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No thanks needed for dodging disaster

February 19, 2021 by Guy

Let me first say that if offered a reward or prize for saving High Point from icy catastrophe in Thursday’s winter storm, I will decline it.

I am gratified that my actions may have prevented widespread damage and electricity disruption, along with the human misery that would accompany that, but it would be wrong to seek or accept any reward.

No, my actions were prompted by no heroic intent but instead by my desire to avoid looking like an idiot for the second time in less than a week. Saving the city was a happy byproduct.

When the previous ice storm hit last weekend, the power in our neighborhood went out around 8:30 a.m. My initial thought was that my wife and I could stay with my stepmother because she has gas logs, so her house would stay warm even though her power was out too.

She told us, “Come on over.”

But as we began to gather our things, she texted a reminder: Her house gets its water from a well, so no power means no pump and no water. If we came, we would have to bring containers of water to flush the toilets.

This altered the calculus.

Maybe it would be better to just add layers of clothing and stay in the growing cold.

Then I slapped my forehead. Though we had lived in the house since June, somehow I had forgotten an element of the room.

“We have a fireplace,” I said. “Let’s just build a fire.”

The previous owners had left some firewood beside the house. Happily enough, they were under cover and were dry, so I set about building a fire.

As the flames gradually grew, I saw a few curls of smoke rolling up past the mantle into the living room, but once the fire was full and hot, everything appeared to go up the chimney.

We set up a table near the fire to play Scrabble while waiting for the power to come back on.

Gradually I noticed the room growing a bit hazy. Some smoke continued drifting into the room.

After a couple of hours, the amount of smoke started to worry me. I set up a ladder by the smoke detector.

I grabbed a towel, opened the front door and started waving smoke out the door.

After a minute I thought it looked like smoke was rolling thickly off the porch. Turning back toward the fireplace, I saw smoke pouring into the living room toward the front door. I had made things worse.

The hallway smoke alarm went off, and then the alarm’s control panel in the kitchen started screeching.

I scrambled up the ladder and removed the smoke detector from the ceiling to run outside with it as my phone rang – the alarm company checking to see what was happening. I grabbed the screeching control panel as I answered the phone and went out the door.

“No,” I said, “the power went out and we built a fire in the fireplace, and we have some smoke in the house.”

Back inside, I looked around the thick haze and felt panic.

Had I ruined the house? Would we have to hire a disaster mitigation company?

We decided we would just have to let the fire die on its own.

So we sat in the smoke and kept playing Scrabble. I tried to focus on the board. Any glance around renewed my panic.

Gradually, the air cleared. The next day, we cleaned out the fireplace, and the house no longer smelled of smoke.

A couple days later, the forecast of another ice storm loomed, but this one was supposed to be much worse – up to a half inch of ice. Maybe even more than that. Trees would buckle everywhere.

I didn’t want a repeat performance of my errors.

Given the age of our house, our fireplace probably originally burned coal, which I once was told meant you could burn a Duraflame log in it but not wood. When I went to the store to find one, it seemed many other people had a similar idea. But I tried other stores and eventually found a box of logs. If the neighborhood was without power for a couple of days, we still would be able to keep warm.

I changed the order of the cars in the driveway so the four-wheel-drive vehicle was in the back.

And Thursday morning I lit a burner on the gas stove (the ignition on the stove is electric, so you can’t light it after the power is out) and kept it on low. Now if the power failed we could heat soup.

We were as ready as we could possibly be for a catastrophic ice storm.

Naturally, nothing much happened. Some ice, but no catastrophe, and it melted by mid-afternoon.

As long as I hold on to the box of logs, I expect the city will make it through the rest of this winter with no significant ice-related outages.

You’re welcome.

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When virus is out of sight, it’s out of mind

December 4, 2020 by Guy

Seeing is believing, but if believing required seeing we would have no churches.

When you buy a car, you don’t require that the dealer take the car apart and demonstrate how each element of it functions before you believe it will drive.

Do you understand how your flat-screen TV works?

Your cellphone?

A colleague recently wrote about losing a relative to COVID-19. The relative had a terminal form of cancer, but COVID-19 quickly took away however many months she would have had left. My colleague wrote of her frustration about people refusing to wear masks, which studies conducted during the months of the pandemic have proven can sharply limit the spread of the virus.

