When Dawn Comes in Cashel

My coffee grows cold as I linger at the kitchen window.

Dawn is never an afterthought for me. I’m up by 4, ready early. Yet I’m not alone in my vigil, even in the lightly populated eastern Sierra foothills of Northern California.

Dawn welcomes us – me and a blinking measles of drones, a nattering pestilence migrating alongside newcomers, mostly San Francisco urban refugees.

Dawn is Verse One, the stage setter. It so empowering to this dreamer that I’ve commandeered one of those sky-riders, infusing it with dominion over time and distance.

We’re soon at the next daybreak in County Tipperary, Cashel, the Ireland of my DNA, my Taylor blood in its fields and bones in The Rock’s cemetery.

I alight inside The Rock’s north chapel wall, resuming a mystical union that I initiated in 1996 on a visit with my then 14-year-old son Corey.

I arch my back against the carved stones, splay my hands against it as if a victim of the fiery slaughter of the 1647 Sack of Cashel.

Needing nothing visible, my spirit is again flung into the sky, majestic, soaring, triumphant, timeless, an indescribable force of healing and memory. Blessed assurance. You will be, someday soon, a vagabond repatriated.

Below, every furrow and bog of the pastoral flatlands encircling the Rock are plowed with the mayhem and mystery of druidic and Christian conflict and celebration.

Here, axes slammed skulls while famines fed excesses and exodus. Most doings and undoing’s known but to God.

Here, art, heart and soul are earned by hauling out calves born on cold, lantern-lit winter nights, by knotting your don’t-fail-me-now legs around iron girders as you marry them with office towers.

And here, writers like me are valued for words crafted smartly like Waterford crystal or as ignoble as spittoon spillage. No matter. Whether it’s owing to Ireland’s historic loyalty to the literary arts or its prayers for better breeding by the artisan’s next generation, wordsmiths are cut a fair piece of reins to wander.

My drone has commenced to wobble. Am I the one droning?

Where shall my bride Judy and I spend a handful of nights?

If the Cashel Palace Hotel allows, would there be no better place? It would be our only time, a favor to ourselves in a season of goodbyes, heralding visits by other Taylors. A reprise of Corey’s 1996 visit, only now with his family. A first visit to Cashel by Erin and her family; we missed it on our 1991 family tour.

Surely, we’ll find handicap-accessible rooms at the Cashel Palace as age has reinvented our definition of step-dancing.

Are there particular rooms favoring dreamers? I write daily and will post online as Judy imagines the caps she’ll knit. Colleagues once gifted me a shirt proclaiming, “Lord of the Blogs.” I’ll be wanting to hobnob with the staff, fellow guests.

And we want to throw a grand party for all the Cashel Irish Taylors and kin. I gave up the drink more than 10 years ago and know there are many ways to create grand – perhaps a fiddler, bodhran player and a singer’s warm voice? Some Palace Hotel feast, with dessert, surprises. And a photographer, for sure. Can we find a Cashel teller of Taylor tales?

All the Taylors and relations together, wrapped around Ollie with us nearby. Josephine and her Jack, Mark, Paul and Donna, and families. Mary and Paddy. Paudie. Sonia. Tom and Jennifer Taylor’s, Paul and Marie Kenrick’s. And the kinsmen I’ve yet to commit to memory.

I’ll ask Paudie Taylor for his advice. I know he loves, lives, and breathes his Cashel town. Maybe he’d walk about with me, slowly and patiently, pointing out wonders, worries and joys.

Paddy, Paudie and Tom could give me a tour of their farm, the grand horses that Tom showcases, with music, on Facebook.

We’ll want to meet the artists and handcrafters, the witty and the wise -- extraordinary people doing ordinary things, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Maybe we’d wrap up the bouquet with Judy joining Ollie and the ladies, perhaps invading a yarn shop. Judy will treat everyone to a fine cup of lunch, forever deleting the memory of a 2005 meal – gosh, 20 years -- at a burn-tourists-at-the-stake Cashel eatery called Ryan’s Daughter. I’m sure the ladies would have a monumental craic.

We’ll need lucky charms, or luck and charm, to birth all this. But now a night’s mist is lapping at my drone’s wheels, encouraging my departure.

I’ll see you again on the morrow, dear family, dreaming at the kitchen window, coffee cold but I’ll be glowing, hugging you and my Cashel memories close from afar. Merry Christmas, God bless and love you!

John G. Taylor is a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive. He lives in El Dorado Hills, CA.

Big Box Medicine? Yes!

I’m stuck at the intersection of harried and impatient, CVS pharmacy pick-up.

When a staffer yells, “Consult!”, customers grumble like a time-eating latte request had infiltrated the black coffee line. I smile, bearing witness to what is fast-becoming nostalgia -- actual in-person interplay with a licensed medical professional.

I’m imagining how the pharmacy and its retail personality will morph as big-box and digital behemoths enlarge and repackage their patient pathways and services.

CVS, Walgreens, Walmart and Amazon are pumping billions into new insurance partnerships and subscription services, home care, clinics, dentists, audiology, X-ray techs and behavioral counselors.

They want to be our medical homes for everyday maladies that needlessly jam emergency departments and for annual shots, labs and cleanings. Their sales pitches lean on convenience, simplicity and, relentlessly, connectivity.

The retailers are targeting the low-hanging, fixable dysfunctions in our sort-of health system, profitable process improvements, coupling one-stop shopping for health and household needs.

Sick, no doctor? How about a Costco clinic visit concluded by stuffing your cart with cheesecake, detergent and potting soil before retrieving your RX? Our mishmash of urgent-care centers can’t top that.

CVS, which owns the insurer Aetna and MinuteClinic, is spending nearly $11 billion to expand its pharmacies and health insurance plans into primary care medical practices, especially Medicare. Amazon has invested nearly $4 billion in a similar venture with annual memberships.

Big hurdles include shortages of providers, state curbs on reciprocal licensing and limits on the scope of some medical practices. Then there’s possible bad photo ops of full service becoming too full.

Retailers extol a new “digital ecosystem.” Algorithms, artificial intelligence, your medical history and your pulsating BP and real-time blood glucose infused to your smart phone.

No surprise, more patient involvement is required. Think about your last lab trip. Aside from a phlebotomist’s draw, didn’t you do most of the computer-entry work?

I’m excited by multimedia public education involved in building Walgreens or Walmart patient health homes, links to neighborhood centers and easing disparities, possibly using promotores, community health workers, for Hispanic outreach.

This is a small part of restructuring the legacy healthcare marketplace which still regards tertiary-care hospitals as everything’s medical hub.

Hospitals would remain a linchpin for in-patient critical care but would be more sharply branded and educationally defined by what they are not.

The United States acted nobly when it broadened care for its citizens, introducing Social Security in 1935, Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

The system has fallen flat in patient education and preventing remediable problems from resurfacing as critical-care needs. Hospital invoices remain more indecipherable than the Dead Sea Scrolls. If there’s no clarity, there should be no government reimbursement or licensure.

Even in framing their survival strategies, hospital execs aren’t patient friendly: “harnessing inefficiencies … embracing alternate payment models … creating a symbiotic relationship between hospitals and vendors.”

While I futilely pursuing an ear specialist, his phone tree repeatedly reassured that my time and patience were valuable and that I should treat whoever answers the phone with kindness. The scars of Covid remain fresh.

