Spring
photos by Fran Yates, collage by Reina Lopez
Spring 2022
To go to the issue contents page (“What’s New”) CLICK HERE
Posted in A&I
NIT WIT NEWZ — September 2022
(Nit Wit Newz is an unauthorized, often unreliable, on-line news source designed to keep Manor residents abreast of the inconsequential, trifling, and superficial events that dramatically shape and inform our everyday lives here at Rogue Valley Manor.
MORNING BECOMES PROTECTIVE
Scene: The Office of the Rogue Valley Manor Executive Director.
Date: The present
In attendance: Executive Director (ED) of Rogue Valley Manor and Manager of the Work-Order Desk (MOWOD) at RVM.
(MOWOD excitedly enters the office) We did it! We did it!
(ED) Well, you look pretty pleased about something.
(MOWOD) Indeed, I am. And you will be, too. Do you remember the work order you sent to us several months ago about the turkeys and the problem they’re causing on campus?
(ED) Oh, sure, I remember. We reached out to everyone we could think of for help. Yeah, we tried nets, snares, cages, even cut-out cardboard coyotes—nothing has worked.
(MOWOD) Until now.
(ED) You mean…
(MOWOD) Yep.
(ED) Holy mackerel, tell me.
(MOWOD) Well, we decided to tap into the extraordinary intellectual resource we have here at RVM.
(ED) And what would that be?
(MOWOD) The minds of our residents. We’ve got some brilliant people up here with years of experience in all sorts of fields of study. So I got a few of them together and discussed the turkey proliferation problem that you outlined in your work order.
(ED) O.K., I’m listening.
(MOWOD) Our team is made up of four residents: M.T. Bowles, he’s a specialist in animal nutrition; a brilliant pharmaceutical chemist, Tess Toob; Les Noyes, he’s a national renowned acoustical engineer; and Abel Craftsman, he can put together anything.
(ED) So, what did this team come up with?
(MOWOD) Our first step was to see if Mr. Bowles, our animal nutritionist, could develop a highly palatable poultry food that was not only tasty but fully filling as well. It took a while, but, viola! He did just that. Clinical studies have shown that turkeys empty M.T. Bowles’s bowls every time one’s put in front of them.
(ED) Seems like an odd direction to take to solve our wild turkey problem, but go on.
(MOWOD) Of course, we didn’t want to spread Mr. Bowles’s turkey feed willy-nilly all over the campus where other birds and animals could get at it, so we had Abel— our can-do-anything guy— put together a unique dispenser that would be placed below the trees in the “south forty,” you know, where the turkeys spend the night. Take a look, here’s a rendering of Abel’s feeding device.
(ED) Hmm, it looks like a very large office water cooler only with a trough at the bottom where, I guess, the turkeys can get at the food. But what’s to keep, the other birds and small animals around here from inviting themselves to chow down out of the same trough at our expense?
(MOWOD) Ah! That’s where the combined geniuses of our sound engineer, Les Noyes and our dispenser guy, Abel, come in. Get this: They fashioned this feeder so that it metes out a carefully measured single-serving portion of food only when it is triggered by the sound of a gobble. It’s voice activated. A mourning dove’s coo, a crow’s caw, a squirrel’s squeak will not budge the device—only the gobble sound of a turkey will do it.
(ED) This is getting weird. So, we’ve got a highly palatable, turkey breakfast food that’s dispensed out of a water cooler sitting in our park that only turkeys can access. How in the world does this solve our wild turkey proliferation problem?
(MOWOD) Patience, patience. Enter our pharmaceutical chemist, Tess Toob. While her three compatriots were working out the dispensing of this highly palatable poultry food, in her lab, Ms. Toob was tasked with developing an ECP in a dosage suitable for turkeys.
(ED) Hold it, hold it. ECP? What the heck’s an ECP?
(MOWOD) ECP stands for “emergency contraception pill.”
(ED) What?
(MOWOD) You know—the morning-after pill.
(ED) Holy feathers, I think your group may have gone off the rails.
(MOWOD) Stay with me—it all comes together. The medication, of course, is granulated into the poultry food. They get a dose of their ECP each morning out of the dispenser no matter what was going on the night before. Hey, we’re talking Fruit Loops for turkeys here. They gobble it up. And get this: it’s so rich in nutrients and flavor, they’re not hungry until the next morning. This plan is turkey-friendly. No more roaming Manor streets, sidewalks and our lawns all day trying to scratch out a decent meal and— I might add— leaving their bothersome untidiness behind on our streets and sidewalks. It’s all very simple—no more litters; no more litter.
