tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-328671852024-03-12T19:17:16.543-07:00Pedaling SquaresViews on life from the right side of the road.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-43241786319156595652015-12-23T22:01:00.001-08:002016-12-24T13:46:43.575-08:00The Tongues of Men and Angels<div dir="ltr">
I am a rather unkempt Christian. I grew up attending services at a local Congregational church, learning my verses and slowly losing trust in all the rituals of religion. College pretty much flushed whatever faith I had left and turned me into a full on agnostic, who, while having none of the answers was pretty sure I was right that this was it and nothing more. This is why I do get some of my atheist acquaintances who twist in the wind at Christmas time and bring to bear all the intelligent, rational arguments. Really. Angels? Stars? Wise men? Retelling Mithraic reincarnation myths in the framework of the winter solstice? You know the Romans hijacked every religion they came in to contact with in order to maintain the peace. Miracles, fairytales, Crusades, the Spansih Inquisition, tent revivals, creationism, no choice, stupid, ignernt, redneck, Ted Cruz. Let us not forget water into wine, which is always good for a few laughs. And I am sure I have left something out. </div>
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<br />
All of that disdain and ridicule is enough to make any reasonable believer scuttle away and question God, the universe, Jesus, you name it. And I consider myself a rational, relatively intelligent person. But my road to Damascus led through my dying husband's hospital room, and his dark gaze focused into the distance, seeing . . . something, a flash of light, a sense of recognition. Then, eyes drifting closed, forever. A voice said, as clearly as if it was whispered in my ear "I am here". And so it was that I began to find my way back to my faith, a witness to things that I have seen and may yet be revealed, even to tired, cynical, old me. Every day, a fragment of truth, a shred of understanding, a step closer to going home. I don't defend my faith, I can't mount an apologia, because I am not really sure what to defend. It just is. </div>
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<br />
So here we are at Christmas, the solstice, the dark time of the year. And the story is told again of an itinerant couple, she heavily pregnant, in a city where every door is closed to them except the gate to a stable, filthy with manure, straw and animals. She turns and twists in her agony, spilling forth in a wave of blood and fluid a baby, howling against the night. The most vulnerable of creatures, hands fisted in the straw, mouth wide, breathing, cells fizzing with energy, alive. The creation of life defies death, over and over and over; if you think about it for a moment, the spark of soul in each of us was passed down back to the very beginning of time, from that very first flash of light out of the darkness. </div>
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<br />
And maybe the sky that night was incandescent with angels, and ringing with music that fell like shards of crystal to the earth. Or, instead, it was just brilliant with stars, and the wind sighed through the desert hills. Perhaps people did make their way to the stable, bearing gifts, or just drifted by looking on in polite disinterest at the birth of a son. To my mind, it doesn't matter how the story is told. The message will always be the same: life endures because love endures. And part of faith is beginning to understand love in all its dimensions. If there is no love, it profiteth me nothing. </div>
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When I learned that verse out of Corinthians as a kid, it was the round and robust language of Elizabethan England; sounding brasses, tinkling cymbals, giving the body to be burned, through the glass darkly, charity. Charity? What the hell. Strong stuff for an eight year old. This didn't jibe at all with the Salvation Army bucket, soup kitchens or dropping nickels from my sticky hand into the collection plate. It was only as I grew older that I finally got it. Not charity, but love. And not love of one's self, or one's toys, or one's trophy spouse, but a love that encompasses all things, humming with brahmic energy throughout the universe. Maybe that wasn't what Paul meant either, but it works for me, and he's not here to argue about it. Life is love manifested. Love is life manifested. </div>
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It is a dark afternoon here, and the rain is pattering down outside through the leafless trees; a million, billion miles away in space and time from a cold winter's night outside a desert town, where life sparked, love bloomed and in one moment began to change the world. Now isn't so different than then. Life is nasty, short and oh so Hobbesianly brutish. Sometimes it seems humanity is at the nadir of its existence with bloody violence and death made Internet cool. There is a horribly grotesque menu of new and hideously painful ways for humans to inflict death on each other, and it seems like every year it gets just that much worse. Not such a great leap from Rome with its gladiators, its decadence, its death. </div>
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But here, on the darkest night of the year, at the blackest moment of despair, hope rises up; faith returns, love endures. We humans are yoked to the cycle of death and rebirth, whether in the seasons, social patterns or religious rituals. Persephone defeats Hades, winter yields to spring, a child is born, grows to manhood, gives his message, is murdered, returns saying: love each other, even in the black heart of death, because a life lived with that kind love vanquishes hate. So, take it as you will, believer or not, because it's a good message: love one another. In the face of a world gone mostly mad, I think Jesus would be ok with that. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-8196899789964577432014-09-04T12:10:00.000-07:002014-09-04T12:36:24.702-07:00Frequency change approved.<i>This was the eulogy I delivered at the service celebrating my father's life and passing from it in 2009.</i> <br />
<br />
Good morning. <br />
<br />
My father was a pilot, and some of my earliest memories are of airplanes: gliders, U controls, radio controlled model planes—then later, airplanes in dim hangers and on baking tarmacs, the sharp sulphur smell of aviation fuel, the gleam of propellers in sunlight, mysteries of all the instruments and radios. I was fascinated by this, and my dad spent endless hours explaining lift, drag and thrust, pitch, roll and yaw to me—and instilled in me a deep love of flying. I'm a pilot too.<br />
<br />
My father was an instinctive pilot; he learned to fly in his teens, and was then forced to unlearn all of those skills when he went into the Air Force; I have heard there are good stories to be told of the molding of Cadet Fawcett by the heavy handed instructors of the Air Wing, but after some gentle reorientation, Dad joined the test pilot corps based at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Dad left the Air Force after an injury, but this didn't quell his love of flying. He continued to fly—a Beech Bonanza, a Beech Baron. He never qualified for jets, because he didn't think he could wedge that 6' 4" frame into what he affectionately called “Bill Lear's mailing tube”. But Dad and aircraft just went together like a hand and glove.<br />
<br />
My father was an intuitive pilot; I remember watching him fly a very fidgety Piper Arrow on a hot turbulent afternoon in Western New York. I was all white knuckles and sweaty palms and a steady stream of almost profane language while I had my thumb (unawares!) locked down on the push to talk switch of the radio when my Dad suddenly said “I have the aircraft”. I looked over in amazement: he had the yoke easily balanced between thumb and two fingers, and suddenly what had been a bucking bronco of an aircraft became a tame and docile machine. “Don't fight the plane; move with it, exploit the strengths, recognize the flaws. Be patient. Be calm. Observe.” Those are good words to live by as well.<br />
<br />
My father was the best pilot I have ever known. An airplane is just a collection of metal, rubber, wires and bad upholstery without the guiding hand, eye and mind of the Pilot.<br />
<br />
When a pilot is planning a long journey, he files a flight plan. After leaving the ramp, the aircraft is directed by Ground Control radio, then handed off to Tower. The pilot completes his checklist at the end of the runway, and when given clearance, he advances the throttle; the plane rolls down the runway and at the proper speed there is a sensation of the the earth tugging, clinging, fighting to pull the aircraft down. But velocity and lift win out, and the nose wheel rises from the runway, followed by the mains. The gear and flaps are retracted and the plane climbs faster and faster. The plane is released to Departure control who will guide the aircraft through the crowded airspace<br />
<br />
When the airplane has exited the controlled airspace there is a dialogue between the pilot and Departure: for example, “Bonanza November 1931 Juliet Foxtrot, turn right heading 270; climb and maintain one zero thousand; squawk 1200 and contact Center on 128.55. Frequency change approved—good day” The pilot will read back these instructions, and then begin his journey.<br />
<br />
I see my dad on this final trip; there is no more cancer, no more pain and fear, he is tall and strong, eager for this journey. He strides purposefully across the tarmac, swinging easily, gracefully into the left seat of his airplane. He completes his preflight checklist, taxis to the east end of the runway and after receiving clearance moves the throttle forward to a smooth and steady take off with just a gentle rock of the wings to those of us watching from behind that inevitable fence. The air is calm and stable today, and his airplane climbs rapidly, fading into a white dot before it disappears from our sight. I see him looking over his charts, studying the instrument panel, gazing out to that sun pierced and amazing horizon; I see my Dad doing what he loved the most: flying, suspended between the vanishing earth and that brilliant, deep blue sky, climbing to heaven.<br />
<br />
Have a good flight home, Dad. Frequency change approved.<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-83955575528142280972013-11-04T21:59:00.000-08:002014-09-11T07:44:53.368-07:00Falling into the Arms of God<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]-->I rolled over on the sofa and groped for the remote; behind
me, my husband was rattling through the kitchen in a noisy effort to make the
morning caffeine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had fallen asleep in
front of an old movie the night before, and my back ached from lying on the
sofa.
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Channel 3 flickered to life, and I blinked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One, two, three times . . . what the
hell?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Towering Inferno?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then understanding slammed into me with a
sickening thud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I gasped out Bill’s
name, but it took a couple of tries before I got his attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“What?” he snarled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Look.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Please.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it was the
despair in my voice that made him turn and see the South
Tower of the World
Trade Center
sway, totter and fall across Manhattan
in a ballooning mushroom cloud of flame, smoke and dust.</div>
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We sat on the sofa, transfixed by the horrors of that
morning, served up to us in glittering high def on our new plasma screen
TV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of the coverage was unedited at
first; I distinctly remember seeing a figure on fire, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a man, cartwheeling through a window and
spiraling down in a smoke trail like some shot up fighter and crashing
into<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a walkway with a horrifying bang.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then more, some holding hands and taking
their last step into the void to escape the hell behind them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
slow, deliberate, implacable collapse of the North Tower
which absolutely obliterated every discreet object in the area to a twisted and
ruptured pile of steel and concrete.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
all saw it that day, saw the evil that mortal men are capable of inflicting on
innocents, and the joy that many took in the wholesale slaughter and
destruction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The machine of war was put into motion on that
day, and is still grinding on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were
all scarred forever by what happened on a clear, blue Tuesday morning.</div>
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Every anniversary it seemed like the wound was reopened, the
grief reexamined, the tears wiped away and the pain brought forward again and
again and again as the names of the lost were read. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>When I visited friends in New York in November of 2001, there was a
foul, rotten odor in the air, and every surface was coated with thick,
tenacious, gritty dust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My friends have
since told me that searchers continued to find fragments of bones on the roof
of their building years after the attack. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>You could feel the particles squeak under your
feet. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could feel the ghosts.</div>
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But time has a way of numbing the senses; and I listened to
some interesting rationalizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
had it coming; not much compared to the last century’s sad census of mass
death. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a bitter parade: WWI with Verdun, the Somme and
fields of poppies; Armenian genocide; Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Khmer Rouge and
murderous North Korean dictators; and less obvious death and despair from
persistent and oppressive colonialism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This year, some commentators noted that maybe it was time that America let go
of 9/11 and get over it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last rescue
dog from Ground Zero died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Children are
growing up and moving on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Slowly, America is
forgetting what happened on that day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Like so many other days, it becomes less about the reason and more about
the federally approved day off.</div>
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But I remember, and Santayana’s admonition about those who
forget the past are doomed to repeat it rings round my head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are more alike than we are different, but
those in power want to exploit the choler and frustration of citizens to
achieve often obscure and frightening ends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And that is evil as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes it seems that no matter which way
you turn, there is nothing but rage and dead ends, bitter dishes at the angry
buffet.</div>
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I don’t know how to eliminate evil; I don’t have a clue how
to effect change, speak truth to power, spin out webs of stereotype and
hyperbole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only territory I know
absolutely is the rather dark land in between my ears, and I guard that
frontier carefully.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But on that day,
watching the burning man, incandescent and spinning like a Catherine wheel, I
knew that I had to make a choice, for myself alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Be good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Be kind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try to do the right
thing, always.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe begin those halting
steps back to a spirituality that I thought was long gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try,
in some minute way, every day, to honor the lost—all those lost to corrupted
power and terror.</div>
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Tom Junod, in his article “The Falling Man”, put it most
pointedly, and also most poignantly:</div>
<br />
“Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn't jump
from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped
to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family.
