BLAST FROM THE PAST: My eye is doing well; I sure hope they ...

From The News & Reporter, Sept. 2, 2009.  

You'd think, with the eyes of the world on not only the politicians involved but also the healthcare industry, because of this big emotional debate going on, an insurance company would be more careful.

Now understand, my insurance company is saying it's just a glitch. It will get fixed, they say. It's getting run through the process again, they say.

But there shouldn't be a glitch. It shouldn't have to be fixed. It was supposedly processed almost six months ago.

    I got a notice from my insurance company last week. It said a $2,800 charge from my eye doctor was denied. Said the policy only covered what was listed and to check the books on what was and wasn't listed. None of the books I've read with my insurance policy go into which specific procedures are or aren't listed. Just what will be paid at what percentage.

    I thought the eye doctor's had handled the pre-approval. They submitted everything, and when it was done, they told me how much I'd have to pay. Before the surgery.

    So it strikes me as a bit odd that I got a denial form, six months later, saying the “patient responsibility” for a $2,800 charge is $2,800.

    Having seen an earlier form indicating a bill for about $2,600 was paid, I thought perhaps a copy of some piece of paper went through the loop after falling off a paper clip. But when I called the eye doctor's business office on Monday, they said the $2,600 was for the surgery itself. There was an anesthesia charge from another office, not as much. There was a facilities charge from the out-patient eye clinic where they did the work.

    Then there was this final charge.

    This charge, basically, relates to the costs of getting me a cornea to transplant.

    Imagine needing a heart transplant, and the insurance will pay for hospital, surgeon and anesthesia, but you were told, “The cost of the heart's all on you.”

    I was a bit incredulous.

    My wife and I went into this knowing we could only do it if it was covered. When we were told what the costs would generally be, after the pre-approval, we thought we could handle it. 

    Of course, we didn't realize how long the recovery would take. I was out of work for a full month, and used up all my sick leave and vacation. My company has a nice thing where you get back a little of what you lost under its family medical leave act policy. But I had to use up all of my leave time first, and be out a little bit longer, before I qualified. It gave me a percentage of my regular, missed pay.

    At the same time, we had a week's furlough to contend with for me, which is lost wages. We have had since May a pay cut she got in her job. We will soon be contending with a week's furlough for my wife, as well.

    We're thankful to still have our jobs, given both the economy and the troubled industry we are both in. But we are also hurting. It's harder to make ends meet.

    So a $2,800 bill for the actual tissue that was placed on my eye had me a trifle concerned.

    Perhaps the guy on the other end of the line could detect a slight, hmm, something in my voice.

    “We can't pay it,” I told the insurance company guy. “Is someone going to repossess my eye?”

    He laughed, but it was a nervous laugh.

    He checked this and looked at that. I told him the billing person at the eye doctor's office said this procedure is covered under Medicare, and an insurance company almost always covers what Medicare covers. So I shouldn't worry, she said. She said they had just gotten the denial, and would put in an appeal.

    The guy accepted the info about Medicare, and did some more “this and that,” and said he would put it through again for payment.

    Just a glitch, he assured me.

    He did not assure me that the insurance would be paying the entire amount, however. Maybe it would. Maybe it would pay 80 percent, and I'd have to pay 20 percent. I can handle that, somehow.

    But since he did not guarantee it would actually be paid, maybe the insurance would still pay nothing.

    So I'm left wondering.

    By the way, I'm going to the eye doctor in a week or so. And the last time I went, I got 20/25 vision wearing my glasses.  So the eye is doing remarkably well.

    I sure hope they let me keep it.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: You might catch me staring ...

 From The News & Reporter, Dec. 24, 2008 

My left eye is going to be bloodshot on St. Patrick's Day.

I'm 100 percent Irish, but it won't be for obvious reasons. I'll be having eye surgery on March 16. I will have a cornea transplant and that's the soonest they can schedule it.

I've had a condition in both my eyes since I was probably 14 called keratoconus.

"Kerato" is a Latin for wart. The conous is the "cone" of my eye, the cornea.

The eye has several parts important to vision. Unbeknownst to me for the longest time, the part you would think does most of the focusing, the lens, inside the eye, actually does about 20 percent of the focusing.

I don't have a wart like one might get on his thumb, but there is a distortion of the tissue that covers the eye. You can't see it to look at it, because the tissue is very thin, and the tissue is also transparent.

But the tissue that bends the light to where it hits the lens is distorted. 

I've had it since I was in high school. We've tried a bunch of things. Contact lenses were once thought to help. I once had to wear a soft contact lens on one eye, over which they placed a hard contact. That was back when I was in college. It was annoying, and actually irritating.

Just recently, they suggested we try a new type of contact lens. It had a soft edge with a "semi-hard" center.