(ED) That would be a blessing.
(MOWOD) Exactly. This is great news for Manorites as well as Manor turkeydom. After breakfast, they can snooze and roost all day under the shade of their bedroom trees living out their lives in blissful lollygagging without having to find food to eat or having little ones to fret about. And, yes, a couple of seasons down the road as nature’s attrition rate unfolds, our “turkey proliferation problem” has quietly and humanely solved itself. This plan, you might say, is— deceptively simple, but exquisitely perfect.
(ED) By golly, I think you and your team of brainiacs may have come up with a solution to our turkey peril.
(MOWOD) We take pride in our job here at the work-order desk, Mr. Director.
(ED) As well you should. But, hold it. You got me thinking—that group of yours, I wonder if they could solve this other problem we’re having?
(MOWOD) Mr. Director, I must remind you that before we can initiate any action, we require a completed work order form, or a detailed message recorded on our phone line.
(ED) Oh sure, sure (picking up his phone) what’s that number?
(WOMOD) #7231.
(ED) Let’see, 7-2-3-1. Hello, this is the Executive Director I’d like to open a work order. We need help, big time. Please ask Bowles, Toob, Craftsman, and Noyes to meet with me in my office tomorrow at nine A.M. You can tell them we’ll be talking about staffing.
—A. Looney
Book Review: The Visiting Girl
a book review by Bonnie Tollefson
Visiting Girl Book Cover
Bonnie Tollefson
I do not care for the genre of historical fiction or for books about relationships, so I was a little cautious when this author asked me to read her book. However, Visiting Girl held my attention from the first page to the last.
Character, Lily Paxton is about to graduate from Bryn Mawr College in 1901. With all her focus having been on getting into college, what with her mother’s death and her Uncle’s attitude about education for women, Lily suddenly realizes that she has no idea what she wants to do once she has her degree. Her former roommate and best friend Caroline, has a suggestion and Lily becomes a visiting girl. She spends time visiting at the homes of different friends, helping where she can but always returning to Caroline’s.
After 18 months of this life, Lily suddenly disappears one day and it isn’t until 20 years later that Caroline suddenly gets a letter from Lily saying that she is ill and begging for a visit in Portland, Oregon. Caroline, now a widow, with grown children, makes the trip across the country by train and starts spending time with Lily. During their talks, secrets long held start to emerge and life will never be the same for anyone. The book is meticulously researched and many issues of the time are discussed without losing the fictional story’s thread. This is an all around first class effort by a very good author who happens to be an RVM resident. I would encourage others to read it even if they are not fans of historical fiction.
The book is available from the RVM Library.
To go to the issue contents page (“What’s New”) CLICK HERE
Resident Art Show
by Eleanor Lippman
Residents Art Show
Now in the Sunrise Room at the Terrace
Don’t miss the works of your favorite artists/friends!
Hill Topics has a complete article on page 4 in the April Edition
by Julie Mahoney
by Joni Johnson
by Lynne Bonetti
by Diane Chase
To go to the issue contents page (“What’s New”) CLICK HERE
Anita Sumariwalla’s Paintings
text by Anita Sumariwalla, photos by Reina Lopez, edited by Connie Kent
My mother was very religious, and our home was filled with prints of religious paintings by Holbein, Raphael, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, and Fra Angelico, but I soon lost interest in them. My favorite memories go far back in time visiting art museums, when I still too young to read the labels. I knew immediately which paintings I did not like. I never cared for Rubens’ frolicking obese women, or some gruesome scenes by El Greco. The Pre-Raphaelite and other Romantic paintings left me bored. I didn’t know what to do with Picasso’s abstract paintings. The Impressionists were so much praised that I got tired of them. I know this sounds very arrogant and most ignorant! Only later was I able to relate to colors, compositions, harmonies, and moods — to really appreciate the works of art.
After I was married to Russy, we visited art museums wherever we were. I became fascinated by Russian and Greek-Orthodox icons. The rich deep-golden background enhanced the somber colors of the figures, and one could sense the deep devotion and adoration by the artist. But I couldn’t understand the bleak expressions of Mary. In my mind, Mary would not look so severe. So I tried to paint her myself. The pictures here are my versions, the ones I painted after being inspired by the masters.