Maybe he didn't jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.<br />
<br />
Oh, no. You have to fall.”<br />
<br />
Perhaps we are falling into the arms of God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We are all trying to fulfill our own small miracles, and by that grace, (even
in the midst of the sorrows of this world) find our way home.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-72367218559004268082013-10-21T22:45:00.000-07:002015-06-30T13:06:20.036-07:00Yarnell 34.22° N, 112.74° W<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>"If you came this way, </i><br />
<i>Taking any route, starting from anywhere, </i><br />
<i>At any time or at any season, </i><br />
<i>It would always be the same: you would
have to put off </i><br />
<i>Sense and notion."</i> <br />
<br />
You parked the car well off the road to avoid drawing attention. Now
you hike north and east, winding through scrub oak and spherical granite
boulders which are slowly spalling themselves through freeze and thaw
into quartz dust; the sky is a cerulean blue with white cirrus feathers
trailing off to the east. In other words, another beautiful October
Arizona afternoon. <br />
<br />
You stop, breathing hard, and take a long drink of warm, flat tasting
water; a handful of trailmix, another slug of water. The USGS sectional
map and compass say you are not too far from your destination, but you
know that it is on private land, and you will not trespass. Looking up,
you see the blackened scar of ridgeline; that is on federal land, and
is accessible. At least for now. <br />
<br />
<i>"Ash on an old man's sleeve</i><br />
<i>Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. </i><br />
<i>Dust in the air suspended </i><br />
<i>Marks the place where a story ended. </i><br />
<i>Dust
inbreathed was a house- </i><br />
<i>The walls, the wainscot and the mouse . . ."</i> <br />
<br />
The terrain is changing from tan grasses and green oak to singed foliage
and black ash. Fire was here--intense, volcanic heat that has baked
the ground to a ceramic glaze. You have walked through the forest
crematoriums before, boots scuffing up little puffs of floury powder,
the deconstructed components of trees, animals, homes and people. You
saw the same ash puff under your feet when you walked across an
apartment building patio in The Battery in November of 2001. Dust in
the air suspended marks a place where the story ended. <br />
<br />
Grumbling, you struggle up the last pitch of the trail which grows
exponentially steeper in the final one hundred feet. Getting too old
for this. Then you break the ridge and the panorama spreads out at your
feet, luminous in the golden light of late afternoon. Across the
landscape of a thousand square miles, the burn scar lies black, thick
and dead across the rolling land. You see the box canyon. That is
where the Granite Mountain Hotshots were trapped and overrun by a forty
foot tall wall of flame driven by the howling gusts of a dying monsoon
thunderstorm. You sit on a round boulder and dig your heels into the
sand skirt. And you watch. And you pray. <br />
<br />
<i>"The parched eviscerate soil </i><br />
<i> Gapes at the vanity of toil."</i> <br />
<br />
The investigations are ongoing; but you know these men died due to
incompetence and neglect. You try not to linger on the manner of their
deaths, but you have worked in burn units; you have seen the victims of
fire, dead and alive, come through emergency room doors. When the
hotshot bodies were found, some were still in their fire shelters; most
were out, charred in positions of escape like artifacts of a new, awful
Pompeii. <br />
<br />
Some sad comrade had covered the bodies of the dead with American flags.
You understand the sentiment, but everything that surrounded this
horrible event soon came giftwrapped, like a box of Whitman's Candy, in
American flags. Memorials and fundraisers were held, even the Vice
President was wheeled in to mumble inanities about sacrifice and first
responders. Then the stew of the media: blow dried and gelled up quasi
journalists posturing in front of a cyclone fence adorned with teddy
bears, flags and sympathy cards. Some wives were numb with grief,
others captivated by the fifteen minutes of fame on teevee and the
inevitable fundraisers. Americans assuage their collective guilt by
pelting the victims of disaster with gold and manna. You observed the
free for all with a growing sense of cynicism. <br />
<br />
But this is here and this is now. You watch the shadows lengthen across
the box canyon, barren and <br />
desolate except for one lonely flagpole at
the end, bravely wearing the Stars and Stripes and the Arizona state
flag. Swirling gently in the evening breeze, they are the last things
to be lost in the blackness that sweeps up the canyon and across the
land. There is no sound here; no birds, no rustles in brush; it is dead
and it is quiet. Unlike that last day, where the 911 tapes disclosed a
dispatcher hushing the screaming men because she was trying to get some
work done and they were distracting her. It was a hell on earth. Like
everyone you talk to, you hope that the end was quick, that the pain
was transient, and the souls of the men were swept to heaven on those
winds laced with flame. <br />
<br />
<i>"Who then devised the torment? </i><br />
<i>Love. Love is the unfamiliar </i><br />
<i>Name
Behind the hands that wove </i><br />
<i>The intolerable shirt of flame </i><br />
<i>Which human
power cannot remove. </i><br />
<i>We only live, only suspire </i><br />
<i>Consumed by either
fire or fire."</i> <br />
<br />
There are tears in your eyes, but you must do this. The sun is an oblate
blob of golden fire on the edge of the turning world. You kneel in the
ash and the dirt; lay down the eagle feather given to you for this
purpose; the crucifix; a saint's medallion; a matchbox toy car; the
totems of this and other ages. You secure these to the earth with a
lovely piece of rose quartz; and then, rising to your feet one last
time, you look into that well of darkness. It is a void so black and so
deep and so far out of time. <br />
<br />
<i>"And what the dead had no speech for, when living, </i><br />
<i>They can tell
you, being dead: the communication </i><br />
<i>Of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living."</i> <br />
<br />
The prayers said, you shrug the pack over your shoulders and don the
headlamp in the ebbing twilight. The stars begin to flicker over your
head, one after another, and the crescent moon lies lazily on her back
in the clear blue of the western sky. The boulders cast long shadows in
the fading light. It's a tricky descent, but between a mixture of
hopping, glissading and stumbling, you make your way back to the car.<br />
<br />
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<i>All quotes were from "Little Gidding" by T. S. Eliot.</i> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-23191703938651086112013-10-14T20:52:00.000-07:002013-10-14T20:52:01.767-07:00Darkness<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I love being outside; have loved it since I was a kid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spent summers at Camp
Keewano and Crystal Lake, disappearing after breakfast
and returning for dinner, filthy, scratched, sunburned and mosquito bitten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In between those ordinal points I climbed
trees, built forts, learned my woodcraft, rode my bicycle; and as I grew older,
I camped and backpacked<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the glacial
moraines of Northern Michigan and the rougher and more forbidding Appalachian
terrain of Pennsylvania and New York.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
learned to budget my time and strength, to read the nature of the trail, to
keep an eye cocked at the luminous, ever changing sky and to feel that deep, profound
reverberation in my soul of being there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Just being there, in the moment, in the place and in the still, serene
wildness of it all.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It has never left me, this sense of belonging to the wild,
even through the massive disasters and minor disruptions of every day
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With an ordinary arrogance, I
always assumed that I knew my way in the woods, walking up and down upon
the earth. Bad things only happened to others, amateurs with their department
store hiking gear, who couldn’t orient themselves out of a small elevator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wore my Patagonia, North Face and Vibram
proudly, and even fancied a through hike of the Appalachian
Trail; the ex husband particularly disapproved of that idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The divorce divested me of all my hard earned
gear and left me doing some real life camping out of my car for a period of
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Homelessness is a great leveler of
egos.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I pointed my Honda west to Arizona and, in the process of rebuilding my world, found new campgrounds, new roads, new mountains and a man who shared
my passion for living under the open sky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some of the happiest days of my life were spent with Bill, prowling
through desert washes and mountain mining roads; the end of the day would often
find us filthy, scratched, sunburned and mosquito bitten, slouched in front of
the fire with snoring Labradors under our feet and a mug of Kentucky whisky
balanced on a knee.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was nothing to
fear, nothing at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were kings of
our world, the woods behind us, the flames before us, and the galaxy lazily
circling over our heads like a banner of distant fire.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That world included a particularly lovely campground in the
Granite Mountain Wilderness outside Prescott,
Arizona.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yavapai had been built in the thirties by a
gang of young Civilian Conservation Corps workers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the original foundations were still
present, and the campsites were scattered through these ground works in a grove
of fragrant ponderosa and scrub oak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
blue, sunlit September day, we set up camp after a day in the woods; enjoyed
dinner and a night cap and after settling the dogs, we fell asleep in the pop
up camper.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Somewhere after midnight, nature called, and I crawled out
of a warm sleeping bag and headed out to take care of business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coming back, I laid out flat on the
concrete picnic table and watched the sky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jupiter was falling to the west; the moon had already slid below the
horizon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The stars burned steady and
unblinking through the clear, crystalline air; my eyes traced the old, familiar
constellations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Big Dipper; Cygnus;
Corona Borealis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bootes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked for my old friend Camelopardalis,
but the Camel was out of sight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was an incredibly silent, calm, peaceful night and I could feel the massive
bulk of the Earth hurtling through that darkness, that void.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then I heard five, loud, distinct steps crunching through
the woods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fear, terror, indescribable
horror washed over me as if I had fallen through rotten ice and submerged,
drowning, into freezing dark water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
had never felt this before, this sense of imminent death, of being petrified
and unable to move.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somehow I did move,
rolling off the table and onto my feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My primate eyes, even dark sensitized, couldn’t make out the black mass
in front of me, but something was there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It moved forward with three deliberate steps and I saw it was a fully
grown brown bear, teeth glittering in the dim starlight.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Adrenaline flooded over me; my palms were greasy with sweat,
and I felt my heart hammering in my chest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I had no weapon but a large Maglight flashlight like security guards
carry; my pistol and knife were in the camper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This bear looked thin and I stood between it and the pop up with its
snoring collection of dogs and husband.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What should I do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I balanced on
the balls of my feet, feeling the rocky ground through my moccasins, holding the
Maglight with both hands like a baseball bat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It seemed like an eon passed as the bear and I glared each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was hungry and I was scared, but neither
one of us moved, frozen in an eternal regard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I could hear the breathing, smell the rotten musty odor of fur and
feces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This too was the wilderness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On any given day, anyone can die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a campground, dismembered into a bloody
mess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By a bear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Suddenly the spell was shattered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the dogs finally woke up and realized
that stink was something new and dangerous, and a volley of barking, snarling
and howling erupted from the camper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Bill’s voice called to me and a light came on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Bear!” I screamed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Don’t open the door!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was afraid the dogs would pour out and
attack the beast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With my words the
bear’s head swung back towards me; I could see, sense its confusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I took a quick step forward and brought the Maglight down
across the bear’s muzzle with all my panic driven strength.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt bone crunch and shatter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bear howled in pain and rage and leapt
over the table, across the wall and off into the darkness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could hear the crashing dim and disappear
over the thunder of my own beating heart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Looking down, I saw the front of my t shirt was spattered with black
blood and hair; the Maglight was slick in my blood covered hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stood there, petrified, unable to move,
swaying in the starlight, the sky whirling over my head.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Time seemed elastic; ages passed, and I felt Bill’s arms
around me, soothing me as I dissolved into a shaking mess of tears and
incoherence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sat me down at the
picnic table; the dogs started licking the blood from my hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Don’t worry, honey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I get the picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My flashlight?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the hell did you do to my
flashlight?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He turned it over and over
in his hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lens was shattered,
the head of the light was cracked, clotted with a thickening mass of fur and
sticky blood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt an arm snake around
my quivering shoulders, pulling me close, holding me, guarding against the darkness,
the wilderness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On any given day: if you walk in the wilderness, you play by
its rules, and they are not fair, even to the prepared. But<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> o</span>n
that night, in that darkness, I won; I felt my heart reach back to the hunters
of Lascaux, survivors of the hunt, sketching out pictures of bears in
the smoky firelight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every day is a
victory if you make it alive to the next dawn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-10652901000951229722013-10-07T20:17:00.000-07:002014-06-30T17:36:06.939-07:00Building The Perfect Wheel<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
It's not for the faint of heart, but once the skill is learned, building
bicycle wheels can be almost as easy as lacing up a pair of hiking
boots. I remember sitting on the living room floor of my coal company
house in Clarion, Pennsylvania with a set of Hi-E hubs, a box of
glinting DT spokes and a dark gray pair of Mavic tubular rims. Now you
would use high end clincher rims, but back in those days all the cool
kids had tubular rims which required gluing silk cased tires to the
running surface. And I desperately wanted to ride with the cool kids.
