The Road Through Oblivion

I just spent five hours driving from Anacortes, Washington, to Portland, Oregon, and I'm struggling to remember something about the trip. I don't do long drives alone much anymore, perhaps because the time is filled with little more than background noise, creating few memories and much lost time.

On this trip, A cop was directing traffic around a stalled 18-wheeler in Anacortes.

I heard the guy from Breaking Bad interviewed on Fresh Air. Later, I played some vintage Paul Simon. Still Crazy after all These Years left me morose.

I pulled into line behind a silver Prius at the gas station on the Swinomish reservation. After he'd filled his tank, the driver gave me a friendly wave, probably because I drive a Prius too. As a group, I think Prius drivers are constantly amazed that anyone chooses to drive something other than a Prius, unless maybe they need a truck.

I took the scenic route to the interstate, down a back road and through Mount Vernon. There was a train of seemingly infinite length blocking the road in Mount Vernon. The growling wall of a thing rattled and squealed through the heart of town for a nearly 15 minutes while the drivers of cars and trucks bound for Seattle and Portland and the Mount Vernon Food Co-Op stared vacantly at traffic lights shining red in all outbound directions.

When I finally reached I-5 and turned south, past Dick's Restaurant Supply, I had a flashback of the Christmas when I gave my mother a set of restaurant-quality chef's knives. She said she had always worried about what would happen if someone broke into the house and attacked her with one of her old knives. “Lord knows,” she said, “the newspaper would have reported I was killed with a blunt instrument.”

As evening came I fumbled with the MP3 player and the radio. The windshield wipers were on sometimes, off more often. Mostly I just drove snake-eyed, nothing registering but unexpected movements.

I vaguely remember glancing at the Space Needle and the Tacoma Dome, and reflecting for the thousandth time about how awful the residents of Federal Way must feel about living in a town named “Federal Way.” Puyallup may be pronounced as if it refers to a malodorous whallop in the face, but at least that name has color and history. As for Federal Way, I suspect nobody showed up for the naming committee meeting.

At 9:30 p.m., about 20 miles north of Vancouver, Washington, I called Susan to let her know my progress. She was still up and sounding fresh. She let on that she was a little pissed that I would be spending the night at our condo in Portland. She'd already staged it to make the perfect first time impression on the girl friend she's bringing down to see it next week, and she reminded me to put everything back exactly the way she'd left it.

The condo did look nice when I opened the door a half-hour later. There was, however, an unfortunate shell necklace laid around a bucket-sized candle in the middle of the small dining room table. I stared at it for a while, but left it alone.

So as not sully the kitchen, I walked down to the corner McMenamins for a late dinner. The server dropped a brochure on the table promising that I would become a “Cosmic Tripster” if I got my McMenamins passport stamped at every McMenamins in the world.

It's an intriguing idea. I wonder what I would remember.

Killing an Old Tree

The soggy, gray winter finally gave way to a weekend with crisp blue skies and scattered flowers, and I decided that it was finally time to take out the gnarled old eyesore of a tree that lived by our winding driveway.

I'd left it standing when I cleared the brush away from it, hoping it would leaf out and be more attractive when it had more room, but it had been stunted and maimed by battles with choker vines and encroaching brush, and its branches remained twisted and bristling with bare, misdirected twigs.

The trunk was little more than a foot in diameter, so I went to the shed and pulled out an ax rather than a chainsaw, thinking it would be good exercise.

My first blow with the ax stung like I'd struck a rock. Neglect had dulled the cutting edge of my old axe so that I might as well have been swinging a baseball bat.

I couldn't find a file or stone to sharpen it with, so I drove up to Browne's and picked up a ten inch bastard cut file. I laid it on the counter and told the clerk, “I want this little bastard.” She took my money without a word and tried to avoid eye contact.

My attack with the sharpened ax felt little different. Each blow stung right through my heavy work gloves.

I put my body into it, starting with my hands split on the ax handle, building momentum with my shoulders as I came around, until my hands slid together and I whipped the ax head into the cut.

One hundred blows cut a notch halfway through the tree. When I stripped off my sweatshirt, steam rose off my skin in the chilly air.

“Where is it going to fall?” Susan asked.

I shook my head. The tree was so twisted and gnarled that I couldn't even guess where its center of gravity lay. I'd notched it on the side facing the house, parallel to the driveway, but there was no safe bet.

Another hundred chops and I could no longer see what kept the tree standing. I stepped back to look at the damage I'd done when I heard the wrenching sound of the old tree giving up. First a crack, then the crackle of wood fibers stretching and breaking and then the screech of a huge, rusty hinge as the tree majestically leaned farther and farther away from me. It hit the ground with a soft whomph as the tree's branches cushioned its fall, then it settled with a sound that could have been a sigh.

The old tree looked even more tired, twisted and wizened at rest than when it stood. Looking at it, I felt pangs of sadness, rather than triumph. The tree had fought its way through its youth and finally been shaped into a caricature of what it might have been, had its life been easier.

My back ached, my hands throbbed and I could barely raise my arms, but I'd made promises to Susan and if I was to keep them I needed to start cutting it up right away.

But when I tried to fuel up my chainsaw the fuel cap cracked and came apart in my hand. At that hour there was no replacement on the island and the thought of plugging it with a rag conjured images of a motorized Molotov cocktail.

I called my friend Pete at his home on the upper half of the island, and he promised to bring his chainsaw with him when he came over for our early Sunday morning run.

In Sunday's morning chill, we ran the winding trail through American Camp, across its prairie and down to the beach. As we ran along the shore, a promising rim of blue appeared on the horizon, separating the flat, gray sky from the flat gray sea.

I called a break on a long uphill stretch and while I caught my breath, Pete talked about his 92-year-old uncle with an eidetic memory. He said his uncle remembers names, dates and places of family events that happened even before he was born. Until the past few years, he'd worked in a Sonoma Valley vineyard and grew tomatoes he sold under the label: “The World's Best Tomatoes.”

Pete wants to write a fitting eulogy for his uncle while the old man is still breathing. He does a lot of family eulogies. He has a gift for it.

After we finished our run, Pete pulled his chainsaw and a half-gallon of chain oil and a container of fuel mix out of the trunk of his car, and made sure the saw started before he left it with me.

When he drove away, Susan set the table with a plate of eggs, sausage and chunks of the warm, crusty bread she'd baked while I was running. After we ate, I put on work clothes and walked out to cut up the tree. It looked sad and uncomfortable at rest, an old soldier no longer able to stand his post.

Pete's chainsaw growled and chewed through the wood, sputtering now and then like most seldom-used machinery. Once, the saw got pinched and I had to open the case to reseat the chain, but I forgot to tighten one nut when I put it back together. The nut vibrated loose when I started back up and the chain to flew off track again in a spectacular explosion of unmuffled motor noise. The nut itself fell off and disappeared into the thick layer of bark, pine needles and wood chips around the old tree.

I scavenged a compatible nut off my own chainsaw and finally got back to work. By the time I cut the last section of wood, I was moving in painfully slow motion; a parody of the old man I pretend not to be.

When I was still in my full youthful gallop, I'd marveled at how slowly and steadily my father, and his father, worked their truck gardens. Now I saw their hands picking up the stacks of wood as I loaded the old tree's dismembered body into my battered pick-up and drove it the short distance to our burn pile.

Susan still fairly danced around, raking up the fallen branches and the accumulated winter's blow-down from the big Douglas firs and hemlocks on our property.