But one line she wrote about why people find it difficult to stick with the strict precautions that public health officials call for caught me short: “I know it’s hard. The last eight months have felt like a dystopian hellscape, our sense of reality warped by a disaster in slow motion.”

I told her I thought the reason it has been difficult is exactly the opposite – the world does not appear to be a hellscape or a disaster. If we went outside and brimstone were falling from the sky, we’d go back in to get our asbestos umbrella – “The scientists say we’ll catch fire if we don’t keep an asbestos umbrella with us at all times!”

The reason it’s hard to get people to change their behavior from what they were doing every day until this past spring is that everything looks exactly the same as it did a year ago. Unless you personally have known people who suffered extreme complications from COVID-19, the danger of the disease can seem remote. It’s hard to keep up your guard day after day when nothing happens to you.

A recent letter sent to The High Point Enterprise questioning whether the pandemic continues to rage through society said, “Doesn’t the definition of ‘pandemic’ include ‘excessive deaths’? I’ve yet to see bodies stacked on the roadsides.”

It is statistically evident that the United States is seeing “excess deaths” (that’s the term to Google). The number of deaths from all causes each year normally falls into a certain limited range, but a research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in October reported that from March 1 to Aug. 1 the number of deaths in the U.S. was 20% higher than that normal range – that’s more than 225,000, of which only 150,000 officially had been attributed to COVID-19.

And you don’t have to look far to find recent news stories documenting the toll that the current surge in virus-related hospitalizations is taking on health care workers across the country – but unless those workers are part of your immediate family, you do have to choose to look.

Among the statistics that the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services publishes on its website, and updates every day, is the number of state residents hospitalized for COVID-19. Many county health departments, including Guilford’s, do the same. On Friday, 166 Guilford residents were hospitalized.

But the bodies are not stacked by the roadside.

Perhaps if this pandemic were like the 1918 Spanish flu, and one of the groups hardest hit was young children, there wouldn’t be so many skeptics. The emotional wounds would be more open and raw and distributed across the population.

No one would demand to see children’s bodies stacked like cordwood before believing there was a problem.

No one would think of suggesting that the deaths of a few hundred-thousand children was acceptable, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested in the spring about the deaths of seniors from COVID-19: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’”

But, at least so far as we know in the less than one year scientists have had to study the disease, COVID-19 does not have serious effects on most children.

In fact, most adults who are infected feel no effects or have mild symptoms, and even most infected seniors recover.

The issue, though, has never been that you personally were likely to die if you caught this disease. If that were the only risk, you would be well within your rights to not wear a mask and even to offer to deep-kiss any willing stranger.

But with this highly infectious disease, when you are infected you may not know it, so if you take minimal or no precautions, you easily infect other people. They then infect other people, and so on, and so on, and eventually the virus reaches someone whose health is fragile, but you will never see it. All you see is that the number of deaths went up yesterday, and you don’t believe you could have had anything to do with that.

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No, the government didn’t admit aliens are here

August 7, 2020 by Guy


A reader called me this past week and asked in an exasperated tone why the newspaper hadn’t run a story about a statement the Pentagon issued to the New York Times for a story that ran July 31 essentially confirming that at least some identified flying objects are alien crafts from another world.

“Why isn’t everyone talking about this?” he said.

He had learned about the Times story from a friend.

A quick Google search indeed turned up stories reacting to the Times report and indicating that the Pentagon task force investigating UFOs would be publicly releasing information that might confirm the existence of aliens.

This is how a story from the Fox TV Digital Team put it:

“Now, the New York Times is reporting that the secretive task force is expected to release new and alarming findings that may involve vehicles made of materials not of this planet.”

The Independent in England said this:

“A Pentagon UFO unit will make some investigations public as ex-advisors suggest that ‘vehicles not made on this earth’ were placed in U.S. government storage.”

The problem with those stories is that what they say isn’t what the New York Times story said. Rather, they read between the lines and juice the elements of the story most likely to catch people’s attention – a common flaw of our internet age. They strongly suggest facts that are not in evidence.

There is a term for that: clickbait. They just want as many people as possible to click on a headline and share it.

The Times story by reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, which was posted online July 23 (not the 31st), actually said that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is focused on “discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States,” and the story contained a suggestion that the unidentified aircraft might be highly advanced drones.

