So Which Dwarf Am I?

Oh no, I couldn’t have done that!













What time do they do the pick up?















Alright so I just mailed my grocery list. It was an accident! This could have happened to anyone …at any time… at any age. It just seems that my capacity for actions in life during my Retroment are beginning to seem more ‘Monte Carlo’ and almost miraculous when there is the desired outcome. I feel like I am a monkey with a typewriter and am desperately trying to rally boomers to begin typing madly on their ‘senior’ typewriters so that we can gestaltingly produce The Electric Kool-Aid Proctology Test.

So is there a portion of our brain that we have disciplined through our youth and maturity that somehow cries havoc and lets slip the dwarfs of ‘yore’? You know, our new retroment buddies/attributes such as Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy and Doc. Happy is babysitting Bashful but is having a blast eating popcorn and watching our new paradigm. Should any of them wake Snow White, she may need a minute to remember who Prince Charming is.


I seem to remember something about the Seven Dwarfs …let me see…Oh yeah! Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to the beginning of the ‘80s (yes, the 1980s). We are going to visit the University of Lowell in that textile Valhalla in Massachusetts. Our hero was gainfully employed as an adjunct instructor. ‘Adjunct instructor’ was edu-speak for ‘we can pay him cheap and not have to call him Doctor’.



The job had started as a transition from the Nuclear/Energy Engineering Dept to the Mathematics Dept upon the completion of a master’s program. There were not enough jobs in alternative energies (there still aren’t) and running a nuclear reactor seemed a bit tricky. So I headed back to the department where I was a rumor during my Bachelor of Science years when the place was called Lowell Technological Institute. I was warmly received as the return of the prodigal.

What started out as a slate of Calculus classes for the first two years soon changed. Computer programming had become a requirement for the engineering students and many others on campus. Since I had taken a two credit computer course back in 1970, I felt qualified to teach the course. I was again warmly received. This time because nobody else from that squadron of Math PhDs wanted to do it. Besides, it seemed so - adjunct.

So before you could hit "ESC" , I had 500 students who were just dying to learn FORTRAN. Tech support from the department consisted of two double sided blackboards on wheels that could be coolly flipped over when one side was filled with hypnotizing code. Meanwhile I thanked goodness that there was so much drug momentum from the 60s and 70s because I could read the material and stay a full week ahead of them as preparation and basis of authority.

Well this approach seemed to be lacking something – like computers. So in one fell swoop I bumped into a state grant encouraging corporations, like Digital Equipment Corporation, to donate equipment to state colleges and universities; designed and built the lab with the help of Rich Beaubien and John Tucker, his brother-in-law; wrote a course that consisted of thirteen complete lessons containing samples, lab assignments and explanatory text; made it 24/7 available to every terminal on campus; was given a lecture hall complete with fifteen foot screen and microphone (used it once); acquired a staff of eight graduate assistants to help with the lab; and one PhD math professor to help with the lectures. I be adjunct – hear me roar!

The dwarf nostalgia is now crystallizing. One of the fun components of having a staff of mostly foreign graduate students was having a weekly staff meeting at a local Lowell bar called The Old Worthen. Kerouac and Poe both threw up there.

During these meetings, the curriculum did get discussed. An important feature of FORTRAN programming was its ability to print in columns. To impart this skill to our students I wanted the assistants to demonstrate how to make a chart. This chart would list the Seven Dwarfs, favorite drug of that dwarf and how many days of work during the year was missed due to that drug.

Grumpy was on bourbon and missed 10 days of work per year.






Bashful was on Valium and missed 40 days.





Sneezy, of course, was on Cocaine. He missed 20 days.






Dopey loved marijuana and, in trying to relate to the students, I assigned him 8 missed days.







Sleepy was into barbiturates – 125 days out.






Happy loved his nitrous oxide but the restaurant supply house was only open during the week so he had to miss 1 day of work per year.









Doc, well he’s on LSD and missed 365 days of the work year.







Pride may not be the appropriate description for the demeanor of the assistants as they did this lab with their students. But I have to admit there were some twisted smiles on my graduate helpers when they were espied during a tour of the ‘first in New England, computer lab’ by visiting dignitaries of other universities. They dutifully lectured with gusto and joi de dwarf and loved recounting it during our meetings at the Old Worthen.

You Say It's Your Birthday!

Greetings!

So far Chicken Little is wrong. The sky is not falling because of my licentious declaration of ever-after-hood in the previous blog. It’s a good thing since we now enter the August portal where the existence of prayer may have to be a bit more concrete than say…happiness.

