Nows and Forevers

My father gave me some of my grandfather’s photos a few weeks ago, which had been rescued from my aunt’s house when she moved. My grandfather has been dead since 1976 and my grandmother since 1994, and my aunt joked that a lot of the material hadn’t seen the light of day in at least 70 years.

I got more photos. My grandfather was an Army combat veteran in Europe, and he brought a camera along with him, from training through every battle between D-Day and after the Bulge. This is one of those photos. I only know what it is because my grandfather scrawled on the back:

“First (leading battery) of 302nd C.A.B.B. Bn executing eyes right as it passed reviewing officers on retreat parade, Saturday, Sept. 5, 1942.”

Can’t tell you where it was — somewhere where the 302nd Civil Affairs battalion was being trained here in the States — but at least we know when it was.

I recently got a bunch of family memorabilia from my father, who got them from his older sister when she moved recently. One of those was a photo my grandfather, Edward A. Gough, took in what I think is 1942, visiting the Gettysburg National Battlefield.

It was odd because the day before my father gave them to me, he and I had visited Gettysburg ourselves. It was only my third visit. That in itself was difficult, given that the first time, 20 years before, was with a loved one who is now passed. It’s interesting that the only photo that we have of the 1942 visit is of a place where I had just been, the Gettysburg Address Memorial, at the cemetery.

Here’s what it looked like then:

And here’s what it looks like now. I was a day early for getting this photograph, otherwise I would have tried to take the same angle.

It did throw me a bit, to be honest, seeing it among the two dozen or so 80-year-old pictures. I had just been at Gettysburg the day before, only the third time in my life. Interesting to know that three generations of my family had been there, 80 years apart.

Three years ago this week, I was in London and Wales, blissfully unaware that within a month or so London would be gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic. The highlight of the first day was Westminster Abbey.

It was incredible to see a place so steeped in history, so connected not only to British history but Western Civilization. It’s been the home of almost every monarch’s coronation since William the Conquerer in 1066. It’s the final resting place of Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth I, and so many other monarchs.

But what moved me the most was Poets’ Corner, the final resting place of so many of the British writers that I grew up reading and still love. So many, I can’t count them all: Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Johnson. There are memorials to William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, the war poets including Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke.

And it’s the final resting place of Geoffrey Chaucer, whose masterpiece — The Canterbury Tales — I was introduced to by Jan Hart, my beloved British Lit teacher at Westbrook High School in Westbrook, Connecticut, in the mid-1980s. It was there, in her classroom long ago and far away from London, that I fell in love with British literature. I won Student of the Year in British Literature in 1985, and it probably the award I hold most dear given that it was given to me by Mrs. Hart.

I paused a long while to pay my respects to Chaucer and to remember Mrs. Hart, who I learned a few years ago died way too young, about a decade after I graduated from Westbook High School. It was crushing news, hearing she had died, even though it was almost 20 years later before I found out. I have two teachers who mean more to me, above all others. She was one. I hear her words to our class and to me when I sit down to read and to write. She encouraged, she inspired and she fanned the flames of a love of literature.

Bless teachers like her.

I was writing about Moxie yesterday, and then I was surprised to read more about Moxie in a book last night.

Funny how things work out.

Moxie is one of the first soft drinks, developed in the 1800s and still produced today where it got its start, Maine. I have a somewhat tortured relationship with Moxie. I never really found the taste for it — to put it mildly — but my stepfather loves the stuff. So on and off for the past 30 years, I’ve gone up there to get it for him. (Or, more recently, I’ve been able to find it where I live.)

But I was reading Stephen King’s “11/22/63” and about 15 pages in, there’s an homage to Moxie.

Kind of.

“Moxie, that weirdest of soft drinks,” King’s main character calls it.

I can’t disagree.

You can read much of the Moxie in an excerpt that was published in Entertainment Weekly, it turns out.

I’ve probably bought more Moxie in my life than anyone who doesn’t drink it. That’s because my stepfather, who can’t really find it where he lives, loves the stuff. So I end up buying it.

When I lived in Maine, as I did for several years, I could find it anywhere. It was a little harder to find in Connecticut and even more difficult to find in New York, where I have lived half my life. But you could find Moxie some places and I was up in Maine enough even then that I could buy some.