Medical mail retailers are spared the 24/7 overheads of hospital trauma centers, the plethora of state-specific earthquake mandates and billions in uncompensated care costs.

Vacant strip malls and regional shopping complexes are being revived as condos, homes for the unhoused and new retail-medical partnerships. The Urban Institute reports the nation has 1 billion square feet of surplus or obsolete retail space.

We shouldn’t continue to merely reset acceptable levels of deterioration in healthcare access. Opponents of the Affordable Care Act warned that if we educated consumers a little, they’d consume more medical services and worsen the costly logjams.

I’ll wager that there are successful retail business models in right sizing care for non-urgent needs, alleviating a chunk of “sit, wait and ache” emergency department visits.

I’m imagining healthcare shifting from complaint driven to compliment inspired. I’ll grab chocolate bark at checkout to feed that buzz.

John G. Taylor is a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive. He lives in El Dorado Hills, CA.

Revivals: My Back Story

Where have all the Promise Keepers gone, especially the 50,000 who filled Fresno’s Bulldog Stadium in 1997?

If you relished profoundly public spiritual revivals, the Nineties were your decade, capped off with a humdinger national event.

October will mark the 25th anniversary of the “Stand in the Gap” rally in which several hundred thousand Christian men engulfed the National Mall in Washington, DC, under the Promise Keepers’ banner.

In the shadow of the Capitol building, the men fell to their knees, flung up their arms and professed faith, confessed failure and pledged to reclaim moral leadership of their families, churches and nation.

The decade’s kickoff event occurred in 1993. Roman Catholic young people from around the globe gathered for five days of World Youth Day celebrations in Denver, concluding with a fainting-filled outdoor papal Mass celebrated by John Paul II.

There were no official headcounts, but estimates were a half million participants at each event. Some called them a Catholic Woodstock or Billy Graham on steroids.

Such gatherings seem unimaginable now. We’re either infected or affected by pandemic and incivility. We stay within our tribes lest we solidify as salt licks. Truth-telling and curiosity that benefit all of society are as welcomed as paying for gasoline with pennies.

Revivals enabled people to temporarily leave safe harbors. They thrust themselves into the company of strangers similarly striving to fill God-shaped holes in their hearts. I’m still struck by the memory of people out-loud promising to cease being self-centered jerks, name badges and all.

My long marriage had just unraveled. I craved the spiritual and emotional head-straightening every bit as much as others who jammed stadiums, parks and churches. 

But I was a paid outsider, a religion reporter for the Fresno Bee and McClatchy Newspapers. Only years later did I grasp how full immersion in this assignment helped me regain personal footing.

I tracked religious mobilizations in Sacramento, Fresno, Seattle, Denver and DC.

If you needed lifting up, a hand wave would attract prayer counselors. There were sweaty hugs, steadying arms and the cement of tearful shared prayer.

Participants raised travel cash selling T-shirts and Portuguese pastries, holding car washes and stay-awake-a-thons. They fixed flats, scrubbed in public restrooms and danced barefoot in downtown Denver’s fountains.

They bantered chants of “JP2, we love you” and “I love Jesus, yes, I do. I love Jesus, how about you?” If you needed tribulation, you joined hours-long queues for water and outhouses.

The endurance, humility and harmony created a grand catharsis and ecstatic repurposing. The connectedness, while not universal or apolitical, was tangible and usually refreshing.

I wonder what’s become of World Youth Day and Promise Keepers participants, 25 to 30 years older, many at leadership position ages.  What ecstatic promises have they made real? How do they reconcile lies blessed as truth in public discourse? Have they become leaders or misleaders?

My personal reformation was much informed by reporting the experiences of those engulfed in intense spiritual self-assessment. It was the start of a happy ending, a marriage that will celebrate 25 years not long after the Promise Keepers anniversary in October.

John G. Taylor is a former Fresno Bee journalist and retired California hospital system executive. He lives in El Dorado Hills, CA. A version of this appeared as an op-ed in the July 23, 2022 Fresno Bee.

Reinventing Southwest Utah

ST. GEORGE, Utah – Welcome back, visitors to southwest Utah. Welcome to our “Ferris Bueller” era. It’s where we remind you -- “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

While you’ve been defeating the family in games of Battleship and your spouse has been abusing an old Jane Fonda workout tape, lots has been happening here.

Let me catch you up while you’re stuck in Hurricane on the way to Zion National Park. It’s like every traffic light is timed so you must gawk at the sprawl of new hotels, housing tracts and fast-food joints amid the post-pandemic grunion run of outdoor enthusiasts.

I moved to St. George three years ago from Central California. Good thing, too, because I couldn’t afford the prices for housing now. It’s a drunken market, said a Realtor friend, and there’s no end in sight.

I was a tourist when I first saw the big white “D” carved into a St. George mesa. I thought it was odd. After doing homework about how this “Dixie” got its name, I regarded the “D” as quaint. Now it’s an endangered word, linked more with intolerance than heritage.

Intermountain Healthcare quickly shed the Dixie name, so we now have “St. George Regional Medical Center.” And Dixie State University will eventually wear a new badge after a politically fraught mediation.

The “D” on the mesa may remain as the university tries to get it and its hillside placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Meanwhile, the St. George Temple, the first completed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple in Utah, is still closed for renovations. It won’t reopen until 2022.

And the eye-popping drive to the Tuacahn amphitheater and Snow Canyon State Park in Ivins will take longer thanks to oodles of new homes as well as what some call the area’s first strip mall.

Washington County still supports building a multi-billion-dollar pipeline to siphon water from drought-strapped Lake Powell. And plans continue for a Northern Corridor highway through a tortoise preserve.

So, star gazers, rock climbers and road graders, welcome back to southwest Utah. The past is still present. But as successful school truant Ferris Bueller warned, you’d better give it a hard look quickly.

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, provides “Dateline: St. George” commentaries on Utah Public Radio.

I'm Buying Into Truth, With Trust & Cash

ST. GEORGE, Utah -- I start with coffee, Cheerios and “the news.”

I transact with nine paid news sources daily. Most subscriptions are as satisfying as a stack of dirty dishes. I’m so hungry for a news relationship that I stop everything and beam when NBC newscaster José Díaz-Balart signs off with, “Thank you for the privilege of your time.”

So, I just donated the equivalent of three Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts to the now-nonprofit Salt Lake Tribune, atop my annual subscription. It’s a starter gift that I hope gives neither of us indigestion.

The Trib is, dare I say, the closest thing I have to a news relationship – factual content, historical context and reader empowerment often wrapped in engaging writing. It’s an endearing, endangered marriage.

Columnist Robert Kirby pokes fun at his Mormon brethren the way Catholic altar boys in Brooklyn smiled after stealing a quick sip of sacramental wine when the sacristan was busy. (Yes, guilty.) Editorial page editor George Pyle regularly rams his compendium of elbows into clubby Statehouse conservatives hoping to rattle loose a filament of candor or conscience.

The sports staff loves the locals but recognizes stinky coaches and rank performances. The news side, bolstered by teams of outsiders including Report for America, uncovers grand-scale, and small-town, public hoodwinking and rule-twisting from Covid testing and zoning variances to voter registration.

