August 21,
2026, Friday morning
Good morning!
It’s the first day of my 76th year. The last day of the 75th was great fun: two tables of bridge with good friends, a little painting, and then an excellent dinner with my beloved spouse at a restaurant we hadn’t tried before. So a good way to end a year!
* * *
I’ll lead this off with a few words on a topic that consumed me for four months: prostate cancer. Some of you had available to read my chronicle of events; if not, and you have some strange desire to do so, you can find Part 1 here:
http://www.onmymind.online/2026/04/adventures-in-health-care-1.html The links to Parts 2, 3, 4, and 5 are also there. (Part 1 is quite long; the following parts are much shorter.)
My advice to all of my male friends of a certain age (50+ years, or earlier if there are other risk factors or a family history) is to get an annual PSA test. If I had not been getting them, I would be writing this while prostate cancer is spreading to bones and lymph system (and I would not know it) or I might be receiving care that contains advanced cancer but does not cure it, or I could be beyond treatment.
My urologist told me that with the treatment regimens now available, they are able to treat even significantly metastatic prostate cancer (that has spread considerably in the body), but they cannot cure it, only contain and suppress it. Beyond a certain point, of course, no treatment will save a guy. Fortunately, even though mine was metastatic, it was only barely so, and my urologist is using the word “cure” in my case. Had I not been getting a PSA test, however, the outcome would have been less positive.
It used to be that because of the high false positive rate of PSA tests, the consequent biopsy was unnecessary (either because there was no cancer or the cancer was so slow growing that you’d die from some other cause before the cancer became deadly). I’m told that as a result of the false positives and the ensuing risks, some physicians have been reluctant to recommend PSA tests. Some also declined to do so on a cost-benefit basis (for the patient).
In the world today, that approach doesn’t make much sense to me. My local urologist told me that diagnostic techniques have improved markedly in recent years; before I had a biopsy, my Florida urologist required an MRI, and it was only after the MRI suggested strongly that there was cancer would he conduct a biopsy. I’m also told that the biopsy procedure itself is more sophisticated, more targeted, and the risks are much lower than they used to be.
One clarification I received from my urologist is that the risk of incontinence and impotence comes from the actual treatment for cancer, not from a biopsy. I had thought the biopsy posed the risks.
Prostate cancer happens to about 1 in 8 American males (1 in 6 for Black Americans). It seems to me that any guy choosing not to get an annual PSA test starting at age 50 is putting his life at unnecessary risk. Or, in other words, it’s just stupid not to.
* * *
As some of you may recall, in one recent story I wrote about how the children of my generation are uninterested in our stuff. (It’s here: http://www.onmymind.online/2026/04/115-kids-not-want-silver-and-china.html) Elliott responded.
Prior to, say, your parents' generation, or maybe the one before that, the vast majority of the people in the world tended not to have much stuff. Either because they were unable to afford it, there was no access to it, or both, among other things. So if you inherited anything from your parents, it was probably land or property and the handful of (likely farming) tools they owned. In many cases people probably just inherited the occupation as well.
It's only in more recent times that children almost universally move out into their own separate dwellings and can go out (or use the Internet) to buy everything they conceivably need. So when their parents go, most of the material possessions they stand to inherit are redundant. And we're now the fourth, give or take, generation to inherit a growing number of commercially available materials from our parents. It was inevitable that there would come a point where the volume of those things far exceeded the capacity of an average household. Especially now with fewer younger people owning homes, or at least large homes. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a mass dumping of old objects in the coming decades. Landfills and secondhand stores will be inundated.
The only point I’d make is that much of the “stuff” that I think should be passed on are those items that have some sentimental or heirloom value, not everyday crockery or pots and pans. But accumulations of family photos going back to the 19th century? Your great-grandparents’ irreplaceable china? A desk-size grandfather clock from the grandparents’ wedding in 1900? And so on. Few of our children live in such tiny abodes that they can’t keep, value, and look at or use these items. Of course, the yearning of this paragraph will fall on deaf younger ears ☹
* * *
Speaking of family photos, does anyone keep or value photo albums anymore? Or do people store every image digitally? I am printing photos of Svea to put in an album. I made up a large wedding album for Elliott and Martha. I have about 40 albums of family photos going back to the 1890s and up to the 2000s. I also have five oversized albums of hundreds of photos from when the family spent five months in Edinburgh in 2006. I would like to believe that Svea will enjoy looking at these albums with her dad when she’s old enough to understand them. I may be delusional.