After I showered off the sweat and saw dust and tossed my clothes in the washer, I drove over and returned Pete's saw while Susan stayed home to tend the old tree's funeral pyre. On the way home I picked up burgers at our favorite pub and we sat on lawn chairs and ate while we watched the fire burn down.

Now the day has ended and the orange glowing embers and the last flickering flames in the burn pile look like a melting jack-o-lantern.

Susan is still attending the fire, sitting with her e-reader, sipping wine in the smokey warmth of the gnarled old tree's smoldering ashes. From time to time Marv, our black Lab, gets a nose full of smoke and snuffles and sneezes, reminding us that he is curled up just a few feet away, invisible in the liquid darkness.

Finally, I defer to the chill and my aching back and leave Susan and the fire for the comfort of the house.

The morning will bring a new day, curious to see if we can still to stand our posts.

Death Makes a Courtesy Call

   Death stopped by last night to see how I was doing. It didn't touch me, it just paid its respects and reminded me that we are scheduled to meet professionally within the next few years, so – you know – I should probably be getting ready, burning all the embarrassing stuff, making sure everyone knows where the will is, think seriously about funerals and final arrangements.

    It occurred to me that I'll be 65 years old later this year. Susan and I just got back from an event in Palm Springs where we hung out with retirees who, to a person said, “There's no reason to be here if you don't play golf.”

    I asked one woman, part of an older couple who was worth a few hundred million dollars, how she'd spent her day.

    “Busy” she said. “I was up before 6 a.m. this morning, walking my dog on the golf course, then from 8:00 until 9:00 I worked out with my personal trainer, then I played 18 holes of golf with two girl friends and one of their daughters, then we had lunch out, and by the time I got showered and took a nap I had to start getting ready for this event.”

    A male guest noted that he tries to get out on the golf course early every day. “I like to finish up by 11:00 or 11:30 A.M. so I have the rest of the day free."

    These are good people who were successful in their business lives, wise (or fortunate) in their investments, and generous with their philanthropy. I admit to being jealous of their financial freedom and ability to literally save lives and make dreams come true with their wealth. But confronting them for a brief period of time, surrounded by people who are desperate to “facilitate their philanthropy” was a little unsettling.

    I'm angry with myself for not seeking more insight into their world and their comfort level with their lives.

    When death stopped by last night, the thing that immediately worried me was what if Susan died first. I really have no clue about putting on a funeral or a memorial service. I doubt, at this moment, that I could compile a list of invitees. One used to be able to grab the Christmas Card list. I suppose these days you just post to the deceased person's Facebook friends.

    From the time we got married a quarter century ago, we always said we wanted to go together. Tonight I imagined the logistics of one of us dragging the other's pain-wracked body out to the berm by the pond where the frogs serenade us in the spring, having a final kiss, then calling the Sheriff to come collect our bodies, hanging up and fulfilling our suicide pact.

    Of course there are the logistical problems. We don't own a pistol, we'd have to arrange to have someone look after our dog, and since we don't get cell phone coverage out here in the sticks, I'd have to get a long cord so we could bring the base station for our wireless phone out onto the deck so we'd be able to call. And what if, after one partner is dispatched, the other realizes we forgot to hit send on the email to our family, so the surviving spouse has to run back into the house, finds the computer is off, then discovers that it has to finish 44 updates so please don't turn it off or unplug it . . .

    This whole death thing seems less scarey than annoying.

    But but death will come. No way to know when, but at my age it's easy to figure out that it will be sooner rather than later. I certainly hope I don't end up being one of those 110 year olds who shows up on the news gumming birthday cake and saying the secret to life is eating legumes, drinking a glass of whiskey every day, and never masturbating.

    On his 90th birthday, Studs Terkel told Garrison Keillor that when he was young, he had wondered who the hell wants to live to be 90. “Now I know,” he said. “It's every 89-year-old I meet.”

    Well, the time has come to think about it, the time to deal with quantity versus quality. My health and money may run out at different times. What happens when I can't feed myself, deal with my own bodily functions and it's clear that I'm not going to get better? I wonder whether I'll recognize when I'm starting that final glide path, further and further down, until I reach that truly hopeless spiral into death's arms?

        In his final days, my father was aware of it and it made him mad. "I'm not finished yet,” he said. He still had things to do that he'd been planning for a long time.

    I wonder if many of those wealthy, aging retirees in Palm Springs feel that, somehow, they have finished.

    Someone told me Palm Springs's nickname is “God's waiting room.” It seemed like it a pleasant enough place to wait, if you are finished.

Good Dog

Marv, his black fur smooth as velvet, lays his warm head on my lap and looks up at me.

Mark Knofler plays the Sultans of Swing, backed by the chorus of frogs in the pond outside my library window.

Marv smiles at me as I scratch behind his good ear, and he rumbles contentedly when I cup his soft graying jowls in my hand and tell him he is my favorite dog in the world.

Diana Krall croons Let's Face the Music and Dance, and Marv sighs and ambles over to his bed and curls up, positioning himself so he can watch me.

Maybe I'm good for another pet, maybe a moonlit walk, maybe just a smile and a sense of belonging.

Whatever he wants.

And Marv is thinking, whatever he needs.

SMALL TALK
A Monologue (Excerpt)
By Stan Matthews

[Lights up]

(Middle aged guy walks on stage carrying a coffee cup as if he's looking for a place to sit, walks up to table)

It's a little crowded today, mind if I join you?

(sets his coffee cup on the table and sits down)

You a regular here?

Yeah, I know it's really none of my business, just small talk.

(sips coffee)

That's one of the problems with this country—too much small talk. We used to talk big: "54-40 or fight", "Give me liberty or give me death", and my favorite: "Bring it on!"

Yeah, BRING IT ON!

George W., now there was a President who had...how do I say it politely? Kuh-JONES. Brain the size of a pea, but cojones like pair of cantaloupes.

(Gestures like he's holding a cantaloupe in each hand)

Bring it OWN! Root hog or die!

(Shakes head and sips coffee)

You know what makes me mad these days? Everything.

Ev-er-EEE-thing.

Four dollar coffee, welfare cheats, Obamacare, politicians—I'll tell you something though, that Ted Cruz, the senator? Harvard man, he's smart.

But the left-wing, lamestream media makes him out like he's stupid because he read a kids book on the Senate Floor when he was filibustering Obamacare, and they claim he didn’t understand it—said he got the moral of the story wrong.

Well pardon my French, but that's a load of manure.

Have you ever read it - Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss?

Well, I went down to the library and checked it out, and I was shocked. It's not really a kids book.

It's about a creepy little guy named Sam who is trying to get this doggy-looking guy to eat some (finger quotes) "green egg and ham." But the dog guy doesn't want to eat it.

I mean, who the hell would? If you look at the pictures, it's not just the eggs that are green, the ham is green too! Probably spoiled rotten, for god's sake.

But this Sam guy is relentless. He keeps pushing and pushing and pushing until finally the doggy man gives in just to get Sam off his back.

Well, one taste was all it took. Lights out, major brain freeze. As soon as he tastes it, this upstanding doggy guy is afflicted with an all-consuming Jones for the green stuff.

The first thing he says is: "I'd eat them in a boat, I'd eat them with a goat."

Did you catch that? That Satanic reference?

The man clearly says "I would eat this stuff with a freakin' goat." That means Satan.

Makes my skin crawl.

So Ted Cruz seems to be the only one who recognizes that this Sam guy is a pusher, just like Obama. See, he turns this honest, hardworking dog man into a slobbering Satan worshiper just by giving him a taste of affordable health care.