But I know about fleeting news relationships and columnists, those creatures who give freshness to institutions. I’ve mourned the passings of Mike Royko in Chicago, Herb Caen on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Green Sheet, the Fresno Bee’s Eli Setencich, writing-as-sight-failed sports columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times and New York’s earthy Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.

I’m a hard-to-please news junkie. I’m ticked that the federal government has to fulfill my pension because McClatchy Newspapers, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains where I invested 20 years as reporter and editor, sank into bankruptcy.

I’m not sure where the Salt Lake Tribune’s evolution will go. I’ve adapted to all-digital news the same way I learned to read backward and upside down while copy editing in the Hartford (CT) Times hot-type composing room of the 1970s.

Propaganda and fake news are poisoning the well, deluding and enraging citizens. Truth is now a niche alongside fabrication, prevarication and other news distortions. It’s like burying a Jersey Mike’s sandwich amid smelly, mismatched socks.

So, I’m investing the Trib with my authentic attention as a donor and subscriber. Maybe I can help sustain meat around its ribs.

Accurate news is an essential part of democracy’s connective tissue. But the news biz is now in its “Money Ball” era. Data drives dollars. Drivel -- “Madonna’s daughter shows off underarm hair at Mom’s birthday” -- competes with public service journalism. My old boss McClatchy recently considered basing employee performance reviews on the popularity of their stories as measured by story clicks.

Making a career out of screening out treacle, and discerning and conveying news, should be regarded as a profession on par with attorney and physician, requiring formal continuing education and a paycheck going further than a shot and a beer.

I still wear a stenciled 1990s T-shirt I bought while working in DC: “Trust Me. I’m a Reporter.” I might append the following: “I’m Now a Reader-Investor. Truth Still Matters.”

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, provides “Dateline: St. George” commentaries on Utah Public Radio.

(This first appeared as an op-ed in the Dec. 1, 2020 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune.)

My Daughter: A Teacher With Covid

(My daughter, Erin Taylor Koht, is a public school teacher who lives in Rescue, CA. She posted the following on Facebook on Nov. 24, 2020. I’m sharing it, proudly, with her permission. Please celebrate the holidays — all days — safely using your free will to share good will.)

“I don’t understand why no one can talk about their Covid diagnosis.

“I am Covid positive. I am a mom, wife, and a teacher. I told my class when I tested positive. Everyone has been awesome. I’ve had a few friends be harsh, but I believe it’s because they are scared. I have had families tell me I’m brave for telling them. Brave .... I’m not brave. The front-line workers are brave.

“ I just wanted to give my parents a peace of mind as they received an anonymous email that someone was positive. Why is this a secret? Why are people ashamed?

“I didn’t do anything to catch this or give this to my family. It’s a pandemic. Why can’t we take care of each other ... lift each other up.

“I know on (Thanksgiving) Thursday I’m giving thanks ... thanks for my family having the holiday together, thanks we are surviving this, and prayers to the families that have lost ... I feel thankful my family has survived this pandemic.

“Love and hug your family.”

Empowering Yourself for a Hospital Visit

I kick into self-defense when I walk into a hospital. It starts with homework done long before my head is gridlocked by worry, basic research everyone should do.

The pandemic is a pointed reminder that we invest more thought in buying hair color than knowing where’s the nearest trauma center. Or why that should even matter.

We lump hospitals together with cemeteries and prisons. We shoot them a glance, a glare or a glad I’m not there.

I’ve been an insider, working for a hospital system, trying to translate its idiosyncrasies to community leaders and electeds and to modify some of its idiocies.

I’ve been a patient, flatlined and been revived. I’ve welcomed kids, cringed over grandkids’ broken bones. I’ve bid prayerful farewells. Hospital staffers are a praiseworthy tribe.

Still, try as some do, hospitals rarely engage the public in holistic ways. Thus, our first encounter may be stepping through a million-dollar weapons detector, followed by the castor oil of “insurance card and ID, please,” and questions that beg Methuselah-like memory.

No surprise then that hospitals haven’t persuaded us that emergency departments are not the Yellow Brick Road for all needs, dental through mental.

One hospital size – the one nearest you -- may accommodate but not fit all needs. If you’re knocked catawampus in the mountains, the hospital that first greets your bones may be the one that keeps you alive until you’re shipped to a more complex medical center that saves your life.

If hospitals listed ingredients like Frosted Flakes, choices might come clear: a rehab center for hip fractures (protein) vs. a cosmetic lip enhancement specialist (additional sugar).

Self-empowerment improves the likelihood of your getting appropriate and successful treatment.

You can start by compiling a personal health history, a bullet list of surgeries, injuries treated, allergies and current medications and homeopathic products. Include dates, dosages and providers names.

Providers are required to create (and share, within legal limits) your electronic medical records, so this is your starter kit.

Mine is two typewritten pages.

Because I can review its contents, I can engage my stressed caregiver who’s likely skimming the document and may overlook a crucial sensitivity (allergy to mint, perhaps, which is infused in most toothpaste and floss).

Our family lists are kept in a red emergency folder, along with a durable power of attorney and key family phone numbers.

When my wife recently broke her collarbone, my usually reliable brain panicked as the emergency medical team arrived. I grabbed the folder and regained focus as questions surfaced at the hospital.

Such a health resume is your personal protective equipment. If a relative were quarantined behind a nursing home window, I’d want that tip sheet in my hands.

It needs a critical companion – a grasp of what services your local hospital offers and what it does especially well.

“The Golden Hour” refers to the narrow time window to preserve life, brain and body following accident, heart attack or stroke.

For heart attack symptoms, beeline to the nearest hospital. For stroke and serious trauma, the keys are access to clot-busting medications and microsurgery specialties. There’re typically in major urban medical centers.

You can browse hospital services online, like buying sheets from Target. Better options include chatting with the nurse or volunteer next door and, when the pandemic is history, testing your hospital’s vibe by lunching in its cafeteria.

The pandemic reminds how thin our government and medical resources can become. The budget-cutting ahead may worsen that.

I can’t fathom a healthier step now than becoming an effective self-advocate.

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, lives in St. George, Utah.

(This first appeared as an op-ed in the May 4, 2020 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune.)

A Vanilla Name? There's No Such Thing

ST. GEORGE, UTAH -- If you’re moving to Utah, you’d better bone up on the back story behind your name before someone politely explains the you who you are not.

I hauled my gray ponytail and presumed vanilla name to St. George two years ago -- a graduate of NYU, not BYU – hunting a friendly, affordable place to retire where breathing didn’t mean chewing California pollution.

You do know you’ve got a famous name, right? First, it was a CVS pharmacist, then an AC repairer and recently Margaret, who owns a used bookstore in Hurricane.

It seems nearly everyone – the two Mormons of every three Utah residents – educates me on my namesake who was the third prophet, tucked behind Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, in establishing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I found I had way more in common with him than my other namesakes such as the retired wide receiver for the San Francisco Forty-Niners and the bass player for Duran Duran. Their fans mistakenly hounded me for autographs in California.

The prophet Taylor died on the same month and day as my birth. My family roots are in Ireland, where he preached. He had been a Methodist as have I. He worked the fields; I milked Wisconsin cows.

He was shot several times in the 1844 riot that killed the faith’s founder; only Brooklyn fistfights for me. He liked to tell stories, wrote a book and edited newspapers; I spent my career wordsmithing for newspapers and hospitals. My wife says we look alike; Prophet Taylor had eight wives, so I’ll cut my one and only some slack on her dubious claim.

