News from the Neighborhood

By Mary Langton

Praise for Mary Langtons writing from The Times Herald-Record:

witty essays

short, mostly humorous essaysthe kind of reading that can be done in spurts, when you need a break or a laugh.

an acerbic sense of humorallow[s] readers to look at their Hudson Valley town or the worlds problems and not take them as seriously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496929990

Mary Langton

Mary Langton has been a teacher, a newspaper columnist, and a radio personality. Originally from Queens, she lives in Orange County, New York.

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© 2014 by Mary Langton. All rights reserved.

© by The Senior Gazette

© by The Times Herald-Record

Author photograph by P.A.L

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/09/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-3000-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-2999-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014913525

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

SOME THINGS CONSIDERED

The God Particle Explained

Turn Up the Heat

Attached to My Attachments

Martian Chronicles

Hypovitaminosis D and Me

Gray Gardens

Mapping my Brain

Conversing with my Computer

A Proclamation for Grandparents

A Dog’s Life

Nevermore!

Resolutions You Can Keep

My Year in Review

RALLY ’ROUND THE FLAG

Stuffing Happens

The Great Anniversary Festival

Presidential Nicknames

Secrets and Spies

A Name Fit for a Queen

A Fourth of July Quiz

Behind Every Great Man

The Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US

Downton Abbey: The Lost Episode

Time to Clean Out the Closet

A Monopoly Token’s Bitter Farewell

Snow White at Seventy-Five

Faster, Higher, Stronger

Your Guide to

the Super Bowl

Sochi Olympics Q & A

Shirley and Sid

Lt. Columbo Revisited

The Best Show

You’ve Never Seen

Maeve Binchy: An Appreciation

Old Favorites for the Holiday Season

More Old Favorites

Sunday Breakfast

NEWS FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD

In Search of Celeste Holm

Baffled Birds and Buds

Cradle Song

Pomp and Circumstance

Cash-Register Etiquette

Do You Haiku?

The Long Gray Feline

Art Therapy

Spoiler Alert!

West Point Sing-along

Exeunt All

Dispatches from the Polar Vortex

At the Town Hall Meeting

POESY

Edgar Allan Poe Goes to Cheers

Sister

Memo to the IRS

Summer’s Sonnet

Driven Apart

Looking for Yesterday

Portraits

The Lefthander’s Lament

Song of My Shelf

Good King Merchandise

To My Doctors

The Train

O, CALL BACK YESTERDAY

These Days, the World Spins Faster

Big Kids

Of Pencils and Laptops

College Then and Now

Deconstructing Rudolph

Making a Case for Flexible Flyers

Tiger Beat and Me

Acknowledgments

About the Author

T

o good neighbors

Also by Mary Langton

Essays

American Idylls

The Bright Processional

Sense and Nonsense

Fiction

Dividing Line: Stories

In short, man is comically arranged; there is apparently a joke in all this.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

SOME THINGS CONSIDERED

The God Particle Explained

As someone who taught sixth-grade science for two years in the 1980s, I am eminently qualified to explain the importance of the recent discovery by physicists of the so-called God particle, one of the building blocks of the universe.

The proper name of the God particle—the name used within the scientific community—is the Higgs boson. True, this name sounds like that of a musical instrument, as in, I have such fond memories of sixth grade. I was a Higgs bosonist in the school orchestra. Second chair. And my science teacher was really cool.

But in fact the Higgs boson is not a musical instrument at all. In physics, a boson—any old boson—is a subatomic particle, which is a particle smaller than an atom. How small is that? Smaller than the salary I received for teaching in a private school in the 1980s, but not by much.

The Higgs boson is so small that it has no substructure; in other words, it cannot be broken down into smaller particles. That’s exciting, because particles that have no substructure—fundamental particles—are what all other particles, and therefore everything in the universe, are made of. No wonder it has been nicknamed the God particle.

The recently discovered boson is known as the Higgs boson in honor of the English physicist Peter Higgs, who first theorized its existence way back in the 1960s. Obviously, Dr. Higgs is one smart cookie. In fact, he completed sixth grade when he was three years old.