The book ends there, but anybody can see where it's going. One day this guy is going to find out his kids have been getting into his stash and his teenage daughter is so hooked on the stuff that she's gone out and gotten pregnant, just so she can score some of that free pre-natal care.

That's where it goes. End of America.

Am I right?

(Pause, stare until he audience absorbs the implications, then nod.)

So, what does the liberal media do in the face of this undeniable truth? They try to crucify Ted Cruz, because he has the courage to speak the truth.

(Short pause for effect, sip coffee, mentally shift gears)

This kind of thing has been going on for centuries.

Ever heard of Martin Luther? He tried to speak out and the Pope made him eat worms.

A lot of people never heard that, but I'm something of a history buff and it's in all the history books.

The Pope didn't like the way Martin Luther was talking, so he forced him to have the "Diet of Worms." Check it out.

(Glances down at the opposite side of the table)

Are you gonna finish that cannoli?

Cool, I just didn't want to see it go to waste. That's something my mother drilled into me - "Clean your plate, there are children starving in China."

I always wised off when she said it, but it stuck with me.

I hate to see anything go to waste. I compost everything-leftover food, grass clippings, leaves.

I made a worm composter out an old refrigerator, just laid it on its side. I figure, if Obama decides to put me on a diet of worms, at least I'll have my own supply. Eh?

(pause as if waiting for an affirmation. Takes a sip of coffee.)

You aren't a liberal are you?

Independent?

Pardon my saying so, but I don't see how anyone can be an independent these days—just like I can't understand how anyone could be bisexual.

I mean, I personally don't care if you are straight or gay, but at least you ought to pick a side so everyone knows what to expect.

I'd really hate to go home and find my wife with another man—I mean I'd probably cut his head off and throw it in the worm bin; but if I found out she was fooling around with another woman ... I mean, what are you supposed to do? How's a guy supposed to act?

(Sips coffee, shakes his head)

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, politics and you said you are an independent—middle of the road, out there on the yellow line with the raccoon carcasses and dead snakes—no offense intended.

You aren't one of those gun control freaks are you?

No, you look too intelligent. I can usually spot the gun control nuts, they freak out when they find out I'm packing a piece of artillery.

(Pulls back his jacket and points to a holstered pistol)

Have you ever read the Constitution cover to cover?

No shit?

Well, I've gotta be honest, I haven't actually read it word for word myself, but I know what it says. I spend a lot of time in my car and I make a point of listening to Constitutional experts on the radio when I'm driving around.

That Rush Limbaugh, he's another guy the liberal media can't stand because he's so smart.

Okay, he's not a doctor. He got a lot of grief because he didn't understand the exact number of birth control pills a woman has to take so she can be a slut, but he stood his ground.

The man never apologizes. You have to respect that.

Liberals? They go running around like babies begging forgiveness when they make some stupid mistake. But Rush? He just keeps kicking ass and naming names. Standing up for the working man.

That's why he can afford his own private jet. And he comes right out and says it, "I'm just in it for the money," he says. No apologies.

Do or die.

Liberty or death.

Truth or consequences.

Commitment. That's the difference between big talk and small talk.

...

Mean Spirits

I briefly posted a column entitled “Oh Yeah?” last week, then took it down after my wife said it seemed mean-spirited. After I read it over, I had to agree. It mostly consisted of things I've refrained from saying aloud to people who commit the increasingly common sin of annoying me.

Unfortunately, as I grow older, I find my baseline dudgeon level is dangerously high and my sharp tongue slips out of its scabbard too easily.

One of the “wish I'd said” exchanges in that self-censored essay went like this:

Annoying guy: “I'm a big picture person, I just need someone to fill in the details.”

Me:  “Actually, you are a lazy, self-absorbed, vacuous dilettante who wants other people to clean up for you after you smear your own excrement on the wall and call it art.”

Upon reflection, that does seem a little harsh.

In general, my biggest problem these days is impatience. When a telephone salesperson calls, then asks if I'd mind holding, I tend to ask them to please hold while I transfer their call to the dial tone.

I know telephone sales people are underpaid and likely to be supporting young children who need expensive, life-saving operations; but I'm also becoming dreadfully aware of my own ticking countdown clock.

Stealing my money is one thing, but wasting my time is stealing something that is both precious and irreplaceable. These days, I am much less patient with people who are late for appointments than I used to be. I took some pains, recently, to explain to someone that when he kept me waiting, he was showing that he thought my time was worth less than his.

I'm also starting to get impatient with people who call, wanting something that could be handled quickly and easily, but who feel obligated to begin with a bit of pallid small talk first. When someone asks how I'm doing, obviously not caring in the least, I've been sorely tempted to let them know in excruciating detail. But experience holds me back.

There was the time I gave a friendly wave and a “How are you doing?” to a nice fellow who had recently waited on my wife and me at a furniture store. It was a beautiful day, I was on foot and he was in his car, stopped at a red light downtown with his windows rolled down.

“Not so good,” he shouted back to me. “My brother died last night.” Then he burst into tears, and the traffic light turned green.

I really hadn't cared how he was doing, other than to wish all humankind a nice day, but after I asked and got the answer, we both felt terrible.

Revealing? I think so, but not in the way I expected when I first wrote it.

Of course people are no more or less annoying now they've ever been.

Reminders of my mortality abound – seeing parents and old friends disappear from the earth, and hearing dinner party conversions turn into obituaries of the latest local deaths and disabilities. Mortality's nagging drumbeat sets us on edge, causing everyday tickles and taunts and jostles and bumps to provoke disproportionate responses. 

What's really annoying me, of course, is not the minor inconveniences and delays of daily life, but the realization that I've already wasted so many precious hours and days and years doing nonsensical things that neither gave me joy nor made the world a better place.

So I've resolved to stop letting so much time slip by unused, to meditate some of my impatience into zippity doo dah, and to try to keep a rein on my inner cranky old man. Sure, he may sneak out and cause trouble from time to time, but he doesn't get to take over.

Salesperson: “Excuse me sir, could I interest you —“

Cranky old man: “Kid, you couldn't interest me if you dressed up like a peacock and farted the Star Spangled Banner.”

Me: “Um . . . what I meant was, perhaps you could show me something in a Harris Tweed that would go well with a good book and good friends.”

After all. Time's a-wastin'.

By the Book

I tossed the last of my framed journalism awards and plaques into the trash this weekend. I found them while I was cleaning out our storage shed. They were packed in a retired cardboard pet carrier that bore tooth marks from our dear departed cat, Janet.

When I was in television news I won a lot of awards. People in television spend a lot of time giving each other awards. Since leaving television, I don't believe I've won any professional awards. Of course, there have been times when I haven't been sure what profession I was in, so perhaps I just didn't know where to enter.

But I'm pretty sure there are no awards for best ghost-written speech, best PowerPoint presentation, best original campaign management software, best staff report to a local legislative authority, or best series of news releases headlined, “Council Postpones action on . . .”

In any case, honors do not age well. Every time I get off the ferry in Anacortes, Washington, I pass a restaurant that bears the banner, “Voted best chef, 5 years in a row.” The sign looks sad, hanging over the entrance of a restaurant that closed years ago.

One of the award plaques I tossed out was “Best Documentary” from the New York International Firm and Television Festival. The awards show was emceed by the comedy duo, Stiller and Meara –  Ben Stiller's parents. Back then, they were still doing edgy stand up.