Utah is a Joseph’s coat of names with some, such as Romney, Huntsman and Eccles, as iconic as Arches National Park. But the richest reside with wayfarers and byways.

You can thank explorers, miners and the roughnecks who built the transcontinental railroad for arcane and frisky map monikers such as Drunkards Wash (in coal country), Peter Sinks (a frightfully cold natural sinkhole at 8,100 feet) and Mollies Nipple (there are several, supposedly named by explorer John Kitchen to honor his wife. Wow.).

I’ve encountered a Walmart checker named Erda, a credit union teller named Skyla, and brothers Bridger and Sawyer. I’ve read obituaries for Zelpha Roundy and a Sanpete County official with the handle Orange Frederick Peel. Yep, Orange Peel.

Some names flow from the Book of Mormon, some from partial melding of ancestral names and others, I surmise, from romantic dashboard-light memories of artists and lyrics of the 1980s -- think Journey meets U2.

When I grew fatigued over my fortunate accident of being a non-Mormon sharing a prophet’s name, I asked my conversational partner if he could name all the prophets. I now know there are 17, including four Smiths.

Yet another Smith saved a starving Mormon settlement by suggesting the eating of raw potatoes. So was born St. George, my home and one of the fastest growing communities in the nation.

And while my yearning for fuller Utah immersion includes  attending the annual Ute Stampede Rodeo in Nephi (where the mayor’s name is Glade Nielson), my days of describing myself as just another John are history.

Holiday Mayhem: Media as Victims

Forty years ago, before random shootings became commonplace, a hilarious holiday gathering of Milwaukee journalists concluded with an after-party at a bar called the Knew Boot.

I wrote the attached story on the 10th anniversary of the tragedy that occurred at that bar. It was published in 1989 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I’ve lost track of Paul and John, but I’ve never forgotten what happens when journalists become the story.

The Original Story

Saved by St. George

Keebler cookie elves, that explains the chewed-over, throbbing rouge mesas. Psychedelic azure skies slathered with white custard clouds, that conjures Beatles’ lyrics. Dinosaurs tromped here, that means finding fossils and more – like venomous gila monsters, the newly named state reptile hissing in burrows not far from my house.

 “Life elevated” is an official Utah slogan.  “Life Saved” is my headline as I touch an empty pocket where once resided my emergency asthma inhaler.

It’s been a year since we escaped Central California’s corrosive air. Family and 40-plus years of friends grasped our desperation but gasped at our taking refuge in St. George: You aren’t Mormon and don’t know a soul in Utah, so why there?

Dad, you went to NYU, not BYU. You’re a first-generation Irish American, Kennedy liberal and retired journalist, not a cattle-ferrying frontiersman whose faith forbids drinking French roast or using swearing as conversational shorthand. You’ll be a friendless outsider.

St. George is a cultural and mercantile nexus for a swath of Utah, Arizona and Nevada, and mecca for California retirees. It’s two hours’ drive north of Las Vegas, a launch point to national parks, and one of America’s fastest growing cities.

At St. George’s Walmarts you’ll encounter sun-blanched retirees hunting bargains or working the check-outs, tanned parents in pink gym shorts with a flock of kids, and fundamentalist Mormons on smartphones and in pristine blue prairie dresses.

Utah’s eighth largest city demonstrates the “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” closing admonition – life goes by quickly, pay attention or you’ll miss stuff.

Take the two pilots who last year successfully landed their private planes where St. George’s airport was eight years ago. It’s now home to a college and a burgeoning tech center. Each had an OMG moment, at least one captured on YouTube, and safely got airborne.

Those miscues would be unforgiven now. The cliffside campus is abuzz with construction, and St. George’s regional airport, built on an old drag strip southeast of town, is closed until September while runways sinking in blue clay are replaced.

The land route here tests your discipline. Interstate 15, Utah’s narrow link to Arizona and Las Vegas, carved into head-spinning cliffs along the Virgin River, is down to one lane in each direction as bridges are replaced.

Since we arrived in 2018, within a mile of mile of home there’s a new hotel, gas station, jewelry and other warehouses, and the first structures for a new 30,000-resident community called Desert Color.

Clean air. Courteous, frugal people. National parks. A thriving cultural and arts community. Children’s museum. A first-rate hospital with trauma center. Plenty for hikers, bikers, joggers, artists and other wanderers. Pickleball/golf. Costco. An expanding dinosaur museum. Retiree and veteran friendly. A Mormon temple downtown and branch church spires on corners and hillsides everywhere in this 2,700-foot high desert of 10,000-foot crenellated mountains.

Californians coming here 20 years ago wanted to transform St. George into a mini Golden State, said our Realtor, a Mormon and California ex-pat. Now they want to preserve what remains of its small-town wholesomeness.

The weather forecasters lean heavily on the phrase “Except St. George,” in part to explain how accuracy can be elusive when storms flow up from the Gulf of Mexico and down from Alaska.

We came here for clean air. We relocated here because we were welcomed. We visited and jawboned for week, trusted the Chamber of Commerce directory – if a business replied first, we tried them; we took strangers at their word; and tried to ease off my New York Minute expectations.

The place’s got quirks.

The St. George City Council restored a ban on public alcohol consumption after mistakenly deleting it. The council purposely deleted a possible jail sentence that loomed for dog owners whose pets pooped on others’ lawns.

And it’s got a dark side.

Presumed arson fires destroyed a Mormon church and damaged an Episcopal church sanctuary. A man was shot dead outside the One and Only Bar.  A woman called state police saying her car’s driver wouldn’t allow her a potty break, resulting in a high-speed chase and taser battle with police. Another woman tried to pay Taco Bell with her marijuana stash. The area jail is named more for geography than irony -- the Purgatory Correctional Facility.

It’s driven by seasons.

It’s a retirement haven – Wyoming, Michigan, Washington, Oregon and especially San Diego and Orange counties.  Retirees are generally welcomed as economic drivers who lifecycle out of their temporary communion with locals.

The diverse newcomers here and in the Salt Lake area are propelling the economy and challenging a tight-fisted, paternalistic political system. The state suffers from underfunded public education, pollution and drought, high opioid use and suicide rates and a sizable population of hungry children and “vehicle residents” – consequences of low wages and a weak supply of affordable housing.

State lawmakers are uneasy with the general populace. When voters instigated and approved an expansion of Medicaid and legalizing of medical marijuana, the Legislature hurriedly consulted with special interests including the Mormon church and enacted restrictions before both initiatives took effect.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is rebranding itself. Mormons want the world to see them the way they see themselves -- as part of mainstream Christianity. That may be easier to accomplish as mainstream denominations continue shedding members.

Less than half of Salt Lake City’s population is Mormon. It is one of the state’s few Democratic strongholds, electing the state’s only Democrat (a Mormon) to the House of Representatives last year.

There are more than 2 million Mormons among Utah’s 3.1 million residents. That’s about one-third of Mormons in the United States.

Among our first encounters with St. George Mormons: a furniture saleswoman, who chuckled over my fondness for “groovy,” “awesome” and “righteous,” and a Home Depot checker. I’d complimented the checker on her jewelry, which she explained was a CTR ring – a public endorsement for “Choose the Right,” a Mormon affirmation to righteous living in obedience to God’s will.

