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A 63-year-old New York woman was fatally attacked by a great white shark while swimming off the Maine coast. For whatever they’re worth, I offer my condolences. That would be a terrifying way to go. 

No one really expects to be attacked by a shark while swimming in the waters off Maine. Shark attacks are something we associate with the tropics, generally. Continue reading “Sharks in New England”

 

I was tying my tie in Dr. Beckman’s exam room when I felt the chill. I was alone in the tiny, antiseptic space. The doctor had stepped out to allow me to get dressed.

I took a deep breath. The cool air had a vaguely chemical odor.

There was nothing in here to be afraid of. From where I stood, leaning against the exam table, I could see a sink and counter—spotless and sterile—lined with bottles of hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. Formica and metal surfaces, gleaming in the bright glare of the overhead florescent light panels.

The tiled floor gleamed, too. Beneath the sink, there was a little rolling stool. (There is one of those in every exam room on the planet, it seems.)

I took a deep breath, and continued tying my double Windsor knot.

There is nothing in here to be afraid of.

Then I saw the closet door, in the corner of the room behind the exam table.

The door was slightly ajar—just a crack.

Had it been closed ten minutes ago, when Dr. Beckman was in here, prodding me with his stethoscope, tongue depressor, and ear speculum?

I wasn’t sure. But after recent events—and after long-ago events—I don’t like doors that are slightly ajar, doors that partially reveal dark spaces.

I could feel my skin breaking out in gooseflesh beneath the starched fabric of my white Oxford dress shirt.

The room is chilly by design, I told myself. Someone—I forget who—once told me that temperatures in medical facilities are kept deliberately low, so as to stymie the growth of molds and bacteria.

But what else was growing in here? What was hiding in that closet, that I couldn’t see?

 

I felt foolish for having such thoughts, for even raising such questions. I am not a child. I am a fifty-nine-year-old man, a father and grandfather. I’m a divisional manager at Covington Foods, a large consumer goods company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I have investments. Stocks and mutual funds. All the requisite forms of insurance, for a man my age.

No one who knows me would say that I am easily spooked, whimsical, or given to flights of fancy. My wife, in fact, calls me “Steady Steve”.

And Steady Steve I am, most of the time.

But this past week, I have not been myself.

 

 

Fully dressed now, I was trying to decide what to do about that closet door. I was weighing two options.

On one hand, I could walk across the room and push the door shut. That would be the simplest option.

On the other hand, I could pull the door open. Then I would know for sure that there was nothing lurking in that space.

I was still considering these options when I heard a door click open behind me. Not the closet door, but the door of the exam room.

Dr. Beckman was back.

 

Dr. Beckman is a stoop-shouldered man with a sallow complexion. He is still in his thirties, but his light brown hair is fast receding. He wears thick glasses.

Dr. Beckman has been my family physician for about three years now. My wife, Peggy, and I started seeing him after dear old Dr. Alfieri finally retired at the age of seventy-two.

I greeted Dr. Beckman. I noticed that he was carrying a clipboard.

I was in his office today for the second half of a two-part exam. The first half had been carried out last week.

This was a routine physical, but nevertheless done at the behest of my employer. Covington Foods requires all of its managers to receive a stem-to-stern physical exam every two years.

“We can go over the results of your exam,” Dr. Beckman said, “if you’re ready. Per the usual procedure, my office will send a copy of the results to the Covington Foods human resources department. We’ll also mail a copy to the home address that we have on file for you.”

“Please,” I said. “Let’s go over the results.”

Dr. Beckman consulted his clipboard. “The results of the blood work that you had done last week are quite satisfactory. Liver and kidney function look good.

“Same for lipids. We’ll have to watch your LDL cholesterol, moving forward. But that’s the same for practically everyone. You performed well on your stress test. Not bad at all, for a man your age.”

Just then Dr. Beckman stopped himself. “Oh, I’m sorry, Steve. I didn’t mean—”

“That’s okay, Doc. I’m fifty-nine years old this year. We need not pretend that I’m a spring chicken. But it’s good to hear that I shouldn’t die in the foreseeable future, just the same.”

