Mouthful of spit

Since late winter I've been dealing with muscle tremor.

First my left leg - occasionally, then steadily - now my left hand.

I saw a neurologist in midsummer. He did some physical "tests" - write this, hold this, walk there - and concluded that the shaking was likely "essential tremor", a relatively benign symptom of brain function desuetude that accompanies aging.

But he wanted to see me again this winter to rule out Parkinson's Disease.

Well, the shaking has grown slowly worse. Not shocking or scarily so...

...until last weekend. When I realized that I was salivating. Constantly.

The fancy name for this is "sialorrhea", and it's just plain old drooling. It's to the point where I have to carry around a spit cup like some goober sucking on a bag of worm dirt (that's "snuff" for you non-Eighties-GIs).

Point is...the drooling is strongly - as in reeeeeally strongly - associated with Parkinson's, or other severe neurological issues like ALS.

So.

It's VERY likely I have Parkinson's.

I'm going to call the neurologist Monday to try and get seen ASAP. While Parkinson's has no cure there are treatments that can help quality of life. 

It's going to kill me.

But I won't go easy. I'll fight as long as my life is worth fighting for.

But I thought I'd just say this here and now, so you few remaining readers would know where I'm coming from. It's...not a good place.

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

Death, be not proud

It was almost six years ago when we last had to take leave of one of the cats that have the run of this place, and I still have a small empty place in my heart where little Miss Lily used to be.

Now the time we will have to pet Nitty Kitty farewell is fast approaching.

She has been getting thinner and weaker all this past year - she's well over 15 years old, which is something like 140 in cat-years - but was doing as well as an ancient cat could be expected to until this past weekend. We had a nasty, rainy couple of nights and the Nit, who loves to stay outdoors in the vilest weather, was outside, as usual. She came in looking like pure hell; filthy, wet, covered in her own wastes.

We cleaned her up, but she insisted in returning to the rain. Finally the weather turned frigid and we brought her inside for her own safety. We made up a little cat bed, filled a litterbox, and plied her with food and medicine.

She didn't improve, growing shakier and more ragged by the day. Finally my Bride and Little Miss took her to the vet and discovered the inevitable. She's dying, ridden with some sort of awful ancient-cat-cancer. All we can really do is decide how long to palliate her dying, how long to ease her with medication and love (and cat food) until she can go on in this life no further.

Nitty, being the iconoclastic cat she is, has decided to thumb her nose at death by being the most obnoxious cat she can be. After complaining vociferously about being kept indoors she proceeded to ignore the soft cozy bed that we made for her and chose to sleep in her litterbox.

Cat...

Then again, I suppose she'd doing what I hope we all can do in the end; flip Death the finger and go to hell in our own unique fashion.

Dammit.

I'll miss you, cat. You were always a goofy critter, but we will be the lesser for the loss of you.

At least he's good for a laugh now and then...

In a dim, dirty hostess bar on a sultry backstreet in the Pham Ngu Lao district of Valhalla, a bunch of the tattered shades of the boys from the 66th NVA Regiment and the 1/7th Cav take a break from pounding warm "33" beer and talking shit about the ARVN to stand up, drop their khaki and OD trousers, and hang a collective moon on the guy who couldn't run from their war fast enough but now claims that he would rush a mad gunman barehanded.

Over at the corner table Trung sĩ Vo and Staff Sergeant Baker spit sourly on the filthy floor and yell at the hostess for another round, cold this time, goddammit, but Hạ sĩ Nguyen thinks that the idea of Five-Deferment Donnie as a rootin' tootin' heeeero is so fucking funny he spits beer out his nose and Private Bookwalter has to pound him on the back so hard that he hits his face on the table and the whole squad, including Loi the B-girl, breaks up laughing.

Some ruminations on nutter shootings

Look, people. Death is all around you. We're BORN owing God - or Nature, or whatever - a death. As my old drill sergeant used to say, the single most fucked up thing about Life is that NOBODY gets out of it alive.

If you're going to get all freaky worrying about your safety or groveling on your knees begging God to save you because anti-abortion propaganda drove some loony to shoot up medical clinics, or because some asshole with a religious mania, or a nasty personality, shot up his workplace's Christmas party you're worrying about the wrong thing.

An e. coli bug, or a drunk driver, or that third goddamn Hostess Ho-ho you just ate is gonna kill you long before some Islamic nut or some rightwing manic.

So...you could get all freaky about what seems like a mad orgy of death and destruction and the end of times and OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!

Or. You can listen to an old Army sergeant.

You're gonna die. Yep. Some day you're dead meat. Pinin' for the fjords. Ceased to be. Expired.

But.

Until then every day you live you are a gift of love.

So hug your children. Drink something strange, and adventurous. Sit out under the stars and watch the universe wheel overhead. Hold someone dear to you very, very close and still, so still that all you can hear is your heartbeat and theirs. Kiss their skin softly, sweetly, and inhale their scent and stop and remember; every day you live you are a gift of love.