Community doesn’t happen without your skin in the game. Whether it’s for church, wilderness rescue, ski patrol or at St. George’s annual Huntsman Senior Games competition, Utahns lead the country in volunteerism.

My family has always responded to need, and we don’t choose friends based on spirituality. We’ve attended a Mormon sacrament meeting at the invitation of friends, and my wife Judy has worked with a Mormon group to create reusable feminine hygiene products.

We’re working with a local jewelry merchant who holds an annual Christmas party to benefit area Paiute tribes. Judy is now knitting winter caps and scarves for that charity, as she has done for others.  The merchant refers to her as “Sister Scarf.”

I’ve disenrolled as a Democrat and now volunteer with United for Utah, a third party espousing public principle over internecine party politics.

We take reusable bags when we shop, irritating some checkers in the free-bag culture here. We chat with strangers with names like Arda from towns named Erda. I enjoyed a successful real-time email exchange with the state DMV. And the neighborhood kingsnake I met while getting my Wall Street Journal has a name. My California daughter said Stripes has a pretty face.

We now take our breathing for granted. Our leaps of faith joyfully continue.

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, lives in St. George, Utah.

Taking the initiative -- and the blows that come with it

St. George, Utah — I moved here last year admiring the pluck of grass-roots Utahns for securing statewide votes on expanding Medicaid and legalizing medical marijuana.

They dared. I voted with them. And I’ve quickly realized that Utah legislators engage with their citizens the way a jumping cactus regards a curious dog’s nose. Stray from tradition’s path and they’ll stick you — repeatedly.

Gov. Gary Herbert and the conservative Republican Legislature smacked us around first with the special legislative session to successfully restrict Proposition 2 (what became the Medical Cannabis Act). Then, during the regular 2019 session, they curtailed the Medicaid openings in Proposition 3.

Having mollified the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other critics, lawmakers devised a raft of “we know what’s best” legislation to devalue future initiatives.

Herbert stenciled his name onto several knots of red tape – delaying implementation of initiatives until after a subsequent general legislative session, changing the signature threshold and prohibiting the introduction of initiatives with similar content in back-to-back elections.

Another new thumb-screw — that “active voters” be counted in qualifying signatures rather that the simple number of voters who participated in the last presidential election. This hamstrings unaffiliated voters who may be attracted by a single controversial initiative but otherwise might not regularly vote.

Utah can be as paternalistically overbearing and dismissive of an involved citizenry as the other side of the political mirror – California. There, I spent nearly 40 years navigating a so-called professional legislature in which the Democratic Party is sovereign, ballasted by near-endless union dollars and wish lists.

One example of Golden State imperiousness. My Fresno-based hospital system was one of several troubled by people loitering in lobbies or trying to access maternity units to abduct newborns or young children. We secured passage in 2003 of AB 936, creating the crime of “infant stalking.”

But its gravity was diminished. California prisons were overcrowded, and Democratic leaders insisted they’d only consider adding misdemeanors – no new felonies – to state law. Don’t add a crime if there’s no space to do the time, was their reasoning, like the lyrics from the theme song of “Baretta,” the 1970s detective show.

Californians use initiatives so often you’d think they were Miracle-Gro, creating a separate legislative environment. That’s as bad as the quashing of a handful of initiatives in small-government states.

Initiatives are a necessary and appropriate response when the legislative process is too slow or politicized. At some point, attempts to aggregate and maintain political power, as done in the last Utah legislative session, will be seen as an anti-democratic strategy to diminish voter engagement and broad-based election turnout.

I’ve grown tired of the whipsaw between “mainstream party” extremists. I ended my lifelong Democratic Party affiliation and have joined United Utah Party, a refreshing group of moderates from all stripes seeking open and civil discourse and policymaking. A Gallup Poll of ideology shows that 40% of Utahns identify themselves not as conservatives or liberals, but as moderates.

In coming decades, growth and diversity will compel a transformation in Utah’s current part-time “people’s” legislative format. Like California, Utah must curb air and water pollution, invest in affordable housing, improve educational funding and refresh tax policies.

I’d like to think current legislators would revisit their hostility to the initiative process, choosing instead to welcome participants as well-intentioned, complementary efforts of committed public servants and confirmation of an educated, resourceful and motivated citizenry.

They show spine in the face of clubby politics.

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, lives in St. George, Utah. This was published as an op-ed in the April 14, 2019 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune.

Transparently bad, like a hospital gown

When you’re drowning in a pile of crap, the last thing you want rescuers to throw is toilet paper.

But that’s what the federal government did this year to consumers wanting to decipher their hospital medical costs.

The feds now require hospitals to publish online spreadsheets for thousands of five-digit common procedural terminology (CPT) codes showing their prices for such things as chest expanders, metal knees and ibuprofen suppositories.

Duly enriched, consumers presumably could concoct a cost estimate for gallbladder removal or Tommy John shoulder surgery, matching hospital against hospital.

I suppose we are to think of the codes as Royal Doulton table settings instead of another episode of the chronic GERD that is the American health payment system. Hospital care is a mere $1 trillion a year, one-third of all health spending, says the U.S. Department of Health Services. How dare Byzantium be simplified?

Never mind that few people pay what’s listed on these “chargemasters” after factoring in government or private insurance, discounts for impoverishment or deals like one-third off for paying cash.

The government considers the chargemasters as starter kits toward empowering consumers. That suggests the feds truly want a role in educating the public – such advocacy was somewhat evident during the chaotic deployment of the Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010.  ultimate Trained navigators were hired to enroll the uninsured and under-insured.

But sustained public education is one of those safety-net strings that have been unraveled since the election of Donald Trump.

Hospitals can do more education if they desire, says Seema Verma, current administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  Sounds like a shoulder shrug.

The health industry has nearly doubled its annual marketing spending from 1997 to 2016, to a total of $29.9 billion, according to a January study in JAMA. Atop that, the pharmaceutical industry’s top two trade associations spent a record nearly $38 million in lobbying in 2018.

Clearly, important somebodies are being targeted for big-time education.

“Hospitals have an incentive to do a CT exam, and taxi drivers have an incentive to take the long way home,” an American College of Emergency Physicians official told Kaiser News Service. “It’s not a perfect system.”

Nearly 60% of physicians blamed bureaucratic tasks for them feeling burned out, according to the 2019 Medscape Physicians Burnout & Depression Report.  Patients and pathological payment systems clog the bureaucracy, making doctor visits more like fiscal cattle drives than individual care plans steered toward safety, healing and cost containment.

At best, the publicizing of hospital chargemasters is a squishy step toward a Consumer Reports meets Yelp meets Expedia for patients – how many stars, dollar signs and emojis.

Consider the chargemaster postings as kind of a hotel rack rate for non-emergency care. You can match the charges with what you’re ultimately asked to pay after your insurance adjustments.

Not so if you enter through the emergency department.  There, you’ll encounter “dynamic prices,” like the above-average ticket costs when marquee teams like the Yankees and Red Sox play. You’ve lost pre-calamity negotiating.

I forecast another option that is largely fantasy now. Imagine hospitals and doctors doing elective surgeries on weekends. Imagine, too, your top-rated urologist doesn’t care for sports and has lined up surgery openings during the Super Bowl. Do you skip the party at your house to get your pesky prostate fixed? Now that’s transparent patient choice.