<br />
<br />
Under my ex husband's disapproving eye, I began the task. One
spoke through the hub and into the rim at the valve hole; screw the
nipple on. Skip four holes to the right and repeat. Do this all the
way around the rim. Flip the wheel over. Same thing. Then begin the
intricate pattern of spoke heads in, spoke heads out, weaving over and
under in a three cross pattern, screwing on nipples until the wheel is
built. A good wheelsmith can assemble a wheel in as fast as thirty
minutes. As I recall it took me three hours and any number of bottles
of bitter Lord Chesterfield ale to build, go back, fix, rebuild, find
another mistake and so on. But finally my wheel was done, gleaming like
a blade in the light from the floor lamp. I checked the spoke tension,
popped the wheel into the truing stand and after a handful of tweaks my
wheel was ready to accept its glue and Clement tubular tire. In fact, I
had done such a good job that after the initial truing, I didn't have
to dial those wheels in ever again; they lasted longer than the
marriage. I sold them after my divorce, and I believe that somewhere in
Western New York those wheels still are turning.<br />
<br />
A racing
bicycle is a wonder of physics, which is why physicists love bikes:
witness the grin on Einstein's face as he pedaled his bike around
college campuses. Newton's laws are everywhere, and, when violated,
bloodily so. Gravity. Centrifugal force. Gyroscopic precession.
Leverage. Balance. Speed. Power. There is a whole universe whirling
in a bicycle pointed down a Pennsylvania mountain road. And there is
nothing like being folded into a tight wedge between the handlebars and
the saddle, nose just above the angle of the stem and watching the
speedometer edge above sixty miles per hour; at that point the wheels
sing over the pavement, slicing through the air in a high, thin soprano.
It is as close to flying as I have ever been. <br />
<br />
The bicycle
wheel exists in tension and compression: the bicycle is both supported
and suspended by the spider web of spokes. Which is not unlike the
human condition: we exist in stress, stretched and pushed to unknown
speeds. Sometimes we fail, collapsing in the cobbles; and sometimes we
soar, singing, flying down through the green darkness of the Pennsylvania forest,
chasing the mosaic of sun and shadow.
</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-34462950799978182352013-09-30T23:04:00.000-07:002013-09-30T23:04:05.786-07:00De Profundis<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
The first time I saw him, he was lying on a hospital gurney,
laced in a web of IV lines and sensor wires; a vent sighed in the corner to the
beat of twelve breaths a minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
young man’s eyes jerked asynchronously in their sockets; feet pointed and arms
curled in, almost protective of the fisted hands.
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A good looking kid; coming home from a football game, drunk
and high, and his buddy missed the curve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My patient rocketed through the windshield, doing what his coach had
told him not to by leading with his head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The EMTs found him a hundred feet from the burning car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now here he was, laid out on a kind of
medical sacrificial alter, surrounded by his stunned parents and sobbing
girlfriend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I worked quickly,
fabricating the splints to support his hands and feet; pressing his limbs into
the hard plastic felt like molding Silly Putty into a bundt pan.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I saw him a month later on the rehab unit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His gaze was vacant but at least his eyes
moved as smoothly as dance partners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
trach was gone, covered by an elegant little bandage secured by micropore tape;
it’s important to keep that precious, tiny hole sealed up while it heals
because maggots just love to roost in there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I tried to edge by the empty eyed boy slouched in his wheel chair when
suddenly his hand clamped down hard on my wrist, leaving a bruise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Ow!” I snapped and rolled my forearm down
against his thumb, breaking his grasp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He stared at me hollowly for a moment, then closed his eyes and fell
almost immediately asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
encounter left me shaken, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was
as though I peered into those blue eyes and could almost see stars, galaxies,
infinite space in the dark pupils.</div>
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As my patient began to rouse from his vegetative state, he
became a handful of battling demons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Querulous,
angry, frustrated with even the seemingly simple activity of drinking Coke out
of a can; that task earned me the can right in the face and a drenching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another day he was hauled out of the rehab
room, spitting foam in an incoherent rage and masturbating furiously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh, that kid made me mad; I would go out
after work with my friends and just vent for hours at how frustrating this all
was and how I wasn’t getting anywhere with him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It never occurred to me at the time that it wasn’t about my getting
anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was his journey and I was
along for the ride, like it or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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When his words finally returned to him, it started as a
steady stream of remarkably colorful profanity that went on for hours and hours
and hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It finally stopped when he
fell asleep in his chair, but would resume again the minute his eyelids slipped
open and that icy blue gaze looked out on the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speech therapist was almost at the end of
her own rope; we were sitting across the table from him when suddenly his eyes
fixed on me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was almost as if a light
turned on, a blue laser light shining out of his head:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I remember you.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speech
therapist came to life in an instant and I eased out of the room, feeling his
eyes on me even as she was talking to him.</div>
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He left our unit shortly after that to go to a specialized
neurorehabilitation hospital downstate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His father rolled him by my office, but I was out at a staff
meeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I returned, I found the
filthy and mangled splints on my desk, along with an icy cold bottle of Coke.</div>
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Life carries us in strange directions, ripples moving ever
outward from that first impact of rock into water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I left that job, took others, moved across
the country, treated hundreds of patients.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’m terrible with remembering names; but what is even more terrible is
that I remember all of the people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
used to joke that I should get overtime since I treated them in my dreams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, sleeping or waking, I never forgot that
young man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed like everything he
did with me in therapy seemed to strike sparks as big as lightning; he came
from the edge of death to the possibility of a new life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wondered often what happened to him but
never thought I would see him again; patients come, are treated and are
discharged; most leave, stronger and better, but a few never make it home. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
But I seem to have my own personal gravity, as I found out
last year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Standing in Safeway’s
checkout, idly flipping through the latest trash from Hollywood, and suddenly a man’s hand clamps
down on my wrist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alarmed, I step back
and look up, ready to cold cock this guy, when I see those blue eyes and the
darkness behind them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s you, isn’t
it?” he asks; I nod.</div>
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We step out of line and go get a coffee at Starbucks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s nervous, but determined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hear his story, see pictures of his wife
and children, hear about his job in IT at a local aerospace company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He asks about me, and I skim over the last
twenty years in a sentence or two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am
uncomfortable with his attempts to thank me, but he insists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I need to say it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You saved my life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I titter uneasily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Dude, I’ve never saved anyone, and lost a
few along the way.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He frowns at
that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Listen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You don’t understand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was falling, dropping faster and faster down this black hole when I
felt you holding my hand—putting those damn braces on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was like someone had thrown me a rope, and
I started to climb, up, back, out of that place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can see it just like it happened
yesterday.”</div>
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I stare at him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
boy was in a decerebrate coma when I put the splints on; there was no way he
could remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sees my disbelief and
becomes a little angry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I came back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You don’t have to believe me, but it saved my life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“My friend,” I say, “you saved your own
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your family was praying for you,
your girlfriend was holding your hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That is the truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m glad I
could help you as you recovered—maybe that’s where I passed you the rope.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s not mollified, but as we exchange
business cards and promise to get together again his mood eases; wishing each
other well, we leave by separate doors.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I don’t think I saved him that day, or any other day; I
think it was those collection of sparks from moment to moment struggles in
rehab that relit the fire of his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But, more than that, it was the powerful spirit of the boy that refused
to die, who put up the hand, rolled back the stone and leaped for the rope, emerging into this
bright, strong, brilliant world.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-76959962795665046262013-09-23T22:42:00.001-07:002013-09-23T22:42:45.338-07:00The Grampian Hills<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">One of the first books I checked out of the Beulah Library was “Good
Night, Sweet Prince”, Gene Fowler’s biography of the great actor John Barrymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fowler
eloquently described Barrymore’s obsession with a map of Scotland that
detailed an obscure range known as “The Grampian Hills”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Grampian Hills ultimately became
Barrymore’s own Elysian Fields: serene, magical, unattainable, a nepenthe in
which all his sorrows were washed away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Barrymore was ultimately doomed by alcohol, his own personal demon; but
the image of the Grampian Hills was a powerful one for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A land, imagined with midnight blue lakes,
sunswept fells and overarched by an endless sky</span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<a href="http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h17/fawcettt/237_zps317b0622.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h17/fawcettt/237_zps317b0622.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">The ridges and moraines that surround Crystal Lake were like the Grampian Hills to
me. Deep</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;"> and intensely green at noon, they flowed to gray, blue and finally
black in the darkening sky at sunset, seemingly eternal (even though ephemeral in the geologic time
of once glaciated</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;"> Northern Michigan</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">). The lake was equally as mysterious: two hundred feet deep, varying
between turquoise and navy, laced with white caps, and with water so clear that
I picked out a huge Petoskey stone and dove through twenty feet of icy cold
water to retrieve it from the sandy lake bottom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Petoskey stone now sits on my desk, a
silent semaphore.</span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">I didn’t, couldn’t know it then, but growing up in Northern
Michigan was a magical time; I was blessed with the freedom and
the resources to sail the lake, ride my bike through the hills, lie on the
beach at Elberta and watch the sky shimmer with boreal fire. My mother, who was
an unhappy person, encouraged me to stay out of her way, and from an early age
I learned to tread lightly around her. My father came on the weekends, and
generally regarded me as a strange creature from another planet that he would
never understand. So, the library, the lake and the sky occupied me.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">My first
job was working at Horizon Books. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt;">I spent a lot of time
there, so much so that the owner hired me on part time to help with cleaning,
restocking and supervising the half off rack that was parked on the sidewalk
just outside the door. Looking back now, I think it was one of the best
jobs I ever had; the hours were flexible around my sailing time, I got to read
every book I could lay my hands on, and this was the place where I met Bruce
Catton.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mr.