The contact lens in both instances was to take the place of my damaged cornea.

The piggyback didn't work too well that semester in college. The new-type lens didn't work at all most recently.

In my college years, at two separate times, I had surgery then. Long name for the procedure, but it was a graft. They put a little bit of someone else's cornea on top of mine. It was intended to stabilize my vision. It did well enough. I still needed glasses to see good, but my eye worked well enough.

I continued to see the doctor who did my surgery up until a few years ago. He doesn't do this anymore, I understand. He passed me off to another doctor in his practice. It's actually a family operation, and I have a lot of trust for what was done. I had two procedures done on my eyes then. You see, you only do one at a time.

Anyway, my former doctor said that he was amazed how long the grafts had held up, but they were beginning to go.

The vision in my left eye is atrocious, and the plan, right now, is to do that eye. But my right eye is actually a bit more fragile, despite giving me substantially better vision. And I wonder if I'm making the right choice.

I'm not much of a daredevil, but I'd almost like to do them both at once.

I'm amazed at how the technology has come in certain respects. For other problems of the eyey, cataracts, etc., they can use a laser to reshape the eye. But not this.

I don't hear much about the graft being done, though I've fallen off the National Keratoconus Foundation's mailing list since it merged with another eye disease group.

But this procedure that was done at a hospital when i was 19 will now be done on an outpatient basis at my doctor's office.

There will be pain. But I remember what happened the last time. I had it done over the summer, so it didn't interfere with college courses, not that much. The vision problem did interfere with it.

I've had my prescription changed about four times in the past year, and we didn't get one the last time I went in. Thought it could perhaps survive.

I'm sure it's hard to do any job if you can't read. But reading is about 90 percent of my job. There's this solid waste plan for Chester County that I've been dying to delve into, sitting on my desk.

My right eye is fragile, I think, because it's been carrying the load for so long. So after the shock to my left from the surgery subsides, it will take some time for the vision to settle in to what it will be. I'll have stitches in my eye for almost a year, though some will come out sooner, and some will "pop" too early and cause something between an itch and pain like a molecular sized needle stock in your eye.

When they told me what day I was going to have surgery, I had the opening line of my column right away. 

I thought it was funny, and it had the added benefit of outraging one of my sisters and my mother.

"How can you make a joke about this?" they wanted to know.

It's the easiest thing in the world to make fun of it. If you can't, then it owns you.

It's an established procedure. I think this doctor is about my age. I might be a little weirded out if he were younger, but that will have to happen someday, right?

And while there's some humor to be made at the situation, and it will certainly get funnier as the day approaches and they ask you all those silly questions, we have to take it seriously.

I've never really had good vision in my life, but if something does go wrong, what I have today might be the best vision I'll ever remember as an adult. There's a lot to lock in. My gorgeous bride, my smiling, blue-eyed son are foremost among the things I will have to memorize.

So you might catch me staring.

PS: I wrote the following short, short column a few days before my 2009 surgery, right before I took what was supposed to be a week off and turned into a month off.

’tis no time for Irish jokes, me ma says

Originally published in The News & Reporter, March 11, 2009 

I’ve written about my eye problems before and written about my upcoming surgery in a column when it was scheduled. I joked about it, because of the timing.

I’ll be having it Monday, March 16. St. Patrick’s Day “Eve,” so I wrote I’d have a bloodshot left eye on St. Patrick’s Day, but not for obvious reasons. That made my mother and sisters a bit angry.

Normally around St. Patrick’s Day, I try to regale my readers with Irish jokes or tell them at length about Irish music and songs and writing.

But we are a pretty busy bunch of folk here at The News & Reporter these days. So I have to appease my sisters and mother and we have to do “important” work.

A good newspaper does have a sense of humor, but times are tight on space these days.

The N&R will be closed on Monday. Please get your items to our staff for next Wednesday’s paper as early as you can. I’ll be out for a week. If you need to get a news story in, please call Travis Jenkins or Nancy Parsons Tuesday through Friday.

Thanks for your well wishes. and I promise to treat my new cornea better than the old. No more using it to hammer nails into the wall.

Sorry. Forgive. Please allow me a little bit of humor in my last column before I go under the knife.

Headed to the black market because of shortage

It was my 13-year-old son, altar boy and Boy Scout and all-around good kid, who suggested I go to the black market in my quest.

We will get to that.

It's subtle, but you might have noticed some people are losing their minds right now, some with irrational fears and some with rational concerns about the "novel" coronavirus COVID-19.

My wife, son and I had just returned from a cruise on the Caribbean, and we left from and returned to the port of Fort Lauderdale. If you hadn't heard, Port Everglades has had a some trouble with at least one ship arriving.