That would make sense because the limits on aircraft maneuverability in many cases are human limits. The human body can’t cope with the extremes of acceleration and high-speed changes in direction that aviation technology is capable of.

And there was no Pentagon statement confirming anything. Notably, the second sentence of the story began, “Pentagon officials will not discuss the program.”

However, the Times story does include a few people who openly say they think at least some UFOs may be of alien origin.

The Pentagon program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017, “is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study,” it said.

And Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who the story said worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the UFO program since 2007, is quoted as saying that in some cases examination of recovered crash materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

But the story also includes a couple of reminders that just because right at a certain moment you can’t tell how something could have been made doesn’t mean that nowhere in the world could there be anyone who has figured it out:

“In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say. …

“No crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification. Some retrieved objects, such as unusual metallic fragments, were later identified from laboratory studies as man-made.”

A correction attached to the story and dated July 24 shows that the original version of the story more strongly stoked speculation about aliens:

“An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades. “

Whatever the truth is, there will be additional stories to come, prompted by public releases from the Pentagon’s task force. Again, from the Times: A Senate committee report in June outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year “said the program … was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.”

In short, the reason no one reported the government’s confirmation that aliens exist is because the government didn’t do that.

Maybe in the coming months or years it will. But it hasn’t yet.

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Labor unrest a crippling situation

June 26, 2020 by Guy

Life advice: At some point as you get older, you should not try to lift a lawnmower by yourself.

Apparently I passed that point sometime in the past year.

When I needed to take the mower in for service last summer, I hoisted it solo into the back of my SUV without any trouble.

But last weekend, I hoisted the mower solo to drive it from Lenoir to mow the incipient meadow in the front yard of the house my wife and I bought in High Point two weeks ago.

This time, there was some trouble.

As I lifted the mower I felt a muscle in my back complain. I don’t speak fluent muscle, but the complaint seemed something along the lines of, “I’m too old for this crap and I’m done.”

I got the mower into the SUV, but the rest of the packing I had to do without the help of that muscle.

I coughed, and the muscle threatened me.

Almost every step I took, the muscle grumbled.

And the muscle continued grumbling during the nearly two-hour drive to High Point.

As the day turned to evening, the muscle stiffened its resolve, meaning it not only wouldn’t help me move around the house but it fought me. I walked like the old people in the Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched in my childhood – bent over, holding one hand on my back. If I’d had a cane or walking stick, it would have been helpful.

Finally, I went to bed and was able to sleep – for a while. But the muscle’s constant complaints woke me.

And because our house in Lenoir has not yet sold, we barely have any furniture, and the muscle refused to help me rise from the mattress on the floor. Once I rose, I could not bend over to pick up my socks.

It was a work stoppage. A boycott.

Somehow I got myself showered and dressed for work.

The muscle grew more cooperative as the day went, ceasing the boycott, and we are back on speaking terms again.

But I’m worried.

For now, we are splitting our time between High Point and Lenoir. The grass in both places refuses my request to temporarily stop growing. There may be more mower transport yet to be done. I won’t try to lift it on my own again, but what if the muscle balks anyway? What if there’s another boycott?

Looking ahead, there’s a larger worry. I’m not getting any younger, and what if the muscle has sympathizers? Next time more than one muscle might boycott.

My entire body might unionize and demand better working conditions – i.e., no more working conditions.

That would be unacceptable. I might have to hire some union-busting goons. Things could get ugly. There might be violence. I’d be caught in the middle, literally. Any blood that would be spilled would be mine.

Everyone tells you it sucks getting old.

No one says you will find yourself quietly negotiating a careful labor agreement with your own muscles just to keep walking upright.

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Technology amps up anxiety of moving

May 30, 2020 by Guy

Some people change residences frequently, not only renters but home buyers. A woman once told my mother she never lives in a house longer than three years “because then you have to clean it.”

Then there’s my wife, Jane, who hates moving. Early in our marriage she declared that the next people who moved her would be a local funeral home.

We are now in the middle of buying and selling a house for the third time in the 21 years we have been married.

When we moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 2001, the only thing about the house-hunting process that had changed since I first bought a house as a bachelor four years earlier was the advent of online listings.

