Last Night on ER

Oh deer.

Last night we worked until about 11:00 and then I said goodnight and stepped out onto the street with my bag over my shoulder, feeling all at once like the advertising/marketing version of Kwai Chang Caine, on my own, pointing my feet deliberately and thoughtfully down the street, down the hill, a poor stranger moving through this valley of wealth and comfort.  Now, granted, I was walking not quite a mile to the Fireplace Room at the Brick Path B&B, so the comparison to the peripatetic Caine is a shallow one.  But suffice it to say that I descended this hill with my mind engaged in questions like those Caine might have pondered in a troubled or a weak moment—Who am I?  Why am I here? Is this path the right one?  If I cannot find happiness in this moment, why should I expect it of the future?  Did I truly earn my day rate?

I was brought back into the moment by a sudden commotion in the yard to my right—a rustling, a sound like someone kicking a recycling bin.  The sidewalk and houses were dark on this stretch of Marin Ave.  The only light came from the pulses of traffic that thundered by on my left.  I continued forward.  A flash of motion to my right—was that a, a deer?  It looked like a deer leaping the hedge between the yards. Then, in front of me, his calmer partner trotted onto the sidewalk, gave me a sidelong glance and, not too worried by what she saw, turned tail and preceded me down the street at an easy walk.

We went along together like this for something longer than a moment and then she turned into the next yard and disappeared as if she’d never been. 

It is always thrilling to see a big animal. I’m sure there must be a reason for the charge it gives, something deep inside us, perhaps an ancient instinct that prepares you to either defend or dine.  But these deer had shown no serious sign of aggression and as for me, I was full of Tikka Masala the delivery man had brought to my friend’s house.  Perhaps then the deer were some sort of sign, meant to show the fairness of my path.  Had I not come here for this job, had we not decided to work into the evening, had the delivery man not gotten hopelessly lost and arrived half an hour late, I would not have been here to see these animals.  But imagining these deer were a sign meant to show something presupposes a supernatural being with the ability to control deer and the desire to show me something.  I don’t imagine God has that kind of time on his hands.

No these were just deer, trying to eat without being hit by a car.  It’s tempting to look for a larger lesson about life there, but sometime a deer is just a deer.  What I got out of the moment was almost entirely up to me.

Well, if nothing else, they got me out of my head and I was able again to breathe the night air, smell the faint licorice smell that seemed infused in it, and basically enjoy the last little bit of my walk down to my little cottage room.  Here, it has to be said, in case the reader is tempted to swap a David Carradine metaphor in for Kwai Chang, there is no closet, only an armoire, and anyway I went straight to bed.

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

It’s odd to eat lunch on your own at a place like Chez Panisse.  Now there’s an opening line not guaranteed to secure the sympathy of the reader.  Maybe I could mitigate the impact by pointing out that I am only in the café, not the restaurant proper.  Well, no apologies: here I am, at a cozy table, seated on the banquet.  To my right a young couple plumb the depths of their feelings for one another—or, really, she seems to be doing most of the plumbing and questioning the accuracy of her readings.  He is young, florid, well fed and well dressed but I detect the bloom of perspiration on his brow.  The questions hit home.

Across from me, what looks like a mother/son scenario.  She: thin, severe, somehow simultaneously elegant and bedraggled.  He: scruffy, studiously casual, arrogantly slovenly, slumped in his chair.  They are mid-meal.  To the waiter, “We’d like a glass of wine.”  The waiter: “White? Red?”  Him: “Yes.”  There is no reaction, no sense that he’s said something funny, just a pause while he waits for the waiter to read his mind.  A young software millionaire? I ask myself. 

Next to me, the waiter delivers the dishes and says, softly, “ Delicious.”  It seems a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion, just in case these water buffalo don’t know what to make of it.  “What is this again?”  “I dunno, delicious?”  “What?”  “Delicious.  He said it was delicious.”  After the waiter leaves the girl says what she really thinks.  “It’s too hot,” she says.  Well, that’s easily remedied.

My salad has arrived and it is fantastic.  Light, subtle, tasty.  Almost as good as the salads my wife makes.

Diagonally from me sits a woman, one of a party of four, who could to my eye be  Deb Chen of ER fame.  I mean, ok, I know it’s not her.  I am aware of the typical western tendency to lump all Asians into the same category so, no, I know it’s not really Deb Chen but it looks a lot like her.  It makes me think of her, at any rate, and how cocky she was, at least until the moment she let a guide wire slip into some patient’s aorta. 

Oh Deb, I judged you then, but my heart is with you now.  I feel myself paralyzed, continually on the verge of letting the guide wire slip into the bloodstream of my fledgling freelance career.  Where am I?  In a restaurant in a town far from home waiting on an old friend who has work.  If I stood up quickly and hit my head on this lovely, dark, craftsman-styled beam and began wandering around town aimlessly, with no idea of who I was or what I was doing, who would ever find me and put me straight?  It is like being a young man again, with the added wrinkle of having three children and a mortgage.

Arrogant man and his mom receive a friendly visit tableside by an official from a higher strata of restaurant management.  They are acquaintances. Friends? Talk ensues between the three but quickly narrows to a back and forth between the mom and restaurant man.  The son drifts, loses interest and ends up looking out the window, biting his cuticle.  I look out the same the same window but see nothing.  Some trees.  Blue sky that feels like it’s hanging over an ocean.  The man works at his cuticle.  What troubles him?  I cannot know.

Jing-Mei!  I meant “Jing-Mei,” not Deb.  Well, she was going by Deb when she let the guide wire slip and ran from the ER in tears.  I didn’t think we’d see her again.  But she came back next season, calling herself Jing-Mei, and with her new name a confidence restored, bolstered even by the wisdom that comes of failure. 

Holy crap, I am hungry.  The people to my left, ladies lunching, are sharing their plates—steaming pasta on one side, a lovely cheesy pizzeta on the other.  Oh for a long fork and the courage.

At my back is a solid partition of the same dark wood that frames the windows, rising to about six feet in height.  Behind that is a service station for bread and water.  The restaurant official who had been chatting with the mother and son across from me is back there now and I can hear a scrap of what he’s saying to one of the servers:

“If you can’t find someone to help, you make two trips.” 

She says back, “I know but (inaudible, unintelligible).”

“I’m not having a discussion,” he replies.  It looks sharp on the page and I suppose it was a little, oh, abrupt, but I admired the way he said it.  He was just letting her know what was actually happening.  You know, giving her the recipe for success:  I’m blending the dry ingredients.  I’m not beating them.  I'm sure she left the station entirely unconfused. 

I think if I were going to kill myself, I might do it right here, in the Chez Panisse café, at lunch, just before dessert is served.  I would use a hand gun and be careful to send the slug up towards the ceiling so as to avoid taking anyone along with me.  I think it would be a good time to go and it would have, I imagine, a fine effect.

Sometimes you have a glass of something—or rather, I do; I will speak for myself here—and at first sip it’s clear that someone, somewhere has poured his whole heart into making this thing.  Such is the case with this glass of Barsac.  This morning I went out into the world feeling fine and well-educated, yet the word Barsac meant less than nothing to me.  Now and forever more it will recall this day, this hour and this taste—a kind of concentrated intensity that makes me imagine falling asleep in the sun after a morning picking grapes. 

Also, I may be getting a little drunk.  Hello, ladies.  Are you going to be finishing that pizetta? 

As I had come to suspect, the young man across from me is probably not the boy-genius software developer taking mom out for a nibble.  She just ponied up the credit card, which is the first clue.  Second clue is how he and the waiter got talking—they were classmates and my man is, he says, currently out of work, living with his mom for a while but about to go down to work on an organic farm south of here somewhere. 

But you know what?  Forget about that kid.  I love him but he’s history.  The new news is the marvelous, friendly way the just-arrived peach sorbet knocks boots with the Barsac.  Is this even legal?  Jury is still out.

I look at this bowl.  Three balls of sorbet, a compote of raspberries with four more or less intact berries—no, wait, six, seven; a couple hid beneath the long crisp sugar cookie in the shape of a tongue depressor but with the opposite effect. Anyway, the point is this bowl looks like life. Not exactly like life in everyway you can imagine, but in some respects, yes, very much like it.  To wit, contained, remarkably good over all, and soon to be gone. 

I marshal my bites and I wonder.  Would an unlimited supply of this dish improve matters?  No.  It would ruin them. You know it would.

A distance more than miles

Well, what is the point of having a blog if you can’t now and then fire off some half-baked thought because it only just now occurred to you and you wanted to get it out there before it slipped your mind.

Ugh.  That may actually be the primary reason for having a blog.  It’s a kind of aide-memoire for the attention-deficit generation, of which demographic I consider myself to be a shining exemplar.

That said, I will push forward.  Having recently published an entry that took more than three months to complete, I have some work to do to get the average down to something respectable—an entry a month, say.

Anyhoo, I have been reading Moby Dick to my son at bedtime. I used to read it to both of the older boys but it has been such slow going that the eldest outgrew the habit somewhere around chapter 35 so now it is just me and the nine-year-old.  It has become one of my favorite parts of the day—well, of every day he is here with me.  Usually, right around nine in the evening, he will suddenly appear at my shoulder and ask if I am going to be reading to him.  I tell him to go ahead and get ready and I will join him.  Then, when I think he’s had time to brush his teeth and so forth, I follow him up there and invariably find him in bed reading something else—Pearls Before Swine is a favorite or, recently, a large book about vampires written for girls—which he immediately puts aside, expectant of the imminent delivery of a dose of Melville.

My son's sustained interest in one of my favorite things gives me great joy, joy that is hardly diminished by his recent admission that, as he put it, “I’m glad you’re not reading me something great—well, I know it’s great and all—but not something I love, like, love love.  I mean I love that you read it but it doesn’t really interest me, so I can fall asleep easily.”  So be it.  In the 7th grade I didn’t think I really loved Jeannie Anderson and by the 8th grade I realized how wrong I had been.  The realization came too late for me to really get into Jeannie, chapter and verse.  She had moved on. But Melville is not so fickle.  He will wait for the boy.

Meanwhile, I read on.  And it often happens that, as I’m reading, I’ll come to some passage, some metaphor or thought, some one of the many such moments for which Melville is so justly known, and, moved by the word, I will make some appreciative aside to the son.

“Man oh man,” I might say.  “That was well said.”

Or sometimes, “Wow.  I didn’t understand a word of that.”

Inevitably, silence is the only answer.  He has gone ahead into the other realm.

Just such a moment occurred last night as I was reading to him from Chapter 58, Brit, a beautifully crafted gem of just a few pages.  Melville has begun with an image of the sea as a vast, gentle meadow full of this stuff, this brit, “the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds.”  He goes on:

For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.

A modern reader can’t help but imagine that these fields have since been sown with salt and such visions are unknown to today’s mariners.  This is the first frisson in the chapter.

But as beautiful as this imagery is, Melville quickly begins to describe the sea as a dangerous, violent and deadly place.  The placid sea the Pequod sails through is, essentially, a graveyard.  He speaks of the ancient ark, reminding us not of who was saved, but who was left behind:

The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

You’ve been warned.  But he regains his humor long enough to make this observation:

Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.

He’s fronting, basically.  Your land-based “miracles” are an everyday thing out on my bad-ass ocean. 

He continues distinguishing the comparative safety of the land to the dangers of the ocean and then he ends with this, one of those Melville lines that just takes my breath away, because it seems to me to be an example of everything writing can be—not just the desire to put words on paper, but the ability to somehow put truth there as well.

Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

“My God!” I say to my boy.  “Did you hear that?”

But he is asleep.  I look at him.  He sleeps soundly.  It won’t wake him to move the hair back from his eyes.  And then it strikes me that while I may have pushed off from that isle many years ago, it is still close at hand.  Unreachable, for sure, but not out of sight.

Protocol

There’s more to be said on the topic of yoga, to be sure, but I thought I would harness the momentum the blog has developed with this short but timely entry which demonstrates, anecdotally but convincingly, how careful observation of the show ER has helped me navigate life’s little emergencies.

For the past eight days I have been living aboard a bus with six other gentleman as part of a somewhat unusual project.  Basically we’re traveling across country to see what we see and to collect these observations into a website promoting the new album by a band the name of which I am currently not allowed to reveal.

Life on the bus has many vicissitudes but rather than turn this into a travel journal (and thereby risk exposing some of the limitations of this blog’s stated aim) let me just say that I find myself thinking twice before doing anything because at day eight people are running tight enough that you never know where you’re going to step in it.

For example, one major component of this trip has been that our Chief has been riding the front of the bus taking pictures of the road ahead.  He has been incredibly diligent about this and now has something on the order of twenty thousand pictures of the road ahead which he is going to compile into a kind of video flip book.  Previews suggest that the end result will be mesmerizing.

To do this, he has essentially crossed the US standing up, making for very long days.  Combine this with the very long nights he has spent working with the rest of the crew photographing the places we stop or else working with these photos to create the site and—well, sleep hygiene is not being maintained, let it be said.  Last night I shut the light out at two and I was the first in the bunks.  It is now 5:00 and we are on the road again and I am up and count myself lucky to have had such a languorous time abed. 

The chief however, for the first time in the trip, has not answered the bell.  That means these miles of road, shrouded in darkness though they may be, are the first to escape documentation since our departure from Manhattan 8 days ago. 

This sets up a conflict.  Chief needs sleep.  Needs it.  The road needs to be documented.  The miles are slipping away.  His camera is right there.  I am up.  Why don’t I take that camera up to the bridge and begin snapping photos, filling in as best I can?  Why indeed?

Why shouldn’t Chen insert a central line unsupervised?  Because she might lose the guide-wire and endanger a patient’s life.  But surely no such harm can come from simply taking pictures.

Well that’s the point.  I don’t know what harm can come.  I can’t imagine it.  But the fact remains, I look at that camera and know that I am not qualified on that machine. 

So we roll on into the night.  And if the website suffers from a dearth of photos of central California highway in the pitch black, well, sue me.

Shavasana

I have been on the verge of telling this story before, but on those past occasions I gave in to the storyteller’s instinct for getting a running start on the subject and, taking a step back, again and again I tumbled from that verge into a crevasse of detail or a moraine of connected facts which, when explored, offered no path back to the top but only dead ends, sheer walls and dizzying drops with nary a handhold.

But this time I shall not be rimlocked.  This time I will dive right in and get to it.  And, what’s more, I will not be distracted from my goal or diverted from my path but will promise now to see this simple tale through to its end, whatever that may be.  That is the writer’s pledge, after all—not merely to begin but to continue and, now and then, to finish.  People have the strangest ideas about writing—writers have some of the strangest, I think—but whatever else it is, writing isn’t an exercise and it isn’t meditation and it really doesn’t matter one goddamn bit until someone, anyone—like you—reads it.

Then it’s got a chance.

So here we go, without preamble.  And what we lose in poetry perhaps we will gain in clarity.

When my father died it was not long before I felt that I was dying too.  And not just in the sense that we are all of us mortal and one day destined to cease.  I felt it looming. I felt it opening up before me with nothing and no one between me and it.  The accident that had taken my unborn son, the hard-earned coronary disease that had taken my father were like two shells fired from the same cannon.  It seemed the gunner had the measure of me, and the next round, no doubt already whistling through the air, would strike home. 

My father had had trouble with his weight all his life.  It was one defining factor of his existence—not the only one, but a major one for sure.  It certainly must’ve contributed to the disease that eventually took his life, though in his last year he had gotten himself down to something approaching ideal weight for a man of his build.  In fact it seems likely that, as he reached a trough in his weight and I simultaneously recorded a personal high, he weighed less than me for the first time in our lives.

At any rate, that was certainly true the last time I saw him.  I flew home on a Thursday, arriving late in the evening, and first thing the next morning I went over to the funeral home where they’d held the body pending my arrival.

There was some urgency in this visit.  The funeral director had impressed upon me that my father needed to get off Cape to the crematorium as soon as possible so as to ensure his timely return for the service.  One last trip over the bridge, and with a snow storm in the offing, any delay might send things awry.  It seemed funny that this man, who worked so hard all his life, would still be “under the gun,” as he liked to say, even in death.  But I took the funeral director at his word and arrived at the parlor at just after seven in the morning.

I parked behind the building and let myself in through the back door and into a narrow, carpeted hallway. 

“Hello?” I ventured quietly. 

There was no one about on the first floor.  I could hear some voices coming from upstairs and I made my way to the landing, but as I reached the foot of the stairs, I saw a familiar figure from the corner of my eye.  It was Dad lying in the side room.  Feeling somewhat like a trespasser in this strange home, I hesitated a moment.  He waited. It seemed simply stupid to climb upstairs to get some stranger’s permission to go sit with my father.  So I went on in, and was glad to have this time alone with him. 