Catton was a bit of a North Michigan legend: a
famous Civil War historian and Pulitzer winner. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite his local hero status, he was a
remarkably pleasant and unassuming man. He visited the bookstore several
times a week, and was clearly amused by my wide eyed awe. Mr. Catton
would sometimes come and perch on the bench by the front door while I was guarding
the half price books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the afternoon
shadows lengthened across the sidewalk, he would gently ask me questions about
literature, history, poetry, music, Crystal
Lake. He had much to say, but most of it told in
stories of his youth growing up in the area, his time at Oberlin College,
surviving World War I and the Spanish Flu and his interest in the War Between
the States. I was immensely flattered that he treated my thirteen year old self
like an adult and worthy of an opinion about What It All Means. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was my first editor, looking
over my adolescent short stories and poems and returning them with proof marks
and serious commentary in the margins. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seeing
these manuscripts now, I cringe with embarrassment at just how bad they are;
but I believe he took just as much time with them as he would with a post
graduate’s treatise on the Battle
of the Wilderness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can see now that I
idolized this kind gentleman, but it was those long conversations that propelled
me into reading more, thinking more, writing more, taking chances and making
the leap into the university.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt;">The summer waned; my
family returned home to Grand Blanc, and to a winter of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>cold rain, dirty snow, and a steel gray
blanket of clouds which the sun never seemed to penetrate. But, as they
say, the promise of spring lies under the snow, and sometime round the middle
of April, the clouds lifted, the sun emerged, and the black, icy drifts
vanished. Springtime in Michigan
can be an amazing, almost fluorescent green, ephemeral as a breath of air.
Then, Memorial Day, school was out and we were back at Crystal Lake, to my job and another pleasant
summer of reading, sailing, riding my bike and conversing with Mr. Catton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Years passed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But time was holding all of us, green and dying; time was running out.</span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">The last time I saw Mr. Catton, he looked thin and wan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He asked how my studies were progressing and
offered advice and encouragement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
remember that I told him that I had read his autobiography and how much I
enjoyed hearing his story, told in his words He smiled at me and his hand clasp
crackled like dry straw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Keep writing,”
he said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Your words will guide you all
the way home.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t understand what
he meant, but impulsively I hugged him farewell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His frail body felt like paper and sticks
under my hands. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I never saw him again;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mr. Catton died shortly after that encounter.
When I heard the news, I went and sat on the seawall with my arms looped around
my knees, looking West, and watched the sun set behind the Grampian Hills,
shading the lake in lavender, pink, blue, scattered with molten gold; then the
twilight for an hour; stars, a black sky, northern lights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I realized that he knew he was dying at our
last meeting, and somehow those words were a message.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now he was gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The water whispered over the sand beach and
it was the loneliest sound in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">I always meant to go back to Crystal
Lake but after my mother died, my father sold his
summer place, married again, and started a new life. There was really nothing
there for me anymore, just memories. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Going
home is a questionable business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can
never truly look back, relive the past, find the lost; but life has a way of
fooling with you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A friend’s daughter attended
the National Music Camp at Interlochen this summer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pictures and videos appeared on Facebook, and
it was the Grampian Hills all over again: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the air full of music, Crystal
Lake an aquamarine gem, rolling fields, forests and sand dunes, Lake Michigan like a gunmetal mirror under a cold, clear blue
sky.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">I observed all of this from a continent away as I was sweltering
through another Arizona
summer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surrounded by towering
thunderheads and irritating dust, sweat trickling through my hair and down my
back, I was stewing in a sea of loneliness. Throughout my life I have stumbled
from one crisis to another, watching my world blow up in new and interesting
ways; but my husband’s death had drained me completely and left a vacuum that
nothing seemed to fill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On a miserably
hot August night I finished looking through those pictures from home and,
unable to stand it anymore, went outside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The sky was lit with a fauvist sunset and thunder was rolling from
horizon to horizon; it seemed that the air was paralyzed with heat, waiting for
rain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something just has to give, I
thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">“Keep writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your words will guide you all the way home.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a blinding flash of insight. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was, is, and shall be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That will never change. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I came inside, sat down and wrote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And wrote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And wrote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked deep into the lake, broke the surface,
reached down and just began to understand that place, that time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this place and this time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: ArialMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">“Life is a flame burning in
water, shining on a sea which has no shore, and far overhead there are other
flames which we call stars.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bruce
Catton<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>Waiting for the Morning Train</u></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-82680931772935169822013-09-12T12:32:00.000-07:002013-09-12T12:35:50.041-07:00The Persistence of Memory<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-3a5c4d54-13a3-9037-2bab-5a2dfe19004f" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the darkening room</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the color of the air was gray.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he was lost in the bed, </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">drowning in a sea of sheets</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a gulliver snared in a mortal net of lines</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a spiderweb of tangled silver hair forming</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a damp mat across his forehead.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">if your heart were a train</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">marking off the miles towards a vanishing point</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">infinity gray in the distance</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">it would sound like this, slowly ticking away</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fading into silence.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-26495517909072885622013-08-09T23:24:00.000-07:002013-08-09T23:38:10.922-07:00Racist.<!--[if !mso]>
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<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">My job is beginning to get to me. I’m a home health
occupational therapist, and I sit on my butt, driving around Phoenix all day to see my
patients. It’s not a very healthy lifestyle, what with value meals and
hot coffee being the sum of my nutrition most days. Add into that a
Bluetooth phone that won’t properly sync and contractors that are mad for text
messaging, and it makes for a pretty stressful job. That, and the golf
cart demolition derby on the sidewalks and streets of Sun
City.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">So I wasn’t surprised a few years ago when my heart started to
bark at me; I am descended from a long line of tall, ruddy faced Northern
Europeans with all the genetic coding to die young. My paternal
grandfather died at 51; paternal grandmother at 64; and so on. After a
full tilt boogie work up at the local cardiologist, I found that while all
those years on my bike kept the pipes clear, my Purkinje fibers were another
thing altogether. My heartbeat had always thundered on with a certainty
like the march of time--but now when it burps, it is the most amazing and scary
feeling; you are motoring along at the speed of light when suddenly, everything
stops and you look down to see one foot out over a vast, echoing abyss.
There is a cold sensation of waiting, waiting, waiting . . . and then
ba-dunk! Meds help, but not always. At the end of the day, I am
overwhelmed with a shattering fatigue that doesn’t seem to ease with sleep.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">So, longing for that old, worked over feeling, I joined the local
gym (again). I should practice what I preach: exercise, healthy
living, no booze, plenty of rest. It’s a great idea, but most of my
patients are where I’m going to be in twenty years. Now I see a sprightly
collection of golf mad Sun City
septuagenarians who are going through periodic upgrades to their joints, hearts
and eyes. But in my line of work there have been way too many episodes of
“I’ve never seen that before”. Some things I would rather forget: people
in pain, people without limbs, power, movement or sight, people burned so badly
that you can’t tell the color of their skin, only the red mess of tortured flesh. That’s the hard part, but
that is what I do—rehabilitation. And I would like to think I am
pretty good at it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">So here I am, entre deux guerres, on the elliptical and watching a
hundred people around me bobbing up and down like demented pistons. It is
an unsettling sight, and reminds me again why I liked cycling. It’s
generally a solitary sport, and no one can watch you groan, huff and sweat.
The TV overhead was on a 24 hour news channel, where the blow dried
blonde was babbling on about the Trayvon Martin murder and George Zimmerman in
a seemingly unending tirade of racist, racist, racist. It made me flinch
and fling a disgusted look at the TV.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">Then I realized the man on the machine next to mine was watching
me. And he was black. And I don’t know if he saw my eyeroll, but he
suddenly stopped bobbing, jumped off the machine and stalked away. I
don’t know if he was pissed at me, at the TV, at Zimmerman, at Trayvon, or just
at the world in general. But there was no mistaking the widening of the
eyes, the flare of the nostrils, the tightening of the mouth. U mad, bro?
Yes, he was. I’ve seen that look before.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h17/fawcettt/black_and_white_hands_by_lapastillaazul-d385y4t_zps23907564.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h17/fawcettt/black_and_white_hands_by_lapastillaazul-d385y4t_zps23907564.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">What I always struggled with was the anger. I am from Michigan; I grew up in
the 60s; I remember the integration of my school, the burning of parts of my
hometown during the riots, the simmering, slow, hot hatred that festered
between whites and blacks. Michigan,
in those days, was an unhappy place. Like so many other whites, I developed
a well polished defensive stance against the assumption and accusation of
racism. Hey, my dad’s family was Canadian; in my mom’s family bible there
is a list of soldiers who went to off to fight in the War of Northern
Aggression and died for their trouble. I went to an urban college, wrote
for the Flint Voice and tried to get real with the revolution and my black
brothers and sisters. But that barrier was always, always there.
That anger, that quiet, accusatory look.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">I moved away, got married, got with child, got
divorced, got less liberal and got back on my own. Luckily, along the way, I stopped being
a medievalist and became an occupational therapist. But that had shocks
of its own. Going to see an elderly black lady paralyzed with pain and mute from a
stroke (her skin a dusky charcoal from malnutrition and dehydration), and
realizing the grandkids were dealing away her pain medication. Having my
car window shot out (while I was inside). Being spit on because the
project dweller thought I was the social worker there to question his
eligibility for benefits, not the therapist who was to help him get back up on
one foot and learn to walk on the prosthetic limb replacing the rotten leg lost
to diabetes and gangrene. Watching in horror as baby daddy pitched an
obviously pregnant teenager down three flights of steps into a pool of blood on
the landing—and then baby daddy pointing a pistol at me when I tried to call
911.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">It’s not racism, it’s reality in the projects, a reality that
continues to exist no matter how much money is thrown at it. And no, it’s
not all of society, but it is the stereotype that cuts the deepest. The
anger and hostility directed at anyone in that world is caustic and terminally
destructive. It was better in the professional environment I move in.
Courtesy, collegiality, polite disinterest; but still the guarded look
and at times ugly comments and actions. So I continued to polish up the armor
and the ever growing chip on my shoulder, sliding by my fellow men and women in
an endless waltz of political correctness, walking on crumbling eggshells in
order not to offend.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">But part of me wanted to stand up and bawl like an eight year old:
Why? I didn’t do this. I wasn’t here. What the fuck,
homer? Five million Jews were blasted into nonexistence along with
another five million of assorted Eastern Europeans and somehow the survivors
got up and kept on living. A few Germans paid for what they did, but the whole
nation was not destroyed. Somehow Europe
got its collective act together, cleared out the trash and rebuilt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">But now things are a little different. My president
thinks that Trayvon could have been his son; hell, Obama is two months younger
than me. I don’t hear him saying that about my son, who is putting
everything out there for this country. But that line of thinking runs
counter to the preferred dialectic these days; I am considered a racist not
just by the color of my skin but by my politics and even by the way I choose to
live my life, bitterly clinging to my Skygod and boomstick. The anger
burns, the rhetoric rises; the word racist is used like a whip, indiscriminately and abundantly. The white oppressors must be punished, over
and over and over. Maybe even beyond the seventh generation. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">Rhetoric eventually dies out and only ugly truth can remain.
It finally became real for me when I was speaking with a patient, an old
black lady who had moved from Alabama to Arizona with her family early in the last century to work
in the cotton fields of Mobile
and Goodyear. The history of her people, laced with want, hunger, heavy
labor and slow death from overwork and tuberculosis are the threads that are
interwoven into the tapestry of life in Depression era Arizona. Slowly I realized that
slavery didn’t end with the war between the states; this lady and her family
were slaves as well, economic hostages paid in script and solaced with
hellishly hard work during the week and a little church to ease the pain on the
weekend. And who profited from their labor? It was clear enough.
