Farewell to a Friend

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

It’s been a month since the Saturday that began with such great promise.  I’d managed to get myself up early and got in a good run; 40 minutes, pouring sweat and feeling exhausted.  Not the “I think I’m going to die,” exhausted. It was the kind of exhaustion that makes you feel great knowing it was damned good effort. Longest run in as far back as I could recall. It was going to be a good day.  Changed into a dry shirt and headed for Starbuck’s for morning coffee.  The Starbuck’s drill on a Saturday morning is to cruise by and peek inside.  Yeah, lined up to the door.  Never mind the coffee I needed to get home to see how our dog Rainey did overnight. When I walked in she was lying in the downstairs bedroom.  She sensed that I was home and struggled to get up on her three legs to greet me; a good sign.

Then came the screams.  

It's Just A Dog

“It’s just a dog.”  That’s what she said.  That was her first offense.  Her second offense was saying it to someone who had had to put down her two Rottweilers within about a year of each other.  Actually what she really said was, “It’s just a fucking dog.” Which only served to redouble the offense.  This was part of a friend to friend conversation. 

After ACL surgery

Tripod

That’s odd - I’m dreaming about a braying donkey.  A few moments of confusion when I came out of that deep sleep and the donkey hadn’t gone away.  Geeze, it’s my dog and that’s not a dream.  Rainey had rolled over onto the site where her leg had once been and was screaming in pain.  I got up and helped her to sit up.  She whimpered and quivered while I rubbed her head and held her.  Once calm I made sure that she laid down so that she wouldn’t roll onto the wound again.  Back in bed I wondered, ‘Did we do the right thing?’  I glanced down and she was already back to sleep and once I calmed myself down I reasoned that this is going to be one of multiple challenges for the next 10 days or so.  ‘Don’t get hasty with doubts.’

Sodden Holiday Thoughts

We’re approaching that holiday time of the year once again.  Actually if you believe corporate it’s been holiday season since sometime around Labor Day.  Time to buy the little woman a Lexus or a Mercedes to go with the thousand dollar bauble from Zale’s.  Break out the camping gear because Black Friday is a-comin’ and you gotta blow off a couple weeks of PTO so that you can save a hundred bucks on a TV.  Every year about this time I try to come up with some holiday theme.  It gets a little harder every year and I was despairing a bit until Starbucks dropped a big present under the tree and a self-styled evangelist put a giant bow on it.

Father's Day

"My dad taught me everything I know.  Unfortunately he didn't teach me everything he knows."  ~ Al Unser.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”  ~ Unknown but often attributed to Mark Twain

He pulled on the oars on a chilly (well, frigid) early morning and the little rowboat, not so much glided as  moved in fits and starts to a little spot tucked into some reeds at the lake’s edge.  I would stare sleepily, trancelike at the water that swirled around the paddles.  Once at our spot he would tie the boat off on a half-submerged tree and then he’d make sure I’d baited my hood correctly and then would guide me through the cast.  The reel zinged and then the little split shot plopped into the water and then we waited.  That was Lake Merced, in the southwest corner of San Francisco.  The lake is just inland from the ocean and is often blanketed by fog that’s pushed in by a chill ocean breeze.  In the middle of that lake on a little rowboat it seemed like you were in the coldest damn place on Earth. 

Classic Dad; book, pipe, easy chair and a little Cognac

Evacuating Suburbia

Throw out them LA papers

And that moldy box of vanilla wafers.

Adios to all this concrete.

Gonna get me some dirt road back street

~  From L.A. Freeway, Lyrics by Guy Clark

“Concrete and cars are their own prison bars”

~ From Toes, Written by Zac Brown, John Driskell Hopkins, Shawn Mullins and Wyatt Durette

Retirement talk has been revolving around the domestic circle a lot lately.  Mine, not the wife’s.  You see she’s been retired and according to her it’s the shit (that’s urban slang for she likes it).  I know this because she tells me it’s the shit all the time, quite often after I've dragged my worn out bones into the house after a day at the office and an hour on the freeway with a few thousand of my fellow Americans feeling like shit; about 10 pounds of it in a 5 pound sack (which is old school for suburbia blows).  