Someday you will die.

But not today.

Filius est pars patris

Well, my father died in...well, it'd be wrong to call it "his sleep"; it was the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead. He was alive only in the sense that his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath.

Early on the morning of Sunday May 3, 2015, however, that ended.

He died hard, my father, his body refusing to cease its function days after his mind had ceased to direct it. It was...painful...to watch. As a living man he was inordinately proud of his intellect. He was an engineer, a Cornell Chem-E from the postwar crop, and if there ever was a term that described him "engineer" was a good one. He was convinced that there was no problem that he couldn't out-think or solution that he couldn't design, whether to physical or personal matters.

He was in several ways a difficult man, but for all his cussedness he was also a decent, honorable man in a fashion that made his stubborn irreconcilability as much a quirk as a curse.

So to see his husk a mindless, twitching thing lying helpless in a bed was very hard. My mother and sister both told him that they were content with him, that he had finished his time here and they were willing to release him. I sat with him, talked to him, told him that he had done his job, raised his family and cared for his wife, and now that great work was ended.

But in his contrary fashion he refused to die until he was ready. And then, in the half-light of predawn, he was gone.

I don't want to be maudlin about his death. In many, many ways it was a great mercy. His mind was failing, the intellectual acuity that defined him in life leaving him apace. I believe that the part of him that was still lucid hated and raged against that decerebration, that loss of self, and both hated and feared what he was becoming, the gormless vacancy of mindless existence, the parody of his life that would have been not life but un-death. The death of his body spared him that, at least.

But that mercy is only for the dead. As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone.

I am in several senses my father's son. One of those is that I, too, am vain of my intelligence. As such I understand that it is the nature of life and death that sons are born to bury their fathers, that a man who dies before his children is in that way a blessed man and that the child who buries his father will find nepenthe for the grief and loss of that parting.

But that does not make me feel particularly blessed or peaceful today.

The son is a part of the father, and now that part of me is dust and ashes.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

The Master Chief says good-night

My father - the "Master Chief" for those of you longtime readers - is in his late eighties and has been slowly fading into the sort of twilight lands that we often wander into late in our lives. Forgetful, querulous, diffused...all the early signs of a mind that is dwindling towards that last goodnight.

But he was, as he has always been, physically sound. So it was a bit of a shock to get a phone call from my sister - who of the two of us is the geographically close one - last week informing me that my father was in the local hospital have suffered some sort of brain trauma, and the medical tests had revealed that the insult was bleeding inside his head, a sort of stroke, if you will.

He had lost much of his coherence and almost all of his intellectual function. Over the past weekend into Monday he appeared weak but physically healthier than mentally; the medical opinion was that whatever had happened inside his head had suddenly moved him into the "late stage" of Alzheimer's Syndrome. Monday he was moved into the Alzheimer/hospice care wing of the place where he and my mother now live out the ends of their lives. I and my sister were preparing for a part of our lives that now included the body but not the mind or soul of the man who was our father.

But Nature or my father, who was ever a masterful man, intended otherwise. My sister called again last evening to tell me that my father had fallen yet further into the wilderlands of brain death. He was lingering now like a cat in a doorway, motionless, at the very furthest borderlands of death. My sister called this morning to inform me that our father is still sleeping if you consider the consciousless twilight at the edge of life "sleep".

But the blades of the scissors are very near his thread. The hospice nurse told her "Hours. Days. But not weeks."

So I'm taking the wretched day-long cross country flight this afternoon not knowing whether I will arrive before he departs.

But in a very real sense he has already gone on ahead of me. The shell that breathes in the bed in the anonymous room in the industrial warehouse for the old is not my father, not the man who raised me or stood beside me through my childhood and young adulthood and manhood, who helped me become who I am and what I am.

That man is already gone. What remains for me is to honor the bargain that we all make, parent and child, father and son, mother and daughter, from the moment we begin our lives together; that we as parents will bring our children into the world and we as children will see our parents out of it.

Catullus said it better than I ever can, and so I will depart and leave him speak for me:

"Traveling through many lands and over many seas I have come, brother, for these wretched funeral rites, to give you the last dues of the dead and to speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes."

Agonistes

A friend of mine - who is an intelligent, genuinely decent, loving and compassionate woman - sent me a link to this:

"The face on this week’s People magazine cover is Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old, recently married woman who went public with her plan to take a fatal prescription on November 1, rather than live with her terminal brain cancer until its deadly end. Her reasons include not merely avoiding the suffering she expects to experience, but also protecting her loved ones from the awful reality of watching her deteriorate...her decision—and the notion of assisted suicide in general—troubles me deeply, for a couple of reasons."

I'd heard something vague about this in the way that you "hear about" stories in the electronic press. I had no real thought except "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, what a fucking shitty deal for this poor woman."