Another award I pulled out of the box was a gold-embossed “Broadcast Media Award” for consumer reporting. It was dated 1977. There are reporters on Seattle Television whose parents had not even met when I reported on whatever outrage it was that prompted the judges at San Francisco State to honor me that year.

I remember being a 20-something street reporter in Miami, Florida; standing out front of a place where a boatload of Haitian refugees were being processed. The refugees' boat had washed up on Palm Beach at sunset, so it was late at night by the time they'd been gathered up and bused to “Freedom Tower” in downtown Miami.

The only locals out in that neighborhood at that time of night were the alcoholics, addicts and schizophrenics who made themselves invisible by day, but took over the streets after dark.

One fellow with a bottle of cheap wine protruding from his side pocket, kept threatening to kill me if I didn't leave immediately. Finally I told him that my boss would kill me if I did leave. He nodded sympathetically and said he'd let me live this once.

Then another fellow walked up to me and complained that our government was spending all this money on refugees, but didn't give a damn about people like him. He said he'd been a police detective in New York, but his partner had gotten killed and he'd lost his house in a divorce, then lost his job because he started drinking. Now he was living on the street in Miami and nobody wanted to even look at him. “What the hell's wrong?” he asked.

After he walked off, I pointed him out to one of the Federal agents escorting the refugees and said he'd claimed that he'd been a cop. I'll never forget his matter-of-fact tone when he looked the wino up and down and said, “He probably was.”

In the day-to-day world, nobody really cares a whole lot about who or what we used to be but are no more.

I thought about that as I tried to decided what to do with that box of faded glory. We all know that the past is prologue, but it's hard to tell what part of the story we're in now.

Looking at the classic story structure, I'm either approaching my journey's end – settling down to let my wounds heal while I enjoy the rewards won in my life's battles; or I'm fast approaching the point in the story where the hero has to face the ultimate antagonist, and in doing so, face his own worst fears and internal demons.

If it's the latter, then the protagonist must strip down to the essentials and be prepared to use the lessons he's learned, the allies he's made and the weapons he's acquired to face the challenge the whole damned, convoluted story has led to. In a novel, it's usually something unexpected that the hero has held onto that tips the balance in the final battle.

I did feel as if a plot point was passing as I tossed that box of awards into the trash. A little while later, I decided to hang onto a box containing my collection of FBI Wanted posters from the 1960s and early '70s. Someday they might be of some value.

The protagonist never gets to know in advance.

The Moving Finger Writes

I'm on a train halfway between Portland and Seattle, sitting at a table with three people, each of whom is absorbed in an electronic device – one texting on an IPhone, another watching a movie on an IPAD, another playing Words with Friends on a Kindle.

I'm packing two laptops, a Nook and a cell phone; an MP3 player is pumping golden oldies into my ears . . . and I'm writing this in a paper notebook with a fountain pen.

Lately, I've noticed that I end up working just as quickly with pen and paper as with a laptop because I make fewer first draft mistakes. I'm also beginning to think that I may belong to the last generation that can do that.

I'm running into a lot of 20-somethings who never learned cursive writing. They can text on a smart phone faster than I can write, and I can certainly keyboard faster than I can write in what used to be called “longhand.” (My wife leaves teenagers gape-mouthed with her ability to write, and read, shorthand.)

I've loved technology since I met my first Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, but I can type very fast and my fingers get bored waiting for my mind to catch up with them, so they get sloppy. I'll think: “I should write home,” but my fingers type: “I should right home.”

Homophones like right and write, here and hear, or tear and tier pop out of the keyboard with annoying frequency. And commas? Sometimes it looks like someone spilled a bucket of them on the screen.

Raymond Chandler once advised writers who find a story starting to get dull to “have a man walk through the door with a gun in his hand.” As for me, when I'm at the keyboard and a poorly constructed sentence bogs down, my fingers just start poking dashes between independent clauses.  That doesn't happen as much when I write with a pen.

Why a fountain pen instead of a pencil?

For one thing, pencils make it is too easy to erase and re-write. You can bet Omar Khayyam had a pen in his hand when he wrote:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Why not a ballpoint? Most ballpoints are expendable. A good fountain pen is something of value. It feels good and looks good in your hand. It glides over the page and the words literally flow from it.

Writing on paper encourages logical, linear thought. If you want non-linearity, you can write on note cards and move them around. But in our world, time, like fingers holding a pen, moves across the page in one direction.

Changing technology won't allow most of us to get very far out of step with the changing times. I'll have to keyboard this into my computer if I want to publish it anywhere. The computer has become the undisputed best tool for final editing and formatting. But as a writer, I like to think of myself as a man who walks through the door with a pen in his hand.

Watch This!

In one of his stand up routines comedian Jeff Foxworthy reported that the most common last words spoken by redneck men are: “Watch this!”

Last summer I was ready to pull out of our driveway onto the country road where we live, and I sensed something was out of place – our mailbox was missing. Someone had pulled our mailbox, on its concrete-anchored 4” X  4” cedar pole, out of the ground and dragged it behind a bush several feet away. I stared at it for awhile trying to reconstruct what happened.

I'm pretty sure the incident involved at least two mating-aged males. And I'm pretty sure it started out in a moving vehicle with a conversation that went something like this:

“Bubba.”

“What?”

“I bet I can pull a mailbox out of the ground.”

“Betcha can't.”

“Yeah? Well just pull over right here and hold my brewski.”

“You're crazy.”

“Okay now, watch this!”

(A little grunting and growling.) 

“Whoa stud! You have just committed a federal crime!”

Doing stupid stuff may give you something to talk about at the tavern on Saturday night; or in the county lock-up on Sunday morning; but it doesn't normally attract much of an audience unless your stupidity shows some originality.

A few years ago, here on San Juan Island, there was a spate of mailbox vandalism. Rampaging vandals with baseball bats smashed mailboxes as fast as they were repaired or replaced. (Okay, rampaging vandals is a little strong for bored small-town high schoolers.) The outrage came pretty much on the lack of creativity. One mailbox smashed in a beer-drinking, hormonal rush may show passion, but a pattern of attacks on what are essentially tin cans nailed to posts shows only a desperate, but profound, lack of imagination.

A few years ago, as I was walking home at night after working late in my office in downtown Portland, I came upon a teen-aged kid spray-painting his initials on a building. I walked over and asked him if he thought it was his right to make the world uglier. He said he thought it looked better with his name one it.

I told him that he should make something of his own if he wanted to sign it, because signing someone else's work was plagiarism and it defaced the view on my walk home. I may have raised my voice, I seem to recall that I was getting a late night voice-of-god-like echo off the surrounding buildings.

The kid started to stuff his spray can in his pocket and I asked if I could borrow it so I could sign his ass. He asked if I was crazy. I told him that people do ask that from time to time.

There are street artists in our world that create amazing, illegal works of art on blank walls. (Google Banksy's images). But scrawling your name or gang sign on the side of a building – like being the 10th person on a small island to smash a mailbox – isn't creative, it's just stupid.

That night, I followed the kid with the spray can for a block or so, asking questions that he pretended not to hear. After a while I lost interest and headed home.

I suspect that lone kid with the silver spray paint was just looking for a shortcut to lay claim to being a bad-ass. He didn't seem to have a statement to make, he just thought he needed to have his name on a public place. What little damage he'd done had been scrubbed off by the time I walked by the building the next day.

I'd like to think he stopped at some point since that night and reflected on what I'd said, but I know it probably just made him feel more angry and isolated.