Dinner at Mom's: 2nd Course - Fried Meat, Mushrooms, Politics and a Side Order of Fear

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?

Can't you see the fear that I'm feeling today?

If the button is pushed, there's no running away,

There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave,

take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy,

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,

ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction. 

~ Eve of Destruction written by P. F. Sloan, recorded by Barry McGuire.

October 1964; probably 3 or 4 times in a month mom put fried pork chops on the menu.  Chops carried more fat back then and so it followed that they carried a hell of a lot more flavor.  Mom would put the pan drippings to good use and make a batch of cream gravy.  Nothing quite like pork chops and mashed potatoes in a bath of cream gravy.  It was the meat and potatoes diet that was starting to undergo scrutiny.  The medicos waved a bony finger at America and warned that fatty red meat, cream, butter and all that frying was going to clog the arteries and bring about a national cardiac crisis.  We were faced with the fear that our diet was killing us.

As so as we cemented our arteries, we watched the dour TV newsmen report on the upcoming presidential election. The GOP had nominated the conservative Barry Goldwater to unseat Lyndon B. Johnson who took office after JFK was assassinated.  It was the dual of initials; LBJ versus AuH2O (the chemical symbols for Gold and Water).  Johnson teetered on the Vietnamese fence by positioning himself as a pillar of war restraint who could still be tough on Communism. It might have been a hard sell against anyone but Goldwater.  The Arizona Senator's tough posture on the Commies translated to acute "hoof in mouth" disease with some propositions that scared the shit out of the electorate. His notion on dealing with Chinese supply lines in Vietnam was to clear them out with "low yield nuclear weapons."  I still recall the GOP campaign slogan touting Goldwater's conservatism, "In your heart you know he's right," being turned by the Democrats to, "In your heart you know he might" (launch a nuke) and "In your guts you know he's nuts." And so as we sat at the dinner table that forkful of dessert hung suspended as we watched with unease and then gasped at Johnson’s campaign ad; a little girl, a daisy and a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Oh yeah, we knew all about mushroom clouds.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were within my parents’ recent memories and as a kid I remember news footage of those boiling explosions. My grade school friends and I may have been too young to be concerned but we knew all about mega tonnage and we were in awe along with the rest of the world of the Soviet's gargantuan tests. I was 10 years old when Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro had their atomic pissing contest. It was the Eve of Destruction that Barry McGuire would sing about two years later.

As kids we carried A-bombs in the backs of our minds.  We wondered if the destructive force of a nuke dropped on downtown San Francisco would carry as far south as San Mateo.  My friends and I would ride our bikes around the nearby College of San Mateo, often passing by the stairs that led down to the fallout shelter.  I seem to recall some sense of relief that we had a shelter so close, although in retrospect had the bomb been dropped when class was in session the shelter would have filled up with college students leaving the rest of us to go through the radioactive baking cycle. We knew all about the Strategic Air Command B-52s that hovered round the clock on the outskirts of Soviet air space to deliver retaliation in the event of of a Soviet launch.  We knew that fighter pilots on alert slept in the cockpits of their jets on the tarmacs.  When the sixties began we went through the bomb drills not really knowing what we were doing as we got into a tuck position under our desks.  We giggled and made faces at each other.  By the mid-sixties we probably started to question what the hell good a student desk would do in the midst of a nuclear attack.  Finally, by the end of the sixties as we entered high school we darkly joked that the tuck position was invented to be able to conveniently and easily "kiss your ass goodbye."  And yet there was this perverse fascination, an attraction to the images of nuclear blasts.  The vivid colors and the seeming grace in which the big cloud formed carried a strange and awful beauty. And then of course there was the awesome, hard to imagine power. We were transfixed, but really, who would admit to it?

Practicing to kiss your ass goodbye?

When I look back on the cold war I pause for a moment at 9/11; I recall the general fear that gripped our nation in the hours, days and weeks that followed. It makes me wonder how much fear our parents felt when they knew that destruction and death from above were just a few minutes away.  A nuclear storm could strike Oklahoma City with more destruction than a tornado and about as little warning; or a bomb could topple San Francisco as suddenly as a 7.0 earthquake.  If we kids could sense the danger of nuclear holocaust how much fear dogged our parents?  In some cases it was enough for them to build bomb shelters under the house and then be prepared to lock out the desperate folks who used to be friends and neighbors before the sky started to fall.