When we moved to Lenoir in 2013, the one new wrinkle was the ability to digitally “sign” all the sales documents needed in Virginia while we were on a computer in Lenoir.

But now?

The process of buying and selling a house — each separately but especially both together — has been transformed into a nightmare of text messages, emails and automated phone calls, all of which seem to be added onto instead of replacing the regular calls and emails that previously went between a buyer/seller and the real estate agent.

The day our house went on the market, my phone “blew up.” I had heard other people use that phrase, but I had no firsthand experience. My phone had never done it before. But, boy howdy, now I have experience.

Each time someone wanted to schedule a showing, I received both a text and an email requesting confirmation.

If no one confirmed it quickly, I received a phone call asking about it.

Once the showing was confirmed, I received both a text and an email showing it had been confirmed.

When an agent rescheduled, the entire cycle repeated. If someone canceled, there was another round of texts and emails.

After each showing, we received texts and emails showing the “feedback” provided by the agent for the person who saw the house, which usually was an email mostly full of questions that had not been answered.

On the house-buying end, we both receive automated emails requesting various documents, and if a couple of days pass we get reminders that we have not provided particular documents.

Our agent uses a website that tracks all the tasks that must be completed by either her or us, and each time she writes in that a task has been completed we get emails telling us that she has updated the timeline. The timeline is a wonderful tool, and I applaud it, but it’s yet another series of notifications that trigger my phone to buzz or bong or hum.

All of this piles stress on top of the ordinary stresses of moving plus the added anxiety of a worldwide pandemic.

If Jane and I live to complete the move to High Point, I feel certain she will not declare this time that the next people who move her will be a funeral home.

Mine will be the body they will carry out because she will kill me if I ever want to move again.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 1 Comment »

The looming question: What now?

May 8, 2020 by Guy

With Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order at least somewhat eased as of Friday evening, I know what many of you in North Carolina, and those in other states similarly starting to “reopen,” are thinking: What are we supposed to do now?

The answer can be found within one of the lines of criticism directed at Cooper by his opponent in this fall’s election, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. After Cooper announced the limited loosening of restrictions on businesses, Forest issued a statement that said in part, “He does not believe that North Carolinians have enough self-control, restraint, or common sense to act responsibly in a world with COVID-19.”

No matter how you plan to vote this fall, if you want to know what you should do now with the limited freedom of movement that fits under Cooper’s Phase One guidelines, look to Forest’s statement: Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Upon reading that, those of you who interact with the general public regularly probably feel a sense of impending doom.

A different quote applies here. In the 1997 movie “Men In Black,” about the secret government agency that deals with extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, actor Will Smith’s character asks why officials don’t trust the public with the truth because “people are smart.”

Tommy Lee Jones’ character replies, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.”

That may be too cynical and overly broad, but if there were not a nugget of truth to it then no one would ever be crushed under a stampede of Walmart shoppers on Black Friday, political advertising would contain no falsehoods, and scammers would have to apply for welfare.

Ever since the stay-at-home order and social-distancing guidelines first were issued, there have been complaints about some businesses and people who were not complying. And they are correct, it’s not hard to find people ignoring all social distancing guidelines.

The number of positive tests for coronavirus continues to rise in part because some people do not take the threat or precautions seriously. Even if the governor had left his orders unchanged, those people’s behavior would not be affected — just the way that anti-littering laws don’t stop some people from throwing their McDonald’s wrappers and leftover fries out the window in front of you on the highway.

The best thing you can always do is be the best kind of person you know how to be, the kind of person your parents would be proud to see on television.

That doesn’t mean you have to wear a hazmat suit to the gas station.

It means having the sense to know that just because you feel fine doesn’t mean you haven’t been infected, so if you’re going someplace where you’ll probably be pretty close to people it would be a good idea to wear a mask of some kind to help reduce the risk to other people as well as their risk to you.

It means having the sense of history to realize that the last pandemic this extensive, the Spanish flu, lasted two years, not two months, so we will have to adapt our behavior for the long term, not revert to our old habits and go “back to normal.”

There’s another quote that applies. In “The Andy Griffith Show,” Sheriff Taylor scolds someone who is not displaying common sense, “Act like you got some smart.”

Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Or you can boil that down to something even simpler and easier to remember, something that I tell myself all the time — but don’t often enough heed — especially when it comes to interactions with other people:

Don’t be stupid.

