Keeping pace with 4/4 time

There are times when I need motivation to run. The fact that it's good exercise isn't enough. The fact that it might be a nice morning for a run isn't enough. The fact that I have some nice scenery along my usual route isn't enough.

Which is why I bring music along.

In the same vein that I should stop and smell the roses, I should probably run and listen to the birds chirp, commune more fully with nature. But birds don't chirp in 4/4 time.

I've discovered that the 4/4 time of most of the music I listen to on my iPod is a good pace in which to run.

Each piece of music has a time signature, used to signify how many beats there are in each measure. Those are the numbers that you see on the first line of a piece of sheet music. That's the time signature. A piece written 3/4 means three quarter notes per measure. A piece in 4/4 time means four quarter notes per measure.

Waltzes and minuets and the like are written in 3/4. Rock and pop songs are in 4/4 time. I guess that's why rock and pop are considered a bit more upbeat than waltzes and minuets, thus lending themselves more easily to those of us who need the metronome like beat of music to get us through our running workouts.

I discovered how well timed my running stride is to 4/4 time one day while running and listening to "Boom Like That" by Mark Knopfler. The drummer's beat and my beat on the pavement were in perfect sync. Every other stride of my left foot hit the ground on the downbeat of the drum.

Because there wasn't much else to do at the time except run, I also did a rough calculation using the stopwatch setting on my watch to measure my speed in 4/4 time. By running to the beat of "Boom Like That" I covered a half mile in 4 minutes and 26 seconds. That's almost a 9-minute mile. That pace isn't going to win me any gold medals at the Olympics, but that's a good pace for me these days.

The point of all this?

Sometimes in life it's good to stop and smell the roses. Sometimes it's good to listen to the birds chirp.

But when it comes to running, I want to get from Point A to Point B as quickly and efficiently as these aging legs and cardiovascular system will allow. If that means chugging along to the 4/4 music coming through my iPod earphones,  then more  power to me. God knows I need as much power as I can get.

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YouTube video of "Boom Like That":

My life as an indoor cat

My wife Jane calls me "an indoor cat."

By that she means I don't get out much, that given the choice of inside or outside I prefer to stay inside. It's like she has this image of me: She opens the screen door asking, "Want to go out? Want to go out?" and I just sit there curled up on the couch refusing to budge.

I take offense to the characterization. First off, I don't like cats -- never did, never will. No offense to cat owners, but cats and I don't mix well, something about the tightening chest, wheezing and itchy eyes that they produce in me. Secondly, I get outside ... sometimes.

I play golf -- outside. I mow the lawn -- outside. I go to the beach and surf -- outside. My walking or running exercise is done outside (except on those days when it's done inside on a treadmill).

It's just that I have to have a reason to be outside. It's like the outside and I have to have an appointment to be together. During the winter I ski -- outside -- and we agree on a day and a location and we negotiate the duration of the appointment as the day goes along. If I'm outside mowing the lawn, or at the beach, or doing something else that involves being outdoors, then it is something that has been thought about in advance, scheduled as part of the to-do list.

And there are qualitative conditions to being outside. In that regard, I am definitely a fair-weather friend to the great outdoors. If I've scheduled something to do outside and it's raining heavily or there's a blizzard, then weather trumps outdoors.

I will not be outside just to be outside, I'll be outside if I have a reason to be outside. In that vein, I'm definitely not considered the rugged "outdoorsy" type.

For example, the one time that I worked outside as a laborer on a lettuce farm in Oswego, N.Y., the summer after my freshman year in high school, I swore to myself I would always have an indoor job. I didn't especially like being exposed to all that dirt for such a long period of time. I'm not going to climb a mountain simply "because it's there." A greater qualification is required. 

I observed to Jane the other day how much I liked having a porch on our house. She responded something to the effect of: "Why? It's not like you go outside and use it." I guess she's right. I don't go out onto the porch just for the sake of going out onto the porch. I'll make an appointment with the porch to cook sometimes because that's where the grill is.

Think of me as the rugged "indoorsy" type, the kind of guy who will pick up a guitar and play "because it's there." Think of me as the kind of guy who revels in the company of books more than he revels in the company of trees, the kind of guy who believes that roughing it means checking into a hotel without room service.

Just don't think of me as a cat.

Now excuse me while I find a nice sunny spot to curl up.

And I still like the fact that we have a porch.

What I did -- and didn't do -- on my summer vacation

Summer is a good time to think about composing a future life in the key of retirement. Now that I've finished a summer of retirement, I can accurately say that my composition is definitely unfinished.

That's not to say it was bad; it had some good parts and it was discordant at times with me trying to find my emotional cadence after suddenly not working after 33 years of working every day. It just feels undone.

I often say that I'm glad my retirement started in early June, because it has given me the summer to re-think my thoughts away from the things I was doing at work to the things I wanted to do from home. Pre-retirement to-do lists were different from the retirement to-do lists.

First off, I had to define retirement ... is semi-retirement appropriate? That assumes that half the time is spent retired, as in not working, and the other half is spent working, as in working for some kind of recompense. That didn't happen, so I'm not sure semi-retirement works as an accurate description.