The images that left us in awe

In October 1963, just weeks before the election, my parents brought me with them to Washington Square in San Francisco to listen to Johnson preach peace in a stump speech.  LBJ concluded his speech by saying, “For 11 months I have tried to help us have peace in the world, and if I can have your help, if I can have your hand, if I can have your heart, if I can have your prayers, if the good Lord is willing, I will continue to try to lead this Nation and this world to peace." Johnson won the election handily but in the end it didn't work out so well; for LBJ or for America - at least not on the foreign policy front.

America sat at the dinner table that election year and was fed a diet of fear. By Goldwater, the fear of the Red Menace; by Johnson the fear of Goldwater. Not much has really changed has it? Candidates still serve up the fear diet; just in a different flavor.  Soft on Communism has become naive about terrorism. I feel fortunate that as a boy I had a connection to a different time, as my dad would relate to me the calm that FDR tried to deliver to an anxious nation; "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear is now a permanent ingredient in the campaign recipe. We'll never go back will we? Sad.  

Stump speeches.  I look back at LBJ in Washington Square as irretrievable nostalgia.  Presidential candidates don’t make stump speeches anymore.  They rarely come to California anymore but when they do it's with a purpose irrelevant to the election itself; Republicans know they can’t win here and Democrats know it’s in the bag.  So why would you come to the most populous state in the Union? To meet the people you hope to lead?  To deliver to the electorate your vision of hope for the nation?  Hell no. It’s to appear at a gazillion dollar a plate fundraising dinner.  They go out of their way to appear in front of friendly crowds because protest signs make bad photo ops and heckling a poor sound bite.  Politicians have lied through their teeth for ages.  In the old days you got to see them do it in person - for free, in a big city park.  Now you have to whip out the AMEX, or mortgage the homestead so you can listen to a fellow mortgage his morals at a private dinner in a rich guy's mansion.

And ironically, some fifty years after we were being told that our diet was about as healthy as a glass of hemlock, the stigma has been removed from red meat, starches and heavy cream.  Meat and potatoes have been repackaged as the healthy, salutary paleo-diet.  I suppose that if the diet experts ever tire of analyzing what we eat they can turn to politics.  They seem to be pretty good at flip-flopping and scaring the shit out of the public.
"Wife, we need to get off those damned grains and legumes.  They're killing us.  Whip me up a chicken fried steak with a an order of cream gravy and do it on the double quick"

Dinner at Mom's

“The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.”  ~ Michael J. Fox

San Mateo, circa 1960s.  Dinner was the required event at our house and in most American households.  In our home it was straight up six, every night right after mom and dad had drained their martinis.  About five, dad would shake up some gin with a whisper of vermouth in a gray metal cocktail shaker and the parents would savor a couple of cocktails until dinner time.  The gin was cheap stuff, probably Seagram’s.  I doubt the existence of snooty boutique gin in 1960 and mom and dad wouldn't have it if it did exist. It was after I’d moved back home after college that dad included me in the ritual and I developed a taste for martinis.  I still had the cocktail shaker and used it up until a few years ago when the doc took alcohol off my menu.  I recently gave it to my son in law for his home bar. In sixties America you didn't entertain the thought of skipping dinner for work or an “activity.”  Yeah, dinner was the activity; not soccer or dance class or karate.  And certainly not work.  You worked your 8 hour day and then came home.  Those leashes known as cell phones and laptops were fantasies in the minds of a few dreamers.  Dinnertime was sacred.

Easter; Memories of Eggs, Dogs, Cold Cuts and Japanese Tourists

“New Rule: Someone must x-ray my stomach to see if the Peeps I ate on Easter are still in there, intact and completely undigested. And I'm not talking about this past Easter. I'm talking about the last time I celebrated Easter, in 1962.”  ~ Bill Maher

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.” ~ Gospel according to Matthew 27:50-53.