She held my hand and smiled toothlessly at me, saying it was so nice of
me to visit with her, and would I like a little sweet tea? The shame was
devastating. And there really was no answer for it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<hr align="center" size="3" width="100%" />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">So, here I am, sprawled on the Cool Deck next to the gym’s outdoor
pool, burning in the blazing sunlight; my joints feel deconstructed after the
exercise. I squint one eye open: over there is a mess of kids
pitching headfirst down the slide in a tangle of brown arms, white legs,
hysterical screams and laughter as they somehow hit the water without major
injury. Next to me a woman in a sapphire swim burqua kneels in the water
by her little child. Said kid clambers up round the woman’s neck pulling
the hood off, and her blonde hair gleams in the sunlight; I look into eyes as
blazingly blue as her drape. She smiles, and I smile back. Under
the slide, the kids are screeching at each other in a fluent Spanglish and the
toddler gurgles in time with the splash of the water. The woman’s
Nigerian husband arrives with icy, melon flavored waters for us all and I inhale
mine, so cold in the volcanic heat. Time suspends and my mind drifts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">The Sun squats like an Aztec god on the edge of the White Tank
Mountains, scorching the
valley below, and I dreamily watch my forearm, with its smear of
freckles, scars and strawberry blond hair slowly turn red. Twenty five
thousand years of conflict with glaciers, endless winters and predatory
megafauna never prepared my genetic code for the midsummer Arizona afternoon. My existence alone
demonstrates the victory of natural selection; my forebears survived their
environment long enough to propagate and extend the family line all the way down to me, and hence my son. My evolutionary duty is now fulfilled, I suppose. And yet
here I am, confounding nature in my own dusty little corner of the universe by
immersing myself in UV-B, the modern thanatos. I am in my skin, dressed
up in memory, culture, politics and power. White in a heritage of
oppression and exploitation, but just flame red here next to the pool.
Skin is the barrier, separating us at all levels.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 9.5pt;">Brown, black, white, yellow, sunburned; and when we die, yellow,
green, purple, black and gray. Color is power, but is ultimately
ephemeral. I squint in the sun, my eyelashes forming a reddish lace
against a white sky. The water slops in the pool like molten bronze,
dispersing dazzling chips of light and I begin to doze. Dream a dream,
dream of peace, of love, of loss of all the cares, sadness and burdens; dream
that somehow we will find each other, all of God’s children. The Sun
becomes like a pillar of fire, burning everything away--prejudice, hate, skin,
bone, all of it to ash until nothing is left but spirit without mind, love
moving in the void.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-42488480935041735632012-08-15T22:24:00.002-07:002012-08-15T22:25:53.728-07:00Underlying Conditions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h17/fawcettt/image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h17/fawcettt/image.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
It's happened again. <br />
<br />
While stumbling through the bleary eyed morning routine of coffee, feeding the dogs, and checking email, I hear the empty headed, blonde news babe on Channel 3 chirp that there has been another death in Maricopa County linked to the West Nile virus. But, she babbles to her equally vacuous anchorette, the patient had underlying conditions that contributed to his demise, so there clearly is nothing to worry about. Just use a little Off, and no green pools! And now to sports.<br />
<br />
I want to puke.<br />
<br />
There really is no other way to say it. Yeah, I know, more people die from car wrecks and bad food than from West Nile. And you know, those underlying conditions. If those poor slobs didn't have those underlying conditions, well now, they'd just be fine and dandy. West Nile had nothing to do with it. Nothing to worry about. No panic. Be calm, little sheep.<br />
<br />
That is such a fail. Yes, some people get West Nile and have nothing more than an influenza. More people are infected and their lives are completely shattered by the devastation of the illness and the length of the recovery; and many are not able to return to work. And some, fine one day, are bitten by a mosquito, and within a few hours are critically ill and eventually die, either from the disease roaring through an inflamed brain, or from other infections that invade the burned over wreckage that has become their body. Like my husband. With all his underlying conditions.<br />
<br />
I am sure that the "underlying conditions" qualifier is to keep the public from panicking. But the truth is West Nile virus is a killer, just like AIDS, smallpox, Ebola or any other flavor of death dealing infection. Call the murderer by its true name: Pestilence. Disease.<br />
<br />
West Nile virus is a disease. And the dead were killed by West Nile, not by their "underlying conditions". No amount of Health Department spin is going to change that.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-15603131834025909702010-12-31T20:17:00.000-08:002010-12-31T20:17:53.110-08:00The New World<div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I think that there is a moment in everyone's life where you are struck with a startling, shattering realization of the world beyond yourself. For me, it came when I was about three, playing in the sand next to Lake Michigan on a late August morning. The breeze had freshened out of the northwest as a cold front had roared through the night before with thunder, lightening and hail; with the muggy heat wave broken, there would be no more swimming in the lake that summer. Something caught my attention, though; I distinctly remember rocking back on my heels and leveling a long look at the northwestern horizon. The sky was a brilliant blue and Lake Michigan was a gunmetal mirror under it; there were waves, gulls, kids running around and yelling, fishermen lounging lazily on the pier. But there was something there; something immense, silent and still, more powerful than anything in the world that I had encountered so far. Clean, pure, full of light and dark, beyond understanding, and somehow, I was aware that I was caught up in that and would never be able to fully comprehend it. I remember a sense of fear at first, then a growing awe at something I couldn't grasp but was fully aware of. And because of that awakening, I would never be the same.</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I was aware of it that day, and have felt it it since: the solitude of an abandoned concert shell in November, watching the winter winds hurl snow across Lake Mendota, northern lights setting the sky on fire at Crystal Lake; the dark schist of the Estrella Mountains brooding over the empty valley below. For me, nature is the best mirror to reflect this feeling. I have wondered if explorers had this sense of isolation and awareness as well; a conquistadore, having left everything he knew and loved behind with a full realization that he most likely would not return to that place, stepping from the shifting deck of a ship, splashing through the water and suddenly finding his feet on the sand of the shore. Buzz Aldrin commented on the sense of "magnificent desolation" when he first stepped on to the moon: the boot in the dust, eyes raised to a close horizon and then focusing on the blackness beyond. The New World, and all of God's gifts therein, but never what we expected.</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">On a sunny Saturday in October when I watched Bill die, I was overwhelmed by that same sense of being carried away by a power I could not understand. As my husband began a journey that I could not join, I remember standing on the sidewalk outside of the hospital, balancing on the balls of my feet, feeling the world rock and sway under me and seeing that same desolation in the stretch of the sidewalk, grass rolling away to the street, the vacant sky overhead. Eliot's words circled in my mind: </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>Either you had no purpose</b></i></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured</b></i></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>And is altered in fulfilment. </b></i></span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #eeeeee; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Somehow, it all made sense: I had been iceboating once on Keuka Lake, roaring towards Hammondsport at fifty miles an hour when we hit a patch of rotten ice--not uncommon off the Bluff, at the confluence of the two arms of the lake, where wellsprings deep underwater created whirlpools and eddies. We didn't break through because of our speed and the iceboat balancing its runners on the thin skim of ice. There was immense darkness under that ice, three hundred feet of cold water to the bottom of the ancient glacial lake. I looked into that blackness with the same sense of awe that I had when I was first aware of the sun, the sky, the water of Lake Michigan and the same old, old wind that blew straight across Canada from the north pole. At Hammondsport, we beached the iceboat, and stepping off across the crumpled ice I placed my foot on the frozen sand at Champlin Beach; this too was a new world.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL2d4nH2wzhR8NZ9yf-ybBokM4X5_SJ7XDApkxJOP5yHsRlzt7jFmDyJZgGTfgxnHKJ7tje_6-iMcrEAsRC_LHkTIsC8R4-Iy2zL285WkoGRQF8Jxeh7cMOkaRDRrjZ7Ku1qiG/s1600/2010-11-13+14.43.44.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL2d4nH2wzhR8NZ9yf-ybBokM4X5_SJ7XDApkxJOP5yHsRlzt7jFmDyJZgGTfgxnHKJ7tje_6-iMcrEAsRC_LHkTIsC8R4-Iy2zL285WkoGRQF8Jxeh7cMOkaRDRrjZ7Ku1qiG/s320/2010-11-13+14.43.44.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #eeeeee; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">A year ago, I was speculating on a sense of dread that I had been feeling; my father had died the year before, Bill's health had been declining, my job was on the rocks. As the Earth turned around the sun, three hundred and sixty five days later it is a new world. Now, as I stand on the shores of Alamo Lake, I look north towards Artillery Peak; the sky is a clear, translucent blue, the color of his eyes. The air is still and cold, the water smooth as glass. I am balanced on the soles of my feet, feeling the earth under me, rocking with the beat of my heart. </span></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #eeeeee; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">The New World: every day is a new world, full of portent, potential, life, death, silence and the hope of God. And so we step off, as we must, every day onto a foreign shore.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #eeeeee; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span></div><span style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-50527091278233284132010-10-13T22:41:00.000-07:002010-10-13T23:08:10.742-07:00The Principle of Moments<span style="color: #444433; font-size: small;">My love is a-miles in the waiting<br />
The eyes that just stare, and the glance at the clock<br />
And the secret that burns, and the pain that grows dark<br />
And it's you once again<br />
Leading me on - leading me down the road<br />
Driving beyond - driving me down the road<br />
<br />
My love is exceedingly vivid<br />
Red-eyed and fevered with the hum of the miles<br />
Distance and longing, my thoughts do provide<br />
Should I rest for a while at the side<br />
Your love is cradled in knowing<br />
Eyes in the mirror, still expecting they'll come<br />
Sensing too well when the journey is done<br />
There is no turning back . . . Robert Plant</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="color: #444433; font-size: small;">The past weeks have been moments lit in flashes, like the strobe of lightning; instead of dynamic memories, I see in my mind frozen images of life, struggle, death. Then the ambulance, the hospital, the mortuary, sitting in a stifling sales room populated with stubs of coffins, crypts and truly hideous neon cremation urns. A fan unsteadily oscillated in the corner while I filled out death certificates, applications, writing checks, paying in coin, tears and heartreak to bring Bill home. The stale bureaucracy of death: obituaries, letters, emails, sympathy cards opened, and then tied up with a ribbon and put away. A dark green gift bag is delivered to me with a plastic box; inside of that 7.6 pounds of gray sand. My son observes as we come into the world so we go out.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="color: #444433; font-size: small;">I sit at his desk, and idly open drawers; there are files and projects and notes for clients, work that will never be finished, a life ended. A lot of this has to be shredded or destroyed; I slide the drawer closed. I can't do this today, just like I can't sort over shoes, overcoats and photos, tools, guns or telescopes. A picture of Bill as a young man, lying on his back under huge bundles of cable,calibrating a cyclotron; another photo of a long forgotten Christmas with his children, small happy kids with gap toothed grins and hands full of toys. Pictures of Bill with dogs long gone. I like the fancy that they were waiting for him with wagging tails and balls to throw, but this is probably more to make me feel better.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="color: #444433; font-size: small;">I have never subscribed to woo-woo, but when I came home that afternoon, as I broke down and leaned against the refrigerator, pressing my forehead into the metal door, I felt a sense of peace, coolness, wash over me. I had felt this before, when my Dad died. I was flying home, and as the plane lifted into a darkening sky and the tears were burning my eyes, suddenly there was a wave of quiet release and suddenly I felt that somehow, everything would be all right, that the world would return to order and calm. </span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="color: #444433; font-size: small;"> Tonight, I drove down Rainbow Valley Road, the Estrella Mountains crouching against the skyglow of Phoenix on my left; turned onto Riggs Road, navigated past where the blacktop explodes into rutted gravel, found the cattle grate that signals the entrance to the North Maricopa Mountain Wilderness. This was where we took our last camping trip and where we think Bill got that fatal mosquito bite. I stopped, got out and lay flat on the desert pavement. The air was still and quiet; the moon had set, and the stars were wheeling overhead in an incredibly dark sky. Are you there? There is nothing but the night, and the silence pressing in on me. No feeling came, other than the sense of the firm earth underneath me, the softness of the air against my skin, the dark vault of heaven arching above. But that will have to be enough. Somehow, everything will be, will have to be all right.</span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-65702821327223186692010-10-02T20:41:00.000-07:002010-10-02T21:23:08.290-07:00The Vanishing Point<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRzwZZS-jJr0fxCyzpk6l2j-46EP85eQPNGBOEX-3lp3EhBrSqOieCEj2iflUwKz04l3_WX8upMBsLUH6lTcYE9J09Z9ho1A90YocW5agOgCvCYO-0IpITh1UGjIiqHi1FaG0r/s1600/003.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRzwZZS-jJr0fxCyzpk6l2j-46EP85eQPNGBOEX-3lp3EhBrSqOieCEj2iflUwKz04l3_WX8upMBsLUH6lTcYE9J09Z9ho1A90YocW5agOgCvCYO-0IpITh1UGjIiqHi1FaG0r/s320/003.JPG" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">My husband died today. My husband, partner, buddy, prep master, shooting buddy, political guru and all around best friend died when I removed the ventilator circuit from his tracheostomy and shut off the IV fluids which were keeping him alive.<br />