And then I went and read the Ellen Dollar essay I've linked to above and read her write stuff like this:

"That death is preferable to living with limitations and pain is a prevalent attitude in our health-worshipping culture, and I worry that assisted suicide reinforces it to a frightening extreme."

and this:

"No suffering, no matter how awful, is without the potential for beauty, revelation, love."

and this:

"This makes me wonder if deep down, we understand that healing happens when we strive to live fully with affliction, rather than try to overcome it at any cost. If our life doesn’t offer us enough pain and struggle, we go find some."

And thought:

No.

No, no, no. Nononononononono.

Fuck no.

Some suffering is just that awful. Lying in bed doped to the eyes because otherwise you'd be screaming in agony and shitting yourself has no beauty, no revelation, other than the horrible revelation of how close to an animal you are reduced when you're screaming and shitting yourself.

Writhing in bloody mud, gouging your heels into the ground because your guts have been ripped out by shrapnel, has no potential for redemption, no bright moment for reflection, has nothing to do with beauty, revelation, and love.

It just sucks hideous ass and a quick and merciful death is a benison and a release.

Anyone who has ever been around war knows people, or knows people who know people, who have shoved 20 grains of morphine into a dying man to release the poor doomed fucker from his horrible agony. I don't believe in Christ myself but I can't believe that the Christ of the Bible, the Christ who is supposed to have died himself to save every swinging richard, would want to prolong that sort of hideous torture by so much as a microsecond.

My understanding is that this Maynard woman knows exactly what Fate has in store for her and it's unspeakable agony; bowel-loosening, mind-destroying pain that will be bearable only through sedation so deep that she will be a brainless thing, a meat-sack kept alive by machines.

That isn't "living with limitations and pain"; that's a freaking nightmare, and I'd suck the muzzle before letting myself experience that sort of horrible death.

So if Ms. Dollar wanted to talk about Christ and suffering and this poor doomed woman she'd have done well to talk about how the Christian prohibition against suicide is a nasty hangover from a tribal religious past, about how God's love promises us rest after pain and suffering, and about how faith should reassure us that after we take the hemlock we will awaken to a New Jerusalem.

Or, well, maybe just STFU and let the poor damned doomed woman die in peace. But, hey, that's just me.

But - at the very, very least - not blather on about the potential for beauty and love in death agony.

Anyone who says that there is any dignity in suffering has never actually seen actual suffering.

Deaths of strangers

I opened up my Facebook today to find out that Robin Williams has died, probably by his own hand, probably after losing a fight with his own demons of depression and addiction.

I found two things odd about this.

First, that so many people were expressing actual sorrow, saying that they wanted to cry, that they were personally grieved and felt personal loss. Only one of them - Lisa Jakub - actually met Williams personally, worked with him, and has lost someone she knew and loved. But I'm fairly sure that my friends Chris and Carrie and all the other friends posting messages of loss didn't know him other than as an image on a screen. I'm not saying that they didn't care, in the same way that I care about favorite places, or beloved stories or music, or about people in distant lands in a sort of abstract way that I don't want bad things to happen to anyone outside the Cheney family.

And, second, hard after that was that I didn't, not really, not about Robin Williams, and I immediately felt like a heel; everybody else is posting sadz about the man's death and my only thought as I read it was "Hunh. How 'bout that..?" like I was reading about a water main break on Burnside or a traffic tie-up on I-5 South.

Then I thought, y'know, I don't know the poor guy. I know him as "Mork" or his other pixel images on a screen, so essentially he's as "real" to me as Oscar the Grouch or the Wizard of Oz. I don't have any particular connection or bigger emotional investment in the man's death - or life - than I do in the water main break or the traffic tie-up. For me they're all just "news".

I think I've talked about this bizarre aspect of electronic media and celebrity culture before. We "know" all sorts of people from television and films that we don't really "know" in any sort of real sense. We may feel like Robin Williams' films, or part of his work, or just what we think of as his personality were important parts of our lives. But what did we really know of Mr. Williams? Of what he loved, of what he hated and feared, what made him happy or sad, why he did what he did and was who he was.

It may seem like we "knew" him, though, because his image was as recognizable as those of our own family.

So it still seems odd to me. Was this man a part of our lives, as much a part as any other friend? Enough so that his loss is grievous to us? Is an emotion based on a created intimacy as genuine as one from an intimacy that springs from artless Nature?

Joseph Stalin once said "One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic"?

Perhaps one death is, too.

Or perhaps it isn't.

Timber!

So after our busy Saturday we had a fairly busy Sunday. I took the Boy and his pal to Lasertag and then out to Beaverton to give a basic rifle marksmanship lesson to our pals the Ravas. And came back to another friends' open house for the neighborhood.

Nothing momentious, just a pleasant rainy day full of small pleasures.

