Tread lightly

I’m waiting for the repair guy to finish and deliver his verdict.

My Trotter treadmill has served me well for over 20 years. First, in our Northridge home. Then in the Upper Ojai. Finally, three years ago, it made the trip to the Andrew house where it stands like an ancient warrior in the contrasting company of a sparkly Precor elliptical machine and a high-tech Peloton stationary bike.

Before my Trotter, I used a rowing machine. Built for light duty home use, I religiously spent an hour on it every day until it began to fall apart. Like an old car, it simply wore out; I unceremoniously dumped it in the trash, like the inanimate object it was. That was 1995.

I began a search for a new rower with a trip to a high-end sports equipment store in Encino. Like a Mercedes dealer showroom, it was filled with glitzy boy toys (women were yet to fully come of age and sport tight tights in high end athletic clubs where they now blessedly outnumber ill-clad men.)

I attracted a salesman’s attention, probably because of my well-developed pecs, and said, “Where are your rowing machines?”

His name was Ron and didn’t look much different than my chunky, out of shape bookkeeper. He stared at me like he hadn’t heard my question. I repeated it slowly and loudly, just like my old Rabbi insisted when he coached me on my bar mitzvah speech.

“A rowing machine. You know, one of those things you sit on and try to look like a member of the Princeton rowing club.”

He caught my drift, stuck a pudgy index finger in the direction of the back wall, and said without enthusiasm, “There.”

So, I went there. And I found a total of one rowing machine.

Sure that I had misunderstood his pudgy finger, I worked my way back to Ron who was on a snack break, probably induced by the heavy lifting he experienced in handling my request.

“Ron, is that the only rowing machine you have?”

Taking time out from munching his chocolate M&M’s, “Yes, no one buys rowing machines anymore. I mean NOBODY. Treadmills are the in thing. like this new baby, the Nordic Track; but we don’t have any of those. Sizing you up, I’d say you were a Trotter man.”

Feeling much older than I did before I entered the store and found that I was seriously out of touch with today’s equipment of choice, I tucked my tail between my legs, ponied up serious bucks and went home with Ron’s promise to deliver my Trotter next Tuesday.

Our man-machine relationship has been blemish free, serving me without complaint for over 20 years. With the same routine every morning. Brush my teeth. Kiss Jackie. Lace up my in-thing Hokas. Mount the machine, set the incline angle at four percent and the speed at three miles per hour. Turn on the TV. Dial up an inane news program with tons of unpronounceable products for your lungs, skin, and Crohn’s disease. And try hard to get through sixty minutes without boring myself to death.

Never a complaint until four weeks ago. Then, like a small child, the machine whined. Maybe more like a whimper. I thought, “The machine works. Maybe if I ignore it, the noise will go away.”

I should have known better. The child grew older and became angry. An intermittent rumbling joined the whining. It sounded like a couple of members of the Spike Jones band were stuck under the treadmill playing Spike’s zany version of Cocktails for Two.

The child blasted through puberty and, like an unhappy teenager, turned the whining into screeching, intensified the rumbling, and stomped its feet. It was going to get its way and I couldn’t do anything about it.

And then, last week, it stopped. Not all at once. More like a piece at a time. I tried goosing the running belt by grabbing and rotating the roller at the rear of the machine. It was like cranking an old Model T. That worked a couple of times, but the noise was like being in a lumber mill. I later discovered that people have been dragged under a treadmill doing what I did, never to be seen again.

Jackie’s elliptical and stationary bike continued to perform flawlessly. They seemed to cast occasional sideward glances at the Trotter that conveyed a message, “You’re over the hill. Give it up. He’ll probably dump you in the trash just like the rowing machine.”

My aging adult, depressed and unloved, just sat still, crossed its arms in front of its chest and refused to move. At all. Not a sound.

It was time for action. I had learned my lesson with the rowing machine. I was not junking the Trotter; it had seen me through too many years of loyal support.

I found a guy who repairs treadmills. He’s here now. Says he needs to rebuild the motor. It’ll be back in a week. It’ll look like a senior citizen, but it’ll work.

Meanwhile, I’ll just brush my teeth and kiss Jackie.

Only $43 Billion for a Tweet

Elon Musk is a household name, much like Henry Ford about a hundred years ago.

They both were innovators, they liked cars, and they were convinced that they knew what was best for the rest of us. They treated workers with disdain and didn’t always follow the rules. Ford was worth about $200 billion when he died at 83 in 1947, about $70 billion less than Musk, adjusted for inflation. At 50, Musk is a mere baby with time to build up his lead and his impact on us.

Musk is the world’s richest person even surpassing rock stars Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Race car drivers Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton love cars too but are worth only $300 million. At $18 billion, the Saudi Crown Prince pales in comparison. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is about $90 billion short of Musk.

Although the Saudi family fortune is estimated at $1.4 trillion, it’s spread among 15,000 members. Musk shares his fortune with no one.

Viewed by some as being weird, Elon acquired the trait early on. When he was a child, his adenoids were removed because doctors suspected that he was deaf, but his mother later decided that he was thinking “in another world.” Echoing his mother, Musk’s business ventures sometimes rival those of the psychotic Howard Hughes.

Nearly all of Musk’s fortune is tied up in Tesla. With more than two million slavishly devoted Tesla drivers, the company is valued at about $1 trillion dollars. That’s 5% of the U.S. gross domestic product.