Thankfully it was after our cruise ship, so we dodged that bullet.

But I didn't heed what my cousin in England was writing on Facebook, Had I reacted then, we might not be in the pickle we're in at our household.

No toilet paper.

Somewhere over the years, we joined Costco. When we had our son, and started buying a LOT of milk, we compared the cost of a gallon of milk there to the cost of the cheapest gallon of milk nearer to our home. Buying two gallons a week at Costco, we figured would be saving about a buck a week.  Milk savings alone would cover the annual cost of our membership and the slightly longer drive.

"That's thinking smart," we thought.

"You're cheaper off," as Jimmy Breslin wrote during the 1970s stagflation days of his mother-in-law's comparison shopping.

So that's what we did. And we picked up some other things in bulk, saving some money here and there.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped buying the milk there, though it's not like my son has stopped drinking it.

But we settled into the in-store brand of toilet paper, Kirkland.

I don't want to get into the intricacies of toilet paper (it's two-ply). They also sell Scott Tissue, which claims to be single-ply, but I don't think so. I think it is an atom thick. It's not like real toilet paper. It's like a virtual simulation of where toilet paper ought to be in reality. Not good.

At Costco, the Kirkland brand is twice as thick as the Scott brand, but still cheaper.

And as we kind of settled on this as our brand, along the way, I guess I kind of forgot how to shop for toilet paper.

In the Coronavirus Pandemic crisis, those skills are sorely needed.

Costco has been sold out. Two, three weeks ago, we stopped by Costco on our way back from church, as we are wont to do every two or three months, intent on picking up some toilet paper. It was our normal "time," maybe a week or so delayed because of the cruise.

It was not to be, because of COVID-19 and what has been described as buyer "panic."

They even had stories on it, in which psychologists say the "panic-buying" is people trying to assert control in an uncertain world.

As such, it's been described as an almost rational response.

But after going two days in a row without finding it, I broke down and started thinking it was time to become a full-bore 21^st century consumer.

I went online. 

For toilet paper.

I went to Costco.com, but they do not deliver their brand. I obviously didn't want to bulk-buy Scott. This crisis won't be that long.

So I thought.

I then checked on Amazon.com.

Again, not being sure what kind of TP I needed, it was an imperfect search.

I thought I had finally found a brand and style that might work.

Then my son, who was hovering over my shoulder as I did this, pointed out something before I hit the buy button.

Delivery expected anytime between April 7 and April 28.

So the delivery window opened in 21 days, and was 21 days wide.

I don't think I could wait two months for a TP delivery. I am pretty sure at least one of us is going to need TP before then.

So, as I said, my innocent son suggested the black market.

He didn't use those exact words.

"Why don't you try eBay?" he said.

EBay?

Why not?

On a lark, I decided to put in the Costco brand itself for my specific search.

And there it was — eBay is the land of Canaan of Kirkland brand toilet paper, a land flowing with two-ply milk and honey.

So excited was I, I almost hit buy, way too early. The prices were marked up, I saw, but one would expect that.

Now $39 seems a trifle much for something that's been like $17 to $21. But it was fresh off the TP tree, second hand maybe, but not USED.

But I read closer.

Costco sells a big bulk-buy pack, which contains, I think, 10 packs with six rolls each.

It wasn't $39 for that. It was $39 for one six-roll pack.

So that would be more than $6 per roll. I scrolled down, and I kept seeing individual six-roll packs by almost every seller. These sellers had bought packs with 10 six-roll packs, cut the individual packs out, and were reselling. If you get $39 for one, you've bought back your "investment." Sell two and you probably have made enough to pay to "free" ship all these to new unwary buyers. So your third through 10^th packs are  pure two-ply profit, if you can sell them all.

There were many sellers, and that's the way most of them were going about it.

But at least one guy took it a step further. My son and I were laughing the whole time at what we were seeing, but it was a shocked laughter when we got to the guy selling — auctioning actually — individual rolls. The shocked laughter was not at the audacity of that seller.

No, shocked laughter because there had been at least 18 bids — for one roll of toilet paper. The bid was up to $20.

For ONE roll of toilet paper.

"It's a black market," I told my son. "A black market for toilet paper."

Yeah. These people buying up all the toilet paper aren't people reacting to assert some kind of phantom control over a scary situation that affords no control.

They are profiteers. Price gougers.

I thought about filing a price gouging complaint. But I live in South Carolina, while I Costco shop in Charlotte, N.C. I would have to be able to tell whichever Attorney General I talked to that eBay seller "JTootles" was operating out of North Carolina to have a prayer.

EBay might stop it if the seller of the item, Costco, would complain. I got that much by gleaning eBay's complaint policy. Hand sanitizer and items like that were being restricted. But TP? No.