Sadly, the latest federal transparency order showcasing hospital pricing is as clear as an outhouse in the fog. And nearly as handy.

John G. Taylor, a former newspaper reporter and editor, and a retired California hospital executive, is owner of JT Communications Company. He lives in St. George, Utah. Write to him at communicatejt@gmail.com

Don't Duck This Rotary Puck

Marriages and mortgages. Gangs and gods, family and flag. And don’t forget sports teams.  We promise our love, fealty, credit rating and “good name” as though they were lottery scratchers, blind stabs at self-satisfaction and communalism.

Inevitably, our purposes, pursuits and passions take a detour. Commitments are tossed, consequences be damned.

My blue puck sits at this confetti crossroads. It’s a shredder paperweight. It’s also a life coach.

The puck isn’t slapshot material. It is a plastic memento of my Fresno Rotary service. Emblazoned within is the international community service group’s Four-Way Test, a set of expectations for how members should conduct themselves.

Millions of Rotarians worldwide have publicly promised to adhere to the following. That includes, presumably, one-time Rotarian Donald Trump:

“Of the things we think, say or do:

• “Is it the truth?

• “Is it fair to all concerned?

• “Will it build good will and better friendships?

• “Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”

Oddly, society now views honesty and honorable behavior as radical, risk-laden.

Maybe that’s why we assign them to heroic figures: Superman – truth, justice and the American way; and Robin Hood, brave, courageous and bold (truth, maybe, in his quiver).

The puck is an encourager, imposing neither penance nor a Pollyanna life view. Tipping off your true intentions – in politics, combat and business – can be deadly, illegal and, at the very least, imprudent. I recall the World War II mantra: loose lips sink ships.

But dousing moral benchmarks with a WD-40 of dishonesty and deception to limber facts and fairness more to our liking, that’s a swindler’s strategy.

The moral mud wrestling makes for memorable cinematic lines:

• “You can’t handle the truth.” -- A Few Good Men

• “The rules are there ain’t no rules.” – Grease

• “Pie crust promises. Easily made, easily broken.” -- Mary Poppins

It’s easy enough to relax good judgment.  Who doesn’t click “accept” to iPhone updates without reading the appended lawyer lingo? The same for “initial here” DocuSign electronic pledges on 30-year home loan documents.

Some take a deeper plunge to all-out weasel in word and deed, becoming smilingly vile and productively destructive.  There, we take our halves from the middle, skunk-spraying all else. We distort the truth until we’ve created plausible fantasy. Janus-faced, we become top hurlers on Rotten Tomatoes, downgrading benevolence, self-sacrifice and good Samaritan conduct as time-wasting flops.

As a newspaper reporter, I once asked Fresno church leaders if lying were ever acceptable. A United Methodist pastor affirmed it was, such as when Nazis demanded captive populations reveal whether they were concealing Jews. “A lie to the liars is not a lie,” he said. Not everyone in his flock agreed.

Silence in the face of dark stars suggests fear, indifference or complicity.

Options include activating the poet Robert Frost’s option: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Or we may adopt the dark autopsy given by J.K. Rowling’s character, Voldemort: “There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”

The Four-Way Test helps lift such selective blindness. The remedies always involve getting off your duff and staring into the mirror until one of you cracks. Next, assist others without serving your own self-interests.

Examples in the Rotary include worldwide programs to eliminate polio, reduce malaria, create human milk banks, provide job training for the needy, wheelchairs -- “the gift of mobility” -- for the disabled and solar-powered water purifiers to avert disease. Many nameless cogs empower these betterments.

There is no immaculate good. But the Rotary puck test is a useful Fitbit to strengthen moral character.

John G. Taylor, a former California journalist and retired hospital executive, is owner of JT Communications Company. He lives in St. George, Utah. Write to him at communicatejt@gmail.com

Living Without California

The sweaty gym sock of San Joaquin Valley air is in the rear-view.

When I mushed to California nearly 40 years ago, a mechanic said my Wisconsin car “had the disease” – from Rust Belt road salt. I leave now mottled from the disease of breathing -- allergies, asthma and bone-stripping prescription rescuers. My wife, a Valley native who twice sang in Europe with California choirs, has surrendered her choruses to coughing fits.

We can no longer live the aspiration that pollution is being slowly throttled. To us chokers, it’s a pipe dream.

Long-timers aren’t surprised by our leaving.  Many friends are weighing their own pull out.

Allergies, asthma and bronchitis steal into your life – no red flags, just dingy skies caked in microscopic particulates and baked in invisible ozone.  The scat we breathe is born of wildfires, agriculture, fireplaces for ambiance and for heat, cow methane, pesticides, diesel-spewing 18-wheelers and the geographic bad luck that wedges fetid Valley and Bay area air into a 50-mile-wide fissure of ag land, cities and national parks and forests.

We snore, thrashing riotously in phases of apnea. We breathe as though gargling through our noses. Our lungs rattle like a bag of marbles.

Oblivious, the Fresno area pulsates with new people and businesses. It’s affordable in a state riven and weakened by economic extremes. Affordability has primacy in California’s Maslow’s scale of livability.

My first 20 years in Fresno earned me the scar of asthma. Who knows how much ozone and PM 2.5 I’d blithely breathed. Some 20 years later I’ve joined the cast of “sensitive group,” a gelatinous term to diminish that all of us are living in a toxic risk environment.

Maybe if the daily air smelled and tasted like burned popcorn we’d pay attention. Maybe if we all wore beeping air monitors as though reconnoitering Chernobyl. Maybe if our electeds viewed us as more than a churning of mine canaries. That maybe is more real than the likelihood our health will stabilize or (ha!) get better by staying and praying.

Trust the regulators? The kind of pollution detector you employ, where it’s placed, how it’s read and how and when you share its data – that’s tinkering with my expiration date.

Medical remedies? We survive on crutches of antihistamines, decongestants, injections and, especially, daily maintenance and emergency inhalers. They can morph you into a chattering squirrel, saturate you in sweat and exhaust you like a spent marathoner.

For sensitive groups, “getting out” in Central California means getting the mail and taking out the trash. Hiking in Yosemite? Hollering for the Grizzlies Triple A team and the post-game fireworks? Too risky for pollution hermits.

Leaving packs a gut punch of guilt. We’re walking away from one of life’s treasures. The kids we raised here have stayed. We can – we could -- watch their kids converge on a soccer ball or wiggle holding an academic award. When hard luck hit, we offered welcoming shoulders.

Instead, we’ll schedule time-zone-friendly Skype calls. And being alive, however remote, will be our presence. There are no friends or family – yet – in our new Utah locale.

Guilt led me to another question: Have I been complicit in allowing our air to be salted with manure? Consider how we’ve passively, progressively allowed our airways to be crammed with every manner of fragrance or chemical taint.

An air-freshener electric pump has replaced the Glade manual sprayer. New cars and offices are dabbed with wallet-opening aromatic enticement. Sen-Sen has reappeared to spur a gag reflex. Try to find a toothpaste without mint. Is your mouthwash aroma different than your toilet-cleaner scent?

Real, faux and toxic scents – who wants a vanilla world? Soon, the hot item might be a scratch-and-sniff card for clean air. And suddenly the most important players on the football field are the bench-side oxygen tanks.