During the years we lived in Mill Valley, CA, while I was teaching, I painted during weekends. Someone asked me to submit one of my paintings to the annual Mill Valley Arts Festival. To my amazement and surprise, the local newspaper selected my painting to photograph and publish along with an article about the Arts Festival.
After visiting a special exhibition for Paul Gauguin’s works of art at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, I was totally mesmerized by his brilliant colors. I went through a long phase with Gauguin’s paintings. I bought books of his life and art. Bright original-design printed sarongs against the sun-kissed bronze skins of native Haitians were intoxicating for me. I knew I had to attempt to capture something like it on my canvas. I left out whatever I didn’t like, or I rearranged some figures. The beauty of painting your own version is the freedom of doing whatever you like.
My very last painting, I did with my fingers because all my paint brushes were already packed for another move, this time from the Plaza to the Terrace. On moving day the painting was still wet, so I carried it by hand from one building to the other, where we secured it in a frame and hung it up on a wall to dry! 
There are still times I wish I could paint but my control of fingers and hands have deteriorated…
Nit Wit Newz — March
(Nit WIT Newz is an unauthorized, often unreliable, on-line news source designed to keep Manor residents abreast of the inconsequential, trifling, and superficial events that dramatically shape and inform our everyday lives here at Rogue Valley Manor.)
MANORITES NIX MILLION DOLLAR OFFER. PUSHBACK IN OFFING?
A wave of suspicious phone calls has flooded Manor phone lines in recent weeks. An unidentified caller advised residents that they were winners of a huge cash prize. Alarmed and concerned, suspecting RVM residents have spurned the offer and immediately alerted fellow residents. Unexpectedly, a call came into Nit Wit Newz’s headquarters last Monday from that “unidentified caller.” He identified himself as Demetrius Seaver.
What follows is a transcript of that phone call.
NWN: Thank you for calling in to us today, Mr. Seaver. But before we begin, may we call you, Demetrius?
DS: Yeah, that’s O.K., but it’s too long. Most of my friends just use my first initial, D.
NWN: Fine D. Now please tell us what prompted your call to Nit Wit Newz?.
DS: Look, I’m still burning over the shabby treatment I received from the residents at that senior community of yours and I wanted those people to know about it. I thought you could help me out.
NWN: Well, we are, indeed, an established Rogue Valley Manor news platform, so I think you came to the right place. But we’re sorry to learn of your displeasure with some of our residents. Now, as we understand it, you were contacting residents here at RVM and making available to them a financial offer of some consequence, but you claim your offer fell entirely on deaf ears. What can you tell us about that?
DS: Listen, I’m a certified financial opportunist. I make my living seeking out rewarding propositions in the financial world and then matching individuals that would most likely benefit from investing in those offers. Full disclosure: I should mention that a small finder’s fee is, of course, included in every transaction. Anyway, when I heard that there was such a thing as a rogue’s gallery manor, I figured this would be fertile ground for…
NWN: No, no, Mr. D, its Rogue Valley Manor. Rogue Valley Manor is a place, a senior community, not a collection of reprobates.
DS: Really? Hmm, that’s too bad. Well, no matter. This opportunity from Publishers Cleaning Your House Sweepstakes appeals to everyone…
NWN: Excuse me, sir, don’t you mean Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes?
DS: Yeah, maybe so, anyway, it was one of those publishing outfits. Look, in this particular situation, I was letting residents know that they could win $5,000 a week for the rest of their lives. All they had to do is post a modest up-front fee of $900 to become eligible for this marvelous lifetime pay-off. Pretty darned tempting, wouldn’t you say?
NWN: Well I think it…
DS: Get this, I’d planned to call and make that offer available to each one of those Manor people. It’s so good, I thought they’d be jumping at my offer, but you know what? On my first call, the lady I spoke to heard me out alright, but then said “no thanks.” I didn’t like to hear that, but that was O.K. with me; I didn’t really expect 100% participation. People don’t always recognize a fantastic deal when they hear one. So, a few minutes later, after reviewing my sales pitch to make sure I was using all of my key selling points, I dialed a second resident and before I could say that I was from Publishers Cle…, he hung up on me. Imagine! How would he know what I was going to say? It gets worse; this same abrupt cut-off happened to me call after call. They’d slam down the receiver before I got into my pitch.
NWN: It sounds as if our residents might be suspicious of your “tempting” offer. Maybe they thought it was too good to be true.