But between returning from lasering and going to Beaverton BRM-training this fell from the sky on top of me:

This branch fell probably 20 to 25 feet from the street tree just outside our city strip. The tree itself is a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), "...a deciduous tree in the genus Liquidambar native to warm temperate areas of eastern North America and tropical montane regions of Mexico and Central America." Apparently this species has some value as a medicinal and food source: "Slashed to the cambium, sap will leak out and harden. The resulting gum can be chewed. Unripe fruit can be crushed and soaked in alcohol to make a medicinal tincture. The bark can be used to make a medicinal tea."

Not mentioned in the literature, however, is that the sonofabitch is structurally unsound and tends to shed branches in anything stronger than a gentle zephyr. We've already had a sizeable piece of the tophamper drop on the Subaru and any sort of strong wind leaves branch litter around the base.

And don't get me started on the seedpods/fruits/nutcases:

These fucking things drop all...year..round, wind or no, and function as very effective caltrops when you have forgotten to take the trash out to the curb and have to rush out in the predawn dark barefoot.

The strange thing is that yesterday afternoon there wasn't a breath of wind. I was walking out to the car, Mojo and the Boy were on the sidewalk nearby when I felt a hard blow, like a heavy punch, on the shoulder. I staggered sideways a bit and look around to see who had hit me and there this branch was; I'd gotten the thick end instead of the fluffy, leafy end and had it been two inches west or a half a second sooner I'd have taken it square atop the skull.

No noise, either; no cracking, no sound of leaves rustling, just...BANG, and a big ol' branch in the street beside me.

Which just, again, reminds me how freakish and random Life is. We amble through life taking every day, every night, each breath, every sunrise and birdsong and hug and kiss, each breathless moment at the height of lovemaking, every rich explosion of flavor on the tongue...every single warm cuddle from little bodies fitted to our chests, every syllable of happy babble, every tear, the good pull and stretch of strong muscle worked hard, each and every lingering glance of greeting and farewell with the casual acceptance that we give a yawn or a passing car or a flickering light. We expect life to rise to greet us every day, every heart to just continue beating, every tire to track smoothly, every breath to begin as the last one ends.

The fuzzy-huggy-bunny-wuffy-ladybuggery adoption folks have this thing about the "red thread" that connects you to your magical baby that God (and it is usually God) has picked out for you and how that means that everything will work out for the best; you will always be tied to your love by this mystic invisible red thread.

But if there's anything I've learned in this journey towards the grave, it's that life itself is a tenuous thread, a spindly, blood-red thread that may break or fail at any time. One minute you'll be fine, the next one of you will be gone.

On the one hand, this is terrifying. The body that feels so sturdy, the life that seems so complete...a flu germ, a layoff, an affair, a little too much anesthaesia, and it is gone as thoroughly as the dream of a dream. Nothing is certain. Nothing can be counted on. All is vanity and striving after nothingness.

And yet...tilt your glance and it isn't.

Everything we humans build and are; every house, every love, every layer of fat, bone and muscle, is ephemeral. We are all doomed from the moment we are born. And yet in those moments between darkness and darkness, what towers we can raise! What loves we can lift, what momuments to strength and caring and honor and passion!!

If we choose.

So every day a little death...and yet, every day, every day, is a gift of life. Each time we hold our children, each day we tell our lovers we love them, each day we work and laugh and cry and love and hate...each day is a goddam miracle, and we live and move through them like gods, like heroes.

Or we can. We should.

So today, take a moment to savor your life. LIVE it. Listen to the rain. Meditate. Do a kata until it's as perfect as you can make it. Make a great cup of coffee and a buttered croissant.

Hug your daughter extra tight.

The night is dark and long. That branch may fall this way to tragedy instead of that way to trivia. But we can fear the dark and the fall, or we can bask in and savor the brilliant daylight that is all the brighter for coming between the sunrise and the sunset.

And I hope tomorrow you wake to a sunny day full of love and happiness, work hard, play foolishly, and go to sleep tired and content.

Every day you live you are a gift of love.

Esther Williams 1921-2013

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with my appreciation for the films of the Studio Period.

One of the most intriguing and at the same time peculiar stars of that era was Esther Jane Williams, the "Million Dollar Mermaid".

Williams has always held an odd sort of fascination for me because her place in American film is so...bizarre. She said it herself: “I know I can’t act. I know I can’t dance. I can’t sing, but I’m going to keep trying until I get it right.” Her movies were almost interchangable, the only differences the setting or the names of the characters. They were bright, cheerful, accessible, and trivial; in some ways like the lady herself.

She is also intriguing because in a movie world full of tiny, petite little women she was a titan. Like many of the best swimmers she was tall, broad-shouldered, and long-legged. And that wasn't all that was big about her. Look at her pictures; the woman had nature's swim fins on the ends of her legs. I haven't found any sources that will come straight out and talk about Esther's shoe size but I'll bet she wore a women's 10 or 11. Not a bad thing for a competitive swimmer, but I'll bet the studio costumers and camera guys had a hell of a time ensuring that she never got photographed with those big ol' dogs right in the camera. Wouldn't do for the lads to see the girl had some big, strong feet, right?