He lay in state, wrapped in a shroud, just his head exposed, looking like I imagine Menelaus must’ve looked, his head pointed skyward.  My father had often said, usually on the occasion of the passing of this or that friend whose ashes were scattered from a mountaintop or dispersed from the stern of a sloop at sunset on the sound—in the aftermath of these times, he liked to say that it was his wish not to be cremated and scattered but to be kept whole and dropped from an airplane out over the bay.  He would always follow this assertion by a brief pantomime, hands up, eyes wide, of what he might look like in that moment and then he would laugh that laugh of his, that descending chorus of “Yeah, yuh, yuh, yuh…” that always seemed like a modest acknowledgement of the success of his witticisms as well as a gentle encouragement to the listener to join in the merriment.  It looks a little moronic written out, but it was a subtle laugh, modest and self-deprecating, with an edge of cynicism that recognized the tragedy in all humor—it was a hell of a laugh, in other words, and I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.

But the point was that while he may have joked about this grim airdrop, his actual instructions were characteristically more practical:  he opted for cremation of his body after medical science had taken “whatever parts they see fit to take.” 

His long bones had been harvested—cut away—and so the body beneath the shroud was abruptly truncated, which was curious but not so shocking as I’d been forewarned by the funeral director.  It would’ve been easy enough for him to rig a fake pair of legs, I guess, and it kind of surprised me that he didn’t, as so much of his approach seemed to be to shield the living from the reality of the dead.  As I said, there’d been some small resistance to the initial request of holding the body on Cape until I could come east and see it—but this reluctance was based on concerns about schedule and weather and was, after all, communicated to me secondhand, by my mother, who might well have played up or even, frankly, fabricated the objections, not maliciously or even consciously, but out of her own rather departmental sensibilities. 

I am a fairly get-along-go-along person, too apt, frankly, to let the tides take me where they may—but in this case I insisted, not forcefully, but as forcefully as necessary, and the body was held. It wasn’t a whim on my part.  Recent experience, when my wife and I lost our son in the last week of her pregnancy, had taught me, among other things, the importance of the body.  A dead body is, in a way I am incapable of explaining, the opposite of a symbol.  It doesn’t stand for anything.  It is exactly what it is.  When I held my son’s body, I didn’t feel that I was holding the empty vessel wherein his immortal soul had resided.  I felt that I was holding my son.  And what I knew of him, I knew that way.  My wife had built his life and felt him grow, felt his heart beat and come to know his moods and rhythms—I can’t imagine the loss she felt within her.  For me, there was the hoping and planning, to be sure, and the ear to the belly, and the wondering, but mostly I knew him through that body.  The boy I loved was not this idea named Lincoln Robert Alger, but a nameless, lifeless body.  I remember hardly daring to unwrap the swaddling from around him—but what harm could there be?  No, the harm was done and I wanted to see him and touch him and smell his skin. 

I have read that chimpanzees, when a baby chimp has died, will sometimes carry the baby for days and days, until the corpse became unbearable.  Human observers want to attribute this to love, but really it is an adaptation.  If the baby is merely unconscious from a fall, it is in the mother’s best interest to carry it a bit and see if it might revive.  It’s not sentimentality, science assures us; she clings to the body because she has too much energy tied up in it to just let it go.  All right, but will someone please tell me what the difference is?

So when I held that body, it was that body that I loved.  It was that body that we named.  And when it was time, finally, it was that body that I kissed goodbye.

Likewise, I had too much energy tied up in my father not to make sure, to know in my heart, that he was dead. So I went in and knelt by his head. In an instant I was reminded of being a boy and being sent in to wake him up.  My father was a hard worker and consequently a prodigious sleeper.  I can remember being at his side and being afraid to touch him—afraid of what, I couldn’t say.  His reaction?  His anger?  Something in him that didn’t want to be touched.  In recent months I have woken up to find my boy, my nine-year-old, standing over me with that same look in his eye that—well, now I’m confusing the issue: am I the father or the son, the sleeper or the waker? Where am I in this story?

I am at my father’s side, trying to make sense of it. 

He looked great, honestly.  More rested than I’d seen him in a long while, his eyes gently closed, his mouth relaxed, his hair a laurel wreath of silver curls.  And that nose, so like the prow of some ancient ship.  He looked elegant, graceful, noble—qualities that fit him in life, though intermittently. His skin was cold, his limbs were gone but, oh, that head.  The best part of the man was always in there, and when it was time to finally leave, it was that head that I kissed goodbye.

I made my way upstairs before leaving and found two men—a grey haired, soft-spoken fellow of about my age, and a younger man whom I took to be an apprentice.  The older man spoke so matter-of-factly that it put me at my ease immediately.

“So you saw John downstairs,” he said.

I said that I had.

“We took his long bones,” he said. “I hope that didn’t surprise you.”

I told him I’d been prepared.

“They can do some great things with them, you know.  Transplants, grafts.  All kinds of things.  It’s a good thing to do, you know, when you’re done with your body.”

A week after my father’s funeral, on a Thursday evening, I was driving home from work in my little silver chariot, just merging from the Fremont bridge onto I-5 when it suddenly seemed that all the weight my father had carried for all those years had gathered itself around me, clinging to my ribs, pressing me down in my seat.  I couldn’t catch my breath.  I could feel my chest rise and fall but the air was not enough.  My lungs felt sodden and heavy.  Then, in a moment, I had a vision of myself as a young boy, running out onto the playground in the afternoon.  There were the swing set and the monkey bars.  I could hear the bell and the way it clattered as it rang down.  I felt light and young, as if I could leap into the air and—

Is this my life flashing before my eyes?  Is this what they mean?  Hold on, I told myself, get it together.
I drove myself carefully home and the next day set out for the office armed with workout clothes—shorts, a spare T-shirt—and the resolve to not go gently, but to sweat and spin against the dying of the light.

And that same day, just past the noon hour, when according to well-established ritual I would normally have disconnected myself from the network, undocked from the mothership and stepped out into the neighborhood in search of a plate of warm consolation and a cold pint of courage, instead I descended unto the very fine workout facilities management has provided, and there I dressed, like a boy, in T-shirt and white socks and running shoes, then lumbered out into the weight room, clambered aboard the elliptical machine, and began running—or gliding or skiing or whatever that peculiar motion is that this machine enforces upon you.

It was tedious.  It was numbing.  It was slightly humiliating.  And so my professional career had prepared me brilliantly and I found it was little problem to go for thirty-five or forty minutes.  I truly felt that I probably could’ve continued indefinitely but after the first episode of Matlock finished up I decided it was time to quit for the day.

Thus began a routine that I surprised myself by maintaining into the next week.  The elliptical machine provided an efficient low-impact full-body workout combined with a range of diagnostics—current heart rate, target heart rate, distance covered, time elapsed, calories burned and so forth—while overhead the TV provided entertainment, Matlock or something equivalent, chosen by whatever gym rat had gotten in there before me, sweating away on an adjacent machine.  Fox news one day, Quincy the next, and who knows what the morrow brings? This is living!  An experience so tedious, driven by the warning image of my father’s body, as curtailed as a resuci-annie doll, that it sometimes seemed I had traded the death penalty for life in prison.

Here’s another way to make the same joke: if exercise machines are meant to add years to your life, the elliptical machine certainly delivered—it made a half an hour feel like an eternity.

I throw in this second option here not just to get credit for two jokes but rather to draw your attention to the kinds of decisions that I am constantly making behind the scenes—on your behalf, let it be known—picking out these words and writing them down, considering these other words and rejecting them, not even thinking of those words over there, all with an eye toward, well, excellence, or at least some kind of understanding between us.

So, the aforementioned weight room, to get back to it, is an alcove that looks out onto a half-sized basketball court which serves as a venue for aerobics, strength-training, butt-class, the occasional basketball game and, on a daily basis, yoga. 

Yoga!  I can’t even say the word without feeling something stir inside me—and it is an effort to remember back to the man I was then—a transplanted and lapsed puritan, for whom the word had a kind of nutty-crunchy yogurt taste, a suspiciously foreign and healthy thing, anathema to my upbringing and at odds with the spiritual tradition of my youth.  I was raised Episcopalian, you see, and by that I mean that the church we didn’t go to was a fine, handsome Episcopalian church, where, I feel certain, there was no yoga going on. 

But if I merely suspected how Our Father might feel about the practice of this eastern flim-flammery, I was dead certain how my father would feel about it.  He would’ve pronounced it queer and not in the sense of being gay but in the ancient New England sense, pronounced qwee-uh, and meaning peculiar and suspect—not wrong exactly, but not done, somehow.  As an example, look at the time my father and I were cleaning roe from some herring we’d caught and, upon cutting open a male amongst all the females, he remarked to me that the Finns had a recipe for the milt.  I could tell by the way he said it that he didn’t think much of this, and when I pressed him he said, “Don’t think I want to eat sperm.  Seems queer to me.”  Now my father loved the Finns, of whom there were many living in the woods north of us in West Barnstable.  They were like a mythic race to him—like elves or hobbits. They possessed the secrets of nature: where the quahog could be found or how to jack a deer.  So for my father to pass judgment on a Finn recipe was, to me, a sign of the strength of his moral compass.  He admired these people to no end but it could not cause him to call this recipe other than what it was: queer.

And now I, who admire this man to no end, must also point out the essential, silly squeamishness of this position.  After all here was a man who would, so far as I could tell, eat anything.  Kidneys, liver, brains, tripe, chitterlings.  He could and would happily sup on the thymus gland of a deceased bovine without inquiring after its gender, provided it—the gland, that is—were properly dredged in flour and sautéed in butter.  But the sperm of an alewife?  Here he raised a formidable eyebrow.  And so, for my father anyway, who was not perfect, the etymology comes full circle: there was something queer about being queer. Not wrong, but not done.  Yoga shared this trait with homosexuality: its similarly incomprehensible and foreign physical convolutions would’ve definitely caused my father to raise the other eyebrow. 

But since he no longer had an eyebrow to raise, both of them having been consumed, along with the rest of him, in the great fire that takes us all one day, the way was clear for me to try out yoga, strictly on an experimental basis, as I suspected that it might give me more flexibility and in this way aid my elliptical efforts—that is, my efforts on the elliptical machine.  Thus one day, forty-six years into my life, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds into my workout, with my heart pumping at 152 beats per minute, I decided to step down from my machine, cast aside the spiritual heritage I had, up till then, merely been ignoring, and approach the rather formidably willowy and lithe yoga instructor with my plea: could I try this yoga thing or was it just too late for me.

“Of course,” she said.  “You can start today.”

And so, in search of one sort of flexibility, I stumbled onto an entirely different kind—a flexibility of spirit and purpose, not in yoga, but in myself—which these mystic twists and turns somehow began to unlock. 

C'est la vie.

In the aftermath of the party, the guests are gone, the kids are asleep, the missus has gone upstairs to try to get the baby back down and I’m drinking up the last of the wine, throwing a few dishes at the sink and listening to the butt end of the music mix that was designed to get us from point a to point b.  I figure, from the quiet, that the little one has succumbed and, likely, the missus right behind him. 

What is this cd?  An old Sarah Vaughn thing that maybe isn’t my favorite disc in the world, or even my favorite Sarah Vaughn disc in the world, but just something that, at a party, when you play it, nobody kicks too hard and some people maybe even think, "Huh, Sarah Vaughn, well, ok."

Once upon a time I chose the music with a sharp eye toward what might get me laid.  I used the speakers to try to say the stuff I couldn’t figure out how to say with my mouth in hopes of getting something that seemed like what I needed more than anything in the world.  Those were wonderful times and I don’t miss them one bit.

Tonight, the door had hardly closed on our last, lovely guest when I heard Sarah say, and I quote, “It’s a funny thing, when it comes to love.  You don’t always conquer the one you’re dreaming of.” 

True, Sarah.  So true.  And a young man’s life is dedicated to that principle. But what about when the one you’re dreaming of is upstairs, asleep in your bed.  What about when the soul you have searched for is safely tucked in on the second floor?  Who prepared for this?  Not I.  I was ready to write poetry in a lonely garrett, my words a poor salve to the wounds that marked me from head to toe.  I was prepared to search and search.  I never gave a thought to what I would do if I found what I was looking for. 

Midway through life’s journey, I find myself in a pathless wood.  Pathless?  Only in that there is no way out.  But take a second.  Do you feel that?  It can’t be explained except to say that I don’t want out.  I want in. 

Well, that's a simple, stupid trick of language.  The kind of thing that would’ve earned my scorn when I was young.  Thank god I am not young.

Above me, four hearts beat their beats.  Four sets of lungs fill and empty.  Oxygen to the blood, blood to the limbs.  Four brains bubble and tick.  Dreams fly in and out.  Three boys and this wonderful woman.  Nothing to you, everything to me.

The cage is open, the bird is gone.

John came to Kem with a tall glass and sat by her side on the couch.  “Here, drink this,” he said.  “it’s apple juice.”  She sat up awkwardly—nothing is easy when you’re nine months pregnant—she took the glass he offered and sipped at it.

“Have you done your kick counts this morning?” he asked quietly.

Their child is already dead.  That much is suddenly crystal clear.  Juice is just juice, just a drink, just a kind gesture from a man to his lover.  But a cold slug of juice is also what the doctor prescribes to a mother who hasn’t noticed any movement and is beginning to worry. And kick counts? They’re just a low tech way of monitoring fetal activity.  Put the two together in an opening scene of ER and you have a tragedy.

“Oh, no,” Tanja said, taking my hand. “Oh, no.”

This show rips us up routinely—the drunken, dying father begging his son’s forgiveness; the firefighter with full thickness burns, able to joke now, but condemned to die in 72 hours; the old man who knows he has to let his wife go but can’t—there are a thousand heartbreaks and just when you think you’ve got it under control, they’ll find a new way to twist the knife.  So it was just a matter of time before they got around to this scenario.

Usually on ER, the drama that is unfolding is alien to one’s experience—a drive-by shooting, a spill at a chemical plant.  Still, it’s not hard to understand the issues and emotions that are behind the particulars.  It’s kind of like those three-dimensional posters that were all the rage a while back—at first it looks totally foreign but if you just project a little, try to see into it, let it happen, boom, the thing jumps out at you and you get it—dolphins leaping from a fountain, or heartbreak tearing through a family. 

But now here we were watching something very much like what we’d been through not so long ago—a late-term stillbirth.  A baby, days from being born, whose heart has stopped beating.

They did well, the ER crew did.  They conveyed the apprehension.  They captured the way the hospital takes over, the way you become a patient.  They got the fear you feel when the ultrasound image is resolving, as the idea that “everything is all right “ goes from being a given to an article of faith to which you cling despite mounting evidence to the contrary.  They even got that panicked feeling of “Wait, surely something can be done.”  After all, we’ve seen these very doctors crack open countless chests and start still hearts to beating again.  Surely they can do it now.  Surely they’ll do it for Carter.

But the baby is dead.

The ribs are an empty cage.  There is nothing there. No bright pulse on the screen. No spark. 

And the question we asked ourselves, that was the same too:  Why did this have to happen?  By which we meant, in this case, why did they do this?  Why did the writers of ER deem it necessary to drop this bomb on the stalwart and beloved character of John Carter just when he seemed to have gotten himself together. 

Carter, despite his vast riches and boyish good looks, has had some issues with love over the years, but here, with Kem, he seemed to have a good thing going.  True, they had conceived this child out of wedlock and, true, this may have pushed their romance along quicker than it might otherwise have progressed, but it was easy to see they were meant for each other— See? Hell, you could tell just from listening to the music on the soundtrack, swelling each time they laid eyes on one another—these two were in deep love.

Of course, in the world of ER, to enjoy too much love and luck is to fly into the sun.  You will come down.  ER doesn’t answer to actuarial tables--County General has got to be the most dangerous place to work in the history of film and television—anyone, anytime can be struck down dead, dismembered, diagnosed with cancer, or, as it turns out, worse.  And being happy or lucky or too beautiful is like smoking three packs a day in the real world—it doesn’t guarantee disaster, but it sure ups the odds.

In this case, the death of this baby was the plot twist necessary to keep Carter interesting in his last season.  It added that dose of pain that spices up a story, it drove a narrative wedge between him and Kem—they got that right, too; the way such an intimate tragedy, which you might expect to bring the concerned couple closer together, actually isolates them.  Without the child that had spurred their engagement, Kem began to question what was left of their love.  Had it all been a mistake?  She returned to Africa without John.  They fell into other romances.  It started to come apart.

But over the course of a few episodes, with the help of a team of writers, Carter triumphed.  Despite years of passive gestures toward unclear goals, he suddenly saw what he wanted in Kem and he went to go get it, leaving the ER behind forever, except for the occasional cameo.

Watching him go, it was hard not to feel like, “Well, Carter’s all set now. He’s all off in Africa being all in love with Kem.”   It is, I guess, just the classic happily-ever-after scenario.  We don’t wonder at the obstacles they still face any more than we wonder if Sleeping Beauty will plump up, lose interest in sex, start bickering with the Prince about how much he drinks and cry herself to sleep at night. We don’t worry about whether Carter and Kem will try again, will this child survive and, if it does, will it make them think of their first child and if it does, how will they deal with that?  All we know is, Carter is ok now.  Carter is all set.