I did an online chat trying to get more than a "We'll look into it," from Costco, but no going.

All I know is that it doesn't say much nice about society.

Screenshots from my online search.

Blast from the Past: Back to the Beach

Buddy Ernandez, then and now, shown above a cemetery for Americans killed at Omaha Beach during the Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1944.

Back to the Beach: Ernandez returning to Normandy one final time

By Stephen Guilfoyle

Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 12:00 am

Buddy Ernandez doesn’t get seasick. This son of Lando takes pride in it, telling a yarn about a deep-sea fishing trip he took once with a jet fighter pilot.

The pilot, who could do fantastic maneuvers and barrel rolls, spent the voyage literally spilling his guts. Buddy just smiled and fished.
Rough or easy, the sea doesn’t bother Buddy. After all, he’s been in rougher, tougher places at sea.
The English Channel, to be precise.
June 6, 1944, actually.
That day, he was with 3rd Platoon, C Company of the 18th Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division — “the Big Red One.”
The first wave went in at 6 a.m. The 16th Regiment was in that wave.
If not for a mix-up, Buddy would have been in that outfit, and he is certain he wouldn’t be here, alive today, to tell his story.
The 16th and the rest of the first wave got torn to pieces by German machine guns and cannons raining bullets and shells down all morning. More than 1,500 men were killed in that first wave, Buddy says.
So the call went out. The second wave started going in around 7, hours early. The second wave included the 18th Regiment, which included Buddy.
Buddy boarded his Higgins boat, a landing craft, and headed out over rough waves to his part of the “Longest Day,”
when the Allies captured Normandy, France, starting the offensive that would end World War II in Europe.
Buddy saw things that day he still can’t get out of his mind, blood and guts, real blood and guts, arms and legs, pieces of real men hanging off metal “hedgehogs,” blood in the water, blood on the sand.
Yet for all the horror, next week he’s going back, back to that beach.
Omaha Beach.

“Greatest Generation”

This will be Buddy Ernandez’ third trip back, he says, but “it’s probably the last one.”
Ernandez is one of the greatest generation. He and millions of other young American men fought the Nazis, liberated death camps, fought real evil. Then they came home and built things, cars, planes, homes, creating a booming economic engine. They landed a man on the moon.
But the men who fought World War II are now senior citizens, and they are dying out — some reports put it at 1,000 a day.
Buddy just turned 84. When he first hit the beach, he was younger, much younger – 2009 marks the 65th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.
He was not yet 17, a student at Edgemoor High School, on the day everything changed for his generation. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entered a war on two fronts, fighting Japan and the Nazis in Germany.
Before that, this Lando boy, this son of the mill village, had few worries. He had a couple of good coon dogs and he loved to hunt, shooting squirrels and other small animals in the hills around Fishing  Creek.
But life changed. It was a frightening time, he says. He remembers reading in the old Charlotte newspapers about six men killed when German U-boats sunk fishing ships off the coast of North Carolina.
He registered for the draft when he turned 18, and he was called up a year later, in 1943.

Training, deploying

Buddy went to Camp Webster in Macon, Ga., for basic training. His drill instructor was tough as nails. When his company reported, the lavatory in the two-story barracks was spotless the first night.
“‘You know who keeps it this clean?’ the sergeant asked us. ‘You do,’” Buddy says, acting the role and pointing his finger.
Buddy tells stories with elaboration. He takes time for details. He gestures, raises his arms for emphasis. He often closes his eyes, as if trying to picture the scene. After a few minutes, he really settles in. He relaxes into his natural Lando accent and the tale comes at its own speed of his time on “O-mee-ha Beach.”
Basic finished after about four months, and everyone was ordered onto a train and sent to Union Station in Washington, D.C.
“A man will meet you at the station and tell you where to go,” they were told.
At the station, he was put on a truck and taken to Fort Meade, Md. He carried his duffel bag to a parade ground. He and thousands of other young men were told to wait until they heard their names.
It took forever. Soldiers played poker and gin rummy, Buddy says, while they waited. There was a lunch break in the middle of the day. At the end of the day, Buddy was the only man left standing on the parade ground.
The lieutenant, a guy “so young, he looked like he had just graduated from Clemson,” was not happy to see Buddy. He questioned Buddy, who said his name was never called.
The lieutenant took Buddy to see a colonel, and the colonel heard both out. The colonel asked Buddy to find his name in the list, and it was there. Then the colonel asked the lieutenant to read the name aloud. He stuttered, yet insisted he had called it out on the field.
“The colonel says, ‘If you can’t say it now, you obviously couldn’t say it then,’” Buddy says. But the train he was to take had left hours before.
Buddy had some spending money in his pocket. He’d sold Butler and Leeds, his coon dogs, to a Rock Hill man who admired the dogs yet promised to sell the dogs back, no questions asked, if Buddy made it back.
The colonel found Buddy a bunk. A week later, another mass of men filled the parade ground. Buddy was put on a train again, sent to Camp Shanks, N.Y, briefly, then put on a boat in a six- to eight-boat convoy to England, to train for the invasion.