It's 6:30 a.m. now and the frogs out by our pond are celebrating another sunrise. A doe has wandered out of the woods and will likely try to nibble on our camellia. And somewhere down in Portland, there's probably a young man lying in bed chuckling about the time an old guy followed him through downtown Portland babbling about creativity.

What the hell just happened?

“In a way, I kind of wish something had gone wrong at my wedding,” she said. “It seems like all my friends have great stories about awful things that happened at their weddings and I've got nothing.”

Catherine sat across from me on the train. She's been married to the same guy for 20 years -- happily, she said; but she still regrets that they didn't have to bail the best man out of jail, and that nobody puked on her wedding dress and no one got caught groping the groom's younger sister in the cloak room.

She was traveling on business with Keith, another member of her company.

Keith mentioned that he'd recently been bitten by a brown recluse spider. First, the bite had turned red, then purple. By the time he went to the doctor, the flesh around the bite had begun to turn brown and die. Even after the doctor finished cleaning it up, it looked really disgusting.

In fact, he said, the area around the bite looked so spectacularly nasty that he decided to show the damage only to his best friend at work. But before the end of the day, people were practically lined up outside his cubicle wanting a peek at his nasty, putrefying flesh. Now that he's healed, he's known as Spiderman and his co-workers want to know how he can sleep in his apartment, knowing the spider could still be there.

Personal crises, bumps, bruises, and amputations seem to be life's way of pulling us out of the audience and putting us on stage.

Inertia is a powerful force in my work as a bureaucrat. It's easy to go with the flow, take things as they come, and let things fester that have been festering for years; but that can get really, really dull. A couple of weeks ago I discovered a great short-term project that (in my opinion), would save a lot of money and benefit everybody --a classic win-win deal. But in order to do it, I had to sell it to the County Council in a public meeting at a time when we're transitioning to a new form of government and half of the council's members are campaigning for re-election and the other half are limping and quacking.

As a young man growing up in a small Midwestern town, I remember being counseled on the importance of humility. “It's the nail that sticks out that gets hammered,” the adage went.

I opened my presentation to the Council by saying, “This item really should have been on the consent agenda.” It's been a long time since I got that big a laugh out of a group of elected officials. 

In keeping with procedure, I produced the obligatory singing dog and dancing pony, then brought in some department heads and subject matter experts for a half-hour of back-and-forth and up-and-down with Council members. After deliberating for a while, the Council came to a conclusion on a split vote and gave me direction. As I stepped out of the hearing room into the fresh air, one of the people who'd worked with me on the project asked, in a voice that was a little louder than it was judicious, “What the hell just happened in there?”

The answer is obvious: Amid the pain and collateral damage, a story happened in there.

Every story has to have a protagonist and an antagonist. Each has to have something at stake and there has to be a conflict – both sides can't get everything they want.

The conflict might be between a prissy mother of the bride and a randy aunt, the bride and the groom's drunken frat house buddy who can't hang onto his lunch during the wedding march, an individual fighting forces of nature or a political candidate who needs to make a headline and a bureaucrat convinced that his motives are pure and intelligence perfect.

Along the way, things have to go wrong and the protagonist can never see the worst of it coming. No one worthy of being a protagonist ever sets out to lose.

At the end of the struggle, somebody wins and somebody loses – or everybody loses. (Everybody can't win, that's one of the rules of storytelling.)

And when the smoke clears after the climactic battle, justice has been served or tragedy has triumphed; and we have learned a new survival skill – whether it's the importance of getting medical care for a spider bite, the advisability of requiring groomsmen to take a breathalyzer test, or the consequences of saying “this will improve code enforcement” to a group of libertarian politicians. But we don't love stories because they teach us, we love them because they entertain us and excite our emotions.

We are all grateful that catastrophic disasters and sanity-threatening traumas are rare, but we should be equally grateful for the weird, bruising, embarrassing, and unexpected day-to-day events that season our lives.

Life must be awfully dull for the nails that never get hammered.

The Saga of Taco Marv

Because of allergies in the family, I didn't grow up with furry pets. For a time I had a boa constrictor named BC. It was an okay pet - huggy and pleasantly cool on hot summer days, but it was slow and never really wanted to play. After I got married, I gave BC to my former high school science teacher and, a short time later, my former pet found a way to slither out of his cage in the school's biology lab and he went missing for a couple of months. When they finally found him curled up in a drawer, he was hungry, but otherwise no worse for wear. Boa constrictors don't demand a lot of attention.

My current pet, Marv the dog, is different. If I sit too long at my desk, he comes over and puts his head on my lap and reminds me that it's time to get out and toss the tennis ball for a while. If I get up before daylight, he insists that we immediately go outside to see how the weather is, if there are any foxes to play with, or raccoons or ghosts to chase by moonlight.

My wife Susan (I got the marriage thing right on the second try) found Marv at the local animal shelter shortly after we moved to San Juan Island. I was out of the country at the time and had warned her to stay away from the shelter until I got back, though I didn't expect that she would. Growing up, she'd never been without a dog and one of the traumas of our whirlwind courtship was that she had to give custody of her jointly-owned, totally undisciplined Airedale to her ex-boyfriend when she accepted my proposal.

The puppy she found at the shelter was a black Lab with paws the size of saucers. His nom de shelter was “Sarge," but the name didn't seem to fit. He got his new name when Susan misread a sign in a TV commercial for “TACOMA  RVs.” Before Susan realized it was an advertisement for recreational vehicles, she'd decided that Taco Marv's was a lousy name for a Mexican restaurant, but Taco Marv was the perfect name for a puppy.

She visited Marv daily while I was 12 time zones away and, in emails and phone calls, she gave me lengthy accounts of their walks and the cute things he'd done. “If you decide you don't like him, we don't have to adopt him,” she'd say in a voice that sounded like I might as well figure on spending the rest of the winter in Armenia if I didn't want a puppy in the house when I came home.

Of course, as soon as he moved in with us he started chewing up everything he could get his teeth on, which I thought was unconscionable. Susan doesn't believe in disciplining pets, but we did enroll, as a family, in an obedience class led by an inexperienced but well-meaning teacher. (It's a small island.)

Despite our ineptitude, Marv loved us in the unbounded way dogs do, and he is smart enough to figure out what we want him to do most of the time. Despite being big, strong and alpha, he is gentle and has a good heart. Every now and then he'll pick up an injured bird in his soft mouth and bring it to us with a look in his eyes that says he hopes we can fix it.

Last summer, Marv and I were walking in our woods when we spotted a deer curled up on the ground. When deer run, Marv usually runs with them, but this one just sat and looked at us. Marv walked over to the doe until they were nose to nose, and looked at her as if to ask what was wrong. Then he looked over his shoulder at me as if to ask if I could help. Apparently the doe had been hit by a car and it had broken her shoulder. (I called the angels over at Wolf Hollow, our local wildlife rescue center, to come check her out.)

For much of the year at this latitude, it is dark when we get up, and dark when we come home from work. We're miles from the nearest street light, so unless there is snow on the ground, on moonless winter mornings the darkness feels dense enough to swim in, and it simply absorbs our shiny black dog as soon as we step outside. It's always a bit of a surprise when his wet nose suddenly brushes my hand while we are walking, or his pale glow collar appears out of the darkness and bounces toward us – as if it was being worn by an invisible dog.

I've never been a dog person; probably never will be, but Marv's not really a dog. He's just part of the household – the mischievous part that barks at people who wear hats and likes to roll in something smelly before we have guests over for dinner. The one that walks right behind our granddaughter, picking up the stray Cheerios and cheese snacks that cover the floor whenever she's around, and the one that likes to go outside at 5:00 A.M. to see what kind of day God is preparing for us.