Now, Tanja and I didn’t have a team of writers to blame for the way our story went.  It was hard not to ask, “Why me?  Why us?” and to wonder if we weren’t somehow being punished for being too happy and too fortunate.  But I’ve never been able to maintain any serious belief in God as the head writer of this earthly show, so I can’t look for meaning there.  Why did this happen?  Because the umbilical cord got trapped between the baby’s arm and his ribs.  Here is the bruise in the cord where it was crushed.  That is the end of that story.

But I often think of that child.  He never got a chance.  And sometimes the unfairness of that stings so that I want to fight something or someone.  Unfairness?  That suggests there was a judge of some sort, weighing options, making the call one way or the other.  I have to remind myself there was no judgment, only chance and a slim cord caught under a tiny arm.

So he didn’t live.  But he also didn’t feel any pain.  He never suffered.  He never cried.  Tanja remembers feeling, the day before we went into the hospital, one great movement, and she wonders now if that was his last effort at untangling himself.  Did he know something was wrong?  Was he frightened in those final moments?  I find these questions too difficult to truly consider.

This is where I need to be careful.  I don’t ever want to forget this boy, and my time with him was so brief, the glimpses of him so few, that sometimes it seems just the memory of a memory.

And at the same time I don’t want to remember him too much.  I don’t want him to become nothing but a feeling to me, nothing but a cue for sadness.  I am someone for whom depression comes like a unemployed uncle, arriving without notice and settling in for an indeterminate stay.   I didn’t invite him and yet I can’t really send him away either—he’s family—so I wait.  And sometimes when I am stuck on the couch listening to his tales of woe for the umpteenth time, the subject of this boy will come up.  It almost lifts me, in a way I can’t quite explain except to say, if I’m going to think of this boy (and I am) then I am prepared to feel sad because, after all, there isn’t much else but sadness to be had there. I would do anything to spend a little time with him, in other words, and if this is as close as I can get, well so be it.  But I won’t have him be an excuse for something.  I won’t have him be my permission to draw the shades and bar the door.

He was quite beautiful after all and when I held him I caught myself, time and again, rocking back and forth, from foot to foot, the way you do with a sleeping baby to encourage him to go ahead and sleep.

A felicidade é como a pluma.

Last Saturday night, for reasons I won’t enumerate simply because they’d be too powerfully and personally condemning, I went to bed a little drunk and terribly mad. When I woke up Sunday morning, I was no longer drunk.  It was early but the two older boys were heading off for camp in a couple hours and there were still a few items they needed to round out their supplies, so I took my anger and my youngest son, the infant, and we headed out to catch the early service at the First Church of Glorious Commerce, which opened its doors at 7 am.  

I wandered the aisles, pushing my cart, the baby seat perched atop it, the young one looking back at me while I looked ahead for insect repellant, travel sized toothpaste, a deck of cards and so forth.  On my way into the electronics section, I had to squeeze past this old gent who was engaged in friendly, one-sided conversation with the sales associate.  He had one of those little microphone kind of devices that he held up to his neck when he talked and it amplified his voice and gave it a kind of electronic twang.  

I just shook my head.  “Mortality,” I thought.

There’s something about picking out the spare batteries for the kids flashlights—I guess it’s just imagining a boy in a bunk in a cabin somewhere, reading a book under the blanket, or making his way to the outhouse with a friend, giggling nervously, when suddenly the battery goes dead—“Uh oh, your flashlight battery is dead,” the friend says sadly.  “It’s ok,” my son replies, “Because my father gave me an ample supply of extra batteries.” “Holy crap,” the friend says.  “He sprang for the 2X power.  He must really love you.”  “He does, very much,” my son says back.  “And please, don’t swear so.” Battery shopping puts me in a reflective, almost delusional mood, I guess is what I’m trying to say, so that when I heard a robotic voice behind me say, “Excuse me,” I jumped a bit and pressed closer to the display to let the man pass.

“No, no,” he said.  “I just wanted to tell you, what a beautiful baby.”

I turned to look.  He was right.  It was a beautiful baby.  Very, very beautiful with eyes of the clearest blue and a round face framing the most gentle and knowing smile, like he knew you were just a second or two away from getting the punchline and he didn’t mind, he’d wait for you.  This is my baby—well, I was part of the creative team that came up with it. Typical writer, I was all gung ho at the concepting phase. Then, the seed of the idea planted, I was happy to sit back, hit the bars, have a few drinks, while my partner did all the heavy lifting.  And now, post-launch, here was I, ready to take credit with the public at large. Life imitates work.

Turning my attention to this particular member of the public, this stranger who had approached us at the battery display, I saw a man who, somehow, immediately disarmed me.  I guess I’m like anybody else who is human in that sickness, disease, deformity, fraility, incapacity—it all basically scares the crap out of me and I would rather not face it.  I would rather turn away.  But here was a man who had been through untold trauma, a man sick enough that he needed to hold a flashlight to his throat in order to communicate and lonely enough that he roamed the electronics section of a large department store on Sunday morning talking to whomever he could find.  

And yet he seemed happy.  His gaze was direct and open, his mouth held in a relaxed smile ready to grin at the least provocation, his eyes nearly as blue as my baby’s albeit with a more watery sparkle to them.

“You know,” he said, with his particular metallic twang.  “He is just adorable.  May I?”

He held up an index finger.

“Of course,” I said.

He poked baby in the belly.  He tugged on baby’s big toe.  He tickled the soles of baby’s feet.  Baby responded with unfeigned delight.

“It’s the little feet that kill me,” he said.

“The what?  Oh yeah, the feet,” I said.  There was something about his voice that made you really pay attention—well, I say something like it’s a mystery.  It was the robotic drone of it and the fact that it came more from his fist than from his lips.

“If you need an extra grandfather,” he said, directly to baby.  “I’ll do it for free.”

Baby had no idea what to make of this offer.  He smiled and seemed to shake his head.

“I think we find them so inspiring because they haven’t learned yet to hate,” the man said to me.

Well, that’s the kind of inspirational stuff that I don’t necessarily believe—couldn’t you just as well say that it’s because they haven’t learned to talk?  In my experience there are all sorts of things baby hates—bedtime chief among them—and he expresses his dislikes with great clarity.  It’s his unique diction that keeps him from becoming a real drag.

But rather than take up this issue with my new friend, I chose the much easier option of filling my eyes with tears and blinking at him wordlessly.  

“Youth,” he said, looking from me to the kid and back again.  “It’s pure hope.  Look at him—more beautiful than a sunrise.”

Ok, easy there, Mr. Hallmark.  You’re killing me.

This man’s easy, upright bearing and the way he was turned out on this Sunday morning, neat as a pin, in blue slacks and a blue work shirt, one button undone to show a white undershirt beneath, that and the way he approached me, forthright, unafraid and unthreatening, all open horizons— the whole package, suggested retired military.  Navy, I imagined.

We stood there a moment, side by side, looking at the baby, and he said again, “If you need an extra grandfather, I’ll do it for free.”  I laughed like I was hearing it for the first time—a patently phony laugh in that respect, but so much of what we do is formal speech, call and response, the grunts and squawks of the herd, without which we would never understand each other.  The thing required a laugh and, because I liked this man and wanted him to know I liked him, I laughed.  Simple.

Then he turned to me, clapped his hand on my shoulder and fixed me in the eye.  And then he spoke to me, but this time without raising the little gizmo to his throat.  His voice was all air, faint but clear: “Good work.  Keep it up.”  He gave my shoulder a thump and was on his way.

It wasn’t hard to imagine him, on some dark day in the distant past, piloting his landing craft onto a hostile beach.  As boat lurches into the surf, he turns to the young soldier at his side and, seeing the fear and tears in this boy’s eyes, gives him much the same treatment.  “Good work.  Keep it up.”  

“But I haven’t actually done anything yet,” the soldier cries.

“No,” he replies.  “But you will.  You will.”

Then he lowers the ramp and all hell breaks loose.

Truth be told, my man wasn’t likely old enough to have served in an LST nor is there any real proof that he was a Navy man at all.  He could be a retired insurance rep for all I know.  A rodeo clown.  A bank president.  Who knows what the truth is?  

And you know what?  Who cares?  We pilot our brains around from place to place, all this data pouring in, through our eyes and ears mostly, and then we try to make sense of it.  That’s all it is—storytelling all day long, to our favorite, most attentive audience.  A coworker smiles or doesn’t smile, or leaves us off an important e-mail, and we interpret that as we will.  The bank teller is angry—one person understands that she’s had a bad day, lost her boyfriend, drank too much last night, whatever.  Me, I’d tend to take it personally.  I’d assume the teller hated me for some reason and then I’d spend some time thinking about what that reason might be and imagining how I might improve myself. Or else plotting to kill the teller.

I guess the point is that in my world this was not just a lonely old man.  This was a lonely old man and a sea captain who had stepped in at the right moment and, taking me by the shoulder, steered me off in a different direction.  When life is rushing in through the eyes and ears, like water through the portholes, it’s amazing how a touch can shove you out of the trough, get you back on a weather helm and suddenly you can see and hear again.

That metaphor is a little strained but you see what I’m saying.  I’m sitting there, looking at batteries, listening to this guy, trying not to stare at his throat, wondering about the baby, blinking through the tears, mad about something, getting short on time, laughing, smiling, nodding, shifting back and forth, basically all a-jangle.  Then the guy reaches out and touches me and it’s like the noise just stops.

The rest of my shopping went off without a hitch only now, as I moved though the store, I was overflowing with good feeling toward my fellow man in general and gratitude toward this one in particular.  He was old, he was mute, he spoke through a machine in his fist and he wandered the Insterstate Fred Meyer  looking for people to talk to—but he was happy.  If he could do it, could I try.

And as for the anger I’d been feeling and the fight that had caused it?  Well, when it comes to these inevitable marital kerfuffles, I’ve got a secret advantage.  I’m married to a woman who is basically never wrong.  Oh, about factual things—the capital of Zaire, the molecular weight of Hydrogen—sure.  But in affairs of the heart, pretty much never.  I’m grateful for this because it simplifies my life.  In the event of disagreement all I need to do is find the time to cool down and the nerve to apologize.

Apparently, you can find both at Fred Meyer.

And look, I’ve gone on and on about my morning shopping so that I’ve left aside the very thing I mean to talk to you about, namely our old friend John Carter.  The news there is not good, but neither is it urgent.  It will keep because, to paraphrase the old song, sadness never ends but this blog entry must.

Do you smell burning clove?

Of all the renewable resources in this world, none is more limitless than sadness in all its many forms.  At least, that’s how it seemed to me this morning as I stood on my porch listening to the neighbors arguing in front of their house.

I’d been taking advantage of the quiet early hours of the Sabbath to do some chores which, while simple, were absorbing, so by the time I realized what I was hearing from down the block, the fight was in full swing, at or even a little past its peak.  Fights have many trajectories, depending a lot on the style of the combatants, and, though I am expert in this subject, it would just take too long to go over it all.  (If you, too, are versed in these things, then you know I am not bullshitting here.  Otherwise, please, just trust me on this.) 

At any rate, despite the many ways fights can begin and end, there comes a point in pretty much every fight when rational argument has been abandoned and what is going on instead is a kind of frantic call and response of distilled, extra-logical assertion in which the participants basically take turns saying, “I’m right, you’re wrong,” but with diction and pitch designed to cause the most possible pain and suffering to the other participant.

This is where my neighbors had arrived.  Here is some of their dialog, reproduced as faithfully as I can, except for ninety percent of the obscenity and with the caveat that “he said” or “she replied” should really read, “he shouted” and “she screamed back at him.”  That said, here goes:

“How can you disrespect me like this?” the woman says.

“How can I disrespect you?” the man replies as if this question were barely comprehensible, as if she’d spoken to him in Italian despite the fact that he is French.

“How can you disrespect me like this?” the woman asks again.

“How can you disrespect me?” the man counters with some evident indignation and a barely-concealed need to know.

“Disrespect you?” the woman asks with a laugh.  “Can’t disrespect someone who doesn’t respect themselves.”

“Don’t respect myself?” he says, becoming, if possible, less credulous than before.

“That’s right,” the woman says.  “You heard me.  You’re not deaf.”

“Don’t tell me what I am,” the man responded.

Sensing that this avenue was dry, he quickly embarked on a new line of questioning.

“How can you say I didn’t ask you permission when you saw her there and you knew where I was going and you didn’t say [anything]?”

The woman didn’t seem to follow this any better than I did and for a moment she was nonplussed.  The man pressed his advantage.

“You saw her there.  You saw her there.  You saw her.  You saw her.”

The repetition, which looks a little crazy on the page, was just a technique to keep the woman from talking.  It’s a stalling tactic at best and after a bit the momentum shifted back to her side and she railed on him a while and then she lost steam and he took up the torch and they went back and forth like this for bit with remarkable energy and dedication.

Just yesterday these neighbors had hosted a gala birthday party complete with streamers and balloons and squirt gun fights and capped off with a big inflatable bouncy house that they’d rented and put up in the side yard.  There was music playing and evidence of much cake being eaten and the whole fandango stretched through the afternoon and into the evening.  It seemed, from a distance, like an unmitigated success and I had imagined that the child at the center of it must feel on top of the world.

Now, like a supernova collapsing on itself, the glow from that event had been replaced by this void.  It was impossible to know what they were fighting about—that is to say, the facts of the matter—anyway it wasn’t about facts anymore, except maybe that some event had tipped the scales.  This was about frustration and anger and resentment built up on both sides over time.  This was about history, not about right and wrong, and the events of the day before, which has seemed so joyful to me, were only raised as weapons.

“You act like this,” the woman said.  “After everything I did for you yesterday.”

“You didn’t do it for me,” the man spat back instantly.  “You did it for my daughter.”

I expected this to lead to another round of heavy sparring but instead there was quiet.  Point scored, but to what end.

Finally the woman spoke.

“I don’t understand,” she said “how a son could treat his mother this way.  You’re a major fucking disappointment.”

“Well you’re no fucking prize as a mother,” he said.  “You can believe that.”

To my clinical eye, the fight had presented as a spat between husband and wife—the kind of thing where there was so much energy pushing these people apart you had to assume there was also some strong, invisible bond holding them together or else they wouldn’t bother.  I’d assumed the bond was matrimony.  Turns out it was birth.

And now he is saying, “That’s it, I’m outta here, I’m gonna take my shit and go,” and she’s saying, “You go, just leave, take your shit and leave.”  Seems like all his shit must’ve already been in the yard because there is a brief, almost humorous, discussion about some particular piece of shit—“That’s not yours.” “It isn’t?” “I don’t think so.” “Didn’t I get it that time at the coast?” “Huh, your memory never was any good.”—and then they’re at it again, hammer and tongs.

Where is the daughter during all this?  Inside pretending to sleep?  Is she alone? Or did a friend stay over, as a concession to a kid who wants to hold on a little longer to the birthday feeling, which is just the feeling of being special in the world.  Here today, gone tomorrow.

I remember one night when I was a boy—ten? twelve? fourteen?—waking up in the middle of the night to find my mother on the floor of my room, sobbing.  She was half-sitting, half-lying, with her back to me, looking at the bedroom door which was ajar, and a shaft of light came in and fell across her so that she was all darkness and this one stripe of light.  Outside my door there was a short hallway and then two steps up to the landing by the front door.  My father stood at the top of those steps—I couldn’t see him but I could tell he was there from the sound of his voice as he spoke to her, sometimes pleading to her to come to bed, sometimes rising to argument, sometimes descending into frustrated disgust.

My mother—I don’t remember a thing she said, only that her voice was choked with sadness and bitterness and inconsolation.  And in the pauses when no one was speaking, when they each must have been wondering how it came to this, in those moments the silence was frightening, crystalline and complete. 

My childhood was wonderful.  Me and my dog wandering through the fields and woods of this small town, sailing boats to sandy islands, getting into small scrapes and working out of them.  It was like a dream.

In the course of that long dream, I’m sure I must’ve had my share of birthday parties.  But I don’t remember a single one of them as well as I remember that night, with my mom huddled by my bed and my dad at the stop of the stairs asking her to come back but somehow unable or unwilling to come down there and get her.

You see, sadness sticks better than happiness.  It is easier to make, there are more types of it, it lasts longer and, if you ever think you’re about to run out, just hold on a sec and someone will set you up.

Now, an optimist would stop me right there and point out that one could make the very same claims for joy and happiness and love.  And as soon as I meet an optimist, I will put him on the job.

And no sooner have I said this, than here comes an optimist, where I least expected it, bubbling up inside of me.  What’s wrong with a little sadness, this optimist says.  Isn’t sadness in all its many forms like the shades and hues that, when we have reached the summit and turn to look out, fill the valley with such incredible splendor that we sigh and smile to ourselves and count that mountain well climbed?  You know, I’m not sure I’m entirely down with telling your mother she’s “no fucking prize” but there is something to be said for the seasoning that some darker thought can bring to life’s pie.

In fact, that something has been said, pretty much beautifully and perfectly, by our friend in literature, Mr. Robert Frost, in a poem I’ll share with you here, despite the breech of copyright law this represents. 