<br />
There was no hope. He had been fighting West Nile encephalitis since March and had contracted almost all of the conceivable hospital borne infections. Now, because of all the antibiotics and the resultant c. difficile opportunistic invasion, he was hemorrhaging at both ends. And despite the best of intentions, big medical brains, intensive nursing care, and all the work I could do, there was nothing left to be done. Through a series of decisions with increasingly minimized options, the final choice was to end suffering and bring release. The sad reality and irony was that for the past six years I had been manically following H5N1--and what took Bill down was a avian virus delivered via the mosquito vector. The assassin's mace; you never know quite where to look for the next threat. And then, suddenly, here it was.<br />
<br />
Bill accepted Christ into his life in his last days (something which I never expected to happen, but then, there are no atheists in foxholes!). And when the end came, he accepted it with a dark grace. His eyes had a cold, blue, distant gaze, fixed into some middle distance where we could not see. Then, as his heart slowed, blood pressure dropped and breathing ceased, his grasp around my hand weakened and dropped away.<br />
<br />
I know that life will go on, that I will get up and go to work, pay the bills, feed the dogs, cut the grass. But somehow, I feel like a deep, critical part of me has been cut away, and that wound will bleed for the rest of my life--blood looking, in its bright, slow and sinuous way, to heal the missing heart.<br />
<br />
Vaya con Dios, Bill. Go with God, sweetheart.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-4685621794319302602010-07-01T16:30:00.000-07:002010-07-01T16:30:32.842-07:00The Event HorizonWe had been four wheeling out in the desert all day long, following the sinuous Agua Caliente Road. A quick lunch at the abandoned Sundad site, then with cold beers in hand we turned north to pick up the railroad service track at Hyder. It was a warm April day and when I got out of the truck the rail tracks vanished to a distant point, shimmering in a mix of heat and mirage.<br />
<br />
It wasn't too far from where I stood that a passenger train had hurtled off the tracks twenty years past, the victim of some pseudo militia sabotage. Dozens of people were injured in that wreck, and one person was killed--I had been working at the hospital that day and had seen the steady parade of helicopters ferrying bloodied and terrified travelers in from the wreck site. It was an image that I had trouble settling in my mind--darkness, fear, the ripping and grinding sounds, screams, cartwheeling train cars, a horrible conclusion of plans, events, speed and time. I mused now on the interesting illusion of converging parallel lines, brilliant and silver in the desert light; what seems sure and certain and continuous slowly merges together and disappears into a western afternoon so far from the chaos of that wreck.<br />
<br />
The image returned to me as I stood in Bill's ICU room, surrounded by batteries of equipment that were keeping him alive. How had I let it all come to this? Over and over I heard "He wouldn't want to live like this. How could you have done this to him?" I always consdiered myself sophisticated and advanced in the matters of health care; we both had living wills which we thought spelled out exactly our desires to live and die. But suddenly, here we were; Bill's illness and horrible decline had necessitated a series of decisions in the face of decreasing options; it was like descending into a funnel, straight into hell. Now there were no choices left, no options, no white magic to pull him back from the edge. Hospice, remove life support; friends came in tears to make their farewells to an unresponsive, unmoving, unknowing body in a bed. Make your decisions. How could you have let this happen? For the first time in my life I truly knew what it was to feel a heart breaking, being torn in half by grief.<br />
<br />
The nurses studiously avoided me; the social worker was supercilious and condescending. "He lived a good life. How long have you been married? Well, you should have expected this, given your age differences." The fever raged, the white cells climbed, I consulted mortuaries, obtained quotes, retrieved life insurance documentation, wrote emails to friends.<br />
<br />
A quiet young doctor approached me. "There is one last thing I would like to try." He had never given up on Bill, and I had to honor his request for a new treatment. The fever broke overnight, but the white cells continued to climb. Bill's hand was limp in mine; the bones seemed to float separate of their joints, the skin cool and damp. His nurse circled around his bed like a small blue satellite and numbly I watched her. "What are you giving him? "" Morphine". Something burned in my mind like a small comet, a shooting star. Pay attention. Pay attention. "How much morphine?" "Three milligrams every three hours". Since Bill got sick, all sedatives knock him cold. "Can we try a non narcotic for his pain?" "Well, dear, we don't want him to be in pain, now do we?"<br />
<br />
I resisted an overwhelming urge to belt this woman into the middle of next week. "He has a standing order for tramadol. Can we hold the morphine for a few hours?" After much arguing and consulting with the doctor, the nurse finally agreed. I watched, carefully and quietly, my husband's ashen face, as I have for the days, minutes and hours since he became ill. The sun was setting, illuminating the room with a golden glow reflecting off the concrete walls of the hospital in through the strange and large oval windows that Good Sam is known for.<br />
<br />
A black hole is where a sun has collapsed under its own mass, and where the gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape. But Stephen Hawking proposes that in the strange world of quantum mechanics that a dim light flickers at the boundary of the black hole: Hawking radiation on the event horizon. Maybe that is what I was sensing, what was tearing me apart in the face of pulling the plug. Maybe I was sensing life dancing on the edge of darkness. There was a flicker of an eyelash, then suddenly Bill was looking at me. Truly looking at me, for the first time in three months. We had gone through the black hole, the point of convergence and had come out the other side.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-74657128196680154172010-06-10T23:24:00.000-07:002010-06-11T03:09:39.414-07:00The Red QueenI had read that the concept of the Red Queen as a biological murderer was lifted from Lewis Carroll. At first it was a metaphorical figure for sexual dominance in a hierarchy, but then also (more appropriately) a figure for the victory of the battle in life over life. Step by step, life over arches and consumes life. Bacteria, viruses, animals, humans: the small usually fall to the large, but then also the most minute fragments of life can devastate the most complex organism. Even in our polished and high tech, high touch, twenty first century world, healing cannot hold, wrongs cannot be righted, the sick cannot be made well. Death comes for us all.<br />
<br />
The doctor's eyes were hidden and pained. "We have done everything we can. Your husband is on every antibiotic, and yet his white cell count continues to rise." The nurse slides morphine into Bill's veins and does not tell me; he murmurs to my friends. "She is emotional; his son will set her straight". When I hear that, I laugh, since the son is as variable and inconstant as the breeze; I have somehow been managing to hold things together since the Red Queen came roaring in and toppled the walls of my husband's mind.<br />
<br />
He put up a hell of a fight; the struggle was mighty. Behind bags of cipro, zyvox and daptomycin, primaxin, flagyl and rifampin, cellular death and warfare roared. In the end, the host was overrun, the castle burned to the ground, beaten back by fever, incomprehensible pain and fatigue.<br />
<br />
Tonight, it is clear the end is near. His eyes roam restlessly under his eyelids, sometimes staring deeply into my gaze, sometimes fixed in the corner of the room where the dark man waits, but always as blue and as transluscent as the northern sky. My tears fall down on his face and he flinches from the pain. I love you so much. You are my best friend, my companion, my buddy, the warm hand I touch in the night, the guitar string that resonated to my restless energy. I did my best, but in the end, my best was not good enough to keep you here. <br />
<br />
Vaya con Dios, Bill. Go with God.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-2701409399086392122010-05-30T22:24:00.000-07:002010-05-30T22:35:23.835-07:00FireThere are few things that please me more than a good fire. We would build a modest campfire after dinner in the camper, and settle down with bellies full of steak and salad, bourbon and a splash in our mugs. The chairs would be arranged just so to allow for careful placement of moccasined feet on the fire ring and to allow room for snoring Labradors to twitch and grumble underneath. Sometimes, being poised on the still point of the turning world involves finding the perfect balance between the love, light and heat suffusing the campfire and the cold darkness pressing against our backs as a starry Arizona sky wheels overhead.<br />
<br />
It is easy to spin out the metaphor of fire; light from the sun captured in growing mesquite and pinon, released into ephemeral flickers and dark smoke carried out over the canyon. Fire from the sun, fire from the stars, from the blinding light and flash of the first moments of being; all of this created the moment, the "now" of being, the uncomfortable awareness of moving through the universe and the even more uncomfortable awareness that someday the light flickers out. The fire of creation is also the fire of destruction; existence is intense, bright and short.<br />
<br />
Fire is also fever. Fever is the body's last defense against infection, the struggle to maintain life at the cellular level. A virus invades, perverts cells into mutations; the body responds with a cascade of white blood cells and the elevated termperture. I have had fevers in my life; illnesses like the flu which lit me up with heat and ache. The sensation of fever is bizarre; in my case, lower fevers caused malaise and fatigue while higher temperatures seemed to scorch to fog out of my head and allow me to see the world with a strange illumination; fire behind every atom of matter, a halo of light.<br />
<br />
But I had never seen fever like this. Bill's fever was lethal, the shirt of Nessus determined to extinguish his life. First fevers from the virus, scorching his brain; then fever from the inevitable bacterial infection roaring through his body. In an hour his temperature soared to one hundred and five degrees. His eyes were fixed into an upward glare, unable to blink; his muscles racked, locking and unlocking in tremors that vibrated the hospital bed away from the wall. The ICU nurse was focused in, using all her "mad skillz", pumping tylenol after ibuprofen after demerol after morphine through the IV. I ran and fetched ice bags, wet towels, soaked sheets; coaxed and cajoled a floor fan from a sweating security guard: I mopped and fanned, damped and iced. I prayed. I tried, with my thoughts to reach out through that red darkness to find my husband's mind and hold on.<br />
<br />
Bill came back; within an hour and a half he was asking for coffee and wanting to order us a pizza. But the fevers returned again and again and again, until in frustration a doctor sent my husband back to a regular room, since "his fevers are persistent and untreatable". After another crash and return to ICU, I found Bill unable to breath and scorching hot. I held his hand, begging him to come back to me, even if for just a moment so I could say goodbye. He stared through me and began shaking violently, in incomprehensible terror. "There is a man. He has a gun. He is here for me. Don't you see him?" The corner he was looking into was empty.<br />
<br />
I stood between him and the corner. "If he is coming for you, he's got to go through me first." The respiratory therapist administered a treatment; an oxygen mask was placed; I draped a cool washcloth over his eyes. Slowly the tremors decreased, the breathing slowed, the hand relaxed and sleep came, and healing. A new drug, a new protocol, and Bill began to surface, breathing damply, thickly, like a drowned swimmer. Every fever strips away a little more strength, a little more consciousness, a little more time.<br />