Full retirement -- as in not doing anything -- doesn't really qualify because I was working at stuff. Let's call it a quasi-retirement ... quasi, as in having a resemblance to, as in close but no cigar.

I retired from the newspaper company where I had worked for 30 years, promising myself I would use the summer to re-engineer myself as a professional, that I would think of how to use what I learned as a newspaperman and recreate myself in some other way.

Here's the good, bad and ugly of what I ended up doing:

-- I bought a surf board and wet suit and learned how to surf. I'm not very good. After a lot of trial and mostly error I could stand up and get a pretty good ride on some of the milder waves that the Atlantic has to offer;

-- I created Broad Cove Media as a business platform from which to operate a newspaper operations consulting business and publish web-based content. I didn't do any consulting during the summer. I write weekly, as I always have, for Boomer Angst, and I created Eats@Home as publishing avenue for one of my favorite pastimes-- cooking and eating;

-- I planted an herb and vegetable garden, courtesy of the herb and vegetable plants wife Jane bought for me as a birthday present in June. The herbs did very well. The peppers and eggplant ... not so much. The tomatoes are doing pretty well. If the garden produced anything it was in spite of me, not because of my abilities as a gardener;

-- I do a little volunteer work for the Great Bay Coast Watch program, which is run out of the University of New Hampshire and which looks after the health and well-being of the Great Bay Estuary here in southern New Hampshire;

-- I'm writing for Examiner.com as its Baby Boomer Examiner. This is a national news, information and entertainment web site, and it uses experts -- so-called national examiners -- as contributors. I contribute almost daily content related to issues of interest to Baby Boomers. That's been great because it gets me writing every day, something I haven't done since my newspaper reporting days some 20-odd years ago;

I'm busy and I'm productive in the sense that there's something to do every day.

Oh, and there's the golf. It can't be a quasi-retirement without the golf, can it? I play golf each week with former colleagues from the newspaper and there's a weekly pot to be won based on scoring. I've earned $76, which means I've earned more money playing golf in retirement than anything else I've done this summer.

I guess if Beethoven and Schubert can have their unfinished symphonies, I can have one too.

Getting past the Boom years in the White House

In 1992 in this space I wrote of how proud I was that one of us -- a Baby Boomer -- had been elected president of the United States. With the election of Bill Clinton, it was about time, I had said, that we were finally in charge.

And we were still in charge -- for better or worse (worse mostly, I'm afraid) -- with the subsequent election of another Baby Boomer, George Bush.

With the completion of the Democratic and Republican national conventions and with two months left before the election, it appears that the Baby Boomer years in the White House are coming to an end, despite the fact that the Democratic presidential nominee and the Republican vice presidential nominee were both born within the Baby Boom span of years. I sense that because both Barack Obama and Sarah Pailin are playing to a different generational crowd -- the Millennial.

First we have to accept the definition of Baby Boomers. Demographers and the U.S. Census Bureau define that generation as those Americans born in the 18 year span between 1946 and 1964.

Bill Clinton was born in August 1946 and was 47 years old when he became president. He spent eight years in the White House. George Bush, born July 1946, was 55 when he assumed the presidency and also served two terms.

Here's the demographic rundown of the Democratic and Republican candidates for president and vice president:
Barack Obama, Democrat for president, was born in August 1961. He is technically a Baby Boomer;
Joe Biden, Democrat for vice president, was born in November 1942 is considered a senior citizen;
John McCain, Republican for president, was born in August 1936 and is also a senior;
Sarah Pailin, Republican for vice president, was born in February 1964 and is also a Baby Boomer.

But there is a sharp cultural division between older Baby Boomers and the younger Boomers such as Obama and Pailin. Older Boomers are preparing to or are thinking about or have already retired, and they are dealing with a host of issues -- such as the empty nest -- that younger Boomers do not. Older Baby Boomers' attitudes about culture and politics were shaped by the 1960s and '70s and the Vietnam War, the draft, the Cold War and, regrettably, disco.

Younger Boomers are concentrating very much on careers and raising their families, just as the Obamas and Pailins are doing. Their cultural and political outlook is colored by the '80s and Ronald Reagan, the end of the Soviet Union, the rise of terrorists and, frankly, the political and societal sins of older Baby Boomers.

Obama, for one, has sought to distance himself from his generational tag as I discussed in a posting for Examiner.com. In his book "The Audacity of Hope" he blames much of today's ills on a generation of Baby Boomer politicians who carried "old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."

It was interesting that Obama went up in the age ladder to pick his vice president and McCain went down to pick his, as if the young Obama needed the experience of Biden, and an older McCain needed the youth of Pailin.

Both camps trumpet a common campaign theme -- change. Government is broken, they say, and the old guard, the old ways and old politics have gotten us into a messy war and poor economy. And by old, they mean the politics of the last 16 years, the last 16 years of two Baby Boomer presidents.

My belief is that the Obama-Biden and McCain-Pailin campaigns will put their emphasis on the Millennials -- that collection of Gen Y voters born 1982-2000 who just by their sheer numbers have a tremendous amount of political clout.

No doubt -- senior citizens and Baby Boomers will have their affect on this election. But watch the younger voters. This time around I think they'll have a greater say in whatever change happens on Nov. 4.