But first I have to remind you of the story of the Yankee farmer who was approached in his field by a surveyor from the city who wanted to know if he could help find a particular boundary marker.  The farmer cut a diving rod from a willow branch and in short order found the stone marker under a bush by a stream. 

The grateful surveyor said, “Send me the bill.” 

The farmer said, “That’ll be two hundred and fifty dollars.” 

“Why so much?” the surveyor asked.

“Fifty dollars for finding it,” the farmer said.  “Two hundred dollars for knowing where it was.”

Now, here’s your poem:

To Earthward

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of—was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

—Robert Frost

Marking Time

It’s strange to see the smile on John Carter’s face these days.  Dr. Carter, as you know, has been with us since season one—in fact he is the last main character from the original cast.  Still boyish, despite the ten years of blood and trauma, Carter seems, recently, to have regained a layer of baby fat as well as a layer of something you don’t see much on ER—contentment, which is rarer than osteogenesis imperfecta in this world.

It was just last season that our man Carter went off to the Congo, ostensibly to rescue Luka, but really to escape the pressure that had devolved upon him when his grandmother died and left him in charge of the Carter Foundation, the Carter mansion and the Carter millions. Gamma was a good old soul; she’d been married to George Plimpton, like, forever and when he up and died a couple seasons back, she kinda lost a step.  But she was always there for John, through thick and thin.  That said, Gamma had never completely understood what Carter saw in emergency medicine and, all of a sudden, neither did Carter himself.  It was as if instead of being delivered from the burden of her doubt, however well she’d managed to keep it under wraps, with her passing it was suddenly dropped onto his shoulders 

It would take strong medicine to calm this crisis and, as luck would have it, the Congo delivered. There, in deepest darkest, Carter discovered another side of himself—a resourceful, intuitive almost reckless side.  He threw his money around to solve problems, tumbled in and out of love, and then fell hard for Thandie Newton, anti-AIDS crusader and fellow doctor.  They had a few alcohol-fueled political debates after hours, to kind of establish their mutual compatibility and then, with little foreplay, they marshaled their combined medical know-how and conceived a child. 

This unexpected event, rather than sending Carter into a panic, seemed to settle the man and make him somehow more sure of what he had only thought was true; he proposed to Thandie, she accepted and they came back to the states to have the wedding and the baby.

So here is Dr. John Carter, our friend for ten long seasons, suddenly all pulled together.  He steps up at the foundation, he drops a full-on bolus of attitude on the empty suits there, stands up to his father, donates the family mansion for use as a health care research facility, and buys an awesome but reasonable place downtown where he and Thandie start building a dream.

He is happy, to put it in a word.  Or, to put it in another word, boring.  He’s put on a couple pounds, which suit him just fine, and he still appears in the ER, his face rising moon-like over Pratt’s shoulder to whisper some quiet, condescending advice.  He does his work, he does it well, and then he gets the hell out.

Psychologists have done these experiments in perception where they project an image onto a subject’s retina so that the image doesn’t move relative to the retina. Is that clear?  I know that sounds unlikely but they have done this, or at least they’ve written articles that make it sound like they’ve done this and, for the moment, I am going to take them at their word.  And do you know what these experiments show?  Well, it’s pretty shocking.  Here’s what Freerk A. Lootsma, a respected authority on the subject, has to say about it:

“Usually, when an eye moves, the image of a stationary object shifts across the back of the eye, the so-called retina.  Images of moving objects also undergo some retinal slippage since visual tracking (following an object with the eye) tends to be imperfect.  When retinal slippage is eliminated, that is, when the image is continually projected onto the same part of the retina by a contact lens attached to the cornea, subjects see parts of the image disappear.  Ultimately, the image vanishes completely.  People become functionally blind to retinally stabilized images (italics mine). The light-sensitive cells in the retina fatigue or adapt rapidly if they are continually stimulated in an unchanging fashion.  The motion of the eye prevents this fatigue or adaptation.”

This is such a beautiful paragraph in so many ways that I hardly know where to begin.  First off, when Freerk calls out the back of the eye—“the so-called retina”—you can just feel the heat and you have to wonder what the hell is the back story there.  I picture a man who has spent years kinda hanging out, getting to know the back of the eye, spending all his time with it, more or less dedicating his life to it and then, one day, maybe he’s sitting on the can and he picks up a journal and starts reading something about this retina thing and he’s, maybe, half-way into the article when he realizes, holy crap, this is all about the back of the eye, his back of the eye, going around under some tarted-up Italian name.  The heartache.

Secondly, I love the sentence “People become functionally blind to retinally stabilized images.”  I love it because it gave me the opportunity to write “italics mine,” which I’ve always wanted to do.  But mostly I love it because it’s good clear writing; just try to convey that idea in simpler words. 

Next, at the risk of going off on a tangent, the last two lines of this paragraph contain some wisdom about relationships.  Just as the light-sensitive cells in the retina fatigue or adapt rapidly if they are continually stimulated in an unchanging fashion, likewise the cells in our body that are sensitive to romance, these ever-so-sensitive organs, if persistently stimulated in an unchanging fashion, will cease to perceive the stimulation. 

We’ve all seen the famous sports or entertainment figure captured in the so-called Living section of our favorite rag appearing at some charity event or other with the relentlessly slutty girlfriend on his arm.  Rather than envy this man, we should pity him.  Yes, pity, I say, because it is almost axiomatic that the more beautiful the companion, the more likely that the continual stimulation of her presence delivered in an unchanging fashion will soon enough render him blind to her charms. There is no cure for this fatigue, as Freerk reminds us, save the habitual motion of the eye.  And what sort of life is that?

Gentlemen, do you see what Freerk, and the limitations of our ocular development, are trying to tell us?  The more you concentrate on an object, the more it tends to disappear.  Hence, the things that are most central to our lives are those things we begin to lose sight of.  Do not wait for crisis or calamity to come in and force you to see those you love in a new light.  Resolve to look at your love anew each and every day—try to see again what it was you saw before; try to see what it is you have yet to discover.  You will not always succeed.  But you won’t always fail either.

But, anyway, my point about Carter was simpler.  As we’ve established, if something doesn’t keep moving, it disappears, and Dr. Carter is in danger of disappearing.  Coming at this series as I do, from the future as it were, I know that season 11 is Carter’s last.  I could speculate on all sorts of outside considerations that might be working to convince Noah Wyle that John Carter needs to hang up his stethoscope—fatigue, a desire to do movies, a feud over money, a wish to spend more time with his family.  I get that.  That’s reality.

But don’t leave a character like this hanging, just marking time.  Carter’s given more than a decade of service to this organization—hard work, exciting work, compassionate work—and now we’re supposed to stand by and watch him moon about, quietly grinning in the background, slowly fading away, while Kovac and Pratt preen and strut and butt heads in the battle for resident heart-throb?

It’s a sad and disappointing end to a long, beautiful run.

I hope that should I ever find myself in a similar situation professionally, I will have the sense and good grace to know when to call it.

Choose yer lesson.

Immediately upon finishing yesterday’s blog entry I went upstairs to take a shower, such were my exertions and with some portion of my many in-laws due shortly for a cook-out, but I had hardly got naked before I heard my middle son observe, in a voice that spoke his disappointment with utmost clarity, “Oh, you are taking a shower.”

“Yes,” says I.  “Is that a problem?”

“Well, I am itchy,” he says.  “And I want to take a bath.”

I promised him I would shower more quickly than he thought possible and then he hung around to see if I would.  And I did. 

So he began drawing his bath while I shaved at the sink and, because he is nine, rather than get into the bath and let it fill up around him or, alternately, wait outside of the bath until it was full and then get in, he climbed up onto the lip of the tub, his two feet on one rail, one hand on the other, his belly button pointing toward the ceiling, and his free hand adjusting the water flow and periodically darting into the stream to test his adjustments.

He looked so funny there that, as I turned away from the sink to get the hand towel, I let the hilarity of the moment get hold of me and rather than dry my hands, I flicked the water toward him.

He recoiled and giggled gratifyingly and then scooped his hand into his bath water and flicked the excess back at me.

“Hey,” I said.  “Hold on.”

“That,” he said, “is because you shot water at me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but the difference is you’re just coming in and I’m already on my way out.”

The moment I said it, I was struck by how true that is on so many levels and I wished I’d thought of another way to put it.

But I didn’t.  I said what I said and then dealt with the reverberations, which were powerful enough despite being confined to the space between my ears.  Anyway, it was a minor event, barely a tremor, and I bring it up now just as an example of how sometimes poetry sneaks into life just in the course of things.  It seems to me, we ought to accept that and just make the most of it when it happens.

Now I know that my blog, while not blessed with many readers, has the right few, so fine and discerning, that they will certainly have noticed several spots in yesterday’s entry that were lifted directly from the works of the man himself.  It’s a mild sort of plagiarism to which I am prone and which I cannot entirely explain except to say that I so admire Mr. Frost’s work that sometimes I want to try on his language the way a fan of, oh, Audrey Hepburn might want to try on a little black dress and long cigarette holder.  And when the mood strikes, it isn’t enough for me to simply use the same letters he uses or the same words even.  Sometimes nothing will do but I must use the same phrases.  And if I could find a way to use whole paragraphs or poems in their entirety, well, I would not be withheld.

In fact, it strikes me, thinking about yesterday’s entry, that Frost has actually made a poem that takes on the same subject and deals with it up and down and ties it up in the end rather better than I could hope to and, it has to be said, does so with far fewer words than I used.  In fact, so much do I admire its clarity and originality of thought as well as its succinctness, its brevity, its restraint, its terse, laconic, pithiness and Yankee economy of phrasing that—aw hell, here it is:

           "Out, Out--"

           The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
           And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
           Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
           And from there those that lifted eyes could count
           Five mountain ranges one behind the other
           Under the sunset far into Vermont.
           And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
           As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
           And nothing happened: day was all but done.
           Call it a day, I wish they might have said
           To please the boy by giving him the half hour
           That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
           His sister stood beside them in her apron
           To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
           As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
           Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--
           He must have given the hand. However it was,
           Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
           The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,
           As he swung toward them holding up the hand
           Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
           The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
           Since he was old enough to know, big boy
           Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
           He saw all spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off--
           The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
           So. But the hand was gone already.
           The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
           He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
           And then--the watcher at his pulse took fright.
           No one believed. They listened at his heart.
           Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
           No more to build on there. And they, since they
           Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

                                                         --Robert Frost

And, I guess, if that weren’t enough and you wanted to pick at the wound, you could go back and look at where Frost stole his title, from the king of downers himself, Mr. Macbeth, who, on learning of his wife’s death, lets loose with this bit of joy:

    She should have died hereafter;
    There would have been a time for such a word.
    To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare.  You, yourself, rumor has it, were not above lifting a nice thought or a juicy plot from those who came before. 

So theft is tradition, is the lesson here.  Or else the lesson is that the thief always takes more words to resay the thing he stole.  Or, maybe, the lesson is just that the human fear that life is an empty and pointless struggle is an idea that persists as persuasively as life itself.

Departmental

The world turns, the sun sets and rises and sets again, seasons come and go, the rain settles in, the afternoons go dark and then, bit by bit, the days start to glow around the edges, the rain gets warmer, the sun peeks from behind a clouded arch, and the world outside erupts into life, everything green pushing up from the earth—but in our small basement room the ER keeps on playing, the dramas keep on unfolding, the plot twists keep on building and resolving, the characters keep on striving for—well, for what exactly?  What keeps them going, anyway?  “A paycheck” is the short answer since, I have to remind myself, these are actors working at a job, not doctors working their way through life.  Actors act.  They do it because they need to work.  Because writers keep cranking out scripts and networks keep greenlighting season after season and audiences keep tuning in to see them pretend to save lives and lead lives. 

But, cast that bit of reality aside because what makes this show so great—yes, great—is that despite the melodrama, the heavy-handed moralizing, the ridiculous coincidences that power the plot—or maybe because of it all—the show is fundamentally believable.  Ok, maybe that’s not so high a bar to hold a show to—that it be believable.  But in one sense, at least, it’s enough—when you watch this show and find yourself, in the off hours, asking yourself questions about what you’ve seen, you aren’t simply asking questions about ER.  You are asking questions about life.

So, I ask again:  What keeps these doctors and nurses going, day after day after day? 

For that matter, what keeps me and the missus watching them day after day.  It’s been almost a year now since that fateful evening, adequately documented in an earlier post, when I stepped out on a limb and off the limb, and as the world seemed to spin away from beneath my feet, I found, as it were, salvation in surrender to the healing power of the men and women of ER.  I gave myself to the basement room and the 36” CRT and the silver discs that took me out away from my problems and out of myself for a time.

Since that day we have watched seasons one through ten of ER.  Ten seasons in a little more than ten months—this, my friends, is a lot of thoracotomies, chest tubes, banana bags and gastric lavages.  A lot of love and heartbreak, a lot of bad news and tears and, honestly, not nearly enough laughter.

And isn’t that, too, just like life.

Personally, I’m hanging in there but over the last year I’ve watched as a friend of mine struggled with the grind of it all. The simple necessity of piloting his craft through the straits and shoals of daily life proved a terrible task. It kind of wore him down to the point where he’d lost sight of why he did what he did; he wondered if he was making any difference in the world. Beyond that, he wondered if he was even really any good at what he did. “Do my coworkers accept me for who I am?”  “Do they respect me?” “Do they care for me?”  “What is the point of it all?”  These questions swam before him every day—multiple times a day—and became such a heavy burden that it began to affect his demeanor, his ability to do his job, his ability to command the respect and deserve the affection of those around him—in short, it was a really tough time for my friend, Luka. Have I mentioned him before? Luka Kovac? You know, Dr. Kovac—he works down at the Country General ER.—the tall, dark, Croatian man with so much sadness in his eyes. 

Anyway, he came pretty close to rock bottom when he improperly intubated that patient, and by the time anyone noticed it was lights out.  There were extenuating circumstances, to be sure, but in the end it was a terrible mistake which Luka compounded by jumping in his car and driving it in a dark rage through the city, eventually crashing it and badly injuring his med student passenger and a couple of civilians in the other car.

Luka reacted by withdrawing into himself, avoiding the ER, not answering his telephone, drinking a fair amount, and—the most obvious sign of his decline into turpitude—paying for sex. 

At any rate, just when it seemed he might disappear into a deep, dark depression, he suddenly switched course and disappeared instead into deep, dark Africa.  He took a leave of absence from County and went to work for the Alliance Des Médcins, where he worked in conditions so difficult, with supplies and medications so scarce and sanitation so basic, that suddenly good ol’ County looked like the pinnacle of public health.

It’s not all fun and games in the Congo. Yes, Luka has a brush with death.  Yes, his salvation requires the dramatic intervention of Dr. John Carter and his dead president friends.  But in the end, Luka Kovac returns to the ER with a renewed sense of himself and his purpose.  He has been to the other side and come back a more confident, more compassionate and more complete man who does not question but rather acts. 

That is not to say he’s got it figured out—not at all.  It’s not that he’s answered the question we posed a few paragraphs back, but he’s found a satisfying way to hold it at bay, and that is, as the ad campaign says, as good as it gets.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, the days are getting long now, so sometimes as we’re down in the basement watching the men and women of ER struggle with mortality and morality, outside it is still bright and sunny.  Now and then one of our chickens will pass by the foundation window and we’ll get a glimpse of her, scratching and pecking, scratching and pecking—a kick of the left foot, a kick of the right foot, cock the head, peck and repeat.  That’s the chicken’s life.  All day long they go at it, covering the yard robotically, completely, thoughtlessly, like organic, egg-laying Roombas. Do they ask why they are here? Do they ask why they do what they do? Do they wonder if they are particularly good at it?  Do they look for respect?  Do they question the ceaseless toil?

No, they do not.  They carry on.

Looking at these chickens, it suddenly seemed pretty obvious.  We’re not here to do this work.  We’re here because we do this work and only the chickens that are able to work the yard and get their grub—only those chickens are still with us at the end of the day.  If some chicken thought better of herself and declined to make the effort—or even despaired at the pointlessness of it all and drowned herself in the birdbath—well, that chicken would cease to be a part of the whole conversation, her point of view subtracted from life’s argument.

So, that’s it then.  We’re here because we work to be here.

Then a couple days ago, a raccoon came in the night and killed three of our birds.  Mitch got pretty much torn up and spread across the neighbor’s yard. Silver Heekeetaw got decapitated and split open, her entrails pulled out, her body dumped by the compost bin. And Duff—good ol’ Duff, simple, dumb Duff—was just murdered, her golden body broken and stiff but otherwise whole, lying by the gate. 

For some reason—maybe the warmer weather of late—the birds had, one by one, stopped going into the coop at night, instead climbing up onto a ladder that hangs on the side of the garage, letting the automatic door slowly shut them out as the sun set. 

At first I was pretty good about going out before bed and stuffing them back into the coop, but after a bit I let it go. They seemed so happy lined up together in the cool night air.

And then the netting that forms the top of the coop had pulled away from the garage along a four-foot length.  I totally had that on my to-do list, especially after we saw the raccoon poking around the yard one night.  I tried to trap him a couple of times but he didn’t take, and, after a bit, I stopped worrying.  And then, disaster.