It’s Easter; the time to celebrate eggs, chocolate, hard boiled and jelly bean; pastels; bunnies; baby chicks; horrid marshmallows called Peeps; bright flowers and spring.  Oh yeah, it also celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after he was crucified, which is celebrated as Good Friday.  That’s the Christian (read; original) version of the holiday and I’m not here to refute it or ratify it.  I’m not feeling a religious debate today. 

Christmas Potpourri 2013: Bikes and Turkey Soda and "Twains" (Err Trains)

"Christmas isn't a season.  It's a feeling."  ~Edna Ferber

Many of us in America start the countdown to Christmas as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers have been stuffed into the fridge.  And so Christmas seemed to arrive early this year because just when we were waking up from the turkey and stuffing stupor and erupting cranberry flavored belches November was already rolling into December.

Tall Tales of Trimming Trees

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.”

~ Larry Wilde

“I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects.”   ~ Charles Dickens

“You know,” I said to Cora, “I've been thinking more and more about getting an artificial tree.” 

“Yeah, we aren't getting any younger and a real tree is a lot of work.”

“Wanna stop by Home Depot and just look?” 

This was our conversation as we pulled out of our street headed for the local Christmas tree lot. 

When I was a kid my parents held artificial trees in contempt.  Easy enough to do back then, when artificial trees were strange looking aluminum structures in ghastly, garish colors; pink, silver and blue.  Christmas tree shopping is one of the few things that's not seen much change since I was a kid.  We took the half hour or so drive to one of the lots on El Camino Real near downtown San Mateo.  A fellow with a 10 foot ruler followed a few steps behind us as we tiptoed through the mud created by the rain that we always got then and never seem to get now.  We followed the ritual that every family has followed since the 1840s when the tannebaum became a saleable commodity.  Dad would grab a likely candidate by the trunk and tilt it and turn it as we inspected it for any flaws that might disqualify it from adorning our living room.  The tree had to be full and without any conspicuous gaps in the branches and it had to stand straight.  Size didn't really matter.  Six foot was just fine because in the 60s cathedral ceilings were something that only the folks in nearby, ritzy Hillsborough had.  Our plebian ceiling topped out at 8 feet.  Once we found a likely candidate the fellow with the ruler stepped up and measured the tree, my mom watching carefully to make sure he didn't add phantom inches.  He wrote the tree's height and price on a slip of paper for my parents to take to the cashier.  Once the tree was ours dad stuffed it in the back of our big, clunky Mercury station wagon. 

Thanksgiving; A Breaking of Tradition

Ah! On Thanksgiving day....

When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,

And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.

What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye?

What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?

~John Greenleaf Whittier

With a few days to go until the big feast I stepped into the dining room and noticed that Cora had set the big table with the Thanksgiving tablecloth.  Pausing for a moment I realized sadly, that it wouldn’t be used this year.  This year the table would sit empty and idle on Thanksgiving. 

TV; Episode One. Buying a Set.

 “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.”  ~ John Lennon.

“People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”  ~ Jess C. Scott

With Black Friday looming and all the pre and post-holiday sales yet to come, the wife and I have resurrected the, “should we get a new TV” discussion.  It happens about this time every year.  We don’t really exchange gifts so the idea is to get the big gift for the household (which is just the two of us now).  This year the idea got a little more impetus by a short stay at the Atlantis in Reno.  The room’s 55” flat panel made us realize that our circa 2000 tube television could be improved on. 

Warning: It's Almost Fall

Summer's almost gone       

Summer's almost gone

We had some good times

But they're gone

The winter's comin' on

Summer's almost gone

~ The Doors

“If cross country were easy it would be called football.” ~ Slogan on the backs of many cross country team shirts.

Am I ready for some football?  Well - no.   America is all a twitter, sports talk show hosts are ecstatic and television network and National Football League execs are just beginning a 5 month long fiscal orgasm (For those readers outside of the USA, I’m speaking of American football as opposed to futbol/soccer). 

American football is an absolute dollarific orgy.  On average the 32 NFL teams are worth $1.17 billion dollars each.  The average revenue per team last year was $286 million dollars.  Broadcast revenue from the networks for the current contract, now in its final year, averages $1.9 billion per year.  The new contract starting in 2014 will average $3.1 billion per year.  These are just a few of the bank account boggling figures.  And this doesn't even count the gambling money exchanged – both legal and not. 