I wonder if her arch-enemy Gene Kelly cracked wise about her ginormous hooves? He certainly seems to have snarked about all the other aspects of her size during the filming of Take Me Out To The Ball Game...

She had wretched taste in, or luck with, men. The ones that she got on well with were married to other women; the ones she married were frightful - the first was neurotic, the second drunk, and the third, Fernando Lamas, a psychiatrist's poster boy for priapic self-centered egotism. Once when Esther has an argument with him he tells her that he isn't going to do something purely because she wants to do it, and that is what's going to happen every time she wants something other than what he wants.

"Then the best thing for me to do is not to want anything, right?" she says, to which Lamas replies serenely;

"Yes, that would be best."

William's "autobiography" - which is where I culled this gem - is a delight, full of gossip about the Hollywood of the studios and stars of her day. Esther dishes the dirt, too, and for all that she is often elliptical she comes across as a woman who knew what she wanted. Her biggest troubles always seemed to come from men and her weakness for them. She doesn't come right out and say it but you get the feeling that Esther was a bit of a lusty lass who tended to ignore her man's other bad news if her man was good at pleasuring her.

In later life - after Lamas' death - she seems to have found a great deal of satisfaction in her businesses and the "sport" of synchronized swimming. She seems to have finally found a good man who was good to her (and good with her, since though in her autobio she finally shuts up about her carnal escapades after Lamas it's hard to imagine Ms. Williams being happy with a fella who couldn't make her shout when the lights went out...). She died peacefully in her sleep at 91 after twenty-five years with her husband and kids beside her and a happy ending to a busy life.

And speaking of that...for what it's worth, I'm not sure that I don't believe her story about Jeff Chandler and the striped dress. Chandler's people got into a tizzy and Esther sorta-kinda said that she might have made the story up. But no reason that Jeff couldn't have been all man AND a cross-dresser. It takes all kinds. Thank heaven.

Well, Esther went to the big Pool in the Sky this June.

We will never see another like her. She was a creation of a studio system that is long gone, and a public whose taste in entertainment has vastly changed since her stardom. Her films, her family, and her odd little sport, though, remain behind so she will remain a shining smile and a sparkle in the eyes of those who come upon her works.

Not exactly a bad legacy, that.

No Orchids for Satan

Fascinating little piece of governmental incunabula: did you now that you can get the "Atheist" symbol on your Veteran's Affairs headstone?

Seriously.

There's something like 57 symbols the VA will carve into the rock that let's people know where your personal worm-buffet is scheduled. All the biggies are there, of course; cross, star, crescent, the wheel of samsara for Buddhism. Hell, the various flavors of Jesus-pesterers all have their various flavor of execution device available; I had no idea, but hokey smoke, Bullwinkle, there's more flavors of Christianity than there are at Baskin-Robbins.

Some of this stuff reminds me how little I know of what people believe.

For example; what the hell are "Kohen Hands"?

Oh.

Live long and prosper, then. Except the whole "being dead" thing, of course.

But it's pretty impressive the tolerance the VA shows for who gets what on their last set of dressing-up clothes. You want Baha'i? You got it. Sikhism? Jainism? No problem.

Or the Hammer of Thor, or the what-the-hell-is-Eckankar "EK" symbol?

Done and done.

You notice that the poor Satanists, however, have to content themselves with the pentacle of Wicca, which, as my Satanist pals remind me, ain't the same thing.

Anyway, just a little oddity for Friday.

Touch Not The Cat

As she curled up in my lap for the last time what seemed louder than everything else - louder than the sound of the children asking their mother what was going to happen, louder than the small noises that the vet tech was making, preparing the sedatives that would take her on a very long sleep indeed - was the sound of the rain driving against the roof.



It seemed right and proper that we should part on a dim rainy evening. We met in a driving rain one afternoon more than fifteen years ago when I sloshed through the backroom of the old metal shed animal shelter outside Astoria. I was there on a job of work and had no thought other than finding the bathroom when I felt a tug on my slick, wet rubber sleeve and turned and looked down at the little tortoiseshell cat that had reached out and caught my arm.

She and I have ridden a long way together since the long ride from Astoria back to the yellow house north of Commonwealth Lake that was our first shared home. She grew from kitten to cat as I went from husband to divorcee' to husband again and then father.



She and I lived in a fleabitten apartment and then another little house, sharing a bed first alone together than then with another human (who wasn't as enamored as I was of having small cats climb on her whilst she slept) and a strange dog, and a colorful bird, and then two other small humans who enjoyed her warm softness and sleek particolored fur as much as I.



We shared a lot of other cold rainy mornings curled up together, the smaller warm and soft within the lap of the larger, offering up the sleek arch of her back for my stroking and enjoying the petting herself, together making a wordless tactile meditation on companionship without expectation.

And so it was for the last time. She curled on my legs, weightless from the cancer inside her that had hollowed her out, nothing more than plush fur over sharp bones.