One of the most touching aspects of the Higgs boson discovery is that Peter Higgs is still alive and was able to share the joy of his fellow physicists when this great achievement in the annals of science was announced. A number of news outlets reported that when Dr. Higgs heard of the discovery, he wept.

These reports are only partly accurate. While it is true that Dr. Higgs wept, it is not true that it was the verification of the existence of the boson that prompted his tears. What made him cry was the refusal of the laboratory he was visiting at the time to validate his parking. It did not help that when Higgs protested, But I’m Peter Higgs! the receptionist said, I wouldn’t care if you were Albert Einstein. We don’t validate.

Scientists tend to be cautious when announcing big advances in their field. They like to wait until experiments can be replicated with the same results before saying, Eureka! That is why they are reluctant to say that the Higgs boson absolutely exists; instead they are saying that they have the strongest indication to date that the boson has moved from being a theory to being a fact. Off the record, though, they are dancing in the aisles of their labs. They know they’ve nailed it.

As a science teacher, I exercised the same caution. The sixth-grade curriculum included an experiment whose goal was to demonstrate that heat speeds chemical reactions. To perform the experiment, I placed two clear, plastic cups filled with water on my desk. One cup contained cold water; the other contained hot water. I dropped a tablet of Alka-Seltzer into the cold water. It dissolved slowly. Then I dropped a second tablet into the hot water. It dissolved rapidly. Fizzzzz! Gone.

I repeated the demonstration several times because I wanted to underscore for my students the importance of verifying results through multiple experiments. Plus, there were ten minutes left in the class period and I didn’t have anything else planned.

You may be wondering how the Higgs boson was discovered. It was simple, really. First, a gigantic underground particle accelerator was built at a physics lab in the Swiss Alps. The accelerator is seventeen miles in circumference. It uses electromagnetic fields to propel particles at nearly the speed of light, and if you can grasp that concept you would have made a better science teacher than I was.

What is really interesting about this particular particle accelerator is that ten- thousand scientists and engineers from more than a hundred countries worked together to build it, and no one is trying to hog the credit. It’s something for our politicians to think about.

A particle accelerator is sometimes called a collider because it hurls subatomic particles into each other at high speeds in order to smash the particles into smaller units. The more particles can be broken down, the more scientists are able to understand the structure of matter, space, and time. Why this is so is a topic for seventh-grade science, and therefore beyond my ken. The important thing to know is that the super collider in the Swiss Alps has provided heretofore unattainable visual evidence of the Higgs boson.

The other important thing to know is that if you teach sixth grade, you should keep a lot of Alka-Seltzer on hand. For headaches.

Turn Up the Heat

Few things strike greater fear in my heart than a furnace on the fritz.

On the scary-experience scale, losing heat is near the top. It ranks above encounters with wild animals, abduction by aliens, and that nightmare in which I receive a letter from my high school informing me that a review of relevant documentation indicates that I am one math credit shy of meeting my graduation requirements and advising me to return to school and enroll in algebra.

I like heat, and lots of it. When energy experts appear on television and advise viewers to lower the thermostat to conserve energy, I stare at the TV screen and whisper, Never. When guests in my home point out that using less heat saves money, I point out that another way to save money is to stop entertaining guests. When friends tell me that it is better for our health to sleep in cooler rooms, I stick my fingers in my ears and say, La la la! I can’t hear you! When it comes to discussions about heat, I refuse to engage in Socratic dialogue.

Nobody likes to be cold, of course. Humans don’t tolerate cold temperatures well, which is surprising when you consider how long we have been evolving. Even now, when man has reached the apex of physical perfection, he still needs to wear clothing that both insulates and wicks away moisture whenever he is outside on frigid days.

You would think that sometime during the transition from crawling on all fours to walking erect, from grunts and gestures to articulate speech, humankind would have developed a natural resistance to winter. But we did not. Instead we are saddled with a design flaw that makes us as vulnerable to the cold as was Cro-Magnon man. Oh, well—at least we dress better.