We’ve invested most of our lives in establishing family roots and growing with Central California, my wife as a teacher and I as a journalist. We will grieve it hard but lingering here might be the last bad move of our lives. We can’t chance it.

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

Below is a link to a podcast and story by Valley Public Radio reporter Kerry Klein detailing the personal impacts of Valley air pollution:

http://kvpr.org/post/some-move-work-or-family-these-fresno-residents-want-escape-air

The Inhaler as God

John G. Taylor

Running out of time. The grandkids are finishing Tee-ball, soon the inhaler will go from Mom’s purse to their gear bag.

Central California -- the state’s backwater, the nation’s breadbasket, a glance while ogling Yosemite at 30,000 feet -- is roiling in money and newcomers with nowhere else to go. It’s kicking up the Fresno-area economy as grape vines and fruit trees are disked and mulched to make way for 300k-starter homes, more warehouses for the Gap and Amazon, waystations for international truckers and sheds for deep-drillers of fast-vanishing wells.

In our bedroom where the air purifier echoes Darth Vader, we awaken with plenty of sinus congestion and coughs. Any hope that the San Joaquin Valley will see resolution of its acidic pallor is receding faster than our reservoirs.

More than 100 languages are spoken here. For nearly 40 years I’ve added Brooklynese to this once-swell place where your kids walked with nary a fear to the school playground. I’m a “blow in” compared to my wife whose Mennonite kin have worked as farmers, judges and business owners for generations in Fresno’s neighbor, the once-tiny ag city of Reedley which posted her family name on a nice tree-lined street.

We chat in arcane code about the day’s threats … ozone, PM2.5, red flags and co-morbidities. Steroids help us edge through. Pills, inhalers, shots, sometimes multiples in a day, each leaching calcium from our bones, weakening our immune systems and slapping a depreciation sticker in our life-insurance actuarial tables.

Our aspirations accelerate our respirations spurring our expiration.

Our lungs are tenements of soot, soil and fuel toxins. The remedial promises of regulators, lawmakers and moneymakers are as squishy as cow manure pits. The pits’ residues soon marinate into breathable fragments along with acid rain and fog, and forest fires fueled by trees suffocated by pollution and vermin.

Wherever you live in the US, the cheap coin of blame and accommodation arrives by front-end loaders.

• Clogged sewers converted the relief of a New York City summer rain into pungent Okefenokee in Brooklyn streets.

• When summer smog engulfed Hartford, Conn., long-timers assured me it was a summer thing, just go fishing early.

• In Groton, Conn., the sea-breeze window opened only when Pfizer wasn’t brewing a noxious pharmaceutical.

• Milwaukeeans blamed the industrial fountains of Gary, Indiana, for the taupe swirl of skanky metals in the air near Lake Michigan, though I found it scant danger compared with the turgid nightly spew from south Milwaukee tanning plants and downtown beer brewers.

Maybe we can taper off, detox ourselves, with emission curbs, carbon tradeoffs, green-friendly transit and agriculture, quickening the speed of pimple-sized Fiats that tremble from the buffeting of 18-wheelers. But maybe is a weak drip feed. Maybe is our palliative care.

When we talk it’s like gargling, words spew with coughs. We cringe as our children now adults grapple with the drought of breathable, non-medically enabled air that imperils their kids, our grandkids.

We are all “on the clock,” morphing into statistics for the likes of the American Lung Association and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Clean air as optional extra. Chevy Nova to Prius to hearse.

I wrote this after being interviewed by Detroit Free Press (and former Fresno Bee) reporter Phoebe Wall Howard for a story detailing air pollution impacts vs. the fight over vehicle emission standards. Our comments comprise the story’s last five paragraphs.  Here’s a link: https://on.freep.com/2GSoeKO

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net

The many lives of newspaper dating ads

Before eHarmony and Ashley Madison, there were words-only newspaper dating ads, resembling agate listings of losing baseball teams.

The Fresno Bee rolled out its version in the early 1990s. Time heals, so I stand now to offer the Bee public forgiveness for a misdeed.

I had been cajoled then into placing an ad by two married friends, insisting I’d become too painful to watch in becoming suddenly single after twenty years. I guess Sugar Pops and Pepsi for breakfast further eroded my moribund mojo.

So, I nudged my DWM out there along with slivers of G-rated hankerings that, if so charmed, could progress to a pay-per-listen phone message.

I felt like both chum and chump. With several popes’ worth of monogamy under my belt, I weakly whispered a call for wise, witty and professional women with affinities for the Yankees and “off-beat” lectures. I intoned about the whereabouts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Though sounding as amorous as a shedding sloth, I experienced occasions for a catholicity of sin. There was the test of coffee, tea and woe-is-me; a taste of Friday Hot ‘n Now; golf as religious and spiritual obstacle course; and other Freudian tête-à-tête that fed my mind with endless replays of a favorite Allman Brothers’ tune, “Whipping Post.”

During this rapture, I also worked as the Bee’s religion reporter. This was the heyday of the Promise Keepers movement, Louis Farrakhan and scandalous televangelists. While I was meekly trying to set up something, I wondered about being set up.

Cancel the ad, I ordered. Immediately relieved, there followed a weekend of penitential repair for force-feeding spaghetti into a garbage disposal.

Then rang the phone. The Bee had screwed up. The dating ad was published again, past its cancellation.  

She’d seen me dripping wet, reporting from a soggy Martin Luther King Day parade. She was a marcher, who liked galleries, museums and the Yankees.

I activated my deflector shield of civility. Well, says I, to the sunny-voiced woman from Reedley, if you ever visit Fresno (lo, a biblically long 25 miles), do let me know and…

She called my bluff, concluding my dangling sentence by calendaring a Sunday lunch in a public place (my request).

She wore a green sweatshirt and a pulsing, peach-colored smile.  I could sense her warmth, as I deliberately walked past her sitting at the restaurant, pretending she wasn’t just about the mall’s only other sorry soul seeking a solution to solitary Sundays.

As I neared the down escalator -- I swear I was about to turn around – she left nothing to chance. No way, she said later, no way you were getting away that easy. I went through a lot expensive phone calls to catch up with you.

Thus, did the Bee’s mistake jump out from the page.

After she finished her pastrami, I suggested a short drive for a quick tour of the Bee news and press rooms. We could watch robots move tons of newsprint!

I told her to follow my white Toyota. I was driving a white Honda. Had her guessing.

I swear the redhead’s Ford pickup had a gun rack, along with a pox of dings, dents and a relentless fluid leak. 

She insisted she was a Mennonite pacifist and hinted I was dumber than an empty Pez dispenser when it came to knowing about sliding windows and pickups.

I recall little else beyond her inviting me to a second, equally unique date the next week at City Hall. There, as she snuggled a grandbaby, I watched the family celebrate her son-in-law’s police swearing in.

Some call the printed news a snapshot of history. Twenty years, roughly how long I was in the Bee’s trenches, and there were mistakes on both sides, So, boss types, no need to promise a “free” paid obituary to set things straight, although it would be a kick to have.

We’ll chalk it up to it just desserts as we celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. When you’re married to the news profession sometimes it will marry you, even by mistake.

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

The Clout of One-Word Commercials

For TV ads, it tilted toward tedium, but I think #Volkswagen has given its scandal-ridden reputation a respectable nudge back into the marketplace with commercials hinging on a single word. Really. Check this out.