<br />
A fever, the sun, a thermonuclear blast, campfires, heat, friction, liberation, destruction. Fire consumes and creates. It is too soon to know what the fire has left behind, destroyed or annealed. I have been too close now not to know that death will come eventually; but Bill's will to live is an amazing thing to see. He has always proclaimed agnosticism, but I point out to him that there are no atheists in foxholes. He gives a small, wary smile, admitting to feeling that when he was drifting away there was an immense sense of peace in going home and that he was no longer afraid.<br />
<br />
The dove descending breaks the air<br />
With flame of incandescent terror<br />
Of which the tongues declare<br />
The one discharge from sin and error.<br />
The only hope or else despair<br />
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre--<br />
To be redeemed from fire by fire.<br />
<br />
Who then devised the torment? Love.<br />
Love is the unfamiliar Name<br />
Behind the hands that wove<br />
The intolerable shirt of flame<br />
Which human power cannot remove.<br />
We only life, only suspire<br />
Consumed by either fire or fire.<br />
--T. S. Eliot <i>Little Gidding </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-37443630596078413832010-04-23T22:32:00.000-07:002010-04-23T22:32:07.336-07:00ThreadsA virus is one of the most microscopic bits of existence; not really alive, but life like, small, threatening, powerful. This is what the doctors think brought my husband's life almost to a standstill then into a mind bending tailspin. A mosquito's proboscis, infected with some minute fragment of an unknown virus, digging into the deltoid muscle. Then a strange rash as the virus marched up protopathic and epicritic pathways, invading hypothalumus, hippocampus, amygdala, cortex, overthrowing the seat of reason and setting his mind on fire. A headache, malaise, fever, delirium, coma, ?death? . The slow, deliberate clawing back on shore, somehow coming back to daylight.<br />
<br />
I feel like a demented Penelope, trying to spin the threads of Bill's memory back into some recognizable record of life as he drifts from memory to hallucination to awareness only to be swept away again into some dark closet full of terror. He is pinned in a corner of his hospital room, raging at his inability to manipulate his wheelchair. Reorient, reposition, remind; the breathing slows, the wide eyes narrow and the voice becomes calm. Victories come in small steps. He knows now why he is in the hospital; he demonstrates to the speech therapist complex calculus and how to compute the declination of the orbit of a spy satellite. The physical therapist is trying to get a road bike at cost. My husband tells me of the nightmare of being drowned in blood as he remembers pulmonary hemorrhage and the rescue of intubation and I listen calmly, while screaming inside. He bitches about the hospital food (which is hideous) and refuses to eat. <br />
<br />
The neurologist assures me that there will be a complete recovery, and I believe him, but this virus burned through my husband's brain and extinguished almost all of the lights. Now, thoughts blink like fireflies and find connections, slowly, tenaciously, with persistence, pulling the threads together. It is an odyssey that I never in my wildest dreams expected to be on, but here we are, trying to figure it out and stumble through. One foot in front of the other. One word at a time. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-36346029871138363302010-04-08T20:07:00.000-07:002010-10-20T22:48:37.197-07:00SunriseArizona is a wonderful place to stare at the sky. A night full of stars, the pastel colors of twilight and dawn, the long slanted light of February or the dagger sun of July; the light changes, fills and illuminates. On a Tuesday morning, the nurse reached over and shut off the Propafol dripping into my husband's veins. The ventilator sighed in the corner, the breaths moving steadily in and out of his lungs. I spoke his name over and over, trying desperately to keep my voice calm and steady, hide the tears that had filled my head for the past week. Slowly, the lids lifted, and that white Arizona light filled his eyes, firing them to a radioactive blue.<br />
<br />
We would camp in the desert; in the lavender dawn and over a cup of coffee, Bill would look over the quiet world and quote Kipling: The sun comes up like thunder, from China across the bay. And the Sun would indeed break the horizon, shooting long dark shadows, turning the red rocks into fire for the briefest moment..<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwUQeN9bP8NABH9lod-SrAHEV9ckIB4I056fOvKkErOnsE0RmOZJeoSCN91p67lk1wun2EXhRrPTaXiTcfwDjDfJuEWYij2LCiNDK-Wgw0FmaPKhksfPKwai92sRw5pEb9Py7L/s1600/025.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwUQeN9bP8NABH9lod-SrAHEV9ckIB4I056fOvKkErOnsE0RmOZJeoSCN91p67lk1wun2EXhRrPTaXiTcfwDjDfJuEWYij2LCiNDK-Wgw0FmaPKhksfPKwai92sRw5pEb9Py7L/s320/025.JPG" width="320" /></a>Life is like thunder. The sky fills with an intense light, the roar crashes and fills your head beyond the capacity to hold any sound; then darkness and silence. And another lightning bolt, another, another ; and then, eventually, a quiet night under a black sky drilled with brilliant and unblinking stars.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-10784392997290975472010-03-30T04:17:00.000-07:002010-03-30T04:17:22.523-07:00The Razor's EdgeMy husband is close to death. Bill started feeling rotten about a week ago and descended through weakness, lethargy, confusion and finally into seizures, aphasia, violent delirium and coma. The sense of being a powerless, horrified onlooker is beyond overwhelming.<br />
<br />
The hospital has been great, the staff attentive and responsive, but I feel like I am navigating the razor's edge trying to help with my husband's care. The same story told over and over and over to any number of skeptical medicos: a camping trip over a gorgeous weekend in the Arizona desert, headache the following day, then the avalanche. No, not a smoker. Yes, a social drinker. And every day, a new, possible diagnosis. Delirium tremens? Yes, then no; social history and blood chemistry does not support this. Septicemia? Yes, then no. No infection. We are finally at viral encephalits, probably West Nile Virus, because of abnormal cerebrospinal fluid analysis. <br />
<br />
The doctors and nurses engage in wonderful synchrony, full of shared, private humor and confidence of numbers. I know that feeling, because I used to work in the same environment. But now, standing on the other side of the bed, I feel even more isolated, because I know the code, I recognize the semaphore, I instinctively grasp the message behind the message in the programmed responses from the medical staff. Bill is very sick. He almost died Sunday night.<br />
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Now I look at my husband, who always has been somewhat larger than life to me. He is sedated, but not truly asleep. The ventilator sighs, sounding so much like water hissing up on a rocky shoreline. His feet float under the sheet; hands wave gently in the air in a strange, Jacksonian dance, reflex to reflexive posture. Expressions move across his face, cloud shadows over a sun filled landscape, the land of coma. The barrel chest rises and falls evenly, so much more smoothly than the horrified, screaming gasping, struggling for air and for life.<br />
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We are all walking the razor's edge, but most of the time are not aware of it. Now, I see the exquisite danger in every single step, the gift and threat of life.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-70109416774196606582010-01-04T05:54:00.000-08:002010-01-04T05:54:14.139-08:00The Known Universe<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/17jymDn0W6U&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/17jymDn0W6U&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />
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Amazing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-76685836884772608792009-12-24T22:36:00.000-08:002009-12-24T22:36:48.160-08:00RevelationBack in 1981 I took a course in Byzantine history when I was a guest student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During a chapter on mosaic and art, the professor briefly touched on an interesting symbol--in the Byzantine mosaics, behind the figures of immense power, Justin and Theodora and all the forgotten functionaries, there is always the partly drawn curtain. The instructor said this semi drawn drape was supposed to imply the presence of something sacred, not seen, barely understood. It was symbology, semiotics, spoken and unspoken, all in one small image behind the giant icons with their immense halos and eyes that gazed with amazing and unblinking intensity into the Beyond. But there it was: that half drawn curtain, with a darkened space behind, a veil between here and there.<br />
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Now it is Christmas Eve. The scholars inform that Jesus was actually born in the spring and that Christmas is merely an integration of pagan winter solstice festivals into a general religious festival to bring the unwashed on board with the Roman hegemony. Maybe so; but tradition shapes conciousness, and now it is December 24th and I am thinking about the birth of Christ. Luke's story is in our minds: the young couple, traveling to another city to report for census and taxation, existing under the hand of a foreign tyranny. Then the panic and immediacy of childbirth, the parents searching for shelter, protection, food; the stench and squalor of a stable, the labors of a mother and then suddenly, quietly, immediately . . . life. An infant, defenseless in the face of an angry world, surrounded by draft animals and an exhausted mother and father, sleeps, not knowing what his existence will carve into the marble face of Rome. The shepherds appear telling the story of celestial visitation, and wise men bearing gifts, with their brilliant star that leads them to search for this new King. We all know this story, and have heard it so many times, but it still powerful and resonant.<br />
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And so since then Christianity stumbles along, waiting for the new revelation, the lifting of the curtain, the new Messiah.<br />
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Tonight, I went out into the desert. It is quiet here in Arizona; we are in between winter storms and wind that rips the sand away from the rocky ground; indeed, a recent dust storm caused the deaths of four people. But now it is quiet, so still that I can hear the half movements of the birds nesting in the acacia tree behind our home. The stars shine with almost no twinkle because the air is so dry and still and a half moon is just past zenith. You get the sense that the planet is . . . well . . . waiting. What curtain is drawn, what monster or god lurks in the darkness just behind the fabric?<br />
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Or is it even that important? I am struggling now--so many things--the loss of a parent, the illness of a spouse, challenges of a career, worries about money, health, and whether or not Obama and his cast of clowns are driving us all over a cliff. When my father died last spring, I looked at that dear, quiet and dead face and promised to be a better person--to serve with a humble heart--and to somehow try to be a light to others even when I was met with my own darkness. I'm trying, but still manage to fall flat at least once a day. I keep looking for something to orient me, to give it all some meaning and direction.<br />
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But overhead, the stars turn through the night sky and the Moon glides across the ecliptic; the Hunter chases the Bear and the galaxies whirl in the coldness of space. The sense of anticipation, waiting, threat, hairs rising on the back of my neck: what is coming? Will it by like Yeats, with a disintegration from order to chaos and a monster emerging out of the desert? Or will it be something as small and inconsequential as a newborn with the message of peace? Lord help me, I don't know.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-26004348574669294752009-12-17T20:26:00.000-08:002009-12-17T20:26:22.890-08:00Interesting TimesThat old Chinese curse--May you live in interesting times. Up until now I had dismissed out of hand Panarin's assertion that the United States would fall into civil war within the next few years; and yet when I see the heat and hatred rising out of the different forums I frequent, I am truly beginning to think that our country is indeed in grave danger.<br />
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So who is going to stand up for the United States? I'm not so simplistic to think it will be one party, one religion, one way of thinking. I don't care for the politcally correct mandates for diversity, social justice and green oriented redistribution of wealth; but it is equally as clear that difference is good--otherwise the gene pool gets too shallow. Ultimately the message that is most clear to me is what rings out of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Freedom from tyranny. Freedom from religious persecution. Freedom of speech. The ultimate right to bear arms to defend and protect you and yours, your life, your country. <br />
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What was the Revolutionary Army? A collection of farmers, shopkeepers, apprentices, lawyers and doctors, led by a gentleman farmer from Virginia who in the past was a failed surveyor. But somehow the sum of all these people was far greater than the parts. More battles lost than won, but the important battles <b>were</b> won, at great cost in both blood and wealth. What was that phrase? "Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor?" The spirit of '76 isn't so far away--it flashed back into being after 9/11, and even though it has been drowned almost out of existence by the rising partisan swamp of Washingtonian politics, I believe that spirit is still there, sparking quietly away until needed.<br />
