and I had a half-smoked cigar in my hand. I'm sure I smelled as bad as the nearby compost pile that was just sitting there (not cooking at 170 degrees). Maybe this is why the UPS man tosses packages into our garage from his moving truck. Maybe our seediness and our loneliness are related in some way. Is this cause and effect, or simply a spurious correlation?

The life of a census enumerator

Hello. My name is Tom Gavin and I work for the U.S. Census Bureau. Is this 455 Elm Street? And were you living here on April 1 of this year? And so it goes, day after day, week after week, all summer long.  I knock on door after door, finding that most people are not home, leaving a NV (Notice of Visit) to call me on my cell, completing Enumerator Questionnaires---all for $13.00 per hour plus $.50 per mile reimbursement for the miles I drive.

I thought this might be an interesting experience, and because of my loneliness, this seemed like a good idea. The job has had its moments, and I've met some pretty nice dogs. But for the most part, it is pretty boring. Most people are happy to give out the information I require about their name, age, date of birth, and so forth. You know, the 10 questions or so that we all ask and that most of you have answered, either by writing it on the form you got in April or by telling a person like me who appeared at your door. Some of you have gone through this three times this summer. Don't ask me why. I just work here. I am only doing what the Constitution of the United States requires the government to do every 10 years: count all the people living in the U.S. on April 1 of the census year, and collect some ancillary data.

For some people it seems like a major inconvenience for me to ask these questions. It only takes about five minutes, and it is only done once per decade. Some interviewees act as though they are the busiest humans on earth, and they could not possibly take a few minutes to talk. Others are obviously desperate to talk to someone about anything. One lady took 15 minutes to complain about the crack cocaine-selling neighbors she had until they were evicted. She feared for her life much of the time. Then, she rambled on about an event in California where the police used a TASER on a man who was already down on the ground, and how terrible that was, and what is wrong with the police. Mam, I work for the Census Bureau. I had a farmer all but grab me by the shirt and tell me to tell the President that farmers are getting a raw deal in this country. That most dairy farms have gone under because of the price of milk. Sir, I work for the Census Bureau, and I don't know Barack very well.

One guy told me that he had been on the internet a lot lately and he had learned that people really hate me. Geesh, these people have not communicated their hatred to me directly, and I check my mail every day. He was mad, and these people were mad, because this entire census operation was costing taxpayers $450,000! I said, Only $450,000? And he repeated the amount as though it was the largest number he had ever heard. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the grand total was more like $14.5 billion. If they knew that, those people would really hate me. I would have to change my name to remain safe in a world where every U.S. citizen was gunning for Tom Gavin for committing such a huge sum of taxpayers' money. I would have to dye my hair, gain 40 pounds, and wear plaid golfing slacks to go into town without being recognized.

I thought I would sign up for this gig, in part, to sample the residents of upstate New York. To find out what people were thinking about the government and the world and their place in it. But I'm not getting a strong signal about people in general. Humans come in all shapes and sizes. Some are pissed at the world and everything in it, probably because their life is a mess. Some seem happy to help, feel good about contributing to this operation, and offer me iced tea. Some are just plain lonely and want to talk to anyone who shows up about anything at all (I can really relate to those). Some appreciate that enumerating the people in the country is an important exercise and were disturbed that I had not gotten to them sooner. And still others couldn't care if the country went to hell in a hand basket tomorrow. One young guy was gloating over the fact that he had been working for 10 years and he had never paid a cent of income tax--ever. Sir, I also work for the IRS. Just kidding.

I don't regret working for the Census Bureau one bit. I'm just a lowly enumerator like tens of thousands of others across the country. But the job has given me the credentials to approach my neighbors, look them in the eye, and ask them some personal questions. And while I detest the degrading effect that large numbers of people are having on the earth, I find individuals worthy of respect. I disagree with some, I empathize with many, and I share a common territory with all. And tomorrow morning, I will drive onto Main Street in a nearby hamlet, and ask those living there to share a bit of their time.

Do I have to go to Ithaca?

Ever since I retired last year and my wife began working from home, we have a pretty regular routine. She works on her computers all day at one end of the house and I work in my office at the other end. When we get out of bed in the morning, we usually say let's do lunch, and then we know to meet at noon in the kitchen, half way between our respective work places. This goes on for many days until we run out of something. Understand that we have a chest freezer and a second old fridge in the basement, as well as the usual refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen. That is, we can store enough food to feed a U.S. Marine platoon for a month. (And, we are still working off our supply of paper products we bought at Sam's Club three years ago). In short, we don't care to go into Ithaca very often, which is 10 miles away, and I dread it like it is the most difficult thing I ever had to do. The less we go, the less we want to go. I guess this is a form of use it, or lose it.