In the aftermath, as I was cleaning up the coop and the run, I could see the signs of panic and flight.  These birds are nearly helpless at night but they had done what they could to escape—Duff had run to the gate where she was pinned and killed; Silver Heekeetaw struggled to get in between the wall and the compost bin before being brutally dispatched; Mitch made it as far as the neighbor’s yard.  When death came, they showed that they wanted to live and wanted it badly.  I took some grim consolation in this.  Surely it’s a sign of something.

But now that I’ve been thinking on it a while, it all just seems like more chemistry to me.  Is the will to live evidence that there’s value in life?  Or is it just another necessary condition—like the drive to eat and fuck—without which creatures do not linger long enough to serve as examples?  These birds who wanted so much to live are resting now in a row by the back fence.  Their lives are easier now, by far.  And the world does not seem much diminished.  Maybe, when you ask a question as broad as, “why are we here,” the answer isn’t about what’s right or what’s true, but merely about what persists.

That next night, using a peanut butter sandwich soaked in rendered fat, I trapped that raccoon.  Once I had him in the trap, I gave some thought to lightening his metaphysical burden as well, easing his load the way he’d eased that of my chickens.  But in the end, I lacked the sang-froid and told myself it would be easier to dump him somewhere than to dig the hole, so I decided to drive him across the tracks to the industrial area and release him in the woods by the Columbia Slough. 

He was furiously angry when I first picked the trap up.  He snarled and spat and threw himself from side to side.  But as we drove along he got very calm and all I heard was a quiet click and clink of metal, as if he were patiently working on the lock.  And suddenly, without looking, I knew that he’d picked the lock, lifted the gate and gotten free in the car, that he had made his quiet way forward and was just now poised behind me, about to slit my throat with a razor-sharp claw.  And in that moment, I cried out, “I want to live!”

Well, the attack never came.  My voice echoed and died away in the cabin of the car and after a moment, when he’d recovered from the shock of my outburst, the raccoon began tinkering with the cage again.  Turns out the latch was more than a match for his little brain and it was merely my imagination that had escaped its cage.  We drove quietly the rest of the way, a matter of several miles, to a patch of woods between the DEQ and the State Correctional Facility where, without ceremony, I lifted the gate and let him go.  He paused a moment and then shot out and in three quick bounds was at the wood's margin.  I watched ‘til his tail disappeared into the undergrowth and then, with nothing more to be done there, carried on with my life. 

Who's that lady?

Just last night we were watching ER, of all things, when suddenly, quite early on in the episode we were watching, Dr. Romano grabs Dr. Chen’s ass with his prosthetic hand.  Now I know that the blog of late has not really been delivering a blow by blow account of our progress through the series, so that sentence may contain more than one surprise for the dedicated reader.  Romano has a prosthetic hand?  How?  Why?  What happened to his old hand? Well, with time and patience, we may get to these mysteries but the question that is today at hand, as it were, is more prosaic but also more timely.

Chen’s reaction to the grab—more of a prod or a poke really—was to straighten up and throw her shoulders back.  She didn’t jump or cry out.  Her lips came together firmly and her mien was decidedly stern as she swiveled her head and looked down her nose at the diminutive doctor.  Chen has never been my favorite character.  She does not inspire confidence as a doctor and I find her professed sexual appetite unconvincing.  But these days, whenever I see her, she puts me in mind of someone else, someone I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on—a friend of my mom’s? A professor I had? An ex-client?—and as a result I’ve softened toward Chen, granting her the privilege of her faults. 

And then last night, as I saw her reaction to the ass-grab, I realized who it is she reminds me of: none other than Hilary Clinton.  A woman in a man’s world, smart as hell, ambitious, beautiful if a bit cold, competitive, calculating, somehow superior without actually being particularly competent, hard-working and entitled, angry at the stereotypes that are thrown onto her, judgmental of others, and, ultimately, just kinda lame—this could describe either woman, though, when all’s said and done, I’d still rather have Dr. Chen in charge of my health care.

For one thing, she knows when to call it.  You won’t see Jing-Mei Chen flogging a corpse that is dead beyond redemption.  She will take all reasonable measures, she will even reach for heroic measures, but when the time comes she will snap off the gloves and pronounce the time of death.  Then she will walk out through those double doors and deliver the news to waiting family, and she will do it with a fair measure of compassion.  We’ve seen her do it time and again.

And it’s time for Hilary to follow suit. 

Not that it matters but I have been a Hilary supporter for sometime now—well, ever since John Edwards dropped out right up until recently when two things happened in rapid succession.  First, all the Jeremiah Wright stuff bubbled up and Hillary didn’t have the nerve to step forward and say what she surely must believe: that the preaching of the one man is no reason—no reason at all—to condemn the politics of the other man.  I mean, this is a woman who has dined with dictators and taken killer’s wives on the rose garden tour while—she’s a woman who knows what’s what, in other words, and ought to have been able to say, “Forget about Mr. Wright.  Let’s talk about Obama and me.”

What I wish she’d said:  “We’ve got two great Democratic candidates in this race.  I believe that American would be well served with Mr. Obama in the White House.  But I believe that I will do a better job and that I am a better choice for the following reasons. . .”

Then she would have to come up with a reason better than the gas tax holiday, which is a holiday I won’t be celebrating any time soon because it is, well, at the risk of sounding critical, a very small, dumb idea that amounts to nothing at a time when a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America really needs to be offering something. 

My major complaint with Obama, in fact, now that we’re on the subject—the thing that has kept me from jumping on the big, happy, young and hip bandwagon—is the vaporous nature of what he has to offer.  A vote for Obama is a vote for hope.  That’s like a vote for wish or a vote for maybe.  Maybe if he gets elected things will change somehow.  I hope they will change in a good way. 

If that’s a platform, the planks seem pretty thin, but these days I’m thinking I’ll take my chances and hope they hold out.

I remember, eight years ago, being disgusted by the choice that faced us.  “The senator’s son and the president’s son?  Is this really the best the country has to offer?”  Wow, does that seem naïve in retrospect.  Eight years has taught me a lot.  For one thing, who ever thought that the best the country has to offer—the smartest, most thoughtful, kindest, hardest working, most inventive, most inspiring people—would run for president.  You’ve got to consider context.  I work in advertising and I can assure you, you won’t find any monks or divine prophets wandering the halls of even the finest agency.  It’s just not the right place to look.  Likewise, you’re not going to find true greatness on the campaign trail.  The stuff it takes to do the one thing kills the stuff it takes to be the other. 

That’s how it seems to me anyway and it helps limit the disappointment.  Barack Obama seems like a better choice than we’ve had in a while and, who knows, he might be the kind of man who reveals an ambitious agenda once he’s in office.  I’m willing to hope for that. 

In the meantime, here’s what I think Hillary needs to say now:

“These last eight years have been something of a national nightmare.  Never has a country been so prosperous and so powerful.  Never has that prosperity been so squandered.  Never has that power been so misused.  9/11 was our national tragedy, but it was also our challenge and our opportunity.  We could’ve lead the world.  We could’ve risen above the hate and built connections around the globe.  Instead look where we are—isolated, at war, without a plan for the very real dangers that are around us.  Without a national goal, our principles in tatters.  That’s why I decided to run for president.  To lead the country back to the things that have always made us great.  And that is why, today, I am throwing my support behind Barack Obama.  I believe he can lead this country forward and, as of today, I will work as hard for him as I have worked for my own candidacy.  In life, no matter what you lose, you always have your hopes and dreams.  I have dreamed of being your president.  But today I realize that my hopes for myself are nothing compared to my hopes for this country.  If you support me, if you believe in me, then join me in this quest.  We set out to bring dignity, principle and leadership back to the White House.  And that is exactly what we will do when we elect Barack Obama as our president.”

She won’t do it.  But it’s nice to hope.

Here's to you, Mrs. Patterson.

Here’s a joke:

Mrs. Patterson is baking a cake, but, as she gathers her ingredients, she realizes she is one cup of sugar short.  Really she’s like between two thirds and three quarters of a cup short but she rounds it up in her head to one cup because it is simpler and she feels like it makes more sense to go borrow a nice even cup of sugar rather than get into the whole fraction-of-a-cup thing. 

So she sets out for the home of her closest neighbor, Mrs. Vattanatham, in the hope of borrowing a cup of sugar.  I should mention right now that this is not going to be an ethic joke, nor does it hinge on the discrepancy between the amount she needs and the amount she is going to ask to borrow; I’m just giving you this information so that you will have an accurate picture of the world Mrs. Patterson lives in.  Her neighborhood is surprisingly diverse, populated by emigrants from countries she hardly ever thought about when she was a girl growing up in Beaverton.  Maybe it’s not exactly the way she pictured things when she was a young bride, maybe she wishes Mrs. Vattanatham would dress a little more normally or make a decent cup of coffee, but she can’t deny that she’s a good neighbor and basically a lot of fun to sit and chat with.

Strangely, though, Mrs. Patterson has not seen Mrs. Vattanatham in a while—quite a few weeks, really—and as she makes her way toward the Vattanatham house, Mrs. P is pondering the reasons for this hiatus in Vattanatham/Patterson relations.  The same brain chemistry that makes her consider the difference between the sugar she needs and the sugar she is going to ask for is now dedicated to churning through this new discrepancy.

Well, the ball was technically in Mrs. Patterson’s court, since Mrs. Vattanatham had had Mrs. Patterson over last.  That was, what, three weeks ago, for a cup of tea?  But before that, the Pattersons had had the Vattanathams over for dinner, which is a considerably bigger deal than tea, so it’s not like, if we’re keeping score, a cup of tea discharges the social obligation entailed by an entire evening of cocktails, potato leek soup, roast lamb and the special trifle cake that is a bit of a Patterson specialty.  Yes, it had been a pretty fine dinner indeed, even if Mrs. Patterson did say so herself, to herself.  Much wine had been drunk. Or is it drunken.  She’s never sure.  But you can bet Mrs. Vattanatham would know.  Not even her original language.  Been in the country what, ten years?  But she knows all the grammar stuff.  And speaks in that little alluring accent.  Or at least it seems to be alluring to Mr. Patterson, who spent the entire dinner gazing—yes, gazing—at Mrs. Vattanatham and smiling at her jokes and saying, “Oh, tell me more about that. Oh, my, that’s interesting.”  And she, Mrs. Vattanatham, doing nothing to discourage him in the least.  Not encouraging him either, which would at least give Mrs. Patterson the satisfaction of knowing that her neighbor was that kind of woman.  No, Mrs. Vattanatham had been irreproachable in behavior and demeanor.  To make matters worse, Mr. Vattanatham seemed as taken with her as was Mr. Patterson. 

All in all, the evening had been a lovely, cordial disaster, and if Mrs. Patterson had been a little cool, or even a little evasive, in the ensuing weeks, well, that was the way of the world.  Even the best of friendships have their ups and downs, their hot and cold streaks—surely Mrs. Vattanatham must understand that, unless friendships were somehow fundamentally different in her country of origin, which seemed unlikely and was, in any event, not something Mrs. Patterson could be expected to know.

So now Mrs. Patterson needed the sugar for her pie, and while it might feel a little awkward to come by at this moment, when she needed something, after steering clear when Mrs. Vattanatham needed her (Mr. Vattanatham had actually been taken away by ambulance a week ago Wednesday for a suspected heart attack that turned out to be a powerful case of indigestion, an event which Mrs. Patterson, she remembered with some shame, had watched from her bathroom, peering surreptitiously through the blinds), well there was nothing to be done about that now.  Areturn to normal relations had to begin at some point and so why not now. And if Mrs. Vattanatham would really deny her neighbor a cup of sugar because she’d been a little fragile and acted less than beautifully, well, on whom did that really reflect.  It seemed hard to believe, actually, that anyone would really take something like this into account when what was being asked for was something as basic as sugar.  Hard to fathom.  Outrageous, even.

It was at this moment, in this frame of mind, that Mrs. Patterson reached the Vattanatham home and knocked on the door, which was opened in a matter of seconds by Mrs. Vattanatham.

“You know what?” Mrs. Patterson said without preamble.  “You can keep your fucking sugar.”

I’ve always had a warm place in my heart for that joke, but I am sharing it with you now in part to free up space in my heart for other, more useful things and in part because it does a decent sideways job of describing the author’s current conflict, in which he feels compelled to apologize for being so long between entries and, simultaneously, reluctant to make that apology.

In this cake I am baking I need your sugar, for sure.  But there are many other required ingredients, time and effort not least among them, but some even harder to come by and almost impossible to accurately identify. Does Mrs. Patterson wake up at night and wonder, “Why a cake? Who really wants this cake? Would they rather have a torte?  Who am I to dictate the flavor and consistency?  Why am I the one to make the little buttercream roses and to pipe on the decorative trim?  Why my cake at all when there are so many professionally made cake options available to people these days?”

It is amazing to me, in retrospect, that Mrs. P. had the confidence to go to her neighbor’s house at all.  Yet if she hadn’t, if she’d listened to the little voices in her head—or in my head, anyway—then we would’ve all been deprived of this excellent little joke.

So there it is. It turns out that the crucial ingredient isn’t that hard to identify: It’s confidence.  Confidence is power.  Confidence gets things done.  Confidence is infectious; it’s fun to be around; it builds the things that otherwise would seem impossible. In other words, Confidence is Lunacy’s older brother.
Therefore I will cleave to Confidence and I will from this point forward ignore the little doubting voices.  Ok . . . Done. . . Now what?  It seems to me sometimes that there’s nothing to me but these little voices, constantly weighing in from this side and that, unbidden.  Any one of them taken alone would be a hindrance at best, but together they form an elaborate lacework of flying buttresses, in opposition to each other, all in support of the otherwise flimsy walls of this cathedral of thought which soar ever higher even as they grow lighter and less substantial.

And look! There, near the altar, kneels a lone figure, the one and only worshipper in this church, who is, as I like to imagine it, my true self.

Sometimes I despair of ever getting closer to him than this, even as I gather around myself the ingredients of a happy life—a wife who knows me better than I could’ve ever hoped and loves me still, two truly wonderful children who amaze me with their kindness and their wisdom, a third son who showed me a different side of the world when he could not join it, and now this infant, this child who shouldn’t be here but is, whose crooked smile seems like a promise of things to come—all these riches and still I struggle.

Tonight I was reading to my older boys from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  It’s taken us forever, but we’re at the part where Becky and Tom are in the caves.  They’ve gotten turned around, separated from the others, and have been wandering for what seems like days.  Now they have come upon a subterranean spring and here they stop so that they will have water to drink when this last candle end burns out.  Then the utter blackness.  The dead silence made somehow deeper by the trickling of the spring.  They sit and wait to be found or die of hunger in the dark. It is truly horrible.

Yet in this bleakest of moments, they are just a turn or two from the light of day and the kiss of fresh air.  With a little perspective, we can see the route clearly and we’d like to be able to say, “Now come on, Tom.  You’ve come this far.  Just poke around a little more and you’ll find your way through and be done with Injun Joe in the process.”  But we can’t.  They’re just characters in a book and we are just readers.  We have to wait for them to find it in themselves, or for Mr. Clemens to put it there for them, to seek their own salvation.

Sure enough, Clemens comes through in time and gives them what they need to forge ahead.  And come to think of it, in a roundabout way, he’s done the same for me. 

So I’ll continue baking this peculiar cake and not worry too much if it seems at times that it’s too much about one thing and not enough about another, too long, too short, too infrequent, too demanding, too delusional, too indulgent, too ridiculous or, for that matter, not ridiculous enough.  I’m not even going to worry too, too much about whether it’s done to satisfaction or not.

In fact, you know what? Here’s your fucking cake.

Also, this title could be better.

I’ve been thinking about yesterday’s entry and I feel like it could’ve been better.  I feel like it’s good and all, I took a shot at it and that’s a good thing, but, I dunno, maybe if I’d put a little more effort into it, thought through a couple of the ideas a little more rigorously, really kind of held my own feet to the fire on a few of the more difficult points, it might’ve really helped the piece overall.  I can’t really put my finger on it—I just wonder if, you know, the bar is kinda down here when it really ought to be up there somewhere, if you know what I mean.

Like that bit about Washoe.  That really hit me back in the fall.  Mother of three dies at 42.  The kids asking all these difficult questions about death.  And then the woman being interviewed with her patronizing attitude towards the chimps.  It got me thinking about the nature of God and how, to Washoe, her keepers must’ve been like deities, maybe like the Greek gods—sharing the planet, able to be comrades at times, but essentially superior, the ones who open and close the doors, the ones who answer the questions, the ones we always work to please even when we don’t understand the challenge.  “I'm sorry?  What? Make a counterclockwise circle with the right hand flat over the heart?  Ok, lady, you keep the bananas coming and I’m on it.” 

If you can put yourself in their shoes—well, actually, ok, funny, they don’t have shoes—but imagine they did, then put yourself in them and you can see how, faced with phenomena you can’t understand, you might resort to spiritual or supernatural explanations.  Having a wrong answer, in other words, might be more acceptable than admitting you have no answer.