The Big Red One

That was how he ended up in the 18th Regiment. He also learned the 16th was the unit he should have been assigned to. Both were in the 1st Infantry, the Big Red One, but the 16th was a week ahead of the 18th while they trained for the invasion. Until D-Day, that is.
The Big Red One was an experienced, busy division. Its men had landed in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. The ones who survived were experienced and tough. Guys like Buddy beefed up platoons that had suffered heavy casualties, but it gave the fresh replacements a chance to work with battle-tested soldiers.
Buddy’s convoy landed at Liverpool, England, and he made his way to a camp near Portsmouth, where they trained for more than a year.
They knew their job and they knew the plan. They were to take the beach, off-load tanks and supplies and fuel. They were to head inland to assist airborne troops who went in June 5 to places like Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Cherbourg.
But when they hit Omaha Beach, everything went bad.

The Longest Day

Only one unit landed at its intended location that day. Nothing else went right, but the few officers who survived were innovative.
The 16th hit the beach first, Buddy says.
“About all of them died,” he said. So the klaxon on their boats called, “All hands on deck, all hands on deck.”
The second wave had to go in early.
He got in his Higgins boat with 30 other soldiers, rode the waves and hit Omaha Beach for the first time in his life.
The men were loaded down with every piece of equipment that could be conceived, but once they landed, Buddy says, soldiers started stripping down to the essentials – ammo and weapons, ammo and weapons.
The beach was almost impossible to pass through — barricaded with concrete, concertina wire, mines.
Buddy remembers how his squads got through. A destroyer, the USS Frank-ford, turned parallel to the beach and shelled the German positions, stopping the deadly fire that was pinning down the men on that part of the beach.
Buddy fought 12 to 14 hours, dodging bullets, firing his Browning Automatic Rifle, stripping ammo off the wounded and the dead, trying to stay alive.
It was night, around 9 p.m., when his fighting stopped, briefly. With a little time to regroup, they headed inland.
“I got one thing that nobody can ever take away,” Buddy says. He was there, on “Bloody Omaha,” the biggest battle ever fought, and he survived.
He was 19 years old.

The war in Europe

Buddy walked every mile, he said, from the beach, with fire fights every day and many nights, 50 miles to battles in Belgium. His last combat action was in Aachen, the first German city conquered in the war.
He helped liberate a work camp. It wasn’t one of the death camps that epitomize the evil of Nazi Germany. But it was also not a pleasant sight. He had to delouse the workers, mostly women and young children.
He then helped drive the displaced Czechs and Slavs back to their homelands in the Balkans.
He became part of the occupation until he got orders to head west. He boarded a boat, the Mexican Victory, which carried him past the white cliffs of Dover and back to the United States.

The Statue of Liberty

On the 15-day sea voyage back, counselors told the men to put the war behind them, to forget the bad and look forward to the good that would come when they got home.
If he saw it on his way over to Europe, he doesn’t say. But he does mention it as part of his return. When the Mexican Victory pulled into New York harbor, Buddy saw the Statue of Liberty. It meant something to him.
The troops took a short hop to a nearby station and Buddy and the soldiers were put on a train, again. This time he got a sleeper cabin in a fancy Pullman car.
He and his fellows were unloaded at Fort Bragg, N.C., and told to stick around if they wanted to serve in the peacetime army, or hit the road. He wanted to get the hell out, so he hit the road, hitching a ride to Charlotte with a guy whose brother showed up in a car.
A bus from Charlotte took him back to Chester County, to the old company store in Lando. His siblings were all babies, so there was no one to meet him. He walked the last bit to his home.
His mother “grabbed him by the neck,” he says. She cried.
“I’m glad to see you home,” she told him. She knew he would be getting out sooner or later, but she didn’t expect him “so soon.”
It was Jan. 17, 1946. He had been away for almost three years.

An American life

He got a job at a printing company, took some classes under the G.I. Bill, but after showing fellow members of the American Legion that he could cook, he talked himself into opening a restaurant. His mother had taught him to cook as a young man and he liked it.
He opened the Columbia Street Grill, a restaurant where the Cyclone now stands. He was leasing the space, but later opened his own restaurant, Buddy’s Drive-In, on the J.A. Cochran Bypass, in the ’60s.
He met Beverly at a Sugar Bowl a few years before and the two got married, had a daughter. They worked hard to build a nice life for themselves. They ran the restaurant for almost 30 years.
They’ve leased half of the drive-in to various Chinese restaurants over the years. But they keep the other half for themselves, keeping it ready and clean. Every Fourth of July, they cook barbecue for sale. Buddy smokes his barbecue and won’t give up his recipe.
So he managed to put a lot of it behind him, as he was advised.
But he can’t keep it all inside.