She went quickly and quietly, only starting up at the injection of the first sedative. But once I petted and held and gentled her, after the first drug had draped her back down on my legs the second drug carried her soundlessly over into the Great Sleep of death; settling her from the taut living stillness of sleep into a looser, dreamless stillness from which she would never awake.

We sat there for several minutes as everyone got to pet her goodbye. And then I got up and carried her outside on our last walk together.

The rain seemed just right. It pattered down like tears on the leafless lilac overhead and onto the little coil of cloth that shrouded her beside her shallow grave. The night-rain seemed like a perfect way to mark the end of the journey we began that other rainy afternoon so many years ago.



I set the last clod of dirt in place and leaned the shovel against the back wall of the darkened house.

The rain ran down my face and settled the earth that covers the place where she now sleeps that final sleep, that lonely sleep that will never warm her, or my lap, again.

The Lost World

Eleven years ago today I lost you.



Once you were the darkness that consumed the center of my heart. Once I would have given everything to have you back, to change time and regain you.

But not any more. I know your mother feels very differently, but you lived beneath her heart for almost a year, and she loves you in a way I can never do.

For me you are a memory of a hope, hope for a future that was lost the day you were born. To have you back, to have that future back would mean that I would have to give up my today. Give up all the ten years since, give up your little brother and sister, give up the woman who I loved and who has grown to became the woman I still love, give up myself and the man I have become.

That seems too much for me to ask, and yet in a far corner of my heart I feel like that you're dying again because I would refuse to ask for it if I could.

So all I can do is grieve for you, my dear, and for me; for the world that never was, and now never will be.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1 2002 - March 2 2002

So Emotional

I really try and avoid the horrible celebriphilia that runs mad through everything in American pop culture.

You know when you read something like that you're in for a post about celebrities and pop culture, right?So, okay. It's not that I don't enjoy pop culture; by and large - if you've been reading this blog for any time you know that - I am the pop culture guru in this household.

But to my mind there's a skeevy sort of obsession with famous people you can't avoid unless you work hard at dodging the electronic media and limiting your exposure to almost all the other forms of popular press and entertainment. I try, but even I couldn't miss the "news" that Ms. Whitney Elizabeth Houston departed this vale of tears the past Saturday, aged six years younger than I am.

Now in general this blog tries to live by Joe Kugelmass' "Five Rules About Celebrity Deaths", to wit;

1. A blogger is not capable of being “disrespectful” to a dead famous person. That person’s friends and family do not care.

2. In most cases, famous people who die young will still have managed to have more of “a life” than 99.99% of people who die old.

3. Many people who are publicly sad about a celebrity death had not thought about that celebrity once in the previous twelve months.

4. Some of the things that lead to celebrity deaths are, in fact, not relevant to the lives of ordinary folks (e.g. Michael Jackson’s personal drug doctor).

5. Public mourning is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors. For example, the bad economy increased mourning for Steve Jobs. People are more grieved by Whitney Houston’s death than they were by Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s death because her songs were more radio-friendly and sentimental.

In keeping with the first five of these rules I have no real insights or trenchant observations about the passing of Ms. Houston. She seems to have been a rather ordinary woman whose single outstanding qualities appear to have been her pretty face and powerful voice, without particular intellectual or emotional depth, lacking any hint of either greatness or depravity. Without her voice she would no doubt have been simply another nice semi-urban girl from New Jersey.

So it is her voice that ensures the emotional glurge regarding her death.

And for me, at least, her voice is perhaps the single thing that I truly dislike about the woman, and the only real observation of any worth that I can think to make about the woman now that she is sure to be enshrined in the pop culture pantheon.

Here's why.

First, let me qualify myself; I've sung publicly, not professionally, but in both an organized choral group and as a soloist. You wouldn't pay for my solo singing - at least, I hope you wouldn't - but I have a decent amateur bass-baritone and know my way around both classical and popular music. I've been known to rock the house with "Wild Colonial Boy" when I've had a few. So; I can sing, a bit. And as a result I have some very definite ideas about what makes a song work.

Okay. So, here's our gal the late Ms. Houston tearing into perhaps her best known pop song, "I Will Always Love You" at the 1994 Grammys.The performance is...well, it's what Houston did. The quivering vibrato, the swooping, breathy phrasing, and of course the "big moment" - it comes with the key change at 3:19 in the video - the pause, the breath, and then the soaring blare as Houston's voice rises and swells in a cresting wave of throbbing emotion. That was her style, and although she wasn't the only singer of her era who used it she might have been the best known and the most influential.

That belting style is now nearly inescapable when you hear power pop sung in public. You hear now it every time you turn on "American Idol" and any one of it's many imitators, or encounter one of the many pop-song belters trained in the post-Whitney Era. It's as if every single jazz and pop vocalist between 1950 and 1980 had been instantly turned into Barbra Streisand.