My last sentence, those words about death, seemed to hang in the air. Was I really certain that I wouldn’t die in the foreseeable future? And it wasn’t my LDL cholesterol that I was worried about.

I knew, from the events of forty years ago, that there were far worse ways to die.

“Of course not,” Dr. Beckman said, with a tight little smile. “I anticipate you’ll be coming in for many more biennial exams yet.”

The doctor paused, not saying anything for a moment. During my more than thirty years at Covington Foods, I have had literally thousands of encounters with bosses, colleagues, and subordinates. I can always tell when someone has something to say, but doesn’t quite know how to broach the topic.

“I sense a ‘but’ coming here, Doc,” I said. “Out with it, whatever ‘it’ is.”

The doctor seemed relieved. “Yes, well, I suppose there is something. I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve displayed signs of acute anxiety this week. I didn’t notice that last week, when you came in for the blood work and the stress test.”

‘Anxiety’, Dr. Beckman called it. That was putting the matter lightly. My problems had begun on Tuesday of last week, the day after my visit to Dr. Beckman’s office, for the first part of my full-body exam.

But there was no way I could discuss the past week and a half with Dr. Beckman.

“I don’t think so,” I said, playing dumb. “A little stress at the office maybe. Nothing more.”

I could tell that Dr. Beckman didn’t believe me. You don’t get through medical school without being perceptive.

But in another second my facade would crumble, anyway.

 

That was when I heard the hoofbeats, thundering down the hallway. I could picture a dark black horse. The animal would be partially rotted from the centuries it had spent in the grave, its muscles and bones exposed here and there. The eyes of the horse would be dead and glassy.

The rider of the horse would be wearing an eighteenth-century military frock coat, also rotted and in tatters, heavy trousers and boots.

The rider would be wearing no hat. Because the rider had no head.

The rider would be wielding a large battlefield sword.

The rider and horse would burst through the door of the exam room. First the Horseman would behead Dr. Beckman. (Dr. Beckman would barely have time to see the blow coming; and he certainly wouldn’t have time to save himself.)

Dr. Beckman’s head would topple from his body and roll to the floor. Then his body would drop, so much dead weight, his neck spurting blood.

And then the Horseman would take my head, too.

I had evaded him for more than forty years. But I would evade him no longer.

A few more seconds passed, and I realized the nature of my delusion. The hoofbeats in the hallway moved past the closed door of the exam room. Then I realized that they were not hoofbeats at all.

What I had heard was the ruckus of a nurse or orderly pushing a caster-wheeled cart atop the tiled floor of the hallway outside the exam room. A perfectly normal sound in any medical building.

I recovered myself. Dr. Beckman was staring at me with narrowed eyes.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just felt a bit lightheaded for a moment. It’s nothing.”

Dr. Beckman made not even the slightest pretense of accepting my excuse.

“Steve,” he said. “We’ve got to talk.”

 

Dr. Beckman did not convince me quite that easily. As I’ve said, I’m a divisional manager at Covington Foods. I don’t easily budge when I am not of a mind to do so.

“Have you ever heard of cortisol, Steve?” Dr. Beckman asked me.

I was somewhat puzzled by this seemingly off-the-wall question.

“Maybe,” I said. “I might have heard of it. One of those hormones, isn’t it?”

“Very good,” Dr. Beckman said, nodding. “Exactly. Cortisol is your body’s main stress hormone. As you might be able to guess, your body secretes cortisol when you are under stress. Part of the body’s fight or flight mechanism. A small amount of cortisol is relatively harmless.”

“I have a feeling, Dr. Beckman, that you’re going to tell me that larger quantities of cortisol are not so harmless.”

“Right again, Steve. Over time, large quantities of cortisol can have a myriad of negative effects on your health. And I’m not merely talking about things like a touchy stomach or sleeplessness, though symptoms begin that way. Over time, large amounts of cortisol can lead to autoimmune diseases, heart disease, and even cancer. That’s what chronic stress does to your body.”

I took a moment to take in what Dr. Beckman had just said. It was a sad irony to think that even if the Horseman hadn’t beheaded me forty years ago, the memory of him—these flashbacks—might bring about my death by a thousand proverbial cuts.