I got to thinking there must be some simple lesson in there for us but I could not figure it out.  I asked God to help me, but He couldn’t figure it out either, or at least he kept very quiet on the subject.  So I sat on the whole Washoe anecdote for almost five months, all the while feeling like it was just gold for the blog if I could only puzzle out how to spin it.  But in the end, writing nothing was more unsupportable than writing something, so I went with something. 

Did I go back to the NPR archives to find out exactly what the chimp lady said?  No.  I could’ve, but I didn’t.  Did I go back to Season One, Disc Two to get Div’s crazy, early-morning tape-recorded rant right word for word?  No.  In fact, I’ve lost disc two of season one.  But that’s a tangent.  That’s an excuse.

The real point is, I could’ve done more to make yesterday’s entry great.  And I didn’t.  I have to live with that.

Probably he was just drunk again.

A few months ago-okay, it was back in November but I remember it like it was yesterday—the radio in my car suddenly started talking about the death of Washoe the chimp at age 42.  Washoe, you may remember, got a good deal of press decades ago when she “learned” American Sign Language, becoming the first chimp ever to do so.  I put the “learned” in quotes because many scientists and linguists and concerned individuals questioned whether Washoe had in fact “learned” a language.  To be clear—or clearer, anyway—I guess there is no doubt that she learned ASL.  She could make all the signs and could use them to communicate all sorts of wants and needs.  The question was more along the lines of did she learn it like a language or did she learn it like you might learn a card game or a magic trick.  In this debate there are all sorts of subtle arguments that turn on points too technical and arcane for me to fathom, but it seems to boil down to the fact that a very famous linguist determined that the neural ability for language was developed after the genetic split of the humans from the apes and so, therefore, the chimp didn’t have language but had something else that looked and worked like language.

If that seems a little circular it is because I’m explaining it poorly, no doubt.  I’m not a linguist but I know enough of them to say that they are a very precise and persnickety bunch of people who have put a lot of time and brain power into this language thing and are not going to let some chimp sneak in by the back door. I’ve even looked at some of their papers—the linguists, not the chimps—and I’m telling you, you can’t get three sentences in before you start to run into phrases and concepts that leave you wondering about your own mastery of language. 

Basically, Washoe may appear to use language, but when she signs “I want banana,” is she entering into a social negotiation with another soul in hopes of getting sustenance, or is she just performing a trick which, she has learned, is rewarded with a banana?  I don’t know and now there is no way to ask her, except, perhaps, through séance, which has also been disproved. 

The amazing thing, though, is that, whether she actually learned it or not, Washoe went ahead and taught ASL to her children.  They learned it as well as she had, so that they could ask for bananas, comment on the color of your shoes, make chit-chat about the weather and so forth.  In fact, when Washoe died, one of her children asked, “Is she gone?” 

“Yes, she’s gone,” was the answer.

“Gone away,” the chimp said, already knowing the truth.

“Yes,” was the answer.

At which point all the children appeared to be quite sad.  But, the voice on the radio pointed out, there’s a certain amount of conjecture there. 

“It’s very hard to know, do they understand death?  Do they really have any kind of conception of God or the soul?”

And here is where I wanted to pull the car over and yell at the voice coming out of radio:  “Do they understand death? Well, do you?  Do you have any conception of God?  Do you know what the soul is?  If so, voice on the radio, could you take a moment and lay it out for me because, honestly, I’m struggling with it myself.  I don’t understand God.  I don’t understand the soul.  I don’t even understand the radio.  What do you mean ‘waves travel through the air’?  What kind of waves?  Oh radio waves.  That must be why we use a radio to catch them.  Clever.  The radio catches them, using, uhm, a piece of metal, and then runs them through a box powered by electricity, which I also don’t understand, and sends them out though the incomprehensible speakers which create sound waves (also traveling invisibly through space but totally different from radio waves) which enter our ears and are translated by a flap of skin into vibrations that are picked up by tiny little hairlike things and then through the brain—entirely incomprehensible—and there it is, radio person: your voice, in my head, saying some bullshit about whether or not an ape understands God. 

But instead of saying all that, I found myself turning to the radio and saying, simply, “Fuck you,” along with a little sign language of my own.

It’s strong, even vulgar language, but it is cathartic and it comes in handy these days, when the airwaves are so full of pomp and chatter. And, at the risk of offending you, this is something I counsel you—neigh, urge you—to try out for yourself the next time you hear something coming out of your radio speakers that strikes you as unlikely, ill-thought-through, slanted, sloppy or just personally displeasing: Look directly at the radio, extend the middle finger of your right hand and say, “Fuck you, radio person.”  Do not take your eyes off the road too long—just the moment it takes you to say it.  But do say it out loud—it’s not nearly as satisfying if you merely think it.

However, the reason I bring up Washoe and her kids is that their story highlights the massive gap between what we are able to feel and what we are able to express.  I have long suspected that everything is connected to everything else, even if only in trivial, circumstantial ways but, a few weeks ago—okay, a few months ago, when I was at the height of my ER obsession—I began to feel like the pieces were falling together and I might actually get a glimpse of some pattern in the connection, or a theme to it anyway. 

Then baby Wren arrived and the intensity of that experience and the lack of sleep combined to propel me for one bright instant, not to enlightenment, I’m not going to say that, but maybe to the scenic overlook where you pull off the highway and get a glimpse of enlightenment, away off over there, and you look at it and you read the little bronze plaque but you can’t get any closer and eventually you have to get back in your car and drive back into the valley.

And I remember the very moment: We were in bed, the missus kind of in a fog with this suckling pig drawing the life out of her as she drowsed.  Seconds before she’d been conscious and we’d finished up a crossword puzzle.  I’d reached down for the dictionary to check out one of our questionable answers and by the time I got the mighty volume up from under the bed, she was asleep.  So, I looked up our word—correct!—and its definition got me thinking about another word I thought I knew, so I flipped forward to that word, but on the way the page fell open to a third word that seemed related and suddenly I was reading the dictionary, flipping from page to page, words springing up from the page and falling effortlessly into this amazing, elusive narrative that propelled itself forward, simultaneously revealing and obscuring the truth.  I realized I was holding the prototypical novel in my hands—the best work of a million monkeys at a million typewriters, every story ever written and every story that ever would be written, but all mixed up and waiting to be found out and pieced together by a willing and receptive soul.

I have since been back to this book and, frankly, I don’t know what I saw in it.  It is simultaneously tedious and rambling.  But I fear this is my shortcoming.  I have lost the thread and I suspect this sudden close-mindedness is somehow related to my inability or unwillingness to deal with the subject of Div Cvetic. 

Yes, it’s far-fetched that a refusal to face up to the story of Season One’s most unpleasant Psychiatric Attending could some how derail this quest of mine.  But is it more far-fetched than the whole radio wave thing?  No, it is not.  So I’m going to join in with the whole national zeitgeist and cast my vote for hope; perhaps if I tackle this Div Cvetic story once and for all, I can shake loose some of the doubt and cobwebs that cling to this blog of late and get back on the road to peace of mind.

The first time you see him, Div Cvetic is an angry slash of a man, a straight-razor in a linen suit who barks at the nurses, gets up in Jerry’s face and pretends not to be able to remember Malik’s name, calling out to him, “What’s your name there?  Ma- malouk?”

“It’s Maleek,” Malik says.  “Same as it was yesterday.”

Let me throw this out: Where does a guy named Div get off giving anybody crap for their name.  Div Cvetik.  It sounds like an aperitif made from fermented beets.  Instead it’s this lanky, cocky, sharp-beaked doctor who lets it be known by any and all that he basically can’t be bothered to babysit these patients, so be damned sure they’ve got the charts ready and waiting for him.

And he says this in a voice that’s got just a bit of southern honey in it, but honey that’s been cooked and cooled so it’s brittle and sharp-edged.  He knows he’s an asshole and he kinda seems to be getting off on it.

Susan Lewis chases him down and calls him out on his poor treatment of the staff.  He just screws his face up like her comment doesn’t even make sense.  “Yeah, right,” he says and then he blasts her for being too quick to call psych for a consult. 

“That guy’s a medical problem, not a psych case,” he says.  “I don’t have a bed for him.”

“He’s delusional,” Lewis says.

“He’s drunk.”

“He’s on the street, Div,” Lewis pleads.

“I don’t have a bed,” Div says.  “Admit him yourself or turf him.”

“Okay,” Lewis says.  We know what she’d rather be saying.  We know what she’d say if this were a voice coming out of her radio.  But she doesn’t.  Instead, she utters the least likely phrase, given the context, in all of ER:

“So are you coming over tonight?”

She says this with a little schoolgirl lilt and he, of course, looks like he just bit down on a stone. He looks like he wants to spit.  Well, he says, he’s not sure he can get away but, you know, he’ll try.  Honestly, who knows what he said, I was so blown away by Lewis.  Was she kidding?  She’s sleeping with Div?  This jackass?  Where’s the attraction there?  Physical?  He’s all bones and angles; it’d be like bedding down with a scythe.  Emotional?  If one had deep-seated feelings of low-self esteem that needed constant reaffirmation, then sure, he’s your man. 

Any woman who finds herself thinking, “why can’t I find a nice, normal guy?” needs to take a look at Div Cvetic and accept him as both a rebuke and a cautionary tale.  There is great power in beauty and it is often misused.  I am in no position to referee the battle of the sexes, nor am I qualified to say which came first, the flirt or the cad, but I am prepared to say this: Ladies, if the man who excites you turns out to be an asshole, don’t come crying to me.  There are plenty of what you might call “nice guys” out there—they’re just hard to see when you’re standing on their throats.

That said, it is hard to take Div Cvetic as any kind of hero or even anti-hero of the sometimes-downtrodden male.  In fact there are only a few more things to know about Div and then he will be out of our lives.

One night Susan wakes up and sort of pats the pillow next to her and then gets this worried look on her face.  This is universal TV language for “my lover is gone.”  Susan rises—she wears Chicago Bears sweats to bed!—and walks out to the living room, where she finds Div rocking back and forth and speaking into a handheld tape recorder.  His voice has a kind of monotonous venom as we hear him unloading—the vile stink of the patients, the sameness of their problems, the relentless, mind-numbing stupidity of these whining, wheedling, drug-seeking imbeciles incapable of solving their own issues or even recognizing them, the obliviousness of the staff, the pointlessness of the work¬¬—

“Div?” Susan says.

“Oh, hey,” he says, snapping off the tape recorder.  “Just finishing up some notes.”

“It’s three in the morning, Div,” Susan says.  “Come to bed.”

Maybe it’s the Bears sweats, maybe chronic insomnia; either way Div brushes her off and promises he’ll be in soon.  He’s lying.

The next time we see Div, it’s on the rooftop of the hospital where he’s been summoned to help talk a patient—a depressed transvestite, if you must know—out of jumping.  He does not succeed, and when he turns away from the now empty ledge, the look on his face is that of a man who got the wrong drink at Starbucks. No room again? Ah Christ, what did I expect?

Later that night, though, he fails to show up for Thanksgiving dinner at Susan’s house.  She calls him, she pages him: nothing.  Cut to Div, just crazy drunk, in the pouring rain, walking into four lanes of traffic, waving the swerving cars on, begging them to hit him, like a matador who has tossed aside his cape and is offering up his body to the onrushing beast.

And that’s it for Div.  He stops showing up at the hospital.  When Susan goes to his place to check on him, the door is open and the rooms are empty except for some packing boxes and an upended lamp.  We never see him again.

So, in other words, Div was deeply depressed and just getting by.  Here he is, living and working in the same world as the rest of us.  He’s got a career, he’s healthy, he’s got a girlfriend who is, you know, kinda hot even if she isn’t making the most of it.  His circumstances, the ingredients in the soup of his life, are good but he cannot find a way to make anything palatable of them. Is he wired that way?  Is he just weak?  Or does he see something in life that the rest of us miss, something terrible and sad?

“Variety is the spice of life,” we say, and “It takes all kinds.”  But do we know what we’re talking about?  Do we know what the various kinds really are?  Div presents as a classic asshole—narcissistic, rude, arrogant—but in fact he is lonely, desperate, miserable and lost and pretty much out of reach. How many people in our day-to-day lives are just like Div—they slot so easily into a ready category, we can’t see them suffer and they can’t find the words.

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, the ultrasound tech asked us if we wanted to know the baby’s sex.  We had her write it on one of the ultrasound images and put it in an envelope so we could open it together later.  And that night, in bed, we remembered the envelope and I went down and got it and brought it back up.

The missus had had this dream, years before, where we were walking down a road together, hand in hand, and she realized we were being followed.  And when we stopped and turned around there was our daughter, a little girl named Olive.  This had seemed, at a time when we badly needed it, like a portent of future harmony and happiness.

So she was hoping for a girl.  And, from my amateur reading of the screen over the tech’s shoulder, I suspected we had a boy.  I was not prepared for how terribly these two actualities would clash.  The envelope, the flimsy slip inside, the big happy handwriting of the technician.  The exclamation point with a heart for a period.  The first picture of our first son.

It hit her all at once and a terrible sound came out of her and then she began to sob and she could not stop.  What followed were three days of this unknowable sadness, my wife gone somewhere inside, and me dancing around the edges, sometimes consoling, sometimes reasoning, sometimes angry, but never really getting anywhere near what she was feeling.  It was frightening and I didn’t know what would happen.

Then, on the evening of the third day, her brother called and they talked.  I would guess that his experience of this sort of thing hovers near zero, but he is a remarkable man with this quality, it seems to me, of being born anew every day, which lets him see things that others have stopped noticing and say things that would be terribly misunderstood from another mouth. 

“You know,” he said, after he’d listened a while,  “I heard an expression the other day that I think might apply here and—I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard it before—it’s Get over it.”

At this point, I would be ducking for cover, but he was just getting warmed up.

“To me, that means that there are all these things in life you can control, like if you want to learn French, you take French lessons, or if you don’t like your house you can get a new one or paint it or whatever.  And then there are all these things you can’t control, like the weather or, in your case, whether you have a girl or a boy, and these things you just have to get over.  You know, get over it.”

And she did.  It may have been her brother’s encouragement, it may have been that she’d just run through all her sadness and regret and was done.  I don’t know exactly how or why, but she got over it and it made me proud of her and grateful. I remember wasting a little time worrying a little about this inauspicious beginning—not that I even believe in auspices, or karma or the like, but only that our son could never know how the early news of his arrival was received.  Now of course, I see how wrong I was to worry.  I would give anything—almost anything—to have the chance to tell him this story one day, to laugh gently together at his mother, whom we know to be kind and loving beyond measure, to wonder at the things we sometimes feel and the crazy way things work. 

I guess I’ve known depression before.  It’s a man in a hat and long dark coat who shows up at the front door unannounced.  And sometimes he brings the overnight bag, sometimes he brings the trunk, but in any case he stays longer than you’d like. He is stupid, he is dull, he is heavy.  And he is familiar.  You know him and you can count on him. He moves right in, rearranges things to suit himself, but he never takes off his coat and he never takes off his hat and if you catch a glimpse of his face you see that it is your own.

After Lincoln died, after he was stillborn, what came then was not depression but something better. It wasn’t empty or dumb.  It had a reason, the best of reasons.  It was loss, but loss of something we’d never quite gotten hold of, not even in our imaginations.  It was grief and sorrow, for sure, but it had a quality of joy, strong and irresistible.  It was everywhere.  And it was, in a way, a gift, as if we’d been given this hallowed ground to inhabit for a while.

And I have to say I’ve had some trouble leaving it behind.  But life goes on. It needs to.

Also, I lied earlier.  I said that Div’s drunken traffic incident is the last time he’s seen on ER, but that’s not technically true.  It’s the last time we see him live and in the flesh.  I know what you’re thinking, but hold on.

About a year later, this cab driver comes through the ER for treatment of some minor problem.  He gets talking to Carter and reveals that he runs a dating service out of his taxi, where he photographs likely, single customers and keeps the polaroids in a folder to share with customers of the opposite sex.  He tries to talk Carter into it.

“I have many success stories,” he says to the curious but skeptical Carter.  “I even fixed up a doctor!  Look.”

And there, on the page, is the couple in question—a pleasant-looking brunette on one side, and on the other, well, it’s Div Cvetic, wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and looking very happy if a little blurry.

Wow.  So maybe Div found a way out.  Maybe he changed his diet, took up yoga, started jogging.  Maybe he met a woman he loved and he suddenly decided to pull his head out of his ass and stop wallowing.  Maybe he looked at life and said, this is it, let’s start living.  Maybe, in other words, he managed to get over it. 

Good Work

Close readers of this blog will recall the moment when ER’s Peter Benton, standing by an open grave, began singing The Greatest Love of All—a song made famous by Whitney Houston but originally and, in my opinion, more successfully recorded by the inestimable George Benson, who is, if you think about it, Peter Benton with a guitar and a ready smile—the same intense focus, the same insistence on perfection, both possessed of  tremendous talent springing from lightning-fast minds but made manifest through insanely sensitive hands, not to mention the smoldering, lady-melting good looks—I am now thoroughly convinced of what, at the beginning of this poor, abused paragraph, I had only begun to suspect.  These two men are twin sons of different mothers, minted in the same press, forged in the same fire, two arrows—one of surgical steel, the other polished quick-silver—aimed at the same target: greatness.