Marv just came over and laid his big, warm head on my lap. I guess I've been sitting too long. Or maybe he just thinks the word count on this is a little high for a column about a pet.

The Only Thing Wrong Syndrome

My parents took parenting very seriously and provided a lot of guidance. It wasn't an unloving household, but it was a place where there was a lot of course correction and very little praise. So I grew up believing that the best way to show someone that you care is to tell them how they can improve their work.

As a young adult, starting a career in a very competitive business, I practically begged my supervisors and co-workers to tell me everything that was wrong with my work. Praise made me feel a little uncomfortable. I felt as if the person giving the compliment didn't respect me enough to properly critique my work.

That pattern of thinking served me pretty well until I became a boss. I remember a day at the public television in Dallas, Texas, when a producer brought me the rough cut of a documentary she'd been sweating over for months. A couple of scenes needed some work, but it really was a damned good piece of work, so I gave it what I thought was high praise. I started out saying: “The only thing wrong with this doc is . . .”

That's about as far as I got before I saw the producer's face fall and her eyes tear up. This had been her life for months, she was sleep-deprived and she'd risked a lot physically and emotionally to get this story on video; so I was surprised that she wasn't in a mood to accept my compliment.

Later, I told the story to a friend and kindred spirit who published a local political tabloid. As I recall, my friend gave me a serious look and said, “You know, most people aren't like you and me. Most people really like getting compliments, and even little paper certificates they can hang on the wall and brag about. That's important to a lot of people.”

Honestly, that had never occurred to me. (Most of the awards I'd received ended up in a box in the garage.)

Over the years I've learned to give compliments more freely – though perhaps not as freely as I should. I've learned to open every critique session with a compliment, then give a straightforward criticism, followed by more positive words. It works most of the time. Sometimes people even thank me for my critique, rather than just eyeing me sullenly as they did when I was a less experienced boss.

There is no saint like a reformed sinner. Now I am easily outraged when I hear insensitive criticism. And I really do believe there is a lot more insensitive and mean-spirited criticism than there used to be.

I blame that on a couple of things: The anonymity offered to trolls by the Internet, and the relentless reduction of political discourse to sound bites and bumper stickers - a thin, sharply-defined line between friends and foes. (Others might chalk it up to the lack of forced prayer in the schools, the use of science texts that conflict with the King James Bible, and the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage.)

But for whatever reason, it's not just Internet yahoos; it's highly visible people in powerful positions who are acting as if they grew up in households that never grasped the concept of constructive criticism. Their criticism is both intentionally hurtful to the target and insulting to our intelligence. It is not meant as guidance, but wielded like a chain saw in an attempt to reduce others to the critic's self-loathing level.

There is a surprisingly large, apparently approving and horribly obnoxious audience for today's verbal bullies. Rush Limbaugh, the cadre of talk radio provocateurs, Fox News's shills and others who wield sharp, poisonous tongues are making an indecent living by dissembling, bullying and – in general – showing off their bad manners.

The thing that is most disturbing to me personally is that I grew up believing criticism was a positive thing. Later, I learned how much more effective it could be when applied judiciously.

Now, it hurts to see criticism so often weaponized; transformed from the finely-honed tool of the wise to the brutish bludgeon of spoiled, boorish hypocrites.

The only thing wrong with that is – everything.

Where's Your Vision Thing?

A candidate for a local government office wandered into my office recently, so I asked what I thought was the obvious question: what does she want to accomplish if she gets elected.

She said she had no agenda other than “good government.” She wants to wait until she gets into office, learns the ropes, and sees what is possible before she starts pushing anything.

My response – and I believe this is verbatim – was, “Oh, shit.”

Politicians really do need what George H. W. Bush called, “that vision thing,” a strong sense of what they want to accomplish. Efficiency is not an end in itself. The Nazi death camps were, by most accounts, models of efficiency. In any system where there is a well developed bureaucracy and bad leadership the wrong things get organized and done. In systems without leadership, money and precious resources get wasted feeding systems that do little more than feed themselves, and often harm the people who are paying for it.

Speaking, without portfolio, on behalf of a large number of hard-working, dedicated bureaucrats, I would love to have some people at the top who can tell us where they want to go so we can get moving in that direction. There are a lot of smart, well-qualified, superbly talented public servants in this country who know how organize things and get them done. And a lot of them are frustrated right now because so many people in our society seem to have forgotten that, yes, when it's properly directed, our government really can do great things that can't – or won't – get done otherwise.

Remember what happened when President Kennedy said we're going to the moon within a decade? Dwight Eisenhower said we were going to build a coast-to-coast network of high-speed highways? Franklin Roosevelt said we were going to convert our peacetime industries to produce tanks, airplanes and warships to enter WWII almost overnight? Remember how we built huge dams to generate electricity and wired almost the entire rural U.S.A. within a decade? How we put unemployed veterans and Irish immigrants to work and completed a transcontinental railroad in six years?

Those things got done, not because someone thought about what was possible. They were visions – dreams of the way things should be. Political leaders got behind those dreams, mobilized the country, and armies of bureaucrats organized and engineered the projects and put American industry and the American people to work making those dreams a reality.

Afraid of government boondoggles? At one time or another nearly every major public works project in the country was called a boondoggle. The subway system in Washington finished enormously over budget, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) was another boondoggle, as was Boston's “Big Dig.” Now try imagining what traffic, and life, would be in any of those areas had someone not had the vision, and the courage to face the technical challenges and virulent criticism.

We're spending too much time standing around complaining that we have too many people out of work and saying we have to tighten our belts, lower our expectations, we can't do anything because we need to save money.

For crying out loud, all of those folks who are out of work have to eat, breath clean air and drink from public water systems. They receive health care, their kids are in school, they use cars and buses that use public roads, highways and bridges. We are already investing a huge amount of money and resources in people who are sitting on the sideline because, as a society, we're too timid to put them to work building the world we want the next generation to live in, and maintaining the infrastructure the last generation built for us.

The marginal cost of doing something with our human resources isn't that great, compared to the tragic waste of talent and the money it takes to keep people idle.

In the political arena, a “can't do” attitude should be unacceptable, and a politician with a “haven't decided where we ought to be going” attitude should give up his or her government health care and go to work for someone who does have a dream.

Every candidate running for office should be able to define good government in a sentence that begins “good government does . . .” rather than “good government is . . .”

Even if the dream is to keep things in your community exactly the way they are, the community's government needs to get organized and do things to see that happens, because there are forces of nature and armies of people hard at work every day trying to change the status quo.

Want to keep things as they are? What's your plan to keep people from building mega-malls on farmland? On the international level, how are you going to keep the number of nuclear powers from growing? How are you going to provide a stable workforce and a stable economy as the digital age, robotics and new communications technologies evolve?

No one should climb up onto a stage unless they want to put on a show. No one should run for office unless they are prepared to lead.

The Last Refuge of the Unimaginative

Damned blank page. I've been away awhile doing my nerd thing. Writing code, reading up on HTML5, relearning Javascript – something I do about every year-and-a-half. Whenever I need to stop doing computer stuff and start doing human stuff I have to bang my head against the wall to reboot my brain.

Why the head trauma? It helps switchover to the different user interface.