It’s a little more difficult where I live now. But it’s not impossible, thanks to the craft soda boom. I ended up finding a six-pack at a candy store near my house, and there even were some in a cooler at a Fresh Market. It was more expensive than I remember buying it at Hannaford in Maine, but I’m pretty far from the Pine Tree State these days.

Moxie has its roots in Maine and it’s also one of the first carbonated sodas, going back to the 19th century. It certainly has history going for it.

Even though my stepfather likes it a lot — and my own father, if he doesn’t drink it, still remembers the Ted Willliams ads — I can’t say I reach for a bottle myself when I want a taste of Maine.

The last time I was in Maine, about five years ago, I brought back a bottle of Moxie and a B&M Canned Bread and let my coworkers have a little taste of Maine. They weren’t impressed.

“It’s an acquired taste,” I said.

I’m a journalist. Is a robot coming for my job?

Even if I wasn’t a sci-fan, I might be more than alarmed by the story published in The Sun today about CNET’s use of AI-written stories on its website.

I’ve been fascinated (and yeah, a little nervous) by the possibility that an algorithm might be employed to write articles and leave me without a career someday. It’s not out of the realm of possibility: Bloomberg, Reuters, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have all published AI-generated stories, and not just recently. The rise in natural language AI and data-driven stories have made this possible, if not universal, for years. At least 18 years ago I wished I knew computer science and programming enough to be able to start a company like this.

The Sun’s article, on the Drudge Report, puts it this way: “AI Secret: Artificial intelligence replaced humans in job role for months and ‘no one noticed.’” It says that CNET published 73 AI-generated articles since November.

I’m not worried. Judging from what I know about journalism and the kinds of stories referenced, if AI can do those types of stories, mostly explainer and fact-based articles, more power to it. And 73 articles since November is hardly a big workload. I myself have written 1 articles for publication since Dec. 1 plus hundreds of other words for things that aren’t published yet. (Not to mention this blog, especially this 2,500-word remembrance. There isn’t an AI around that could have come up with that.)

Many of the articles required me to make a few phone calls, reach out to people over Zoom and Teams, ask complicated questions and take down answers, follow up, and analyze what what said and what I know about the topic. Sometimes, I had to drive and then get out of the car and walk around. I don’t think AI yet has those skills.

So I’m not worried. At least not yet. An earlier Sun story, and they must be quite fixated on this, says that a certain type of AI can churn out a sparkling essay or op-ed piece in minutes. I can’t do that.

I’m actually not against AI in the newsroom. I can see it being helpful in sifting through large tufts of data, helping journalists glean insights that may not be immediately apparent, much like they do for radiologists and other physicians. And I also even see a role for AI in writing some types of stories, the kind that are rote, like stock prices and earnings reports.

Rather than taking jobs from journalists, AI would help them spend less time feeding the beast of daily deadlines, and focus on stories and projects of higher value to editors and readers.

What’s not to like about that?

Today was the first day in 2023 that I’ve worn a tie. And I thought hard this morning about whether I would do that at all.

There wasn’t a dress code at the event I attended. About half the people wore ties, maybe a little less. I had a suit jacket on and so did they. But everyone else wore either a dress shirt without a tie or a sweater, and everyone got along just fine. I can’t tell you the last time I wore a tie but I think it was before Thanksgiving. It’s odd now to have a tie around my neck, and I’m still getting used to it.

I know there’s been a tendency over the last decade to have “casual Fridays” or dress-down days at the office. That all came to a halt in March 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic and I don’t know about you, but I rarely wore a tie from 2020 all the way through yesterday. It just hasn’t been necessary.

That’s been a big change for me, who straddles the line employment-wise between the days when you always wore a shirt and tie to everything to these days when there’s no such thing as a dress code. And that’s working for the most part in an office setting, the newsroom, where almost anything went.

As a journalist, I wore ties for a long time. I didn’t when I was a copy editor who worked nights and didn’t interact with the public. Nor did I when I worked from home, as I did a couple of days a week in the 2000s. But my job has demanded it for years on end, and it was cool.