Peace

Buddy says that any man who has fought in a war knows it has just one lesson. War is terrible. The man who’s been to war doesn’t believe in war. He wants peace.
When World War II ended, the whole world was at peace.
“Didn’t last long, did it?” he says.
Soldiers like him hailed the creation of the United Nations. What a wonderful thing, he says — an organization that would prevent war.
Yet every few years, there’s another war.
“Where the hell is the U.N.?”
His voice carries obvious disgust over the war in Iraq. It shouldn’t have happened, he says.

Heroes

His experience has taught him much. Though the survivors of World War II are lauded as the greatest generation, though the soldiers who fought are hailed as heroes, Buddy says there are no heroes who can talk about Omaha Beach today.
The only heroes are already over there, buried beneath crosses and Stars of David in the fields of France.
He and his wife will visit those fields again next week, with a British survivor of the battle they met and befriended a few years ago. They are riding over on a ferry from England to France, almost the same sea route Buddy took in 1944.
Media reports say President Barack Obama will speak at a ceremony over there. A soldier attached to the State Department in Paris has obtained tickets for the Ernandezes and their friends to the official program on June 6, 2009.

In a word

The counselors years ago told him to forget it, don’t talk about it, but he can’t forget.
He puts the whole experience into one word, using its real meaning.
His eyes close, his arms shake a little as he says it, as if, there in his den, he’s actually already back there, back in ’44, back “crawling over nothing but dead people.”
As if he’s back on the beach.
“It was the most … awesome … thing ever.”

From The News & Reporter of Chester, S.C.

Remembering my old Scoutmaster

Mr. Palazzo (center) at a cabin in which we camped at Camp Bullowa, at which it snowed. Best campout ever.

NOTE: I do not know when this originally ran, and I don't know if this is the way it appeared in print, exactly.

My old digital archives are so out of date I can't open a clean version of my old work.

From the file creation date info, it might have been around July of 2003 when I wrote this. The time fits, because I was in the waning days of my time at The People-Sentinel.

I saw a post from the daughter of my old Scoutmaster today on Facebook. So I thought I would dig this up.

(I thought I had all my latter work saved as a pdf, but nope.)

Anyway, on to Mr. Palazzo.

Originally published in The People-Sentinel around July 31, 2003.)

I don't know why, but I thought the unhappiest thing a wedding invitation might garner was a "Sorry, I am unable to attend" check.

I didn't expect him to come, but I sent the invitation on anyway, just in case. If he couldn't, it would let him know that after so many years, I still remembered him. But the answer for Nick Palazzo came instead in a letter to my father.

I shouldn't call him by his first name. He was my Scoutmaster when I was growing up. I always called him Mr. Palazzo. It's an Italian name, and only one person, a priest at St. Helen's parish in New York, pronounced it correctly when we were growing up – Pah-lots-so.

He was the Scoutmaster of Troop 56, St. Raymond's. He's the guy who watched us. He didn't try to teach us "leadership" like they do in some troops these days. He saw who the natural leaders were and he tried to develop them.

He worked in the city planning office of New York City.

When the terrorists attacks happened on Sept. 11, I thought of Mr. Palazzo, because he had given us, when we moved to South Carolina, something to remember New York City with. They were five books, the city planning documents for all five boroughs of New York. They were so big, square pages bigger than a phonograph record. I mostly looked back on those pages to the book on the Bronx, about Parkchester, where I grew up. But the Manhattan section had a detail plan for something called the World Trade Center, which wasn't complete.

It weighed about 20 pounds, at least.

It was a great gift to give someone leaving the greatest city in the world, in my case under protest. It kept us connected.

He was an usher at the church. He was a father.

When I signed up, even though the Scouts met in the basement of St. Raymond's Elementary School, I never knew how heavily tied into religion the Scouts were. But as a Cub Scout, he got us to get our religious medal, the Parvuli Dei. And he was my instructor when I went through the Boy Scout-level Catholic Scout award – the Ad Altare Dei.

That's Latin, and it means Approaching the altar of God.

It was a big deal, and I still have the cross badge and red white blue and yellow ribbon that I earned by listening, in part, to what Mr. Palazzo taught us.