A company’s value is often reflected in its price/earnings or P/E ratio. If a company earns $5 per share of stock and its stock price is $50, the company is said to have a P/E of 10. The higher the P/E, the greater the expectation for a company’s bright future. Tesla’s PE is a whopping 209. Amazon sports a robust but not overly radical 47. General Motors has a P/E of 6. Some might say that Tesla is overvalued; others might say that GM is in the shitter.

An active user of social media, Musk has 80 million Twitter followers. My blog has about 200, not million, just 200. I influence no one other than my wife and my daughter. And even then, I get criticism.

Musk’s recent offer to buy Twitter for $43 billion reminds me of the movie, Citizen Kane. An ill-disguised story starring Orson Welles, it focuses on William Randolph Hearst, of Hearst Castle fame and chronicles his accumulation of wealth and power through his newspaper publishing empire. It demonstrates the impact of one man on the news read by most of America, and the fears of Hearst’s contemporaries who might be targeted for destruction by the influential and semi-neurotic mogul. It also shows the eventual decline of the man and his chronic unhappiness.

Not necessarily equally neurotic, Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post and Rupert Murdoch’s giant news media empire both march in the direction of using the media to advance one man’s favorite causes and his picture of what a perfect world should be.

Maybe Musk has too little to do. Maybe he just likes to rattle people’s cages. Or maybe he has a grand design for Twitter known only to him that comes from what his mother called “another world.”

With 80 million Twitter followers and the ability to sanction other Twitter posters (Barack Obama has 130 million followers) for behavior deemed unacceptable by a sometimes-peripatetic Musk, his influence should be of concern. 

On the other hand, it could be a fun ride. In a Tesla of course.

Harvey

All things come to those who wait…sometimes.

Just before the pandemic, Jackie and I bought two tickets to the Ojai Art Center’s local production of Harvey. Shortly after that purchase, the Center and every other building in Ojai went dark and remained that way for more than two years. Harvey would have to wait.

I squirreled away the tickets, hoping that the pandemic would end before I did, the Art Center would brighten up, reconstitute Harvey, and honor our tickets before they yellowed with age, turned to dust, and blew away in the wind. 

The play was written by Mary Chase in 1944 and won a Pulitzer Prize for drama. It ran on Broadway for nearly five years and spawned a film version in 1950 when I was only eleven. It attests to its continuing popularity today with live performances that delight us even after nearly 80 years.

I’ve seen the film many times. Starring Jimmy Stewart as Elwood Dowd, he wanders through the film accompanied by an invisible to us six foot, three-and-one-half inch rabbit named Harvey. The film is no On the Waterfront or Streetcar Named Desire. And Stewart is no Marlon Brando.

But Stewart engages us with a warmth that Brando would find unattainable. Stewart’s presence offers us a glimpse of who we’d like to be, and who we really are. Like his role in It’s a Wonderful Life, Stewart’s screen presence is enough.

His character is largely restricted to accepting people as they are, thanking them for things that would turn-off the rest of us, and displaying a willingness to recognize the good in everything. Surrounded by an array of bumbling characters, Stewart seems the only sane person despite his fondness for the reclusive Harvey.

Retired from an undisclosed profession, Stewart has little to do with his time other than visit friends at the local bar and drink martinis. He invariably invites characters who wander into the film to share his drinking penchant; a clear violation of today’s caution about displaying alcoholism in a positive light. Yet, we seem to excuse this behavior, perhaps because he might lose his loving character without it.

Like a philosophical rapid-fire ATM, Stewart delivers homilies and witticisms to make his point. The listener still absorbing one, when the next appears.

I have a favorite that comes about half-way through the film:

Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

Given the number of times I’ve seen the film, the scenes are all memorable, but that quote always defies my ability to repeat it verbatim during casual conversations with friends and strangers. I often fumble, sometimes substituting clever for smart, or nice for pleasant. But that doesn’t do it justice. For example, this doesn’t cut it:

Well, for years I was clever, I recommend nice.

Lacking the right words, it loses the essence of what Stewart meant. It has no staying power. So, I always look forward to seeing the movie, waiting for that moment, hearing the carefully chosen words, and then feeling renewed.

Perhaps it’s my mantra, something that reminds me of who I want to be. Harvey refreshes my mantra and pushes me in the right direction. I regularly fail and regret it. I often succeed and congratulate myself. But the mantra regularly flashes before me, and I wish Harvey was there.

I had never seen the live stage play and looked forward to it. The performance, which cast local talent, had been moved from the Art Center to Matilija Middle School to accommodate the crowd. But, after a two-year delay, I was to miss it because I was ill. I felt crappy, and the audience would not have appreciated my hacking and sneezing.

I was sure she would enjoy the play, so I pushed Jackie out the door. Then I laid back on the couch and watched the film on Netflix while she mingled with the crowd and saw my primary care physician, Dr. Halverson, play Elwood. I wondered how much the film would differ from the live performance. Lacking a warm body to cuddle with, I pretended that Jackie was seeing the exact same scene that I was.

Jackie came home around four and spoke glowingly about the two-hour play. She thought that Dr. Halverson was perfect. I asked her if she remembered hearing Stewart’s line about being pleasant. She didn’t. Maybe they dropped it. Maybe she forgot.

I can always watch the film again, or maybe I should just write down the mantra. But that would remove the challenge. And, after all, isn’t that part of it?