Posted in In the news, Personal | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Coronavirus restores youthful perspective on time

April 24, 2020 by Guy

At long last, I found how to make time slow down.

But like the dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, I don’t know what to do with myself. Who needs all this slow-moving time? Take it back. You can have it.

Now I’m ready for time to speed back up again.

We all notice by our mid-30s that as we get older time accelerates. Each year goes by more quickly than the last.

By the time I turned 50, it seemed I barely was able to grow sick of mowing the lawn in the summer heat before frost hit, the leaves turned and I had to wear heavy coats again. Winters once seemed like a long, tedious parade of putting on and taking off heavy coats, but in recent years even the coldest weather has become almost tolerably brief because spring arrives so quickly. Almost. But spring departs barely after arriving, like a coworker who hates to be left out of a party but doesn’t like socializing.

Facebook serves up “memories” that feel recent but were posted a dozen years ago by a version of me that had mostly brown hair, which makes me think about how close I am to retirement age. Can the next dozen or so years really go even more quickly than the past dozen? It seems like a long way off, but back when I was 42, 54 seemed a long way off.

I thought it would go on like that endlessly, each year adding acceleration on top of the previous year’s speed like an ion engine building momentum in space until eventually I would whoosh effortlessly into the void, barely noticing as death arrives and passes quickly behind me.

But then came the coronavirus, and instead of speeding into a void it feels more like I have careened into a giant, moist sponge cake with thick, creamy icing. I’m embedded in it and can’t extract myself.

Last weekend on the radio a news reporter said it was the beginning of the third weekend since Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order took effect.

“What?!” I said. “That can’t be right.”

Two weeks? We had been cooped up mostly at home and locked out of many of our favorite businesses for a lot longer than that … hadn’t we? I checked the calendar.

Nope.

This is now the fourth weekend, not even 28 days yet.

But it feels like the fourth month.

Time has slowed to a crawl. My sense of the passage of time is now more like it was when I was 6. Inside my head, I’m whining, “But I haven’t been able to go out just to have a beer in FOREVEEEEEEERRRRRRR.”

I’ve seen memes on social media saying every day is like the movie “Groundhog Day.” We wake up and everything is the same, no matter what we do, because our options are now so limited.

I understand the frustrations of those protesting the stay-at-home restrictions.

But I also understand the limitations of the health care system to deal with a sudden influx of severely ill patients. There simply isn’t much room. Ask around. Fewer people than would fit in your living room would be a major crisis.

So when my inner 6-year-old whimpers, “How much longer is this going to taaaaaaaaaake?” my inner adult answers, “It takes how long it takes, now behave or I’ll pull this car over and GIVE you something to cry about!”

I’ll just have to take a beer out of the refrigerator, go sit in a corner upstairs, sulk and stare out the window, thinking about all the things I can’t do.

It feels like I’m grounded. We’re all grounded. It feels like it will never end.

My inner adult eyes the sulking 6-year-old in the rear view mirror.

“I know it feels like a long time,” the adult says. “I promise you we’ll go out when it’s over. Whatever you want.”

The 6-year-old rolls his eyes and half-heartedly answers, “Oh, OK.”

But to him the road ahead looks like a Kansas highway. It stretches on and on toward a distant vanishing point on the horizon.

My inner adult knows we are in a slow-motion race on that road. The prize is a healthy community, and it doesn’t go to the ones who get to the end first but to the ones who get the farthest without running anyone off the road. It’s harder than it sounds.

Posted in In the news, Personal | Tagged , | 11 Comments »

What evil lurks in the hearts of peanuts?

January 24, 2020 by Guy

They say only the good die young.

I wonder, then, what sordid deeds Mr. Peanut must have committed in the nearly 104 years before his recent death.

Yes, if you haven’t seen the TV commercial, Mr. Peanut is dead.

He and two men were riding in the peanut-shaped Nutmobile – the Planters answer to Oscar Meyer’s wienermobile, I suppose – when it headed for a cliff. They jumped out just as it went over the edge, and they found themselves hanging like Wile E. Coyote from a branch over a deep canyon. As the branch began to break from their weight, Mr. Peanut let go, sacrificing himself and plunging to the canyon floor, where the wrecked Nutmobile lay.