But...here's the thing. Check out the lyrics to "I Will Always Love You":

"If I should stay,
I would only be in your way.
So I'll go, but I know
I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way.
And I will always love you.
I will always love you.
You, my darling you.

Bittersweet memories that is all I'm taking with me.
So, goodbye. Please, don't cry.
We both know I'm not what you, you need.
And I will always love you.
I will always love you.

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you've dreamed of.
And I wish to you, joy and happiness.
But above all this, I wish you love.

And I will always love you..."

Got it? Is that a sad song, or what? "Bittersweeet memories"? "We both know I'm not what you need"? This sucker is about loss, my God; heartbreak, the death of a precious love, desolation, the long, slow, agonizing draught of bitter gall you know you will drink the rest of your life as the one you can never forget recedes in the rear-view mirror.

This is fucking tragedy, man.

But Houston's version - and all the other belters' that have followed her - makes a kind of joke out of that. The emotional throb and gush, the soaring finale...she's not standing there heartsick and grieving that she will always love you; she's hurling her challenge to the skies - she WILL always love you, goddammit, and she's not ashamed who knows it.

Now.

Here's the woman who wrote and first sang this song, Dolly Parton, doing the tune exactly twenty years earlier than the Grammys:Excuse me for being partial, but for my money that's how you put over a hearbreaking song; simple, clean, her voice as clear and sharp as a winter night and as crushingly empty. There's no strength in Parton's version, no power, no hope. She knows she has lost everything, and the sweet clarity in her voice makes the pain of that loss utterly unbearable.

But you hear much more of Whitney than Dolly in pop singing today. So while I am sure that there are those who were fond of Ms. Houston, or loved her, I cannot and do not pretend to share in their grief.

Since I was not a particular fan of the woman's vocal stylings what was lost to me by her death was only her voice and her vocal style, and since that part of her leaves me somewhere between indifferent and mildly irritated to mourn, or pretend to mourn, or, indeed, to do more than to note her passing with a rather irked shrug would be to violate the Five Rules.

Therefore, I will do no more.Sorry, Whitney, but...meh.

Why Newt Gingrich Should Have Been Clubbed Like a Baby Harp Seal Back in 1995

He married the Joker.Did you "eeep!" a little when you saw the grin-rictus of Death on the mug of Callista "I screwed another woman’s husband for six years until he dumped her and made an Honest Woman of me" Gingrich? I sure did. Talk about the mirror of the soul. I hope she makes this face when the Newtster exercises his marital rights; maybe it'll remind the bastard of his dead first wife, his high school geometry teacher who he screwed in a little different way, handing her his divorce papers while she was recovering from uterine cancer.

This adulterous, skeevy, lying douchebag (Newt, that is, not the Receptacle of Newt-chowder) is still a respected senior figure in the Republican Party, published "author", a serial guest on the D.C. talk-show and lecture circuit.

And Elizabeth Edwards is still dead.

There is no fucking justice in the world.

Bambi vs. Nala

I think you know how much I hate zoos.

To me they're like animal prisons, and, sure enough, the prisoners/animals have similar pathological behaviors like rocking, swaying, and sodomizing young punks in the showers.

Here's the equivalent of getting punked out in SuperMax, this time at the National Zoo in Washington, where a suicidal or just plain panicked whitetail doe lept into the (as you can see from the film) senselessly small lion enclosure.What this makes me think is how absolutely mad it is that we keep these great predators in tiny holes for our own entertainment. THIS is what they do; it is neither entertaining nor majestic but rather a bloody, frightful thing that serves to remind us that for the unpaved portion of the world much of life is bloody and frightful. No standard-issue American would want to or pay to see this, even though it is central to what lions are all about, and what predators and predation are all about. It's been too long since we were anything but the apex predator. When we were prey, this was all too often how our lives ended.

The truth is that life is often about (as Mrs. Lovett said) "who gets eaten and who gets to eat." This sad little video reminding us of that truth points out the degree to which zoos are nothing but a lie and a mockery of the animals imprisoned within. They really need to vanish the way of the minstrel show, Lydia Pinkham's Tonic, and the dog-faced boy in the midway.

Perhaps we could keep the cockroaches and a frog or three.

(h/t to Nancy Nall for the cool video)

Update 11/9 p.m.: Meghan mentioned this '89 Nick Park video, which is too clever and too funny - and uncomfortable in a revealing sort of way - not to include. So here is "Creature Comforts":

September 1, 1939

The first cool tendrils of autumn thread into the late summer air in Portland.

I'm reminded again, in the turning of the season, of the turning of Man's seasons by this wonderful post by the gracious and beautiful Lisa, who reminds me that for all my frantic striving, and impatience, and anger, and lust, and desire and ambition, my rushing only speeds me faster towards the final night. And that the only real meaning is not the end - as she says; we're ALL dying - but in the meeting of it.