I must have been 12 when I went for it, and I am 37 now. A quarter of a century has passed, yet I can still remember one night, walking home from an Ad Altare Dei class, at which Mr. Palazzo tried to teach us about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which we Catholics call the Beatitudes. It was an odd situation for me, that class. Mr. Palazzo was a "civilian" yet he was teaching us religion. He wasn't a priest or a nun or a school teacher.

But he made the most salient point I've ever been taught.

"Blessed are those who show mercy, for mercy shall be theirs," Jesus said. What did that mean, Mr. Palazzo asked. I was a kid, and of course I didn't know. I thought maybe it meant there was a scorecard up in heaven, and you got points later on, in the afterlife. He knew it wasn't so silly.

So he taught me.

"When you do something for someone else, don't you feel good inside?" he asked. I thought I did.

"Isn't that a mercy?" he asked. Indeed it is. I can hear his voice, I can see him standing next to me, me on the other side of my father and my brother as we walked home.

He was just a good man, a man who told me that sometimes my ability to make people laugh was also a mercy for those people, a mercy that should return to me.

I am on the verge of tears as I write this.

I just wanted the invitation to perhaps thank him for always teaching me, and he never saw it.

He was a large man, though. Late in life, he developed diabetes. He got a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. He was put in the hospital, and some toes were amputated, then his leg, at the knee. The second amputation caused a blood clot.

On Thursday, I found out all that. His wife Phyllis wrote a letter to my father because she had gotten the wedding invitation.

I found out Thursday Nick Palazzo died. He died back in January, and I just found out Thursday.

I need some mercy, Lord; mercy for Mr. Palazzo, a good, good man who I never thanked.

It doesn't have to come back to me, but right now, I could use some myself.

Edit to add: I think an online obituary I found is his. Lists "Nicholas A Palazzo was born on February 20, 1926. He died on January 24, 2003 at age 76." 

Dad (center) and Mr. Palazzo (right) at the cabin we camped in at Camp Bullowa where it snowed, we had an epic snowball fight and we went out after Bigfoot at night.

Thoughts on The Last Jedi soundtrack

DO I HAVE TO SAY SPOILERS?

I have always been a fan of the great John Williams, and I have pored over every recording of his Star Wars soundtracks. A lot of time, I have found it's the music, not the performances that tell us what we are supposed to feel in movies,and very most particularly with a John Williams score.
Just as a prefatory note, I was thrilled to finally be able to get the soundtrack to The West Wing by the great W.G. "Snuffy" Walden. And I almost, almost wish I hadn't.
It is a fantastic soundtrack, but it is not separately as listenable. Walden's soundtrack sets the scenes so well. But just to kick back and listen, it's not great in that separate way.
Anyway, when I went into the theater the first time, I thought I recognized most of the themes that Williams was basing his music on. And I wasn't sure, but I was thinking that they were just the themes that Williams had created, many of them years ago, without what I consdered the tailoring Williams did for each theme when it is actually used on screen.
For example, Williams wrote a theme, Luke and Leia, for the scenes in the Return of the Jedi where Luke tells Leia she is his sister and he has to face their father.
But on the Special Edition soundtrack, they include first the performance cue that was actually used in the movie, which they named "Brother and Sister" on the album (for lack of a better word these days).
But it sounded like they were using "Luke and Leia" almost straight up in the scenes in which Luke and Leia have a tender but brief reunion. And just now listening to both, I think I am pretty much on target about that.
Also, Williams wrote "Yoda's Theme" for The Empire Strikes Back, but he tailored for the couple of cues where he raises the X-wing out of the swamp and shows Luke what the Force is really about. And he also made it an "action" cue, as Williams described it, for when Luke is attacked briefly by Boba Fett on Cloud City.
But when Yoda's Force ghost shows up in The Last Jedi, the music playing is a very close rendition of just Yoda's Theme.
Also, a piece of music that has never been played on screen before, straight up, but used to inform other cues is Princess Leia's Theme. It appears in The Last Jedi, straight up, when Leia uses the Force for the first time on screen.
It might read like I am saying John Williams was phoning this soundtrack in, but I am just pointing out the very specific choice I think he made. I think he saw the movie bringing those characters back, and he brought back their themes to give the fans who wish nothing to change to have exactly what they wanted.
Because Leia using the Force is a very different Leia than the one Williams wrote that theme for, but the theme absolutely works.
In The Force Awakens, Williams revisited the romantic cues he came up with for Han and Leia's flirtation where they fall in love. And it's obvious the characters are still in love, but that love is different. And Williams used the theme in that movie to inform themes without it being straight up the same.
I don't know what Williams was thinking when he chose to go this route with those themes for those characters. But he came up with some new stuff for this movie, so he quite specifically was not phoning it in.
The Luke and Leia theme blends into the theme you hear in a lot of the commercials, don don don donnon. The music on Canto Bight is thrilling. Williams uses steel drums, like he used so famously in the Cantina Band music, but this is completely different.
On screen, much is made of what appears to be a ship landing in a steaming bay, but it turns out to be a futuristic iron pressing some Imperial uniform. The scene is said to be reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."
John Williams gets in on the "Brazil" act as well. Part of the Canto Bight music is about 20 seconds or so of a theme used in that movie a lot.
I find it interesting that the name of the track for Luke's battle with Kylo Ren is called by Williams, "The Last Jedi."
But there's one theme that Williams changes.
In the liner notes to the original Star Wars soundtrack album from back in 1978, Williams said that he used the "Force theme" for the twin sunset scene, to show Luke's hopes and dreams for the future.
The theme has been played in just about every Star Wars film ever since. Sometimes exactly the same as it was in Star Wars, like at the end of Revenge of the Sith, where it is used in the same setting -- Luke's aunt and uncle watching a twin sunset.
The Force Theme is present a couple of times in the Last Jedi.
At one point, it weaves so sweetly and turns into Rey's Theme that you might think it was the plan from 1977.
But it's played, and played slower and sadder, at the end, when Luke looks at what appears to be a twin sunset, and he dies, fading away into the Force like Yoda did in Return of the Jedi and maybe Ben did in Star Wars. I am pretty sure it's the track called "Peace and Purpose" on the soundtrack.
The soundtrack, I think, begs the question of who The Last Jedi is. It tells us, by title, that from Luke's battle with Kylo Ren, that it's Luke. The movie mostly says it is Rey, but suggests "Broom Boy" from the final scene might be, since he displays Force abilities.
I think the Soundtrack answers the question definitively. The music that plays over the Broom Boy, as he gazes into the stars they way Luke gazed at that twin sunset on Tatooine, is the Force Theme, very similar to the Force Theme from Star Wars. (Maybe it's a little closer to how it was used at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but still. It hearkens back to staring off and dreaming of something better.
That is as pure a Star Wars moment as any.)
There's a lot going on in this soundtrack, but if you've never bought a Star Wars soundtrack, this one just about has it all.