Legacybox . com is an MPR sponsor; its message is that it converts old photos and material to a digital format so that it can be viewed “for generations to come.” Sure. That’s only if one trusts that the material is regularly transferred to the newest version of digital viewing (e.g., not floppy disks, not CDs, now thumb drives—but what about the next iteration?). One solution I’ve heard is to put them in the cloud, but who knows how well that will continue to work, how long it will function, and how much it would cost to save gigabytes of data (I believe that beyond a minimum point, cloud storage incurs a monthly charge).
Photos, on the other hand, will stay the same forever if they are carefully stored and saved, such as in albums on bookcases in rooms not subject to temperature and humidity extremes. It is certainly a good idea to make digital copies of family photos and records, but in my case that would cost a fortune and I’d have to disassemble all those albums because the photos are all behind acid-free plastic sheet covers. I just have to hope wherever they are kept over the years doesn’t burn down.
You can count me as a curmudgeonly Luddite when it comes to family photos (or any valued photos, such as those gorgeous pictures one of my classmates takes and posts on Facebook from time to time). But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
* * *
This story is for my hometown friends and those who may
have participated in graduation ceremonies or other events in Northrop
Auditorium on the University of Minnesota campus. For those of you not familiar
with the campus, Northrop Auditorium sits at the head of the University’s mall
and by most measures is the iconic building of the institution.
Kathy and I took a tour of the Northrop Auditorium pipe
organ a few nights ago. Although I’ve listened to classical music for over 50
years, organ music has been one oeuvre I could take or leave. At the same time,
I regularly listen to “Pipedreams” on Minnesota Public Radio, two hours devoted
to exploring pipe organ music, because the host, Michael Barone, is entrancing,
and I’ve come to appreciate organ music far more than I would have otherwise.
Wow. I had no idea how a pipe organ with 7,000 pipes is
housed. Here is the interior of the large auditorium, from the back, facing the
stage and the arch, as it appears to someone attending an event.
Sitting
in the audience, you would never know it, but those vertical strips above the
arch are fabric. I’ve been in the auditorium several times in recent years and had
no idea; they look like a plaster wall. Behind the fabric, the full width of
the auditorium, sit the 7,000 pipes of the organ. The tour took us up behind
the fabric (up a *lot* of flights of stairs) and the guide showed us all the
pipes. There are rows and rows of small to medium pipes (some as small as a
pencil) and big pipes on the ends (the largest is 32 feet tall).
Here’s a photo taken when the lights are
on to tune/clean the pipes:
The organ console rises up
on a platform in the center of the stage in front of the curtain:
Kathy
took some pictures while we were on the tour. One section of the smaller pipes:
Some different sized pipes:
Some of the larger pipes:
Standing behind the fabric, on the walkway
in front of the 7,000 pipes:
(On the left you can see the rows and rows
of pipes; the organist can also open and close the louvers from the console to
control the sound level. On the right is the fiber curving above the arch. In
the center is me with my hand on the railing. The thought crossed my mind that
if someone jumped the railing into what appears to be a wall, they would go
right through the fabric and plunge to the stage floor, likely DOA.) I had no
idea there was such a thing as fabric that does not dilute sound, but that’s
what he told us it is.
It is the third-largest concert-hall organ in the country
and was installed between 1932 and 1936. It fell into disrepair in later years,
and when the auditorium was completely remodeled in 2012, somebody had the
foresight to carefully dismantle the organ. It was stored for several years
after the remodeling because the University didn’t have the money (several
million dollars) to reinstall it. Finally, six years after the remodeling was
completed, the organ was reinstalled thanks to a significant donation from a physician
who was a fan of the organ. Our tour guide said in a way it was a gift that no
one tried to repair it over the years, because all the pipes, except for being
a little rusty, were in perfect condition; it is a rarity that organs of this
age (or older) are preserved as originally installed. The pipes, once cleaned, now
function perfectly.
What
we weren’t told, and didn’t think to ask, was how pressing a key on the console
leads to the pipes making a sound.
At the end of the tour, the organist (who did not give the tour up to the insides) talked for awhile with us. He closed out the event by playing the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Bach, which everyone from my parents’ generation and later knows because it is the first piece in Fantasia.
Enjoy the rest of your summer! We intend to.
Gary