DS: No, no—how could they possibly think that when they hadn’t even heard what I had to say? But they sure kissed big opportunities good bye. Heck, after the sweepstakes, I was going to cut those rogue people into “Bunco Bingo,” “Power Ponzi for Profits”, and the roll out of my new crypto-money laundering exchange, “Two-Bitcoin Currency”—they could’ve been on the ground floor on that one. But it’s that alert system they have up there that’s ruining my business. It’s making all those people think I’m some sort of con artist or something even before they hear my pitch.
NWN: That alert system you’re talking about is an internal email network. It’s called the “RVM list.”
DS: I don’t care what they call it. You’ve got a group of people up there preventing me from practicing my profession. I call that collusion. And I want them to know I won’t stand for it.
NWN: Well, D., people don’t have to buy into your propositions. They don’t even have to accept your phone calls. Maybe if you came up with a more plausible financial opportunity they’d be more receptive. I’m afraid you mistook our community for a group of fools. We here at Nit Wit Newz aren’t in the advice-giving business, but maybe you’d have better luck if you apologized to our residents, we’d be happy to publish an apology if…
DS: Apology? You mean confess to a wrong doing? No way! Hey, I’d be giving grifting a bad name. Look, nit wit, you’re no help at all—to heck with you. There must be another newspaper up there. How ‘bout that Bits and Fleeces paper? They’ll be …
NWN: That’s Bits and Pieces.
DS: Yeah, that’s them. See ya. (Dial tone)
—A.Looney
The World Ten Years From Now
a book review by Connie Kent
Guillén, Mauro F. 2030. St. Martins, 2020. Available at the RVM library
The world as we know it is changing. Guillén makes a compelling case that many of the rules we learned in order to succeed in the world will no longer be appropriate by 2030. During the seven years before the book was published in 2020, Guillen gathered information and projected trends to see what our world might be like in ten short years.
No longer will babies be plentiful; there will be more grandparents than grandchildren, and retirees will outnumber workers. The middle class in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the middle class in the US and Europe combined. Non-Western consumers will drive the global economy. Women will own more of the wealth of the world than men. Cities will grow, exacerbating inequality and pollution, inching us closer to potentially catastrophic social and climate crises.
We are seeing technology disrupt the status quo by changing the concept of products (cellphones are replacing telephones); the way products are made (a robot can displace five or six workers); how it is sold (think Amazon); who uses the products (1.5 billion people in the world own or share a cellphone but must relieve themselves in the open or go to a shared outhouse); and how people interact with each other (think of FaceTime and Zoom meetings).
Artificial Intelligence, Guillén claims, will bring about epochal change. 
As an example, truck drivers constitute the largest occupational group in twenty-nine of our fifty states. They are at risk of losing their jobs as a result of autonomous vehicle technology. Another example: surgeons are beginning to use robots to assist with delicate operations.
Most intriguing to me is the potential impact of what’s called “blockchaining.” The technology began with crypto currencies. But its potential applications include government services, intellectual property, trade transactions, counterfeit regulation, gun control, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection.
In a postscript, Guillén speculates that Covid-19 will accelerate such trends as declining fertility and use of technology. In order to survive 2030, we must challenge received wisdom, rather than honoring inherited assumptions and ways of thinking. We will not survive the changes unless we challenge our traditional mindset.
Guillén, Mauro F. 2030. St. Martins, 2020. In RVM library
March Library Display
by Anne Newins
March Sports
This month we are featuring books about sports. All types of sports: swimming, football, basketball, skiing, the Olympics, tennis, cave diving, golf, mountaineering, fishing, and more. Even if you are not already a sports fan, you still might check out the display since it offers a variety of genres, including biographies, histories, mysteries, cozies, and thrillers.
Many of the books are written by best selling authors, including John Grisham, Douglas Preston, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and Walter Mosley. A popular mystery series about a fly fishing guide is authored by Keith McCafferty. Each of the books is named after a type of fishing fly, for example, The Royal Wulff Murders.
Why We Swim, by Bonnie Tsui, might appeal to Manor swimmers. According to New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer, it “combines fascinating reporting about some of the world’s most remarkable swimmers with delightful meditations about what it means for us naked apes to leap in the water for no apparent reason.”
Note: None of the books are instructional manuals—our Wellness Team can provide you with their expertise.
Book Review: Life Along the Applegate Trail
a book review by Cathy Fitzpatrick
Cathy Fitzpatrick
Everyone has experienced a good road trip. Planning for accommodations, meals and restroom breaks can be challenging but did you ever dream of how difficult the same trip would be in a covered wagon? Horsepower from actual horses! Author Linda Lochard did just that and wrote a book about it.