In more than forty years, I had told no one about the events that transpired in the summer of 1976. I was the only one left alive who fully remembered them.

Perhaps I had kept my secrets too long. Perhaps I could benefit by opening up, just a little.

Could I tell Dr. Beckman about that horrible summer? No, I didn’t think I could. But perhaps I could tell him about the problems that I had been having more recently.

“Okay, doctor. I suppose I get your point. I have been under a more than usual amount of stress lately. Some very unusual things have been occurring.”

“Unusual?” Dr. Beckman raised his eyebrows.

“Very unusual,” I confirmed.

Dr. Beckman leaned back against the spotless counter where the sink was. He set his clipboard on the counter, near the bottles of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.

“By all means, Steve. Do go on. We have some time left in your appointment hour.”

I took a deep breath before beginning. “Okay, Doc. It all began with a quarter.”

“A quarter?”

“Yes. A quarter.”

 

Chapter 2

Table of Contents

Three of your coworkers are planning a murder. Will you stop them, or become their next victim?

A corporate workplace thriller based (very loosely) on some intrigues that I have seen and experienced in the corporate world.

You can start reading The Eavesdropper here on Edward Trimnell Books.

Or view it now on Amazon!

Amazon has expanded the Kindle Unlimited FREE trial to two months.

This is therefore an opportune time to try the service.

Many of my books are in Kindle Unlimited, including my latest, Venetian Springs.

Many of my forty- and fifty-something friends have been complaining of late…about their own young adult children.

With very few exceptions, their kids aren’t what would have been called (in more plainspoken times) “bad”. There are no drug addicts or delinquents among the group. Most of the ones whom I’ve met seem polite enough.

The problem, rather, is a lack of motive force—a lack of ambition. Some of these kids are now approaching twenty-five, and still very much dependent on Mom and Dad.

Many of them still live with Mom and Dad. And they don’t seem in any big hurry to change the status quo.

Anxiety and depression—but relatively little to actually worry about

And the young’uns are anything but well-adjusted. Today’s teens and young adults—Generation Z—suffer from chronic anxiety in record numbers.

This is borne out in various statistics, but I’ve also seen it anecdotally, in my own social circle. I know of at least four young people (all children of friends and acquaintances) who have dropped out of college because of nervous disorders.

In one case (a friend of a friend), the young woman is so overcome with anxiety, that her parents have applied for Social Security benefits for her. Yes, really. Her parents don’t believe that she will ever be able to function, even though there’s nothing clinically wrong with her.

This epidemic of youthful anxiety is baffling. Today’s young people live in a world that is (statistically, at least) much safer than the one in which their parents grew up. Violent crime rates are a fraction of what they were in the 1980s.

Today’s young adults should be carefree, bold, and ready to take on the world.

But they aren’t, as both statistics and observation attest. So what happened?

1990

Childhood changed, for one thing.

The timidity of today’s youth represents a marked contrast from my age cohort—so-called Generation X. I was born in 1968. I fall right in the middle of Generation X.

By the time we were in our early 20s, circa 1990, most of us were functional adults. We weren’t perfect, but we were independent.

We jumped into things, and we often made mistakes along the way. But we jumped in, nonetheless. We were aggressively risk-tolerant—sometimes to our own detriment.

At the age of twenty-two, I moved from suburban Cincinnati to Chicago, for my first “real job”. As it turned out, both the job and Chicago were mistakes for me. After three months, I got a different job—in Columbus, Ohio.

I wasn’t completely on my own. I had some help from my parents. The couch in my first apartment was a hand-me-down (from my grandparents, actually, I think). The first time I moved, my dad (then still in his forties) helped me. The second time I moved, my buddy and I rented a U-Haul.

I asked my dad’s opinions on things, from time to time. But no more than I had to. In fact, I solicited the opinions of my elders far less in my early twenties than I did later on, in my thirties and forties. In my early twenties, I was convinced that I could handle whatever or whoever came along.

Because that’s the way that I—and most Americans born before 1980—were raised.