But eventually we run out of scotch or wine and someone has to go, usually me. Cigars and coffee beans are purchased online, so they are not a problem. On the day I have to go to town, I feel like one of those old gold miners who went to town two or three times a year to get grub and a chew of tobacco, to get a whisky shot at the bar, and to carouse with loose women for a couple of days. Yesterday in town, I did my errands, ordered some takeout Mexican food, and had a beer at the bar in Viva Taqueria; I never even talked to the three women sitting next to me (they appeared to be moderately loose). I must say, it was a successful trip, except that the traffic at 5pm in downtown Ithaca is annoying. What are all these people doing here? I arrived home with the goods, but I spared Robin (any news from town?) the gory details of my harrowing escape from the local metropolis.

Since we both began working from home, we drive much less, and we buy less. I am sure our carbon footprint has decreased significantly. If you don't care to drive anywhere, and the nearest store is 10 miles away, you tend to stay home, you don't spend as much money, and you avoid loose women. All in all, this is a pretty healthy way to live.

Is it Tuesday or Farmer’s Market day?

When I worked at the university, it was not a problem remembering what day of the week it was. I had field biology lab on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, I lectured in conservation biology on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Friday, I had no class, and then came the weekend. Simple. But now it is a challenge, because one day pretty much seems like any other when you're retired, except that the stock market is closed on Saturdays and Sundays. If today is the day before tomorrow and the day after yesterday, which day is it? I give up, and so does the Management at DrTom's.

What can we use as benchmarks as to which day of the week it is? Today's cigar is a Dunhill Diamantes and yesterday's scotch was a 12-year old Aberlour. Does that make today Thursday? I filled the hummingbird feeders this morning and turned the compost pile with a pitchfork. Friday? Next week I have a urology appointment to check the plumbing and last week I had a neurology appointment to check the wiring. Saturday? If my sister-in-law is visiting on the 5th, and that is 10 days from now, what is the day today? But to answer that requires additional information. How many days are there in August, 30 or 31? Darn! I almost had it there.

I even went to extreme lengths to find out this time. I drove into Ithaca to see if the Farmer's Market was open. That only happens on Saturday. Nope. I listened for church bells, cause that happens on the 7th day of the week. Or is that the first day of the week? Do the expressions on other motorists' faces look happy, like it is a Friday, or angry, like it is a Monday? Geez. I hate tinted windows in cars. I turned on the radio and flipped the dial, now almost in a panic, but light jazz, heavy metal, and pop stations don't talk about this sort of thing. I hear on the news that Ted Kennedy died yesterday. But what day was that? Tell me dammit!

At this point I decide to do what no self-respecting man ever does. I will ask someone. So I pulled into a Citgo gas station, I ran into the convenience store attached to it, and I asked the clerk. What day is this? It is Pizza Supreme Special day, sir. What!!! We never learned that in primary school. That is NOT one of the seven names I memorized. I regained my composure, I gently grabbed her wrist and held it on the counter, and I looked into her eyes intently. Please.. tell.. me.. what.. day.. of.. the.. week.. this.. is. You know, like Monday or Tuesday or whatever. And she said, just a minute, I'll have to ask the manager. Honest to God. The 20-year old kid from Ithaca College was as clueless as I was.

I returned home. I walked into the house and Robin said, Hey, you wanna go to the movies tonight? It's Friday. We can see that Keanu Reeves' film. I sat down, on the verge of a headache and stared at her incredulously. How did you know what day of the week it was, I asked? The cell phone. So we went to the cinema downtown, and saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. What a dumb title. It didn't even tell us which day of the week that calamity happened.

(Note: if you want to really blow your mind, try figuring out when to take the trash and recyclables to the curb here in Danby. Trash pickup is now on Fridays, but they pick up recyclables only on alternate Mondays!).

Picking up returnable bottles and cans for fun and profit

My wife was a dutiful, frugal girl when she was young. In primary school, she would routinely bring her dime or quarter every Tuesday on banking day, and she would have that money deposited in her bank account. (You young people will not know about this, but back in the day, we actually had such a day at school. Apparently, these school banking programs are making a come-back.) At the end of several years of this kind of weekly deposits, she had saved several hundred dollars, which was quite an impressive sum in the 1950s. When she went off to nursing school in 1965, her parents gave her $5 as spending money. Months later, she still had that same 5-spot. During three entire years at this school (she went year-round), during which her room and board were prepaid, she didn't spend more than about $25, although she used a Lazarus Department Store credit card to buy one dress for a Homecoming dance and a slip in preparation for our wedding shortly before she graduated. That was it!