Looking down, one of the two men said, “Maybe he’ll be all right.”

And then, just to eliminate all doubt, the Nutmobile exploded.

That commercial is a teaser for another commercial that is scheduled to run during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

Officials at both Planters and VaynerMedia, which created the commercial, swear that the character is dead, so presumably Mr. Peanut will not emerge from the flaming wreckage as an intact but roasted peanut. The Super Bowl commercial reportedly will show his funeral.

Maybe viewers will be introduced to Mr. Peanut’s progeny at his funeral, or much of his extended family, and one or more of them will take up his mantle.

Actually that’s probably exactly what will happen. There is no chance in the world that Planters is going to just give up using such a well recognized symbol.

Perhaps VaynerMedia hopes to do with Mr. Peanut’s family something similar to what KFC has done with Colonel Sanders since that character was rebooted in 2015. Now there is not just one Colonel, not just one image based on a real, historical person, there is a different Colonel played by an entirely different actor for every product or deal KFC offers. There’s even a female Colonel (at least just the one so far), played by country singer Reba McEntire when promoting the introduction of “Smokey Mountain BBQ” chicken. (My favorite is the Extra Crispy Colonel, played by deeply tanned actor George Hamilton.) It’s endlessly adaptable.

So maybe now, instead of the one Mr. Peanut with his unchanging monocle and top hat, there will be a whole family of Peanut characters, each with his or her own appearance and personality suited to the various Planters products. And whenever Planters introduces a new one, they’ll just roll out a new member of the family.

I just hope that the depiction of the funeral includes some dark character in attendance who will tell us Mr. Peanut’s naughty secrets, maybe a “second” family from a tryst with Miss Cashew, petty thievery, major stock holdings in Nutella and JIF, or forbidden passions, such as a late-night habit of snacking on peanuts – cannibalism! What would be the worst Mr. Peanut could have done in 104 years?

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When not getting up is falling down

November 22, 2019 by Guy

Friday morning came.

I hate it when that happens.

I’m happy when the end of the work week is near, but by Friday I am tired of getting up in the dark for the fifth straight day. Sometimes my first thought when I wake is that it’s Saturday, I forgot to turn off the alarm, and I can stay in bed. Then the stark, terrible realization hits that, no, it’s really Friday, and I really need to get up.

This time, when my alarm went off I knew for certain it was Friday, and I grudgingly got up in the dark and went to the dresser to put on my exercise clothes.

My wife, still in bed, mumbled, “I’m going to sleep a little longer.”

I stared across the room at the bed for a moment.

Then I went back and climbed under the covers.

Her alarm then went off, and she turned it off and lay back down.

An hour later, I woke when she got out of bed.

I stayed put and pulled the covers up. She closed the bedroom door and went downstairs to get ready for work.

I couldn’t get back to sleep, though I tried for 20 minutes. When I finally got up, got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen, I started looking through the News-Topic when I saw a note my wife had left next to my seat the previous night explaining what she needed to do at work on Friday.

“I can’t sleep in,” the note said. “Don’t let me sleep in.”

As the saying goes: I had one job.

I am not usually the half of our marriage who is relied upon to keep to a schedule, but it’s horrible when the times arise that I am relied upon and fail.

To be fair, she left the note after I already was asleep Thursday night. She just assumed that, as usual, I would be up first.

And it worked out. She got up early enough on her own that she was not running around like a chicken with her head cut off trying to leave the house on time.

But it could have ended badly.

What if she hadn’t awakened on her own? The only thing that woke me was her getting out of bed. If she were relying on me, we might have slept until it was light out.

She might have been late, and when she’s rushing around because she’s late she tends to forget something – maybe just her earrings (I say “just,” but she feels half-dressed without her earrings), but sometimes she forgets her phone, or the key to her office door, or even her wallet.

Because of my job, on any given day I may or may not be home first in the evening, and most Saturdays I work at least part of the day, complicating plans for going to see movies or making day trips. We’re going to have a very short Thanksgiving holiday because of an unexpected staff vacancy requiring me to be back in Lenoir, just in case.

Anyone married to a journalist comes to expect the unexpected in this way. The hours are, to some extent, reliably unpredictable.