Roughing It (With apologies to Mark Twain)

The Family Camping Chronicles: Part III

"On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peak that we had yet seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless."  From Roughing It  by Mark Twain

“It would be distressing to a feeling person to See our Situation at this time all wet and cold and with our bedding &c also wet, in a cove scarcely large enough to contain us…canoes at the mercy of the waves and driftwood…robes and leather clothes are rotten.”   William Clark describing being stranded at Point Ellice, Washington (1808).  (For those who slept through the day they taught about the Lewis and Clark expedition in history class, Clark was Meriwether Lewis’ expedition partner)

“We’re really roughing it,” Dad would say as he loaded our camping gear into the station wagon.  The words were served with sides of arched eyebrow, a wry smile and a large helping of sarcasm.  Dad was alluding to Roughing It, Mark Twain’s chronicle of his adventures in the Wild West of the 1860’s.  Looking back it seems like a magic trick that dad was able to get a big canvas tent, two bulky cots, lantern, fishing gear, stove, clothes, some pre-cooked meals that mom packed for us and an assorted pile of “possibles” into that wagon.

Bags and Baggage

The Family Camping Chronicles: Part II

I relegated myself to sleeping in a sleeping bag the other night.  No, it’s not like that.  I wasn’t in the wife’s doghouse.  There’s a perfectly good queen sized bed in one of the extra rooms that comes in very handy for when the kids visit or when the domestic seas get choppy.  My purpose this night was to test the bedding for the upcoming family camping trip. 

On Dirt, Beans and Wild West Whimsy

“Camping is nature’s way of promoting the motel business.”  ~ Dave Barry.

There’s a family camping trip looming on the horizon and I’ve spent the last few weekends gearing up.  I’ve made lists, rummaged through the big plastic bin in the backyard and a couple of garage cabinets; pulled plastic tubs from an attic storage area and crawled around some closets in the house.

The American Adventure - The Open Road

It's July, 2013 and my wife Cora and I are taking a driving trip through Northern California and into Oregon. 

The wife and I have embarked on that great American summer adventure; that annual migration of the dog days; that paean to the interstate, the motorcar and fuel consumption; the modern day version of the pioneers’ tale – the road trip.  We've headed north from the San Francisco Bay to a distant, uncharted and exotic land – Oregon.  Okay, it’s not distant; it’s only 300 miles or so.  And it’s hardly uncharted.  After all I went out recently and bought a GPS so Oregon, the rest of this land and all of hell’s half acre are all pretty well charted.

A Recollection of Fishing

I got up that Sunday morning a little after 5 o'clock.  During these long summer days it’s more or less my usual time.  Has to be early.  It’s the only time I can take my dog Rainey for a run.  Rainey is day blind; can’t see the paw in front of her nose once the sun starts to peek out so we have to hit it while it’s still dark.  And so when I staggered out of bed Rainey jumped out of her's, did her happy laps around the bedroom while I shushed her lest she wake the little woman and then she rumbled down the stairs. 

“Sorry Rainey, I’ll let you out to do your business but then it’s back to bed."  She wasn't getting it yet.  While she was outside I crawled into my clothes and threw the camp chairs into the truck.  Rainey came back inside, wagging her hind quarters expecting me to grab the leash until I sent her up the stairs.  “Back to bed girl,” as she sulked up the stairs

Defining Mom

Under her pillow she keeps rosary beads and a life guard’s tank top.  In the darkness before drifting off  I can sometimes hear the clicking of the beads.  Her prayers include petitions for her children and grandchildren.  Not because they're wayward lambs.  She simply asks for God to guide and protect them.  For her, channeling God's love to her children and grandchildren is the best way that she can care for them.  The tank top is her daughter’s.  It found its way under the pillow when our daughter left home for college in San Diego.  Jessica long ago graduated and is now living a short 15 minute drive away with two children of her own, but the shirt remains.  I suppose it’s her way of staying close to her daughter and a reminder of the days when Jessica lived here and filled the home with the ever alternating joys and maddening drama of a teenaged girl.