Applegate Trail Book Cover
Her first novel, Life Along the Applegate Trail: A Tale of Grit and Determination, may have taken her twenty five years to write, but once you meet the men, women and children looking for a better life in the Oregon territory, you’ll find you’re in a race to finish it.
Linda and I discussed the trip, the book and family over lunch recently.
Linda, who now lives in Medford, was the director of tourism at the Visitor and Convention Bureau in Grants Pass. In 1993, as part of a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail, she rode a covered wagon into town, in a sort of parade. She fell in love instantly with the feel, the sounds and smells of being in and near the wagons and horses. When she learned of a reenactment of The Applegate Trail scheduled for 1996, she signed on to participate. Three years of training and learning everything she could about wagon trains were worth the effort. She joined the train for 31 days of the 51 day trip. The Applegate Trail was an alternate route of the Oregon Trail that some pioneers used. Much of the Applegate trail is where you find Interstate highway 5 now. She wore period clothing, walked and rode 3 miles an hour during long days, ate from the chuck wagon, and slept in a tent. Although far less uncertain than the 1847-48 emigration, the reenactment held its own concerns over the animals, meals, cleanliness and safety.
When she finished her trip, exhausted, she was determined to write a book about the experience. However, life got in the way and she kept getting distracted. In 2020, at the beginning of Covid, she was determined to finish it. Readers now get to follow Questa and Chase, who meet on the trail, fall in love and plan a life in the territory. It’s a wonderful historical fiction romance novel set in the Old West.
Life Along the Applegate Trail is available in the Rogue Valley Manor library.
Applegate Trail
A Profile of Author Daniel Mason
by Anne Newins
Anne Newins
One of the pleasures of volunteering in the RVM library is the opportunity to discover new authors. About six months ago, I encountered Daniel Mason and quickly became entranced by his writing. The New York Times Magazine states that Mason “has quietly emerged as one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction.”
Mason’s background is almost as interesting as his writing. After graduating from Harvard, he spent a year studying malaria around Thailand and Myanmar. This experience informed his first novel, The Piano Tuner, which was published by the time he was 26 years old and then turned into an opera. He attended medical school at the University of California San Francisco, eventually becoming a psychiatrist. He now is on the faculty of Stanford University, both teaching and practicing medicine.
Not an especially prolific writer, Mason’s complex fiction cannot be easily defined. Most of his writing to date has accurate historical components. His descriptions of the natural world are both precise and poetic. He incorporates vivid and occasionally appalling, descriptions of early medical practices. Asked how being a psychiatrist relates to his writing, Mason stated in an interview with ZYZZYVA, that “If there is a connection, I think it is this sense that human beings are mysteries. Since I was young, human beings have always been puzzling to me. If anything, this interest drove me to both fields.”
Below are synopses of three of his books:
The Piano Tuner (2002) is the journey of a middle-aged piano tuner summoned from England to tune an English army surgeon’s Erard grand piano in the jungles of Burma. Taking place in 1886, the British Empire is attempting to quell native insurgencies and repel French incursions in the Mekong Delta. Although not perfect, this was a powerful first novel. Fellow author Andrea Barrett praised “his ability to embrace history, politics, nature and medicine within a fully imagined 19th-century fictional world.”
The Winter Soldier tells of a Viennese medical student, Lucius. “Resentful of hierarchy, impatient for his training to come to an end,” Lucius joins the army when World War I begins. To his surprise, he is sent to a field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains, where he is the only physician, depending on a mysterious nursing sister to help when the multitudes of injured soldiers arrive. Having never held a scalpel, it is left to Sister Margarete to teach him field surgery. Lucius’s story is contained within the tides of war, as well a tale of love and atonement. As in The Piano Tuner, the historical detail will be appreciated by those unfamiliar with these particular events in history.
A Registry of My Passage on the Earth (2020) is the title of one of nine of highly varied short stories. Each of the tales has some seed of historical fact, but they go grow into wildly different creations. The characters include naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, pugilists, a women balloonist, telegraph operators, an amnesic, and more. All are chronicles of exploration, internal and external. My favorite was The Miraculous Discovery of Psammtetichus I, a darkly humorous yarn of an Egyptian pharaoh’s efforts to develop scientific methods. The collection was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won several other prizes.
The Winter Solder and A Registry of My Passage on the Earth now are available at the Manor library. The Piano Tuner will be added to the collection in late February. All of Mason’s books are held at the county library in various formats.