Adulthood used to be something that you eased into gradually, from adolescence onward. When I was about twelve years old, my parents began decreasing their presence—and active involvement—in my life. Increasingly, they expected me to handle things.

By myself.

This wasn’t child abuse, mind you. I had a happy childhood. But from an early age, I was taught to think of childhood as a temporary state.

This meant solving most problems on my own. Or at least taking the initiative.

A few years ago, a survey revealed that two thirds of today’s young adults can’t change a tire. I distinctly remember how I acquired that skill. I was driving my car, fifty miles from home, when one of my tires blew out. I walked to a payphone and called for help. I was told that at the age of nineteen, I should be capable of changing a tire. Because that’s what nineteen-year-old men were expected to do when they had a flat.

I had never changed a tire before. I decided, though, that I could figure it out. Somehow. And besides—that was the only way I would be able to get home.

So I sat down on the side of the highway, and I figured it out, with the traffic whizzing by.

This experience isn’t unique, among adults of a certain age. Every person in my generation has a story like that. Everyone from the Baby Boom generation does, too.

2020

Fast-forward thirty years. Today’s affluent parents seem determined to shield their progeny from every possible disappointment, bruise, or major expenditure of effort.

Many parents today even write their children’s college application essays—much to the chagrin of college officials. I know multiple parents who have done this, as if it were a matter of course. I don’t have to wonder how either of my parents would have responded, had I asked them to write my college application essay. This would have been unthinkable for any of us.

If today’s young people have anxiety, it may be because their parents convey the message that the world around them is unspeakably dangerous, and impossible for them to cope with—in any capacity—by themselves. Fear and incompetence are now ingrained in children from an early age.

There is a school bus stop at the top of the cul-de-sac street where I live. Every morning during the school year, rain or shine, I see six or seven cars lined up along the street behind the bus stop. The kids are all waiting on the corner for the bus, and the parents are all watching the children from inside their cars.

Let me pose an obvious question: Does it take six sets of parents to monitor a single suburban bus stop for kidnappings or other calamities?

Child abductions are actually quite rare in the United States. During my childhood years in the 1970s, I regularly waited for the bus by myself, at the end of my driveway.

What can I say? I’m still here.

The costs of helicopter parenting

The style of parenting that Generation Z (and many of the younger Millennials) grew up with is referred to as helicopter parenting. The image here is of parents hovering over their children as they move through life; and that’s more or less what happens.

What’s wrong with that? you might reasonably ask.

When children know that they can always rely on an adult, they never develop any coping mechanisms of their own. They never develop the abilities needed to solve real-world problems.

Let me give you another example from the dark ages of my childhood. This would have been 1978, or thereabouts.

A very aggressive boy in my class had taken a disliking to me. I became the target of what could fairly be described as “bullying”. I was not a natural-born fighter. And all I wanted was to be left alone. But he had other ideas.

I appealed to several adults, including the boy’s mother. (She worked in the school’s cafeteria, as chance would have it, so I had access to her.)

The boy’s mother was dismissive of my appeals, as were the other adults I spoke to. I was told—in so many words—that two ten-year-old boys ought to be able to work out their disagreements between themselves.

My adult options exhausted, I started standing up to the kid. This eventually escalated to fisticuffs—which I lost. But I proved to the boy that if he picked on me, he would have a fight on his hands.

After that, he left me alone.

I know: This sounds downright brutal by today’s mollycoddling standards. But not when you look at the big picture.

Boys in the 1970s got into fights. It was a fact of life, and no one thought too much about it.  But as teenagers, we didn’t suddenly snap and and bring guns to school, with the intention of massacring our classmates. The fisticuffs and shoving matches that used to be part of childhood  performed a safety valve function of sorts. Conflicts came to a head before they could fester, and become homicidal rages.

Before helicopter parenting, children learned how to deal with allies, bullies, adversaries, turncoats, and “frenemies”. These lessons were often painful, and occasionally traumatic. But by the time you reached adulthood, you were generally capable of coping with the slings and arrows of life.

Which may have been why almost no young men in my generation became school shooters. Ironically, it may have been because we were allowed to fight on the playground as children.

