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

We continue to screw up two of our most powerful words: thank you. Give a simple “thank you” to a cashier. If you get a response, it’s: “No problem … Sure ... Who’s next?”

The airing of “You’re welcome” makes you gasp. And “It’s been my pleasure” transports you to Downton Abbey.

We’re nearly as lousy with “I’m sorry.”

Apart from politics, we’ve fallen so far in the art of civility that it’s costing money and prompting action. Nearly every industry is attempting to hardwire customer service – aka, common courtesy -- into its employees.

Hospital attorneys are even coaxing some administrators and doctors into injecting “I’m sorry for our errors” into oral and written explanations to patients and their families irrespective of lawsuits that often attend medical mistakes.

Most of us are forgiving folks. Just don’t spit in our faces if you’ve accidentally jammed a door into us. “What can I do to make it right” goes a long way in affirming good will, especially if it can be made real – a complimentary meal, a write off of charges.

Doing the honorable thing has become such a surprise that I can easily recall three personal examples.

A jammed bathroom pocket door had trapped a granddaughter during a visit. She was in tears by the time we extricated her. We hired a carpenter and were satisfied with the outcome of his hours of work. He shook his head. Don’t give me your money, he said. It doesn’t pass my muster.

Wow.

News reporters and editors often don’t see eye to eye. During my decades in the newspaper business, the office atmosphere was “condemn in public and praise in private.”

I once cautioned a Fresno Bee editor about a story I was covering on a Saturday night. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was scheduled to speak. He was regularly in the national spotlight, frequently criticized for anti-Semitic comments. He would talk for hours – loading his most contentious remarks in his final 90 minutes. I’d listened to numerous speeches and knew the arc of his oratory. This won’t work within regular deadlines, I said.

Deadlines are deadlines, the editor told me. We’ll publish what we can in the Sunday paper and trust that will be enough.

As usual, reality snickered at benchmarks.

Local television and radio had captured the midnight hour rhetoric, commanding the Sunday airwaves. Community leaders were outraged that their newspaper of record contained nary a word. And my byline was attached to a story that chronicled only the eloquent calm before the vitriolic storm.

The next day my editor sought me out. I blew it, he said. You were right and I should have figured something out. I’m sorry. Will you please write a follow-up story and make it right with the readers?

Wow. Never heard such self-effacing comments from an editor before or since.

Lastly, some expressions of honesty crack the mold. I was 30, living in Wisconsin when my mother died suddenly in the New York City area. During her wake, her physician – who’d taken care of me as a child back in the days when doctors made house calls – pulled me aside.

I’m shocked and sorry, he said. I should have better monitored the potassium levels for her heart. As I struggled to react, he shook his head and then my hand, and walked away. It was the last time I would ever see him.

As I near the age at which my mother died, I’m still astonished and refreshed by his “out of nowhere” candor and caring.

I’m a tad late. Thank you, doctor.

(Also published as an op-ed in the Aug. 27, 2016 edition of The Fresno Bee)

The Inhaler as God

The martial arts of common courtesy