Gini and I were born three days apart (Aug 8 and 11. 1950 – the exercise is left to the reader). Integral to our relationship is Gini’s gleeful claim that I am older. To further densify matters we also married on Aug 11, 1973. It also happens to be my father’s birthday though the year is druidically etched in Roman numbers somewhere in Limerick, Ireland.

Now historically speaking during the first couple of weeks in August there is a delicate locus to occupy here. Atomic bombs, Manson murders, the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Watts riots teeter tantalizingly opposed to Woodstock nation and (my favorite) the resignation of Richard Nixon on my birthday.


As for Tricky Dick’s decision “to allow the nation to move forward”, we had decided to travel cross-country and see some friends in California. We thought that the family’s Rambler station wagon was too precious and delicate to take the trip so we bought our friend’s ’63 Chrysler for $35. It was dented and the panels were filled with ‘Bondo’ and consistently drew fellow drivers’ admiration as they yelled, “Where did you get that car?”. It had the push button transmission on the dash and got 20 miles to the gallon.

Our mission was to promote social utopia and, since we did not even have a radio, we decided we would scrupulously pick up hitchhikers who were looking for America. So on August 8, 1974 we picked up a young man in the Badlands of South Dakota. He immediately announced that the president had decided to resign and would make the formal announcement that evening. His immediate reward was a can of Coors and a tetra hydro cannabinol chaser. We, of course, would not be able to listen to the radio broadcast that evening but it does eternally play in the background on the car radio as Brad and Janet seek shelter at the Frank-N-Furter mansion.



Ah the Badlands, if only Bruce Springsteen had been with us and could have reduced the wait for when “…these badlands start treating us good”. Maybe he would have melded with us as
“…the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside
That it aint no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

As for August 11 when Gini arrived and 23 years later wound up in Gilford, NH there is not too much to be said other than our wedding may have been the greatest party of my life. As usual a few details escaped us during preparation. When her parents, Anne and Charles Landry, were informed of our marital intentions her dad “..could not quite place me”. Thoroughly incensed I prepared a folder similar to the one that was used each week to open the TV series Mission Impossible.

I placed my ID from freshman year at Lowell Technological Institute on top (I looked about 12). Directly underneath was a paragraph declaring that the mission would involve tampering with Gini’s allegiance to the small but prosperous country of Landria. I submitted for his perusal (wait, that’s the Twilight Zone) an application for the “Why I Like Gini Contest”. Now, one needs to know that there was some cohabitation occurring on his dime without anyone really admitting the population of the apartment they were financing. So the opening lines of the application included:

Name – Chris Duggan
Address – Embarrassing
Phone – See Address
Goals - None
Assists – Twenty Seven

This was followed by a romantic narrative and a poem that should have been rendered on a black velvet wall hanging. Sad to say this really happened and one can only imagine the fear, nay, the trepidation permeating the Landry household at the time.

Gini of course came to the rescue. She designed and made her gown as any graduate of The Boston School of Fashion Design would. She made my dinner jacket and convinced the sisters to make their gowns. Oh, and since we did not attend the local church in Arlington, Mass., where would this marriage take place? No problem since the population of Gini’s apartment also included Dennis Kline, a Roman Catholic priest. He would gladly conclelebrate a mass at Our Lady of the Lakes Church in Gilford, NH. (Where was that? Only 20 miles from our, then, future and current home).

It would be a lobster bake. Ceremoniously, 125 net bags were steamed with each containing a quarter chicken, a dozen clams, corn on the cob and a lobster. Chowder would also be served.

Trying to contribute to the crescendo of planning that was enrapturing me I announced that I would also walk down the aisle and be ‘given away’ by my parents. Somehow I will never be able to fully describe the look on everyone’s face upon that declaration but it being 1973 allowed a lot of strangeness and ‘creativity’.
Also one of my fraternity brothers, a security guard, would meet us at the back of the church at the end of the ceremony and place us in handcuffs. Logical, no? Well, Gini was a good sport and we were ‘led away’ to our new bonded existence.

The energy that day was incredible. Some of it is still unexplained. For example, how did this picture come about? We are supposed to be inside the church but it sure looks like a hilltop sunrise/sunset to most:

Now the photographer was also a fraternity brother and developed the film himself and to this day claims complete bafflement to its occurrence. Did I also mention that about 20 wedding goers, the photographer included, took Timothy Leary’s advice for the day?


The party eventually moved to the fraternity house in Lowell, 90 miles away. It was there we realized that our planning had been a little short sighted and that we had not booked a honeymoon suite anywhere. Oh well, that’s another story for another day.
Thirty six years later she still knocks me out like I was kicked by the whole chorus line at Minsky’s.