Those of you born to a later generation can not possibly believe what I am saying, but the appraisal above of what my future wife spent in college is the absolute truth. We dated during most of that time. We almost never went out, we never drank alcohol, and we bought next to nothing. We simply did not have the money to spend and, of course, a dollar went a lot farther than it does today.

It should, therefore, come as little surprise that my wife collects empty soda and beer cans that she finds along the side of the road in rural New York. Coke cans, DrPepper cans, Bud Light cans, plastic ginger ale containers. Each one is worth a nickel. The similarity in her mind between saving pennies each week at Dover Elementary School and picking up discarded nickels today is no accident. As a child, she saw what that kind of regular saving could accomplish, and she never forgot that important financial lesson.

The problem is that the cost-benefit ratio is very different today than it was five decades ago. To collect these nickels, we often stop the car in hazardous locations. We have almost had our driver-side door taken off by a passing car, we have come close to putting the car in the drainage ditch in our attempt to move the car to a safe location off the road, and we have both twisted or sprained our ankles as we negotiated these same ditches. Once I jumped into one of these pits to fetch a nickel or two and I ripped a hole in my $30 pants (= 600 cans). Not a good deal. Then, after you put the containers in the car, they invariably leak their remaining contents onto the seats or carpet and, for days, the car smells like you held a frat party in there.

If the cans were crushed before being discarded by the side of road (data: about 5% of cans), they need to be straightened out enough so that the bar code can be read by the machine into which you feed them at the grocery store. If they can not be straightened to the satisfaction of that contraption, you do not get your nickel. I have fed some cans into that machine 8 or 10 times in an attempt to get it to read that code, only to have it belch out the can as if it was spitting on my torn pants. The same thing happens if the can has been laying out in the weather for a couple of years; the bar code is so faint and unreadable that the machine gets the last laugh.

But this slow but sure strategy of accumulating wealth can pay off. A few years ago, my wife was able to fly our two sons home from Denver without my knowing with pop can money to celebrate my 60th birthday. And this is all with the return deposit at only a nickel. There is discussion of raising the deposit to a dime in New York State. If that happens, we might buy a second home in Costa Rica. If the deposit ever went to a quarter, I would buy a fleet of used vehicles and hire a team of picker-uppers to scour Tompkins County for its booty. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound.

But already we have someone else picking up cans on the road in front of OUR house. This is our territory, our grub stake, our returnable can domain. My wife has been hiding in our woods next to the road two days a week in hopes of ambushing the person. She baits the shoulder of the road with 2-3 clean, Bud Light cans (I helped by emptying the cans) placed in a neat little bunch. Irresistible. We must stop this can poaching.

This blogger admits being on performance-enhancing drugs

I have some gastroenterology issues of late. I suffer somewhat with a hiatal hernia and an affliction known as eosinophilic esophagitis. Part of the treatment for this condition is a drug that comes in an atomizer (Flovent) that I squirt in my mouth daily and then swallow. The active ingredient is a corticosteroid. Within days after starting this regimen I began to feel wonderfully different.

My wife noticed that I am looking more and more buff as the days pass. I am stronger, and I have been contacted by Nike to represent them in the blogging world. Their new line of writing clothes will have a logo of a pen and paper, instead of the Swoosh, denoting the tools of the original authors of old. The steroid I am taking has improved my ability to think of useful words, synonyms, and metaphors, and the substance gives me an edge in a very competitive arena. I type faster and more accurately than ever, including the ability to hit that back slash with the little finger on my right hand. Before starting this cycle of steroid, my right-hand finger could not reach past the key that has the left-facing bracket.

Am I worried about an investigation or any unannounced drug-testing of a urine sample? Not really. Since I began taking this drug, I only urinate outside in the woods so that the sample soaks immediately into the soil. They will never get my urine for testing. Also, I have no need to frequent a locker room for writers, so there is little danger of bragging to my colleagues who would probably squeal to the paparazzi like a stuffed pig. I have no mistress who might have incriminating text messages from me, and I'm an atheist, so I don't even confess to a priest who might talk. I have all the bases covered.

Not sure how long this euphoria will last. And