On the plus side, it means I'm one step closer to retirement

The thing about feeling old is that it sneaks up in circumstances you don't expect. This morning, I had to explain to rafaela what the vertical and horizontal hold knobs on a TV set were for. Like I said: feeling very, very old. The fun part, though, was trying to describe what happens when said holds go blooey, and the frustrating-as-f*uck tightrope walk of trying to get the vertical hold juuuuust right without overshooting and starting the screen rolling in the opposite direction. Hated, hated, hated that. (Those of you too young to understand, just nod politely and move on.)

As long as I'm babbling, y'know what else I haven't seen in a long time? Those "EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAND BY" placards that TV stations used to put up when somebody spilled soda on the control panel or something. I should do some research and see if anyone on the Web has posted an image collection; I remember MTV had two, an early silhouette shot of a New Wave dork with a guitar and a later animated one of a post-rock apocalypse, but the dozens of others have escaped memory, perhaps for the best.

All right, let's wrap this up and have lunch before the words "good old days" escape my keyboard, forcing me to commit hari-kiri.

Waiting for the call

I talked to both my mother and my sister today, about much the same thing: my grandfather, my mom's dad, age 91, has been in a fairly long and fairly gradual decline of health, one that appears to be nearing an end. By all accounts he's more than ready to go now, after years of battling cancer and all the difficulties and indignities of aging, and it's just his stubborn Pennsylvania Dutch body that hangs on and hangs on and hangs on. My sister Karen used the dreaded phrase "any day now"; my mom wasn't even being that optimistic, saying she needed to end our conversation because she was waiting for the call.

I never know how to deal with this. Growing up, I never had to deal with death—I was amazingly lucky in that I never lost anyone as a child (indeed, all four of my grandparents survived until I was well into my twenties), and even when someone in my family did at last pass away, it was my aunt who had vanished to California and not returned many years before. I never really had to grieve, so is it possible that I never learned how? Even now, my grandfather's decline and the fall that's coming seem at arm's length. Having lived in New York for so long, so far away from my entire family in Illinois, I've only gotten to see any of my relatives every year or two at best. When you're used to going that long between visits, what's another year or two or three or ten or twenty? In the end, it never completely sinks in.

There is a weight here, this waiting, this knowledge of what's coming, and I can't deny that. But part of me doesn't feel it, and I never know if it's because I'm handling it really well, or if it's because I'm not handling it at all. And even if the latter is true—and I have to believe that, to some degree, it is—I am so, so reluctant to just remove those stitches and let the wound bleed until it's done. I may not have learned to grieve properly, but there's that stubborn quarter-Pennsylvania Dutch part of me that insists on not starting now.

Both my mom and my sister said they'd keep me posted, and knowing them, their notification will be prompt. I won't be able to attend to funeral given where our finances stand, so I'll have to deal with what's coming from where I'm sitting. In the meantime, I'm waiting for the call. I don't know what I'll do when it comes. I never do.

Just heard

Robert Hophnia Sampsell: 1919-2008