I have always believed that I should be dressed up to the level that the people I cover are. That meant that if I was covering politics or going to a news conference or a meeting, then I would “dress up” with a tie. For the past two decades I’ve spent covering the business world, I’ve worn a tie more often than not. But I will acknowledge that I was well into my 40s before I consistently wore a suit jacket or a sportscoat, until someone told me to grow up and wear a jacket.

But these days, it’s confusing. We don’t have a dress code and we aren’t expected to be in the office every day. (Both things I’m over the moon about, personally.) I’ve taken, in the cooler months, to wearing a sweater instead. Yesterday, I went to a government meeting without a tie and I have to say I felt a little self-conscious. But if I’m just going into the office or working around the house, I’m not wearing a tie. To me, that’s progress.

I don’t know whether this casual approach is going to last, just like I don’t know if we’re going to continue to be able to work remotely as much as we have over the past three years. The signs, on the remote work part, are all over the place. But I don’t think we lose anything when we allow workers to loosen up a bit.

Just like me. I’m pretty close, halfway through my work day, with loosening the tie altogether. And who knows how long it’ll be before I wear another?

I started 2023 much like I have in 2020, 2021 and 2022: Covid-free. But I’m wondering how long that’s going to last.

For more than a year, I’ve seen headlines all over the place intimating that my fortune in avoiding Covid is going to come to an end and soon.

As USA Today reported this week:

“The newest Covid-19 variant is so contagious that even people who’ve avoided it so far are getting infected and the roughly 80% of Americans who’ve already been infected are likely to catch it again, experts say.”

So there’s that.

That USA Today article quotes an expert saying that even masking isn’t going to save you this time. I credit religiously wearing a mask for the first two and a half years of the pandemic, and a good one, as one big reason why I haven’t gotten Covid.

Yet. Why I haven’t gotten Covid yet.

After I got my omicron bivalent booster in early September, I stopped wearing a mask so much. In fact, I’ve hardly worn one at all. What is a booster for, I reasoned, if I also have to wear a mask? Of course, that’s another stupid example of the fuzzy logic that has kept infections going on and on for so long. And one day, I know, it’s going to catch up with me.

Might even be this week. I’m waiting for my daughter to be done with her music class and there are two people in this room, the receptionist and a five-year-old, who are coughing. I have a mask with me, but I haven’t put it on yet. Yeah, I should.

It would have a certain irony if I caught the latest omicron variant racing up the charts across the country, one that was first detected in Connecticut and New York in October and is now pretty much all over the country by now. Why would that be ironic? Because I’m from Connecticut and I lived in New York for many years. If there’s ever a variant that was aimed at me, then it’s XBB.1.5.

My father and I were in the Hudson Valley in New York the last week of 2022, as this latest variant swept through. We stayed relatively safe. But I do wonder, that USA Today article notwithstanding, whether my luck is about to run out.

I can’t believe that it’s been seven years since David Bowie left us. I have to say the world hasn’t been the same since.

Even though he had been a recording artist since the late 1960s, and was one of the most popular singers in the world in the early 1980s, I never really thought of him as mortal. Bowie seemed timeless. And I have the feeling that he wasn’t done speaking to us when he died Jan. 10, 2016.

Primarily, he was a musician, though he was so much more. His “Serious Moonlight” phase, in the early ’80s, was perfectly timed with my awakening as a music lover. But he was also an actor, and I especially liked him as Pilate in “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

I feel we also lost something else, too: Bowie’s life, and the way he lived it, opened the door for youth and adults to live their lives the way they wanted. His bisexuality, and his openness about it, helped pave the way for acceptance. That’s a blessing, too, because I remember the 1970s and 1980s and the narrow views of society then.

I also like the way he collaborated (with Queen, with Brian Eno, even with Bing Crosby) and his desire to evolve and his ever-growing embrace of creativity in all forms. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, as I try to do things creatively in my own way (writing) that I’ve never done before.

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” Bowie said one time. “Always go a little further into the writer than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Great, if scary, advice. But I’m trying to embrace the fear and confront what I fear. David Bowie’s advice still lives on in those of us who do.