The impact reminded me of a #Geico insurance commercial, done in Civil War daguerreotype style, in which Mary Lincoln asks Honest Abe how attractive she looks in 1860s dress. From innocuous to memorable. Here’s a reminder.

But the all-time champ of to-the-point remarks remains Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe’s reply to the German demand for surrender at the Battle of the Bulge. Here’s a recollection from the US Army website.

John G. Taylor is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

The Navy's vital, aging "bus"

Our seats faced backward, adding disorientation atop dread.  We were buckled into what proved to be a reliable rattling relic. The C-2 Greyhound ferried us sweating rookies from Coronado Naval Air Station to the floating high-tech projection of power called the USS Abraham Lincoln.

It was like riding a reeking dinosaur to a tightly orchestrated yet lurching dance floor of jet landings and launches.

The memories of 2011 were revived last Thanksgiving after hearing a similar C-2 Greyhound had crashed near Japan while delivering 11 passengers to the USS Ronald Reagan. Eight survivors, three missing and presumed dead.

The C-2 Greyhound is a workhorse, designed 50 years ago and in the air ever since in some form, with phaseout not beginning until 2020. Hard to imagine the Navy doing business without this bus.

Without doubt, the most white-knuckle moments in my two-day Lincoln visit were my C-2 flights and watching nighttime shipboard landings.

Mortal peril is a close companion to military service. Nothing can be taken lightly, one Lincoln sailor told me, any mistake or bad break and you’re done. I’d signed my permissions, waivers and a farewell note.

The Japan accident spurred me to track down a blog I wrote for Fresno’s Community Medical Centers, my employer during the Navy trip. Here’s what I wrote on the C-2 shuttle experience, and condolences to families in the recent crash.

“Layered like a mummy. Tucked into darkness. Awash in fumes of fuel and gusts of heated air.

“Welcome to the belly of a C-2 Greyhound -- you've been fed to the COD --"carrier on board delivery." You and 14 others are today's special meal, part of the Navy's Distinguished Visitors program, in this case social media writers, photographers, thought leaders who been invited to overnight aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

“But as the twin-engine COD lifts off from Naval Air Station North Island, Coronado, you are only socializing with yourself, your anxiety heightened and your excitement tempered having just heard news of the deaths of Navy SEALs and other American personnel in Afghanistan.

“When F/18s and other aircraft descend onto a carrier, it's often called a "controlled crash," as they measure angles at high speeds and aim their tail-hooks for one of four wires strung across the ship.

“But when your COD is trapped, it's called an "arrested landing," going from about 105 mph to zero in two seconds. And, a day later when they "cat" – catapult -- you off, you’ll be shot from zero to about 128 mph in three seconds.

“And you think of the 4,500 sailors, aviators and others you're going to eat and chat with, and marvel and watch and worry with as well, however briefly. Where does their day take them, how do they deal with separation, if there's something they want to world to know -- the Navy has imposed no limits, other than no flash photography during nighttime landing. Sure, it's a time-controlled snapshot but you want to be illuminating.

“And so, you sit there in the dark, waiting, as you've been warned, for the flight officers in the COD's belly to yell and wave their hands to alert you that the trap is imminent.

“In your horse collar, cranial, ear plugs, ear muffs, goggles and spin-buckle, four-strap seatbelt, you're sweating and maybe hyperventilating just a tad, as you head for the gentle violence of a landing atop 4.5 acres of sovereign U.S. territory about 90 nautical miles west of San Diego.”

The latest in a sad string of accidents involving the Seventh Fleet drew me to old photos and a souvenir badge purchased from the “Providers” VRC 30, the crew of my twin-propeller Greyhound flights.

Again, I could smell nauseating fuel, feel the carrier deck quiver as engines thunder through my ear mufflers and my knees seesaw. Again, I am sealed in a dank, muggy metal purgatory, compelled to re-experience scattered memories while hurtling toward “Apocalypse Now.” Eternity was real as the sweat trickling down my spine.

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

The strangers we hire, then ignore

We invite scarcely vetted visitors into our house to revive air conditioners, exterminate critters. Expectation: Do the job right, right away and go away.

Some of us detest needs we can’t self-satisfy and revile waiting for the likes of a plumber’s snake. And thus, we shortchange ourselves from being a partner in our own material repairs and personal growth.

During a recent relocation, I decided to seize every chance to ask over-the-fence questions of haulers, installers, Lowe’s hardware staff, and customer service reps at Fresno and Clovis utilities.

No scripted secret shopper here, I’d chat sports, weather and then descend into silences long enough to watch corn grow. The hobnobbing positively refreshed my rationale as to why, although moving six times in nearly 40 years, I stay planted in the same Fresno bull’s-eye.

For one thing, I’m persuaded customer service is no longer a YouTube loop about what happens when stupid whacks a golf ball while standing on thin ice.

My wisdom came from vendors in their 20s to 60s, almost all men, of diverse ethnicity. Several started with a script, mostly from heavy-hitter outfits like Comcast and AT&T.  Smaller shops were more focused on tackling a task rather than replying to “but, what-if”?  And I discovered that the only people gifted enough to either instantly fix or irretrievably break something were handymen impaled on their cell phones. No asking them anything.

Virtually all were happy to call Fresno home, though some were surrendering hopes of snaring a decent home in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The visitors told of honor-winning children who were on track for college scholarships. They also shared frustrated shrugs for kids who behaved like junkyard dogs. At the doorstep, some would slip shoes into protective booties. Others stifled sneezes employing the bat-wing technique.

One claimed he’d fallen from a multi-story roof. Two blamed workplace injuries for lost jobs and pain relievers. Mideast veterans talked around and sometimes through their PTSD.

One man’s big dream: Opening a downtown Fresno coffee shop offering Christian speakers and computer repairs. A sales rep said daily job satisfaction was critical because she carried home all unresolved stresses. A utility worker anxiously awaited news of a corrections job.

I was stunned that a window repairman commuted weekly to a Fresno job from his Monterey home until he persuaded his wife to move to the Valley. He liked the community’s ethics and friendliness, something the Central Coast lost to the affordable housing shortage.

Fresno is already souring, other vendors remarked. The same San Francisco and Los Angeles investments that are fueling steady work are fattening the ranks of obnoxious customers.

Not all vendors were civilized. One Monday dawned with a visitor’s eyes shot full of red, ill will and bad intent. Two evaluators should consider the role of Fagin in any Oliver Twist remake.

More often, we crossed paths with ethical home inspectors and Realtors, making a new friend and imposing red circles around the toxins.

Other rewards included tapping handymen for techniques and tricks to avoid bonehead troubles. And, especially, the encounters with phone/online reps who were lubricated with courtesy and occasionally heroic in problem-solving, while sharing a rich stew of “still-checking,” time-killing exchanges about Chinese family relationships, how aliens are watching and why Hershey, PA has lost its mystique.

Fact is, nobody wants strangers eyeballing their home or pawing possessions. But investing your time may address that anxiety. So, inspect the ID and invoice, but also consider reaching out to the stranger who’s trying to straighten your cockeyed world.

Consider the immortal Ferris Bueller: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

(Also published as an op-ed in the Oct. 28, 2017 edition of The Fresno Bee.)

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.