As I write this, here at my place of work, I can hear an Elvis impersonator performing in the atrium to the delight of my co-workers.  Their cheers ring in my ears, despite the headphones I’m wearing.  There is a pull to go join the throng, to be a part of it.  But there’s a stronger pull here.  I turn the volume up; the keyboard swells, the drums drive to a crescendo and that voice—what is it, a baritone?—soars skyward.

It’s not his best song.  It has a thick layer of cheese on it—the synthesizer riding under the piano, schmaltzy arrangement.  I wouldn’t call it good music—I’d call it great. 

And for Benton to stand graveside and, in his moment of need, reach for a song that at some level preaches self-love and defiant self-reliance seems like a stroke of genius.  That this took place not in reality, nor even in the heightened reality that is ER, but rather in a dream of mine early one morning, well, this seems to throw the credit to me.  In the past, I’ve been disappointed with some of the narrative directions my dreams have taken—some of the choices seem so ill-suited to the concept of dreaming, where, in theory, anything can happen—that I am happy and relieved to see, on the other hand, things sometimes work out in splendid fashion.

However, the reason I brought up this musical tidbit from blogging past was not to take the opportunity to sing the praises of perhaps the foremost practitioner of scatting-along-with-my-guitar-riff jazz in the history of the genre, but rather to point out the wisdom contained in the lyrics, overall, yes, but especially: “I believe the children are our future; teach them well and let them lead the way. “

I have let my children lead the way of late, down to our basement hideaway and back to the unfolding saga of Battlestar Galactica, a show that not so long ago I’d argued to be fundamentally inferior to ER.  I was wrong.  It’s a great show. In fact, the more I watch of it, the more I come to believe it is, essentially, the same show as ER.  Less medicine, more flying around space, but otherwise exactly the same. 

For example, here’s a story line that could just as easily have filled out an episode of ER, with some adjustments: We are onboard the Galactica and morale is, frankly, in the toilet.  The 40,000-odd souls that escaped annihilation in the Cylon attack on the 12 colonies have been solid on the run for a year.  They are through their collective reservoir of adrenaline and are now faced with the truth: This is all there is.  All the people they knew back home are dead.  No family.  No friends.  No home.  Nothing but this spaceship and a life of running. 

So the Chief, a working man who thinks with his hands, decides he’s going to build a spacecraft—design and build a new spacecraft—from scratch.  It’s a response that doesn’t seem to address the problem—and that’s the genius of it.  It’s all the chief knows—he can sit there and do nothing or he can move forward, so he finds his way forward.  Goddamit, I love that kind of man.

Needless to say, there is much scoffing, both behind and in front of the Chief’s back.  Design a ship from scratch?  Galactica doesn’t have the facilities for that.  What about the coms system?  What about the navs? Where you gonna get the engines?  Plus, what with the chronic crew shortages, all work is volunteer, off-the-clock.  No thank you.

So Chief toils alone.  He welds and grinds and makes a lot of sparks.  And he does this for what seems like a long time but probably amounts to thirty seconds of screen time.  Then, as he is struggling to hold a structural beam in place while fitting the bolts, suddenly his burden is lifted.  It’s the skeptical dude from scene one who is now putting his shoulder into it.  Then Kali joins in.  Lt. Gaeda gets on the navigation system.  Dualla takes on the communication system.  Starbuck picks up a welding torch.  It’s a goddamn team, people!  And there is nothing on TV or under the sun that can’t be accomplished by a good team.

At this point, the XO walks in and is, frankly, outraged at what he sees: officers exhausting themselves in their off-hours in pursuit of a fantasy.  He goes to confront the Chief, who is in the process of brewing moonshine.

“What the frak is this, then?” the XO growls.

“I use it to barter for parts,” the Chief admits.

“You’re wasting your time and you’re damaging my crew.  I won’t have it.”

“Sir, the work is all I have,” Chief says.  “If I don’t have this, I have nothing.”

“It’ll never fly,” the XO says.

“Maybe it won’t,” Chief replies.

“You don’t even have engines,” the XO retorts.

“I’ll figure something out,” says Chief.

“An old service buddy of mine is Chief on the Monarch,” the XO says, mentioning one of the civilian ships in the fleet.  “You might give him a call.  Give him my regards.”

As he says this, the XO is fingering a jar of the moonshine.  He finally takes it and, impulsively, another, and then walks out.

The engines come through, the ship is framed out and, in a last-minute stroke of genius—“Man, where are we gonna get enough titanium to skin this thing?”  “Hey, what about these extra sheets of graphite carbon composite?”—the thing comes together.

Of course, Starbuck is the pilot who undertakes the dangerous test-flight.  Of course, Lee Adama is the man who flies on her wing.  Out they go into space, Lee tight-jawed, Starbuck whooping and hollering.  The strange black ships twitches and spins and threatens to flip out of control—Starbuck wrestles with it, seems to get it in hand, applies some throttle and BOOM, it’s gone.

“Starbuck!  Starbuck!” Lee screams into his mic.  Nothing. 

“Galactica, we have lost contact with Blackbird,” Captain Adama announces, seeking control through protocol.  “Repeat, we have lost contact with Blackbird.”

Suddenly, Blackbird floats up into view, a madly grinning Starbuck at the helm.

“Of course you’ve lost contact, silly, “ she says.  “It’s a stealth ship.”

You knew it was coming and yet it was great anyway.  How like so many of the truly satisfying things in life.  Maybe surprise is over-rated.  A little spice, a twist, a turn—sure—but the best stories are the familiar ones.

Back on the hangar deck it is a pandemonium of shared accomplishment.  The president of the colonies—the frakking president—has come to see the ship and, lo and behold, it is named after her.  Good gods, the tears are fairly flowing now.  They hand her a bottle of champagne to christen the ship and she makes to break it on the prow in the traditional fashion—something that simply isn’t done with a fragile graphite spacecraft, evidently, because the crew, as one, leap to stop her, but, c’mon, she knows better.  She’s just frakking with them.  The president of the frakking colonies is pulling their collective leg.  This is a wonderful, light moment and if there were any doubt that the Chief has worked his way, and our way, out of the aforementioned funk, it is dispelled when the cork pops and the bubbly flows.

But the moment that really slays me—and I can tell you why, though it will take me a couple thousand words —came just before the President’s little vaudeville act.  Starbuck has landed and everyone is gathered around the ship.  Chief is grinning ear to ear, drunk with fellow-feeliing, when he hears his name called out.  He turns, and there is Commander Adama in all his craggy glory.  The Old Man extends his hand and the Chief takes it in a hearty embrace.

“Good job,” Adama says. 

And that’s all he says.  That’s all he needs to say.  What else is there?

Now, I work at a place where, for example, an Elvis impersonator might show up unannounced and put on a concert in the atrium and I could, on my way over there, stop by the Kegerator and pour myself a draft and lounge on the steep terraces of reclaimed lumber that rise up from the center of this modern masterpiece of architecture within which we ply our trade.  And were I to do that, I would be in the company of smart, exceptionally talented, funny and kind people—those attributes being spread out among them and not neccessarily grouped together in any one individual.  And I appreciate that.  I really do.

But I know that, when I finish my stealth fighter and my commander comes down for review, he’s more likely to say something like:

“Hmm, it’s black.  Interesting. Why’d you make it black?”

“Seemed stealthy, sir,” I might respond.  “Why?  Is there something wrong with black?”

“No, nothing wrong.  Just not what I was expecting.”

“What were you expecting, sir, if I might be so bold as to ask?”

“I dunno.  Something cooler.  Something that touches me. Something I’ve never seen before.”

“You were expecting something you’ve never seen before?” I might ask.

“Yes.  There’s no breech of logic in that.”

“I didn’t say there—”

“I can expect something I’ve never seen before.  It’s your job to deliver amazing shit.”

“I thought this was amazing.  It’s a spaceship that is, uhm, invisible to other spaceships.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get all that,” the commander says, suddenly looking depressed.  “I just thought, I dunno, this could be amazing and just blow people away but, gawd, I dunno, it’s just this black lump of a spaceship just sitting there and it makes me sad, you know?  When I think about what it coulda been.”

Ah, what it could have been.  I am all too familiar with that sorry trap.  It’s the promise of the new project—it could be anything, but the moment you start working, you start to limit the possibilities and constrain the infinite.  You chip away at what it could be until you are left with what it is. 

Honestly, I am happy with that bargain. Work is all about arriving at a kind of balance, a compromise, between the various elements and forces in play.

“Compromise? Compromise is weakness.  Compromise is fear.  When we put our passion into our work we pursue art, not compromise.”

Oh, hello Commander.  I thought you’d left the deck.  Well, since you’re here, let’s talk about it a little, sir.  If you think about it differently it suddenly seems like creative work—art, if you want—is all about compromise. You start with a blank page—it could be anything.  Work is the process of forging a compromise with these infinite possibilities and making something.  A lot of people—particularly advertising creatives—hate this process.  The end product feels pretty small compared to the visions that fill the cavity between the ears. 

But me, I love it.  What is color but a compromise between white and black?  What is harmony if not a compromise between dissonance and monotony?  Where to draw the line, what to mix in, what to exclude—forget about the end product, that process is where all the joy is.  That process, in fact, is the end product.

I’ve often said—quietly, so that none of the higher-ups might hear—that I’d rather have a good time making a bad ad than have a bad time making a good ad.  Now, before some angry god half-understands me, let me say that the ideal scenario would be to have a good time making a great ad.  All I mean is, put your faith in the process.

As the man said, once upon a time, “No tears in the poet, no tears in the poem.”  I suppose he could have said “joy” or “fear” or “passion” or anything at all worth communicating. And all he meant, I suppose, was that you can’t trick people into feeling something.  You’ve got to feel it yourself.  And then find a way to take them there.

That’s the work.

Speaking of Frost, he’s got this awesome poem, Two Tramps In Mud Time, that is, in the end, all about work.  A fellow is splitting wood in his yard when two men, two tramps, appear out of nowhere.  It becomes clear that these men think it would be altogether better if they were to take over the wood splitting in return for cash money.  There’s some beautiful imagery in this poem—you can feel the cold air in your lungs, the ache in your back from working a little harder than you know how—but the last two stanzas are where he sneaks up and gives you the sharp end of the idea.  The tramps are watching this man work, just watching:

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Holy crap is that beautiful.  Avocation and vocation, love and need, work and play, Heaven and the future.  So many people seem to think that writing is all about having a way with words.  But isn’t it really about wanting to say something—not something we’ve never heard before but something we already know in our hearts to be true—and then finding a way to say it so that somebody else can hear it again.  That’s the writer’s work. 

I’ve read this poem a hundred times and it gets me a little differently each time because I’m still figuring out, not what it means, but what it means to me.  That’s the reader’s work.

I’m tempted to say that at least part of what the poet is saying here is that life is all about finding a way to work with opposites, to create something harmonious and meaningful out of discord—my left eye sees things one way, my right eye another, and I find my vision in a seamless compromise between the two. 

But I don’t want to turn the poem to my own ends.  So instead let me just quote another little bit that comes earlier in the narrative when the tramps are sizing our man up:

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Now it occurs to me that, in the history of man, few people have handled an ax as adroitly as George Benson.  George was a child prodigy, discovered by jazz great Wes Montgomery, signed to Columbia by John Hammond. Benson played with the giants—Miles Davis, Jack McDuff, Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard—and had a hard-core reputation with the jazz elite.

But he had this idea.

He wanted to sing along with his guitar.

Big deal, right?  Who doesn’t want to do that?  Well, turns out it was a bit controversial

“The first time I tried to sing along with my guitar,” Benson said, “everybody in the studio booed.  They said it wouldn’t work.”

Well, it was something they’d never heard before.  And they didn’t like it.  But George stuck with it—even though he had to change labels to get this new sound recorded—and the sing-along-with-my-guitar-solo style debuted with George’s 1976 remake of Leon Russell’s This Masquerade.  It’s a lush, groovy, fromage-fest of 70’s funk and a lot of his biggest fans said he’d sold out.  And I suppose the fact that it was the first-ever jazz album to go platinum just proves the point.

Still, when I listen to it, it moves me and I can’t help but wonder, what if he hadn’t done it?  Listen to that beginning!  He’s like, “I’m gonna sing along with my guitar and I defy you not feel it.”  Wow. So many people think playing a guitar is all about being able to find the chords and hit the notes—and it is, of course—but more than being able to do it, you have to really tip your hat to the guy who thought to do it and then, having thought of it, did it.

Likewise, one afternoon in 1977, the author of this blog climbed behind the wheel of his forest green, six-cylinder Scout II and pointed it west.  I’d just gotten my license and this was, by far, my longest solo journey ever, my first trip across the bridge, my first-ever visit to the exotic city of Providence, in order to attend the first concert of my young life—headlined by none other than Mr. George Benson.  Nobody told me to do it.  In fact, I’d been actively dissuaded by my peers who were more about Aerosmith and Foreigner and Tull.  But I wanted to do this, I’d bought my ticket and here I was.

By the time I parked the car, I’d already had more urban adventure than I knew what to do with.  I joined the throng pouring up the steps and into the concert hall.  Decent seats, to the left, midway back.  Billy Cobham opened up.  Pretty much blew me away from the first song, but how many drum solos can you string together?  Then Benson came out—he looked exactly like he looked on the album cover.  That I was in such close proximity to this great musician was something I couldn’t quite fathom.  Neither could any of my friends, for that matter, which is why I’d made the trip solo.

Then, as soon as it had begun, it was over and I shuffled out with everyone else into the cool fresh air of this aptly named city, strolled down the street, hopped back in my car and made my way east, arriving home well after midnight. 

As I was coming through the garage my dad opened the door and stuck his head out.

“Oh, you’re back,” he said, as if he’d just happened to be up and curious about the garage at this hour.  “How was the concert?”

“It was great,” I said. 

“Good, good,” he said.  He could give two shits about music, really.

I came up the steps and we walked into the kitchen together. 

“Well, you got down there and back in one piece,” he said, moving on to a subject he did care about.  “Good work.”

It hadn’t really seemed like work, but I kinda lit up anyway.  It’s always nice when the old man gives you the nod. 

Just last year he and my mom were coming home from one of his doctor’s appointments in Boston.  He’d been a handful for quite some time, with his health and all, and my mom worked pretty hard to keep things moving forward on his terms.  Sometimes he didn’t seem to notice.  But on this day, they pulled into the garage, both exhausted, but also feeling pretty good about the day’s events.  They’d gotten up there, they’d gotten back and it looked like he’d be approved for a new drug trial.

“You did a good job today, honey,” he said.  “Good work.”

Stuff like that—after fifty years of marriage, your mate still sees you there and can get out of his own head long enough to say so.  That might not be everything, it might not be enough, but it’s a good start.  Or a good end, I should say.

Mom went around to help him get out and—I suppose you can see this coming—when she opened his door he collapsed onto the garage floor.  I don’t know that he ever said another word.  That’s life.

Is my writer's strike over?

A friend—a very smart, talented friend with a blog of his own of vastly greater scope and readership than my own—gave me some very simple advice, which he delivered as gently as possible. 

As he put it, “I think, in general, people really like to read short things.” 

A five-page amateur exegesis of a middling work by a long-dead New England poet is probably the  paradigm example of how I’ve ignored his advice.  And I will continue to ignore his advice as the spirit moves me but, for this moment, I am going to take his words to heart and share with you some small—I was going to say unconnected, but I caught myself—some small, disjunctive thoughts that have been stacking up in the hopper labeled “Blog entries I intend to write next.”  It is my hope that by pulling out some of these tangled branches and stumps, I will open up the flow a little and get the good, clear cordwood of quality ideas flowing more quickly into the furnace. 

So, here goes.

1. Everything is connected.  There.  I’ve said it.  It’s not the most interesting thought ever but it is one of the founding principles of this blog.  One way of putting it is that all things are similar to one another in an infinite number of ways.  That Coke bottle on my desk and the box of tissues share in common the fact that they are not the lamp.  Or the phone.  Or my big toe.  They are both 36 inches off the ground.  They are both not four feet off the ground.  Nor five feet. Nor five feet two inches.  You can see where this is going and it's true enough,if trivially so, and pedantic and, frankly, pretty useless in the general day to day.  But what I mean is, if you look at a thing long enough, you can start to see it connect to everything else. For example, I think there’s a relationship between Carol Hathaway’s really crappy boyfriend, John “Tag” Taglieri, and my penchant for bursting into tears.   I just don’t know what it is.  But I have some ideas.   

2. Somebody has to write a blog entry about John “Tag” Taglieri.  I think that somebody is going to be me, but when the opportunity arrives, I find myself thinking, “Really?  A whole entry about Tag? Why?”  Well, see point 1 above.  For example, there is magic in Tag’s freak-out speech to Carol on the street in front of the hospital.  If I can tap on the right keys in the right order and somehow capture that magic, well, my job is done.

