I Knew A Young Man

I knew a young man
Who drank warm water
Right from the faucet,
From his cupped hand.

Everything he did,
An act of defiance,
An act of strength,
His way through the world.

They sent him to the war
And he didn’t last a week.




~ Poem and photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

"What is hello?"













~ Answer box, phone insert & text by Russ Allison Loar
~ Alex Trebek photo from Life Magazine
© All Rights Reserved

# 206:

If you could travel back in time,
you would forget how you got there.

My Afternoon With Alex

The charming and erudite host of Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek, is surprisingly sardonic off camera. The studio audience—about 100 split between members of the general public on the left side of the theater, friends and family of the contestants on the right—had plenty of opportunity to ask him questions during down times between segments, sampling his slightly cynical sense of humor.

I asked if he'd ever been a game show contestant; if he would ever be a contestant on Jeopardy! before he retires; and how did he think he'd do as a Jeopardy! contestant.

He said he'd been a contestant on a few game shows, but would not be a contestant on Jeopardy! because then someone else would have to host the show, and "he might be better than I am." How would he do as a Jeopardy! contestant? Trebek said he would probably do well against his "peers." Then, looking directly at me, he said, "I see by your white hair that you might be one of my peers. I would crush you!"

A middle-aged man in the mostly middle-aged audience asked, "How do you pronounce all those foreign words?" He answered with overemphasized, drawn out speech: "W-i-t-h M-y M-o-u-t-h."

I also talked to crisp-toned announcer Johnny Gilbert, asking how many tapings per day the winners do. He said they tape five shows a day. For Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings to win seventy-four consecutive games, he had to win five games in a row, then get up the next morning and go win another five games. Whew indeed! The show tapes Tuesdays and Wednesdays, three weeks a month, nine months a year.

Gilbert introduced two of the three Clue Crew members who were at the taping—Sarah and Jimmy. When the pair stood up and waved to the audience, I saw that Jimmy was wearing a maroon hoodie with "HARVARD" emblazoned on the front in big letters. Yeah, OK. You're smart.

A Few Candid Moments

A fortyish woman asked Trebek what his favorite karaoke song was. He replied, "My favorite karaoke song?" then turned his head to the side and pretended to spit on the floor, saying: "I hate karaoke."

Another audience member asked him what he thought about rap music. As he began to criticize it, he seemed to pause and take a quick scan of the audience, then said he disliked most of it because of the bad language and negative references, adding that he thought it was a bad influence on youth. "Not all of it is bad, but most of it," he said, apparently not wishing to condemn the entire black youth culture.

Surprise! Trebek Doesn't Know Everything

When one of the contestants incorrectly answered "era" instead of "eon" in response to a science question requiring a three-letter word with two vowels, Trebek told the young man that "era" was not a scientific term. One of the fact checkers disagreed.

(Era can be generic, such as the era of horse and buggy, or scientific, such as the Paleozoic era.)

Trebek seemed to think "era" had only a generic meaning. But after the fact checker disagreed, he walked over to the front of the stage where a semicircle of fact checkers are located in a pit behind computer screens and telephones, and picked up one of their dictionaries. He seemed genuinely interested in making sure he had the correct information, although the staff photographer who took candid photos during the taping of the show moved quickly into position to take a few shots of Trebek studiously peering into the dictionary. He lingered just long enough to ensure a good publicity shot.

Trebek Is 73

When asked what books he's read, Trebek said he reads a lot of nonfiction, "political stuff," and also likes novelist "John . . ." and then couldn't think of the author's last name until an audience member called out: "Grisham." Then he mentioned finishing a book during a recent trip, but could not remember what it was. "It'll come to me," he said. It didn't.

So even the sharp-witted Trebek, adjudicator of all knowledge, cannot escape the symptoms of an aging mind. Or perhaps it was just overload, considering all the data that had passed through his brain by the last taping of the day. It was the fifth and last show during a day in which he'd already articulated 264 questions with but a very few misspeaks. Is this reassuring to those of us who worry about occasional memory loss? I don't know, but I'm gonna keep playing.



~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

# 235:

The truth you believe may not exist
beyond your imagination.

I Am Born

W hen did I start? What is my first conscious memory? You might as well ask when my Being burst out from Nothing and became Something. 

Who knows?

I was warm, living in a dream. There was sound but not much light. There were thoughts and images without meaning. There was no passage of time, no wanting, just being.

There surely must have been some kind of struggle at the time of my emergence, but this I do not remember. I remember being removed from my cave into a bright blinding light. I remember crying, but it was more like listening to myself cry from a distance, rather than feeling any personal, emotional impulse to cry.

I was wrapped in cloth and put in what I now believe was the white metal cradle of a scale to measure my weight. I fell asleep, trying to fall back into that place from where I came.

I don’t remember anything else until thirteen months later, the day my mother left me at the orphanage and never came back.

~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Who created this artwork?
© All Rights Reserved

# 229:

Moment by moment we check for messages,
as if we were all heart transplant surgeons,
waiting for the call.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

The Genesis Of Mail

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without mail, and void. So God said, “Let there be mail,” and there it was.

2  God saw the mail, that it was plentiful and multiplied, and so God divided the occupant from the personal. And God called the occupant, “Junk,” and the personal, He called, “Personal.”

3  Then God said, “Let there be a postal office, and let it divide small boxes among those who would receive, though it be more blessed to send.”

4  And God said, “Let there be stamps, bulk rate, and second-day delivery.”

5  Finally, God said, “I will make a mailman in my image, after my likeness, and let him have dominion over the mail, and postcards shall read he them.”

6  But later, the Lord God said, “It is not good that the mailman should be alone.” And so he caused a deep sleep to fall upon the mailman, and took one of his ribs, and made He a mailwoman, and brought her unto the mailman.

7  The mailman said, “This is now bone of my bones and employee of my civil service. She shall be called: mailperson.”

8  They both were naked, except for their bags.

9  Later on, the Lord God planted a garden, in the lower east side of Eden, and there He put the mailpersons He had formed, and the postal office of which He had made thee it.

10  After that, the Lord God commanded the mailpersons saying, “Of every tree of the postal grounds, thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of collective bargainings, thou shall not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely be attacked by all manner of dog and die.”

11  But the civil serpent said unto the mailwoman: “If ye eat of the tree of the knowledge of collective bargainings, ye shall not die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat of the tree, then, your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing of work stoppages and calling in sick.”

12  The mailwoman desired the fruit of the tree and did eat. She gave also unto the mailman and he did eat. The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, except for their bags, and so they sewed many fig leaves together, making postal uniforms.

13  Suddenly, the Lord God called unto the mailman and said, “Why hide you he in underbrush thus?”

14  And the mailman said, “I am looking for my chronograph!”

15  Coyly, the Lord God said, “Who told thee that thou had no wristwatch?”

16  The mailman answered, “The mailperson whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, C.O.D.”

17  Sternly, the Lord God said unto the mailwoman, “What the hell is this thou hast done?”

18  The mailwoman replied, “The civil serpent beguiled me.”

19  Unto the mailpersons God said: “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of the civil serpent, ye shall drive in tiny Jeeps, and delivereth all manner of mail to distant places of dwelling which in turn shall contain multitudes of rude dogs. I will greatly multiply thy sorrow, and in sorrow shall the mailwoman bring forth tiny mailpersons. They shall multiply in the earth, and shall be cursed above all cattle, above every beast of the field, and above all manner of living thing, except for used car salesmen.”

 ~ by Russ Allison Loar ~ Image by ? © All Rights Reserved