That makes it all the worse when the one thing I do with great regularity – wake at 5 a.m. to start the coffee, read the paper and watch “SportsCenter” – does not happen the one time that she is counting on it.

“I failed you,” I told her.

She laughed and kissed me.

I dodged the bullet this time. But there will be a next time. I know there will.

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A different neighborhood watch

November 18, 2019 by Guy

Most days, being a good community newspaper is an exercise in neighborliness.

We like to find out about things people in the community have done, or are doing, that are interesting or to find the new businesses they have started. These are happy stories that help people feel connected to their neighbors.

When something tragic happens to someone in the community, we try when we can to bring that person’s life to light so it is not just a story of pain or statistics. These are not happy stories, but they also help people feel connected, and if they are done right they can help people mourn a loss or celebrate a legacy.

Sometimes, though, being a good community newspaper means sticking our necks out and risking what might become a costly fight over an important principle. That happened over the past two months.

The News-Topic found out in September that a civil lawsuit had been filed against the Caldwell County Board of Education and quickly settled. We wanted to tell you, the taxpayers of Caldwell County, who pay for the Caldwell County Schools, what it’s about and what the settlement was. But all sides in the lawsuit agreed to have the entire court file sealed by a judge.

Strictly speaking, this should almost never happen. State law in North Carolina presumes an overriding interest in the public knowing about the actions of their government agencies, including in court. On the topic of court settlements involving agencies and/or their employees and representatives, the law says this:

“Public records … shall include all settlement documents in any suit, administrative proceeding or arbitration instituted against any agency of North Carolina government or its subdivisions … in connection with or arising out of such agency’s official actions, duties or responsibilities, except in an action for medical malpractice against a hospital facility. No agency of North Carolina government or its subdivisions, nor any counsel, insurance company or other representative acting on behalf of such agency, shall approve, accept or enter into any settlement of any such suit, arbitration or proceeding if the settlement provides that its terms and conditions shall be confidential, except in an action for medical malpractice against a hospital facility.”

That’s as clear as it could possibly be.

The school system is not a hospital facility, so there would not seem to be any room under the law for sealing this lawsuit or settlement.

Yet this lawsuit and settlement were sealed.

The law allows for a judge to make a determination that there is an interest for secrecy that overrides the presumption that settlements involving a government agency should be public. But we were unable to know whether that was true because the judge also sealed his order saying why the entire court file should be sealed.

That seems counterintuitive to me.

Court orders do not exist solely for other judges to read; they are there also to explain why a particular court document or file is not available to the public as the vast majority of other court documents are. Our court system belongs to the public, and the presumption under the law is that the public has a right to know what is going on in the courts and why.

All anyone could tell from what was publicly available in this particular court file was that a child was involved. That makes it more serious and more urgent for the public to know about, not less. We think the public wants to know what happened in the county’s schools, what the level of responsibility of the Caldwell County Schools was and what it cost the taxpayers to make this lawsuit go away.

The N.C. Court of Appeals ruled just last year that the law allows a student’s name to be redacted from any documents made public but does not allow sealing the entire file.

And so the News-Topic went to work to get everyone to follow the law and unseal the file and settlement.

If you have ever hired a lawyer, you know that this cost us money. If you have ever run a business, you realize that this is an unexpected expense that was not in our budget.

But there is a clear public interest here, laid out plainly in the state law quoted above — and also, ironically, in the settlement. Once it was unsealed, we found a paragraph acknowledging that the settlement could not preclude the school board, “as a public agency,” from legal requirements to “disclose the substantive terms of, or produce a copy of, a public record, or to comply with Open Meeting Laws.”

The News-Topic’s efforts on this case began just before National Newspaper Week, when newspapers across the country try to remind their communities of the vital civic role played by news organizations.

There have been several national stories over the past year about that, including one on a study showing that in communities where the only newspaper closed, the cost of government increased in comparison to communities that still had a newspaper. When no one is watching, eventually people start cutting corners, and the cost to taxpayers goes up.

This court case is as good a reminder as you could have of the things newspapers do on behalf of the public. There is literally no one else in the courthouse every week looking at what is happening in both civil and criminal courts other than the clerks, lawyers and judges — all of whom have their own jobs to do and their own interests to pursue.

When someone asks why they should pay for a newspaper when there are websites that provide some of that information for free, this is yet another answer.

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