So perhaps the best thing for me - for all of us - is to just stop. Stop trying to find reasons to divide us each one from the other. Stop finding reasons to profit from another's weakness, failings, or pain. As the Bible says; for every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven. Perhaps the time is here to love each other as we would be loved.

And I find myself full of love; as I age I find that I am more foolishly fond than ever. I find myself wondering that I ever gloried in the thunder of the captains and the shouting - that now seems the nadir of foolishness, when the simple pleasures of friendship, love and loving run so deep. What price glory when tenderness comes for the asking?

This loving comes in the most unlooked for places and times. The other day I found myself thinking of a person; not a lover, or a love at all but a friend, and not even a close friend but just a casual sort of friend, one I don't know particularly well but found that I wished I did better. And in that I realized that I wanted just to immerse myself in her as I would a hidden pool of still water. I wanted to sit next to her, talk with her. To look into her eyes and see the play of quick wit there, to know what she was thinking at that very moment; to see the sunlight shining coolly on her hair and look to find the gray among the original satin, all the dearer for what it told of her life and the living of it. To feel the warm pulse under the quiet skin at her wrist and ankle, and to admire the vaulting tracery of strong bone and tendon in her shoulders and feet; etched more starkly now that the last of the soft fat of youth has been burned away by time but all the more lovely for that.

And I was amazed, because this was not the passion of lust, the desire for intimate possession - I know those, have felt them before, do, and, I hope, always will, for the woman who sleeps with our little man (Tuesday is the Peeper's "sleeping with Mommy" night) in the bed in the next room. I think what I felt was just the desire to really know this person, know her down to the blood and bone, to feel like I could really comprehend the full quality of this person for the really decent, honorable, smart, vital person she is, to enjoy and celebrate her not for what she did, or what she could do, or be, for me and to the world but purely for herself, for the wonder that the combination of biochemistry, synaptic energy and musculoskeletal architecture created in a single, unique woman.

Every one of us holds a universe within us. We are capable of the greatest good, the greatest passion, the greatest understanding...and yet we spend so much of our days finding ways to tear all of that apart. Why? What darkness sates us so, that we rend each other for our own libertarian needs; lupus semper est homo homini?

Seventy years ago we started the balefire that should have burned into our souls that the lie of Authority is to teach us to turn away from that love we should feel for each other; the love of the friend for friend, the tenderness of lovers, the protective love of parent and child, the love for all of those around us. For without that love is the fire and the night.

"For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die."

from W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"

Cool Things in North Portland: Columbian Cemetery

It's not a very peaceful spot.The entire plot is beneath the I-5 interstate overpass that flies the monstrous steel, glass and rubber torrent of traffic from Kenton to the edge of the great river and back.

Even if the freeway didn't lour over it the neighborhood, what there is of it, is insalubrious; a cheerless waste of mid-century industrial erections characterized principally by a complete lack of anything resembling elegance, grace or dignity. The Slough, which meanders along the north edge of the Columbian Cemetery, is infilled wetland as foetid sump, known throughout the greater Portland basin for its toxicity, sediment laced with heavy metals and trash-choked bywaters.

But for all of this, there is a certain mournful peace about the old burying ground.
The plot as just a part of a donation land claim filed by one "Captain" Lewis Love, pioneer, farmer, logger and eventual timber baron and merchant. A New Yorker who crossed the continent in 1849 with his wife of 13 years (who we know from his mouth only as "Mrs. Love" - the captain's autobiography mentions only that the worthy's maiden name was Griffith. I see from the cemetery register that he is buried next to an Alice R, who is probably the doughty missus.) and, presumably, children to hack out a homestead on the lowlands of the Columbia South Shore.

Homesteading the swampy flats south of the Columbia wasn't a game for weaklings. Here's the captain telling his granddaughter Harriet about the rich bounty of the Columbia Valley:

"In the spring I moved in a little log house joining my farm on Columbia Slough and soon after we all took the Mountain or Camp Fever, and also ran out of provisions, yet we had good friends. The year before we moved there, there was a good crop of potatoes raised on the place, and that year there was a few volunteer potatoes came up. Our friends, the wood rats, would dig them up and bring them in a pile them up in the log cabin and we would steal them from the rats and make our soup of them. This was our living for some time. We had no doctor only from the Hudson Bay Co. and he charged $50.00 per trip besides his ferriage which brought his bill to $52.00. Between him and the wood rats we weathered it through."

Tough? You could say so.

Some time during the family's stay on the flats north of what would be Kenton they buried one or more of their own there. Neighbors and friends were probably interred along with them, and eventually the site became a public burial place in 1857.

Today roughly whatever remains of about 5,000 souls are entombed there. The grass is rank and the trees are rough because there is little money to pay for the mowing or trimming of them. Many of the older headstones are illegible, some have fallen, and most have the sort of lonely, dejected look of an object no longer cared for by the living.But the old Long burying ground is, in its way, a part of the living North Portland, part of the soil which my own children spring, Cadmus-like, and, as such, has its own sort of sad, orphaned dignity.