Agents of Shield/Captain Marvel theory

So. If you are into Agents of Shield and Marvel movies, read on.
Otherwise, total geek alert right now. If you are going to make fun, leave now.
We good? OK.
In my slow rewatch of the episodes, in Season 1, Episode Yes Men. Main thrust of the episode is not relevant. But they just got back from the Guest House and saving Skye with the Kree, blood, I guess? Anyway, Phil asks Lady Sif if she's seen any aliens and if any of them are blue, and she rattles off some names, including the Kree, which we all assume the GH alien to be.
And Lady Sif assures the Son of Coul that NONE of them have ever visited the earth. We know this is not true, because Inhumans.
But the Kree experiment that created the Inhumans goes back millennia. So, where does this Kree body come from?
And the thought that popped into my head was, why is Captain Marvel the movie going to be set in the '90s, when up until now, the history of heroes in the Marvel movie universe has been Captain America in World War II, then a whole bunch of failed experiments to try to recreate the super soldier serum which result in the Hulk, AIM, Centipede, Deathlok, Garrett, extremis. But no real other heroes until the Battle of New York. That's what we've been told.
But now, Captain Marvel is going to be fighting Skrulls in the '90s and will have a costume.
And it keeps coming back to me. Where does this dead, sliced-basically-in-half Kree come from?
In the comics, the ancient enemies of the Skrulls are the ... ding ding ding ... Kree.
Nick Fury will be in this movie. Will he get a warning from a Kree about the Skrulls? Will this blue Kree be a good guy, perhaps even a now blue Mar-vell of Kree, who helps save the earth and pass his powers on to Danvers to help save the earth when he gets sliced and diced by a Skrull?
Will a drop of his blood perhaps save Danvers' life, letting Fury know that it would be worth it to keep the Kree body for decades.
Afterward, does Carol Danvers go incognito until they need her again?
Was SHE, at least originally, the Avenger Fury said he kept the body to save?
The downside of this theory is that the movie universe doesn't care all that much about the TV universe.

Edited to add: Clark Gregg is confirmed as being in the Captain Marvel movie.  

Agents of SHIELD is about to end its fifth season with an ending that can serve as a series finale rather than a season finale. And they have heavily name-dropped events from  Avengers Infinity War. So the SHIELD finale is taking place during the mad Titan’s invasion. 

It totally feels like they could GO THERE snd do the thing. 

Also, Jude Law is cast as Mar-vell. I don’t think they would turn him blue. But they did turn Zoe Daldana green and Scarlett Johanssen blond. 

So you never know.