Ask a computer to do something 100 times and it will respond the same way every time. It may not do what you want it to do, but computers are absolutely consistent. On the other hand, if you ask a person to do something 100 times, chances are, right around the 25th time you make the same request, they'll punch you in the mouth – after having responded 24 different, other ways.

As much as we love predictability in our machinery – cars, phones and computers – we find it annoying in people.

Last year, my wife finally asked me to stop saying that things “matched my eyes” after I asked her to stop saying we need to stop for a “bite to eat.” Nothing wrong with either of those phrases, anymore than there is with a single drop of water hitting the back of your hand. After a few hundred drops, however . . .

My father used to enjoy telling the story about a woman who said to her husband, “You liked beans for dinner last night, you liked them for lunch today, you liked them for dinner the day before and for lunch and dinner the day before that, now all of a sudden you don't like beans? What's wrong with you?”

That story was funny the first 10 or 12 times I heard it.

I suppose if someone wants proof that there is a higher being, a supreme creator whose powers and intelligence towers over ours, inconsistency could be a clue. When we create a machine, if it behaves unpredictably, we say it has failed. When one of the supreme being's creations does unexpected things, it's evidence of a kind of success far beyond our comprehension.

The inspiration for this blog? Today I had to do a routine, no action required, presentation to the County Council. The Council's response to my report provided, as far as I'm concerned, absolute proof that there is a God.

And, she has a twisted sense of humor.

I need a reboot.

A Bedtime Story

“Why would anyone do that?” Piglet asked.

The man at the other end of the table was reading aloud in a soft girlish voice.  He wore an old army jacket and a watch cap, and his gray beard was stained with nicotine. His lips shushed the sibilant letters as he read.

“'Oh bother,' said Pooh.”

The sweet little voice was barely audible over the hum of the library's fluorescent lights and whoosh of the air blowing through heating vents.

A pink-skinned Goth guy in a long black jacket and his female counterpart – a chubby, pale teen in a short skirt and torn black stockings – shared our table. He tapped furiously on a laptop festooned with World of Warcraft stickers while she inked sketches of battling dragons and warrior princesses in an artist's notebook. 

A few serious students nosed through the shelves of reference books nearby, but on this bitterly cold day, most of the library's clients were homeless people in need of a  refuge. The ones that couldn't read went through the motions anyway to avoid being hassled: leaning over a book, turning pages, staring at pictures surrounded by incomprehensible symbols.

The man with the little girl's voice studied the children's book in front of him patiently, mouthing each word. When he'd deciphered a full sentence, he took a shallow breath and spoke it in the girlish voice.

“That's what Tiggers like best of all!”

He caught me looking and smiled, his eyes sparkling.

“I have a granddaughter,” he said. “I'm practicing so I can read her a story.”

“She's a lucky girl,” I said.

He smiled at me for a second or two more, then turned his concentration back to his book. He was quiet for a long time.

When I looked back at him, he was looking at me, still smiling, but a tear crept down his cheek.

“When my daughter was a little girl, I couldn't read, so I pretended – I'd make up stories from the pictures in her story books.”

He brushed his fingers through his beard. “But I lost my job and I got to be a drunk and I guess my stories weren't very good anymore so she and her mother run off.”

He looked down for a moment and composed himself. “A while later I found out my little girl had a baby. I looked and I looked and I finally got to talk to her on the phone. She was still living out here somewhere and she said she'd let me come read a story to my granddaughter if I stopped being a drunk.”

“And you went out and learned how to read?” I said.

“Yeah and, I swear to God, I didn't drink nothing stronger than water for a whole year. But the hell of it is, I could never find her again. Nobody'll tell me where she is.”

There were tears in his eyes, but he chuckled and smiled his toothless smile. “So, I guess the joke's on me then isn't it? Hell, she's probably too old for bedtime stories by now anyway. But if I find her, I want her to know that I wanted to . . . ”

He looked back down at the book and faded back into his own world.

“Oh bother!” said the little girl's voice.

Please Don't Tell me It's Your Plumbing

Just as sure as Lucy is going to jerk the football away just before Charlie Brown can kick it, I knew Lena would stand me up.

She doesn't always stand me up; but I know, sooner or later, I'll be sitting somewhere waiting for her, and when I text or call to find out where she is I'll hear, “Thank God you called, I got a new phone and none of the numbers transferred.”

“So let me guess, you're having an emergency kidney transplant,” I say. My second guess would be a plumbing problem, the same sort of thing people do when they call in sick and claim they have diarrhea because they don't want to expend the energy required to fake a tubercular cough.

“My toilet just absolutely exploded an hour ago,” Lena said. “I've got to wait for the plumber.”
What are the odds? Honestly, before she told me, I'd have bet even money and thrown in a plunger.

“Is it okay if I call you back in a while?” she asks.

I'm sitting in a brew pub in Northwest Portland surrounded by people whose friends did show up. Most of them are laughing. Some are making thigh contact. I've got an easy 20 years on most of them and I'm staring a thin crust pear, goat cheese and arugula pizza that's starting to congeal.

“Sure, call me when you have time,” I say. If I'm not having a sudden bout of diarrhea I might answer.

I first met Lena in Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. We were both working on a USAID funded project designed to encourage democracy in the former Soviet Republic by pretending that the upcoming presidential election wouldn't be stolen. (It was stolen, but the Georgians were good enough to throw a revolution afterward, giving us consultants a crack at additional funding for encouraging democracy under the new regime.)

Lena's ex-boyfriend was supposed to be the lead trainer on the broadcast portion of the project, but he managed to alienate the boss, a woman who said I reminded her of her father. The jilted project lead responded to my status as teacher's pet by finding ways to screw me that would have never even occurred to the great whore of Babylon.

But I digress. To most ordinary Americans, one of the most striking things about Tbilisi is that nobody speaks English or any other western language, so after I said good morning, inquired after the toilet and ordered a beer, I pretty much turned into a mime.

So I'd been thrilled when multilingual Lena invited me to meet her for dinner at a khachapuri and boiled meat joint near Freedom Square in Tbilisi.

The restaurant accommodates the linguistically challenged with a menu offering literal English translations – offerings translated as “stuffed guts” and “boiled meat pouches;” so you can point at the words on the menu and something usually arrives.

I was seated at a table promptly at the appointed hour – always a mistake, but after decades in broadcasting I was physically incapable of missing a deadline no matter how trivial. Lena hadn't arrived, so I ordered a beer - “deme Argo ludi” produces a half liter of something yellow, fizzy and about 16 proof.

I called Lena's cell phone after I emptied the first bottle. It rang maybe 20 times. No voice mail, no answer.

Over the next three beers I called perhaps 20 times. When I saw her the next day she said, “Total brain fart – I dropped my cell phone at the office – and I was so tired I just fell out and slept right through dinner.”

It might have been true, but I would have a lot rather had her say she was smoking crack with the CIA attache at the embassy and lost track of time.

Seriously, if you're going to stand someone up, you should at least have the common decency to make up an entertaining excuse. Something like: “An aboriginal tribe elected me goddess of the week and refused let me leave until I finished puking up the ceremonial paté;” or perhaps: “Raoul had me tied to the bed and absolutely refused to let me loose until he . . .well, let's just say he's such a boy.”

If you're calling in sick when you just need a mental health day off, tell your boss that your dengue fever flared up again, or perhaps you're having a bad bout of quoits. Yes, quoits is a game, not a disease; but it's a more credible-sounding excuse than projectile diarrhea.