Who’s to blame?

It has become fashionable of late to blame the Baby Boomers for every real and imagined wrong in the world. But the Baby Boomers—whatever their other faults—weren’t helicopter parents. They were too busy working on their careers, and self-fulfillment, and all that other Me Generation stuff.

Moreover, the Baby Boomers haven’t been in their childbearing years for decades. The parents of most present-day teens and twenty-somethings are members of Generation X—born after JFK but before Ronald Reagan.

Why did the Gen Xers—who grew up under the hands-off parenting style of the Boomers—turn into helicopter parents?

Well, the social engineers of the 1990s can certainly be blamed, to an extent. (Most of these pointy heads were, in fact, Baby Boomers.) These were the educational experts who taught us that dodgeball is “legalized bullying”, and other such nonsense.

But it was the Gen X parents who believed the pointy heads, and accepted their childrearing prescriptions.Why were they so gullible?

Many Gen X adults—especially those who came from divorced households (what we used to call “broken homes”)—believed that the Baby Boomers had been too hands-off as parents.

And maybe they had a point. Some Baby Boomers did practice laissez-faire parenting in the extreme, after all.

Some Gen Xers therefore decided to overcompensate in the opposite direction. They became parents who literally live for their children—hovering over their children like helicopters.

Adulthood is a process

Many of these same parents are now frustrated that their twenty-three-old children display none of the drive, independence, and emotional maturity that they did at a similar age. But what else should the helicopter parent expect?

First you raise a child in a perfectly sanitized, hyper-safe, hermetic environment. Then you follow the child around, and protect him from every setback—not only bullies, but also the adversity of puzzling his way through a college entrance essay.

Then you expect her—at the age of eighteen or twenty-one—to instantly become the adult that you were at the same age. And in doing so, you’re forgetting how different your childhood was. You forget how your Baby Boomer parents prepared you for adulthood—by leaving you alone.   

Adulthood is a process, not an event. That process often entails disappointments, setbacks, and yes—some inevitable risks. But those are all things that must be endured and overcome, if one is to become a functioning adult.

Helicopter parents can delay those trials. They can’t eliminate them, though, not unless they plan to live forever, and always take care of their children.

The Gen X parenting debacle

Collectively, Generation X has arguably been a disaster in the parenting realm. This was a disaster not of neglect, but of loving their children too much, of trying too hard to make their lives easy.

The problems of today’s young adults have demonstrated the false promise of the perfect childhood. The world is going to scar you, one way or another. That’s the way it is. A friction-free adolescence too often leads to an early adulthood in which one is incapable of meeting the demands of reality.

Just ask those young adults, who are perpetually struggling with depression and anxiety. Just ask their parents, who are waiting for the day when their long-coddled twentysomethings will magically grow up.

Oh…and move out.

-ET

Given the passing of Neil Peart last week, I’ll probably have a few Rush-related posts in the upcoming days.

The above video contains a particularly insightful interview from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Topics covered include: Neil Peart’s drumming, and (of particular interest to me) his song-writing.

The man interviewed is, like me, a lifelong Rush fan in his fifties. Unlike me, he’s also a musician.

At the 2:20 mark, he says that Rush was one of those bands that, “You either  got them or you didn’t; and if you did ‘get them’, you became a lifelong fan.”

Well put. I couldn’t agree more. 

Another New Year’s Eve has arrived. I know that many of you will be consuming large quantities of alcoholic beverages tonight.

Not me, though. I haven’t consumed alcoholic beverages very much at all since New Year’s Eve 1986. But that night I did consume a lot of wine, beer, vodka, and other spirits.

For the last time.

I was eighteen years old on 1/31/86. The drinking age in Ohio had just been raised from 18 to 21. But what did I care? In fact, I hadn’t cared much about such niceties since 1981, when I’d begun experimenting with alcohol at the age of 13.

Hey—it was the Eighties! There was no helicopter parenting back then. Moreover, in those freewheeling times, shopkeepers could sometimes be persuaded to sell beer or wine to underage teens who looked mature. I started shaving at the age of 14.

And as for the hard stuff….well, let’s just say that not all parents minded their liquor cabinets, let alone installed locks on them.