(The Cro-Magnons, who lived about 35,000 years ago and are considered to be among the first humans, did not have furnaces to keep them warm. But they did have fire. They were able to start fires without matches, which is something no modern human can do. This is an example of evolution in reverse.)

But if other people dislike the cold, I absolutely loathe it. Which is why, when my furnace abruptly stopped working recently, I picked up the phone faster than a teenage girl wanting to dish about the latest Twilight movie. It was after eight o’clock at night, so I had to leave a message on the repairman’s answering machine. The message was very measured and calm, and went something like this: I have no heat! I have been without heat for almost a full minute! The weather report says a cold snap is coming! I am a Cro-Magnon woman without fire! Send help!

The repairman, whose name is Prometheus (okay, not really) must have been impressed with my nerves of steel, because he called me right back. But in a shocking display of insensitivity, he said he would be at my house first thing tomorrow morning. I did not need to re-enroll in high school math to be able to calculate that morning was hours away. How was I expected to survive in the meantime?

Prometheus said something about how most people turn their heat down at night anyway, so I probably wouldn’t even notice the lack of heat while I was sleeping. Sleeping? Did he really expect me to be able to sleep in a cold house with only an electric blanket, a down comforter, and flannel pajamas to get me through the night?

With an attitude like that, Prometheus might not be in business much longer. I didn’t tell him that, of course. That would be rude. Instead I told him that I would see him in the morning. I did not expect to be alive in the morning, but I figured someone had to find my frozen body and notify the authorities, and I decided that that someone should be Prometheus. Serve him right.

Some people are born under a lucky star. Prometheus, for instance. When he arrived the next morning, I was still among the living. (I know, right? I can’t explain it either.) Prometheus was therefore absolved of any liability. He was also absolved of having to read the sign I had posted on my front door the night before. It read, Check the first-floor bedroom. I tried to warn you. I pulled it off the door as Prometheus was walking up the driveway.

Don’t ask me what was done to fix the furnace. I’m good at panicking, not repairing. Or understanding what others do to make repairs. There was some talk about a faulty part, and about replacing said faulty part. Whatever. All I know is that the furnace is roaring like a tiger, and the heating vents are emitting lots of deliciously hot air. It is now toasty warm in my house, which is how I like it. It’s heavenly.

Unhealthy, perhaps, but heavenly.

Attached to

My Attachments

You’ll get used to it.

That is what the tech-support specialist at the electronics store told me. He was very reassuring. Soothing, even. But I didn’t believe him.

The subject was the new look of the e-mail attachments on my computer. For years they presented themselves at the bottom of e-mail messages in a simple, straightforward way: through the written word. If, for example, a correspondent sent me an article about cool uses for household vinegar, these words would appear below the body of the e-mail: Attachment: Cool Uses for Household Vinegar.

(No one has ever sent me an article about cool uses for household vinegar. That is for illustrative purposes only. But I wish someone would. I have had a bottle of white vinegar sitting on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator door for as long as I can remember. It takes up space that could be used for other things, like aerosol cans of whipped cream, which, in an occasional act of subversion, I spray directly into my mouth. I never use the white vinegar, yet I can’t seem to throw it away. That would be wasteful.)

I recently lost the familiar look of my e-mail attachments. This loss is my own fault. I was attempting to save an attachment to my desktop, and I hit the wrong button. Instead of going to the desktop, the attachment went to something called Google Drive. I was not even aware that my computer is equipped with something called Google Drive, nor do I know what it is, even though Chuck, the tech-support specialist at the electronics store, did his best to explain it to me.

(The tech-support specialist’s name is not Chuck. When referring to tech-support people, I use the name Chuck as a sort of shorthand, as in, Chuck told me I’d get used to the new look of my e-mail attachments. The name derives from the main character on a television show called Chuck. In the show, Chuck works as a computer expert at a store called Buy More. He is a member of the Nerd Herd, a group of employees who are almost universally young and male, and who know more about computers than Einstein knew about physics. They wear white short-sleeved dress shirts, black pants, and gray neckties. The real-life tech support person who assisted me dressed the same way, except that he wore a black necktie.

In addition to working at Buy More, Chuck is also—secretly—a spy.