January 26, 1989
Dear Everyone:
Well, the Go! (where?) 49ers won their game in the last something seconds. I had the TV turned on while I puttered around the kitchen and cleaned up my household files. I didn’t actually see Taylor make his historic catch, but the network kindly replayed it for me. In my opinion, he wasn’t jumping for joy; he was simply trying to break his momentum before he smashed into a bunch of spectators, thus setting himself up for a lawsuit. One can’t be too careful these days.
If I wasn’t actually WATCHING this world-stopping confrontation, I WAS listening to it. As I was setting up my 1989 files, I distinctly heard the commentator say: “Rice set the table and Taylor made the home run!”
Now, these guys are professionals. If THEY can’t tell the difference between football, baseball and table-setting, how can I be expected to keep them straight? At least I know on which side of the plate to place the fork(s).
They held a parade to welcome the 49ers back to San Francisco Monday afternoon. I was one of the some 300,000 people who attended by the simple virtue of it taking place directly outside my office building. I spotted Coach Walsh. Easy – he was the one at the front waving a big silver trophy. I guessed that the guy next to him was the owner. But someone had to tell me the next day that the third man in the car was the mayor of San Francisco.
Since Montana is the only football player that I can recognize (what can I say? He’s the only one who looks like Barry Manilow), there wasn’t much point in staying after that. On the other hand, there wasn’t much point in leaving either; the whole thing lasted about 5 minutes, tops. Then everyone went back home or office.
Note: A 40-story building can produce a LOT of parade-watchers who, after the parade, all want to take the elevators back up to their floors at the same time. I felt sorry for the security guards; there was no way that they could check all those people for badges. No one blew up the building, so I guess it was OK.
In other news…
“Jeannie” and I went to see Michael Feinstein in Concert Saturday night. He sings Oldies-but-Goodies. Or, as he put it, even when he sings new songs, they sound old. Lots of Gershwin, Porter and Irving Berlin. I think I recognized more than “Jeannie” did; although I only saw her nod off once.
She’s very excited about moving up to Oregon. When I arrived Saturday night to pick her up, she was already packing! She presented me with a box of books that she didn’t intend to pay to ship. Very thoughtful until you realize that they were all my books that she had snuck off with when I moved last year.
However, she HAS said that I can have her rolltop desk. I’m already planning what to keep in which drawers. We just have to figure out a way to get it from her place (on the SECOND floor) to mine.
The Learning Center:
Last week I watched a video called The One-Minute Manager which turned out to have nothing to do with time management but rather with management style.
This week I saw an Englishman talking about The Importance of Mistakes. His illustration was a sort of bedtime story about a guided missile named Gordon. Gordon keeps asking if he’s on target and keeps getting messages like “No, Gordy, you’re not quite on target. But if you raise up a little and veer right a little, you’ll make it.” Eventually, Gordy finds his target and blows it (and, incidentally himself) to bits.
The moral of the story is that it’s OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them and don’t let them get too big before you move to correct them. By taking the risk of making mistakes and using them, instead of hiding them, you, too, can blow yourself to bits.
He said that in government, Americans make mistakes usually called Something-Gate, while in Britain all the really GOOD jokes are kept hidden by the Official Secrets Act.
The computer keeps going down. More news later.
Love, as always,
Pete
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