3.    Likewise, Dr. Div Cvetic, though a minor character, is a subject which I almost fear to tackle because I suspect that, if I were somehow able to communicate the truth about him and what he stands for in print, I would spontaneously self-immolate and my poor, beautiful wife would find nothing left behind but a pile of ash and one hell of a blog entry.  However, I am going to go ahead and attempt it one day soon because that is the job.

4.    At some point I’m going to have to come out and apologize to everyone who loves Battlestar Galactica, to the crew of the ship, to the actors who portray this crew, to the production crew, to the network executives responsible for the show and, especially, to anyone I might have dissuaded from watching it, because it is pretty great and I have secretly begun watching it again myself.  I’ve just gone back over that list and, you know what? Fuck the network executives.  The rest stands.

Though there’s a part of me that’s thinking, “wow, only four things?” I guess I will leave it at that or else I’ll end up violating my friend’s advice in the taking of it.  But I will add two links to other blogs because I’m told that such links really give a blog an interactive feel which is pretty much price-of-entry with the young demographic today.

So, first is this website, created by a colleague, which I stumbled across—ok, he sent it to me—back when my friend’s advice was newly rattling around in my bean.  I looked at this and thought, “Good god! Short is easy to read and this website proves it.”  This website also explores the tight and complex connection between easy and tedious but, hey, check it out here.

Second is the website of my friend with all the great advice.  Honestly, because he’s my friend, I would tell you that it is an awesome and inspiring site even if I didn’t believe it, so I’m at a little bit of a loss as to how I can navigate the heuristics of this complex situation and make this claim ring with the authority it deserves.  Wait, I know: click here.

So, what's the other half?

Of course, the big news is that Season 8 of ER has been released on DVD.  This did not get a lot of coverage in the press—I guess it was a pretty busy week with the stock market scare and the breech of the Gaza wall and so forth, so it must’ve gotten pushed off the front pages—but it nonetheless represents an important step forward for people like myself who get their ER exclusively on DVD.  We went through the first seven seasons in just a few months, but the banana bag has been empty for a few months now, we’ve been recycling plasma and our IV feed has been cut back to a slow drip, entirely dependent on the network’s release schedule.  Will they wait an entire year to issue season nine?  It hardly seems possible that the missus and I can maintain our focus and dedication over that kind of a dry spell.  It’s conceivable we may have to start watching Battlestar Galactica again.

But these concerns are for another day because, right now, there are 22 action-packed episodes awaiting us and, though we’ve been in possession of them for three days now, we have yet to dig into them because, honestly, I’m kind of up to my ears in the rewatching of season one.

One of the really surprising and strangely rewarding parts of revisiting this territory has been the total shakeup it has given to my sense of the pace of things.  I have this sense of my friends and the milestones in their lives—the trajectories of their careers, their marriages, their struggles with alcohol or fidelity—as slowly developing over time. 

Carol Hathaway’s relationship with Dr. John Tagliari, for example:  I had the distinct memory of this doomed affair as something that developed slowly over the course of the first season, grew into something apparently serious in season two and then culminated when Carol left Tag standing—pathetically, deservedly—at the altar. 

Well, not so.  As I watch it unfold again I find myself, like Scrooge when he realizes how efficiently the ghosts have done their work, mumbling quietly, “why, they did it all in one season.”  Look at what happens when Carol decides she wants to adopt Tatiana, the Russian girl with AIDS: she hesitates to mention it to Tag, finally brings herself to broach the subject, he can’t get on board with the plan, she sees his point, but in the end decides to go through with it, come what may—all this does not develop, as I’d remembered, over the course of several weeks, but rather over the course of a single conversation. 

This sort of time compression happens over and over again:  Benton’s mom’s decline into senility and death, the dissolution of Dr. Greene’s marriage, the introduction and disappearance of the incomparable Div Cvetic, Psychiatric Attending (who really deserves more attention than I can give him here)—when I think of these things, they have a great weight behind them, as if we built up to them gradually and lived through them over time; as I watch the show again, they pop on screen at a frantic pace, one on top of the other, and we are meant to keep up.

This discrepancy is, of course, a problem with my memory, not with the show.  It’s the same phenomenon you might experience when, say, you need to drive one of the kids to a classmate’s birthday party in some corner of the village you have never before visited.  You follow the directions carefully—south to the bridge, left at the Starbucks, continue past the church, right at the Starbucks, look for the stone gate that reads Orchard Creek Meadows Estates in improbably ornate gold script and, voila, you are there.  It seems to take forever and I am always wondering, between landmarks, have I gone too far?  Has it been point three miles yet or only point two? Where the hell am I?

Then you drop the kid off, get back in the car and you’re home before the Car Talk guys have answered a single question.   

It reminds me very much of this poem by a poet I like, this young guy—just a kid, really—or at least he was when he wrote it, a little less than a hundred years ago. Ok, ok, it’s The Mountain by Robert Frost and there’s this aspect of it that I’ve always wanted to talk over with someone but the time has just never been right.  Until now.

So The Mountain is the first-person narrative of a man, a visitor to a new town, who goes out for a morning walk to investigate a mountain that dominates the local topography.  He runs into a farmer “who moved so slow/ With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,/ It seemed no harm to stop him altogether.”  The rest of the poem is the conversational back and forth between these two men—the visitor and the local, the precocious kid and the elder sage, the sophisticate and the old salt, the man who wants to climb the mountain and the one who never saw the need—quite a crowd, really, so it’s no wonder the conversation doesn’t really flow but rather stops and starts as the various constituents try to get a word in edgewise.

Anyway, they chat about the mountain—how to climb it, whether to climb it—and then the farmer offers up this tidbit:

"…There's a brook
That starts up on it somewhere--I've heard say
Right on the top, tip-top--a curious thing..."

And the conversation goes on from there. But, as if he’s afraid the fellow wasn’t listening, the farmer comes back around to the brook, or rather, to be polite (because to be polite is to be indirect), he comes back to the source of the brook:

“…But there's the spring,
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain.
That ought to be worth seeing..."

As a kid, when I first read this poem, I remember thinking, “Now, why shouldn’t there be a brook on the summit of a mountain?  I’ve seen springs that bubble up under pressure, and pressure can move water uphill, and the earth’s core is certainly the domain of great forces and water comes from the earth so, why not? 

But there had to be something impossible about a spring on a mountaintop because, well, because these gentlemen seemed to think it odd, and these gentlemen were given voice by Robert Frost.  Was the poet wrong?  Or was I?  Even as a teenager, I knew which was more likely.

So I thought about it.  And here’s where I got to: 

The internal volcanic forces of the earth were certainly capable of expelling water at great pressure—but this was always in the form of geysers of steam and hot water.  Springs of cold water got their pressure elsewhere, from the force of gravity, the way that water springs from a punctured can—the flow is determined by and reliant on a body of water above it.  Likewise, a mountain spring needs a pool of water—and hence, a certain amount of land—above it.  Rain falls from the sky, is gathered into the earth, flows downhill and, when the conditions are right, bursts forth from the ground as a spring.

So what of this mountaintop spring?  The farmer says:

"...I guess there's no doubt
About its being there. I never saw it.
It may not be right on the very top:
It wouldn't have to be a long way down
To have some head of water from above,
And a good distance down might not be noticed
By anyone who'd come a long way up...”

Now, we're getting somewhere.  Maybe it's not on the tippy top and it's just a problem of observation.  Kind of.  After all, neither of these guys has actually seen the spring.  That's not going to keep them from talking about it, though.  The farmer begins this exchange:

“…One time I asked a fellow climbing it
To look and tell me later how it was."
"What did he say?"
"He said there was a lake
Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top."
"But a lake's different. What about the spring?"
"He never got up high enough to see...”

Is this poetry?  Or just crazy talk? The farmer continues

“...But what would interest you about the brook,
It's always cold in summer, warm in winter.
One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox's breath…”

This is from a man who’s never climbed the mountain and, so far as he’s willing to admit, can see no reason he ever would.  The traveler questions the farmer on this last point:

"...Warm in December, cold in June, you say?"

"I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun's in how you say a thing..."

Indeed, it is. What is a poem, after all, but the fun—or the pain, or the love—in how you say a thing?

And I can’t say that this is one of my favorite poems—it’s a little talky, in that way Frost sometimes gets, as though he were just a bystander at this roadside chat and he can’t help it if the subject isn’t all that interesting.  Of course it trips along well enough and the voices ring true, but the conversation starts and stops and in the end, where are you any different from where you started out?  To borrow from another less literary but equally authentic New England icon, the folk comedy team Bert and I, this poem is a little like a sausage: “It looks good, it tastes good, but after you skin it, there ain’t much to it.”

But I bring it up because it’s got that idea in it, simple and sophisticated enough that it has stuck with me all these years, that the way things look depend a lot on where you’re standing and how you got there.  And, now that I look, this idea is right there in the opening lines: 

The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.
And yet between the town and it I found,
When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields...

I guess you could say it’s a poem about pespective, or the uncertainty of observation—it’s not a thing you expect in a poem, like love or death or fear of god.  And I call it “talky,” yet he did in a hundred lines what I’ve only poked at in twice that many, and half of them borrowed back from him (you do the math). 

My father, who grew up in the time of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, loved Frost because his poems were about things a person understood. You could not drive down the Barnstable-West Barnstable Road with him on a winter night, past the spot where the light in the window of the dump man’s shack twinkled through the trees, without him reciting, from memory, Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening.    He could not conceive that this was, somehow, a poem about suicide.  And yet, when I look at it, I can’t conceive that it isn’t. 

So I take this as a warning.  The Mountain is a poem about a mountain, to be sure, but also about things I probably don’t understand.  I see my cat at the door, wanting to come in for the thousandth time, so, for the thousandth time he works his paws against the glass and seems to wonder what holds him back.  He doesn’t understand the barrier but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to understand.

Look at how this poem ends.  I’ve never liked it much because I never quite got it entirely and was left to imagine that someone, Frost or me, fell short somehow. The mountain’s name, the farmer tells us, is Hor.  It looks truncated, unfinished—like a code word—and for a kid, the sound of it is like a swear, no matter how you spell it.  Hor? Really? 

The visitor is trying to keep the conversation going but it's played out:

"...You've lived here all your life?"

"Ever since Hor
Was no bigger than a----" What, I did not hear.
He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
Gave them their marching orders and was moving.

Those last lines have always unsettled me.  Why pull that word?  What could it be?  What was the secret?  When would I know?  I want to suspect that farmer of something dark—here’s this spot, high above it all, where water pours magically from the ground.  It sounds like heaven but our farmer can’t see any reason to go there and, by the time he’s done talking around it, our visitor seems less than likely to try the climb. 

It’s just a joke, my father would say, just a Yankee saying he’s had enough of the small talk.  Mountains don’t grow—at least not in the time frame that a mortal man can begin to understand.  But maybe the man is not a mortal and the mountain’s not a mountain.  Half the fun’s in how you say a thing,isn't it?

Anyway, it’s worth a read, if I haven’t talked you out of it.  It's only online at a couple places I could find and, strangely, they both have the same typo in them.  Just a couple letters off—it won’t kill you.  Hell, it won’t even slow you down.  The Mountain

Blinded by the Faster-Than-Light Drive

After a brief flirtation with the new Battlestar Galactica series, the missus and I have put aside the struggles of that ragtag fugitive fleet and we have begun watching a new show which has us totally enthralled. Well, I say a new show.  I mean, of course, ER, season one, which was, technically, new in 1995 but, like love, death, ambition, fear, lust, prejudice, and pride, continually finds new ways to engage with whatever it is ticking inside us that makes us human.

I’ll admit to some trepidation as I swapped the discs out.  It seemed, somehow, like a step back and I wondered if the magic would still be there.  But then the machine whirred to life and the room filled with blue light and the familiar, urgent, percussive music that heralds the coming of great medical drama.  There, on the menu screen, was Mark Greene, the Odysseus of the emergency room, looking pensively into our bed.  And just like that, I felt we were back.  The missus must’ve felt it too, for she spoke with characteristic clarity, though uncharacteristic diction:

“That’s more like it,” she said as the opening title faded away.  “No more fucking robots.  No more fucking space ships and ray guns.  This shit is real.”

The vehemence surprised me.  This little side trip we’d embarked upon, our little adventure in outer space, had been somewhat illicit, to be sure, but I thought we’d arrived at it mutually.  The kids had given her the BSG DVDs for her birthday, it was only right to give them a look-see and, if we got a little sucked into that world for a bit, well, what was the harm?  So to hear my lady-friend dismiss it with such unequivocal language was surprising, not least because I found myself in total agreement.

BSG is a serial drama, so every show begins with some conflict which must be resolved by show’s end.  Conflict, action, setback, turn-about, tension, resolution, repeat. Of course, this format necessitates the “cliff-hanger” ending, which arrives with such clockwork precision that you can’t help but feel manipulated. Sure, there are little subplots they keep brewing to help disguise the metronomic regularity with which the drama otherwise unfolds, but at some level it is like watching a piston fire. Exhaust, intake, compression, expansion.  “Wow, that was quite an explosion at the end there, but I feel the tension has essentially dissipated.  Wait a sec, something’s going on here—do I smell gas?  Wow, the pressure is really building ... whoa! Didn’t see that coming! Quite an explosion!  Phew.  Well now, that’s a welcome relief— But what’s this! …”

My key take-away here: Watching the same thing over and over and expecting to be surprised is the definition of inanity.   

That’s just the limitation—some might say the appeal—of the genre, of course.  BSG doesn’t rest there but goes ahead and invents whole new limitations of its own, like the “phantom” Cylon, in the shape of a sultry blonde, who can only be seen and heard by Dr. Gaius Baltar—Baltar even wonders, convincingly, if she might be all in his head.  We’ve seen this before in Hamlet, if not even earlier in one of the old Greek  series, but where Hamlet’s ghost took the classic form of a father, dispensing a list of to-dos to his son from beyond the grave, Baltar’s ghoul-friend argues with him, flatters him, gives him advice, withholds sexual favors and basically never gives him—or us—a moment’s peace.

In fact, I regret mentioning her.  I regret bringing up a show that features someone named Gaius Baltar.  In a previous entry, I wrote that the show had been recommended as  a stark commentary on the darkness of our political reality but, after a season full of inept management; dangerous, if not incomprehensible decision-making; degrading physical torture; disregard for reality; and a relentless refusal to learn from mistakes, one has to ask, is this show commenting on the current administration or is it just borrowing plot lines? 

In ER, when the pizza delivery driver crashes through the front doors in his car because he thinks he’s bleeding to death from a stab wound but in fact it’s only a little scratch, that’s all it is—a lame attempt at humor that blows over and is never mentioned again.  A little girl comes in with congestive heart failure that turns out to be a cocaine overdose.  Doug accuses the father.  But it turns out it was the girl’s older sister who had the coke.  Doug apologizes to the father and learns a valuable lesson about not judging people.  Do we see the older sister go into rehab?  Do we check in with her in the next episode?  No.  We never see them again. And that’s perfect.

A car accident. Father is dead on the scene. Mother comes in with severe trauma and dies on the table.  The two kids are bruised but fine.  When you realize these kids are suddenly on their own, it’s impossible not to feel something.  Does Carol offer to adopt the kids?  No.  We never see them again.  We wish them well, but that is not our concern here.

In this way, and in many others, ER is like life.  It starts and stops. Sometimes it makes sense.  Sometimes it doesn’t add up.  People walk on stage and seem destined for a starring role and then, one day, we realize we haven’t seen them for a while. Or a character we could live without simply refuses to exit the stage. We don’t really know what’s next.

That’s not to say that bits of plot don’t carry over from week to week.  They do, but generally on a much more human level.  Carter tries to kiss Susan Lewis one week; he’s not still fretting about it next week, but it does quietly inform his future interactions with her.  I guess it’s not so much a hard and fast difference in structure so much as a difference in scale.  The cliffhanger isn’t about the survival of the human race; it’s “tune in next week to see if Mark Greene is still a basically decent but hapless dork just trying to figure things out.”

Now, I have my spies—time-travelers who have seen beyond season seven—who report that in the future ER succumbs to a taste for the big disaster scenario.  If true, this saddens me, but I will wait and see how it plays out.  For the moment, though, these rumors of a less innocent future only serve to highlight what a simple, almost homemade affair it’s been over the seven seasons I know.

Are there times when it might be useful to have a kind of ghostly deus ex machina sidle up to a character and chat with him about his insecurities and fears?  Sure.  But that’s not an option on this show, so if they need to show us a character’s hidden feelings, they rely on a little technique called acting.  When you see Dr. Greene bite his lower lip and furrow his brow, you don’t need some over-sexed android on his shoulder to tell you he’s feeling the weight of the world.

In other words, I’m an ER man.  My time in the desert has only confirmed that fact all the more.  In less than one week, the eighth season will be released on DVD and I am ready—overprepared, really—for that event.  In the meantime, though it’s an odd quest, I am returning to the old texts with renewed energy to see what they can teach me—to see what I’m willing to learn—about life on this planet.