Between the 8^th grade and my high school graduation, I did my share of drinking. I wasn’t a lush, mind you, but I managed to try everything from beer to bourbon. (Rum was the only drink that I never tried, and I’d always wanted to shout, “Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle o’ rum!” with a pirate’s inflection, while holding a bottle of Bacardi or Captain Morgan.)

I quickly learned an unpleasant truth about drinking and me: I didn’t like hangovers.

Hangovers manifest themselves differently for everyone. For me, a hangover invariably entailed projectile vomiting, extreme fatigue, and the sense that my head had just been used to ring a church bell. A hangover left me feeling really bad—for at least one day, and probably two.

By New Year’s Eve 1986 I already knew that alcohol affected me this way. But I was eighteen years old. Since when have eighteen year-olds been fast learners? I had graduated from high school the previous spring, and a girl from my class (one I sort of liked) had invited me to a New Year’s Party. I therefore had to attend. And being a typical teenage herd animal, I had to drink—because that’s what everyone else would be doing.

I don’t know exactly how many drinks I had that night. I got drunk enough, however, that the operation of a motor vehicle would have been out of the question. (I had arranged for a ride that night, so no—I wasn’t drinking and driving; nor did I ever do that.)

The next morning, 1/1/87, my first thought upon waking up was that eighteen years was plenty long enough for any one person to live. I should just die now, and be done with it.

I had a bad hangover—my worst one to date.

I got out of bed and went for a run in the frigid morning air. This helped—to a point. I felt decent as long as I kept running. The thing about running, though, is that you eventually have to stop. Within a few minutes of completing my run, I was feeling just as lousy as I had upon waking up.

I still lived with my parents at the time. They decided to celebrate the New Year by going out for breakfast. And of course—I readily agreed to tag along when they invited me to join them. (Like I said, most 18 year-olds are not quick on the uptake.)

As soon as we were seated in our booth, I wanted to leave. I realized that I wasn’t up to eating anything. My parents, though, wanted their breakfasts. My mother insisted on ordering a breakfast consisting of eggs, hash browns, sausage, and gravy. If your stomach is up to snuff, that might be a delicious combination. But what if you have a hangover, and you can barely keep a glass of water down? In that case, the aroma of a typical “country breakfast” platter is a barf-inducing olfactory concoction.

My parents, being no fools, saw what was up. So did our sixty-something waitress, who poked fun at my misery while I sat there without breakfast.

When I arrived back home that morning, I had an epiphany: I’d been an idiot. Binge drinking was nothing more than self-induced misery.

And no, it wasn’t “cool”. What is so cool about projectile vomiting?

I clearly remember the moment—on January 1^st, 1987, in which I said, “never again”.

I made a vow never to put myself through that again. More than thirty years later, I still haven’t. I’ve never consumed alcoholic to excess since that night.

I have had the occasional glass of wine or bottle of beer. But even these are rare. (My most recent tipple was a beer at a trade show in 2002.) Alcoholic beverages and me just don’t mix. I haven’t missed them.

And besides—now that I’m more than old enough to drink legally, what’s the point?

Perhaps you read my recent critique of the Apple Store concept and thought that I might be a complainer.

Well, a writer at ZD Net had a similar experience: I went to an Apple store to buy an iPhone 11, but no one would talk to me

The article describes “a little chaos in Apple retail right now”.

Based on my visit last week, I would describe that assessment as a very polite understatement.

Thanks to those of you who purchased 12 Hours of Halloween during the recent $0.99 sale. The sale was a big success, when combined with the promotions that I ran for it on several sites.

I’ve got some more fiction in the works for Amazon/Kindle Unlimited publication. Remember that I also have a new story here on the site, “I Know George Washington”. 

“I Know George Washington” will eventually find its way into one of my upcoming anthologies. My plan, though, is to keep this story–along with many others–ever-free here on Edward Trimnell Books (or in Kindle Unlimited)

For me, publication is about more than just Amazon. I am also a big fan of the ezine/webzine concept. That means lots of stories and other content here on Edward Trimnell Books, for you to read online.