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http://mausersandmuffins.blogspot.com/2009/12/true-measure-of-patriot-is.html<br />
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Brigid is a great blogger; her prose is eloquent and clear--but her message rings much more strongly than any other commentary I have read to date:<br />
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"<span style="font-size: 130%; font-style: italic;">Yet when we strive to hold true, to stand firm to our beliefs as free men, together, to carry our weapons and defend our land, the weak become strong, and the wandering hold together as one." Brigid, 2009.</span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-88387857586052224942009-12-10T06:57:00.000-08:002009-12-10T06:57:13.048-08:00Why we fight . . .A thoughtful essay and one of the best explanations of the survival mentality I have found. I tend to bridle a bit at the term "survivalist" just because of the inference of "angry redneck syndrome". Instead, I prefer the term "prepared" with the implied idea of beans, bullets, bandaids, and the flexible and realistic mindset necessary to implement the use of those supplies in a time of crisis.<br />
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<br />
<div class="post"> <h2 id="post-159"><a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/?p=159" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: What Does It Mean To Be A Survivalist?">What Does It Mean To Be A Survivalist?</a></h2><div class="entrytext"> <em>by Giordano Bruno</em><br />
<em>Neithercorp Press -</em><em> 10/1/2009</em><br />
<div align="center"> <a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/arch1.jpg" title="japan-chivalry"><img alt="japan-chivalry" height="450" src="http://neithercorp.us/npress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/arch1.jpg" width="550" /></a><br />
</div>We’ve all seen the stereotypes depicted in TV and film; a lonely, semi-frustrated man with a knack for carpentry, BBQ, and ammo reloading. He stockpiles guns and food in his secret log cabin in the hills near his home and waits, even “anxiously anticipates”, the inevitable “end of the world.” He believes only he will survive, because everyone else is an idiot. Oh, and he’s “crazy.” They all are…<br />
But is this stereotype in any way honest? Does one have to take on all these cumbersome character qualities in order to be a survivalist, or does one choose to become a survivalist, and is suddenly stricken with angry redneck’s disease?<br />
Three years ago I became a survivalist, and I can say without a doubt, one does not have to live the stereotype.<br />
Survivalism is not about taking on a new identity, it is about being prepared. It is not about paranoia and fear. It is about awareness, responsibility, and common sense. The average American today is often so disconnected from his own survival and self defense that when confronted with the idea of “preparedness” he becomes incredulous, as if the entire concept is so fantastical it should be buried in a book of folklore along with faeries and unicorns. The fact of the matter is, true survival will soon be the first thing on many people’s minds in this country, instead of the last, and every man, whether he be a farmer in the country or a yuppie office jockey in the suburbs, will have to decide NOW what he is going to do, mentally above all else, to be ready for what is coming.<br />
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<strong>Taking Responsibility For Your Own Life</strong><br />
A survivalist understands that until we are self-reliant, we cannot help others. Our life is our own, and if we fail in protecting it then it is only we who are to blame. No survivalist “expects” others to save him from peril, and this includes the government. No true survivalist will find himself after an inflationary collapse of the dollar crying on a street corner demanding free food and a job. He knows that he will not get it anyway, and anything he does get will only be through his own struggle and sacrifice. Being truly free is a double edged sword; while the possibilities of life become endless, one must be capably independent in order to make use of those possibilities freedom presents. This means taking one’s destiny into one’s own hands. It means hardship and heartbreak. It means striving, never stopping, always moving forward through any obstacle regardless of how seemingly impassable. It means having the will to fight back against oppression that appears insurmountable. Your world begins and ends with you, and the same goes for your problems. You are the maker of your own epoch.<br />
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<strong>Independence Is Not The Same As Selfishness</strong><br />
While it is impossible to be a survivalist without breaking free of our dependence on society, this does not mean we leave society in the dust. Survivalists are very aware, very insightful people, and when confronted with the ignorance of the average person, we often reel in horror and disgust. We can become jaded and uncaring for those who do not see the trouble coming, taking on an attitude of complacency when confronted with the plight of those we tried to warn. The cold Darwinian mantle “Survival of the Fittest” can take hold of us and make us lose our humanity. Some of us may even stop trying to warn people.<br />
“Let them find out the hard way,” we think, “What’s the point, if they haven’t figured it out by now, they never will.”<br />
But this is pure rationality, not wisdom, and there is a very big difference. While the survivalist movement is often linked with the “objectivist” philosophies of Ayn Rand, and such philosophies lean towards the “every man for himself attitude,” wisdom dictates that this is simply not practical. It is, at the very least, an exaggeration of the truth. Human beings have an inborn sense of individualism. Cultivating this is at the very core of survivalism. However, we also have an incredibly strong inborn sense of compassion and connectivity to our fellow man. It is a part of our conscience, and it is something we cannot escape. It is in the nature of those who are aware of danger to try to protect those who are not.<br />
The survivalist is not an island, and there is something much greater at work in the universe than the narrow mechanics of pure logic. The human heart must be heeded, lest we face the dire consequences, and the heart tells us that all life has a meaning, even the life of a stupid useless man.<br />
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<strong>Why We Fight</strong><br />
Saving our own lives and the lives of our family is, of course, of optimum importance, but this alone is not enough. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? What is the point of it all?<br />
Do I personally feel a great sense of “admiration” for the large part of humanity? Certainly not! Nine out of ten people I meet on a daily basis are earth shatteringly ignorant, self-absorbed, egotistical, self-centered, socially backwards products of the pop-culture sewage pit.<br />
But do we condemn them to death for this? No, we do not… instead, we fight for them, every day.<br />
We do not fight because of what humanity is. Most of us despise what humanity is. We fight for what it COULD BE. We fight for the very real possibility of something far better that what we now know; a world where individualism is the norm, where elite minorities of men bent on dominion are given no ground, no foothold, no quarter. A world where original thought is encouraged instead of crushed, logic and emotion are given equal importance instead of generically separated and compartmentalized, honesty and courage are rewarded instead of mocked, and the love of our fellow man is natural and real, instead of fabricated and forced for the sake of appearances.<br />
We fight for a world we may never live to see, not because it is “reasonable,” but because every impulse at our very core tells us it is right. It is necessary. It is one of the reasons we are here, now. The survivalist is not just a self-reliant and insightful man of resolve, he is the levy upon which the ripping torrential waters of history collide. He is the wall that stays the tide. If the survivalist collapses, then nothing can hold, but if he remains, solid as stone, then there is a chance for everyone.<br />
Whether we like it or not, in times of pain the world turns to those men who have either the conviction and great strength of an honorable soul, or those who are clever and evil enough to fake it. By becoming a survivalist in such times, one also inadvertently becomes a symbol to others. By breaking free of the masses, ironically, we also in a sense become partly responsible for them. The example we set could determine the very direction of the future. The way of the survivalist becomes a steadfast light in the darkness, until finally, all men can see.<br />
<div align="center"> <a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/knight-death-2-l.jpg" title="knight-death"><img alt="knight-death" src="http://neithercorp.us/npress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/knight-death-2-l.jpg" /></a><a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/chivalry.JPG" title="chivalry"> </a><br />
</div><div class="postmetadata alt"> <small> Posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 8:52 am in the category:<a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/?cat=1" rel="category" title="View all posts in All Posts">All Posts</a>. Comment <a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/?feed=rss2&p=159">RSS 2.0</a> feed. <a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/?p=159#respond">Comment it </a>, or <a href="http://neithercorp.us/npress/wp-trackback.php?p=159">trackback</a> this post. </small><br />
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</div><div class="postmetadata alt"><small>(printed with permission from author to reproduce "ad nauseum" J. F.) </small> <br />
</div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32867185.post-31259018707660953312009-12-09T06:37:00.000-08:002009-12-10T05:56:59.509-08:00Pedaling squaresA lot of people ask me what it means. In the world of cycling, the peak of performance and technique is to keep a fluid and smooth cycling cadence as you pedal the bike. Unfortunately, human anatomy, geometry and physics limit this ability, so the skill of a smooth spin only comes after a long time on the bike, and is easily lost with any absence from riding.<br />
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I haven't ridden with any frequency in years, and with all the usual excuses of work, family life, illness and other responsibilities. But when I was a kid, I loved to ride my bike, and made a several year foray as a citizen racer in my teens. I have a garageful of bikes I don't ride, that get dustier and dustier, the tires rotting away from the rims and the leather saddles developing a fine web of cracks from the dryness of neglect.<br />
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But the other day, while straightening out the garage, I leaned my Litespeed road bike outside against the truck so it wouldn't get knocked over. In the middle of heaving boxes and moving bags of water softener salt, I glanced outside and the familiar diamond profile of my bike was suddenly on fire in the sunlight, gleaming and luminous. The memories came flooding back: tucked down in a tight wedge over the handlebars and screaming down Sugar Hill in upstate New York, the speedometer approaching sixty three miles per hour, the fork acquiring a queer harmonic resonance as I wondered if the front wheel would fall off; the soft crunch of the tires over pebbles and the squeak of the chain as I grunted and groaned up interminable steep hills outside of Binghamton and Erie; and then the abrupt transplantation to Arizona, sightlines of twenty miles in every direction and *no cars* and a headwind determined to kill me.<br />
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It was as if in the middle of middle age, my past reared up and slapped me in the face. Is it ever too late to remember dreams? To try again? When my dad died last spring, I made a promise to myself to serve with humility, to be a better person, to try to be a light to others (even if it was a dim one!) I realized it is never a black to white kind of change, but instead the constant erosion of life that models us, changes us, destroys us and renews us.<br />
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So I aired up the tires on the Litespeed and rode it around the block, praying the dry rotted tires wouldn't blow--and they didn't, being quality Continentals! At first awkward, shifting my hands from hoods to the tops of the bars, squirming on the now rock hard saddle, feet stabbing at the pedals . . . pedaling squares. And then, suddenly, for all too brief a moment, it all fell together. Power moving from my legs to the pedals, the ground flowing backwards with a gentle hiss, me almost floating over the handlebars and clicking smoothly through the gears, heart, breathing, cadence all in harmony..<br />
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I'm still not sure if existence is a progression to chaos or organization--most of the time I'm inclined to think chaos--but every once in a rare while things move into place and instead of pedaling squares, I'm spinning perfect circles.<br />
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<i>"Quick now, here, now, always—</i><br />
<i>A condition of complete simplicity</i><br />
<i>(Costing not less than everything)</i><br />
<i>And all shall be well and</i><br />
<i>All manner of thing shall be well</i><br />
<i>When the tongues of flames are in-folded</i><br />
<i>Into the crowned knot of fire</i><br />
<i>And the fire and the rose are one."</i><br />
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<i>T. S. Eliot "Little Gidding"</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0