Sorry if this sounds like I just phoned it in and didn't bother to edit. You see my dear departed mother came to me in a vision prattling on and on about how I need to start getting more fiber in my diet and, what am I going to do, tell the spirit of the woman who gave me life to bugger off because I have a blog to attend to?

Words of Wisdom

I was about 500 words into an a column couple of years ago, when I stopped to get a cup of coffee. When I came back and glanced over what I'd written I realized that it was awful -- so awful that it could tarnish the reputation of all poorly thought out drek. As I stared at it trying to decide whether I should attempt to repair it or throw it away, I flashed back a few decades to the time I helped my Great Uncle Rudy build a fence. I held the boards, he drove the nails.

After a while he hit a nail wrong and bent it. He straightened it and tried again. It bent again. He straightened it and bent it twice more.

“Why don't you just get a new nail?” I asked.

He stood up, braced one hand against the fence post, stared at me from beneath his magnificent, bushy eyebrows and said, “Anyone can drive a straight nail. It takes a carpenter to drive a crooked nail.”

“I wish I'd said that,” James Whistler once told Oscar Wilde.

“Don't worry, you will,” replied Wilde.

For me, a perfect phrase, is a breath stopper. The best are re-quoted so often they become cliches.

I am not a carpenter, so instead of trying to straighten out the column, I decided to assemble some of my family's words of wisdom that have not yet become cliches.

Don't feel like you're making progress just because you're moving forward. My grandfather said this after watching my brother trying to mow the lawn. He had taken the blade off the lawnmower to sharpen it and accidentally bolted it back on backwards. The mower was flogging the hell out of the grass, but it wasn't mowing.

You don't follow a furrow that's crooked as a hound's leg. I was about 12 years old and my grandfather had put me on a tractor and told me to disk up a part of a field that he wanted to plant. I tried to keep a wheel right next to the previous furrow, as he'd told me to; but by the time he came back to check on me, my furrows were looking like a longitudinal graph of President Obama's approval ratings.

If they could suck as hard as they can blow, they wouldn't have a problem. That was my father's reaction when I told him I'd attended a meeting of governors from southwestern states that wanted to pipe irrigation water down from Canada. The problem: The cost of pumping it over the Rocky Mountains.

Be cautious, but don't live in fear. This came from my mother-in-law. I don't know the original context, but I love it. I tend to repeat it whenever someone suggests that we Americans need to compromise our values so we can protect ourselves from people who hate us. Perhaps they hate us because we keep compromising our values.

Just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. My wonderful, octogenarian Aunt Daphine, down in rural South Georgia, said she does that when her daughter calls at night and says she's home alone and hearing funny noises. Aunt Daphine isn't speaking metaphorically; she actually grabs Grandad's old pistol, climbs into her golf cart and heads over to her daughter's farmhouse half a country mile away. Daphine has been living alone on the old family farm ever since Uncle Ben died a couple of years ago, but she claims she doesn't worry about her safety. “Everybody knows I'll shoot,” she says. I believe her.

You can sleep when you're dead, old man. When my daughter was still in elementary school, she used that line to get me out of bed on Saturday mornings and to keep me from napping on Sunday afternoons. It's the perfect antidote to my grandfather's observation: If you just lie down for a few minutes, the notion that you need to run out and do something will pass.

I'll close with one of my own, the shortest of the lot.

It's my ball! I screamed that at the top of my lungs during a high school football game. It was late in the fourth quarter, we were close to the goal line, I hadn't caught a pass all night and the oversized kid who'd been kicking my butt since the opening whistle had my jersey in one hand and the pass I should have caught in the other. Then came an Incredible Hulk moment. I shouted, “it's my ball”, tore the ball away from the kid and carried it and him into the end zone. Forty-plus years later, saying “it's my ball” still seems to help when I confront a challenge. Shouting it seems to help more.

So as the new year rolls out before us like a blank canvas, I humbly offer these few words of wisdom:

As you move through the year, don't feel you are making progress just because you are moving forward; look ahead and make sure the furrow you are following isn't as crooked as a hound's leg. Be cautious, but don't live in fear. If you do become fearful, just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. Everyone needs to know that you'll shoot.

Have a great 2013. It's your ball.

That New Job Smell

The best jobs I ever had were the new ones –  every new one. Since college, I've had 16 different jobs with 11 employers, and on the first day of every new job it felt like the best job ever. The first week is magic; make a wish and it is fulfilled: a special desk chair, a new dictionary, a really cool staple remover . . .

The answer to every questions I ask comes with an exclamation point. 

Can I re-design the website? “Sure!” How about we start a weekly newsletter, I can edit it. “Go for it!” How about we convert everything to touchscreen apps. “Great idea!”

Then comes month two when the foolish enormity of my bravado becomes apparent and I realize that Superman, Green Lantern and Steve Jobs combined could not fulfill the promises I've traded for the honor of having a new stapler.

In a few days I'll become the head of the IT/IS department for an entire county. The data under my control is measured in terabytes. We have servers with 16 multi-core processors capable of sifting through tens of thousands of records in nanoseconds.

I'm getting a new X-Pad, mobile Wi-Fi and the self-inflicted expectation that I will do nothing less than revolutionize document management, video conferencing and remote customer service; and usher in a new era of transparency in government.

The challenge has some quirks. The county consists of an odd collection of islands where high-tech entrepreneurs retire and Luddites take refuge. A place where the latest Gen wireless technology is considered mandatory by some, while others protest any new source of radio waves is a threat to livestock and human health. Not surprisingly, cell phone coverage and high speed Internet is as unreliable in the county as a brother-in-law's lawnmower.

Nevertheless, my 17th new job looks like it's going to be exciting, challenging and fulfilling. Maybe I've been around this block a few times, but whenever I walk into an office and breathe in that new job smell, springtime blossoms in my soul.

Shampoo - a Short, Short story

Joni gave a great shampoo and an okay haircut. I'd been to her often enough that we'd adopted the comfortable barber/regular customer tone that invites intimacy. So, on this particular day when I sat down in her chair and asked what was going on in her life, I expected a good story. Joni did not disappoint. She smiled a slightly wicked smile and reported that she'd had a blind date.

“How'd it work out?”

She leaned the chair back, laid a towel across my chest and set up her tools and shampoo before answering. Finally she said, “He seemed nice enough; so I let him kiss me good night and all; but when I went back and parked across the street from his house the next night, you know what I saw?”

“You had a date with him the next night?” I asked.

“No, I just wanted to check him out, you know, just to see what he did when he thought nobody was watching.”

She was shampooing my hair and she had very strong hands.

“About 8 o'clock he brings this woman back to his house, can you believe that? This was one night after his date with me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, I went up and knocked on the door and when he opened it, I told him that I didn't like sloppy seconds and he should never to call me again or I'd have my father pay him a visit. I said it real loud so his new girl friend was sure to hear.”

“You'd slept with him?”

“Do you think I'm the kind of girl that would go to bed with a guy on the first date?”

She stopped what she was doing and stepped around so I could look at her. She was in her mid-thirties, trim and had a pretty face, but there was something about her that reminded me of that line from Jaws where Quint says, “The thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.”

As Joni used a straight razor to square off my sideburns and shave the back of my neck, I wondered how many second dates she'd had in her life, but I didn't ask.

A Matter of Life & Death

        I'd rather die fast than ever live slow
            --Melissa Etheridge, The Shadow of a Black Crow

The great thing about depression is that it takes away your fear of death.

In the heart of winter, living just  half a degree latitude below Canada, it's dark when I go to work, often damp and gray all day, then at 4:00 P.M., it starts to get dark again.

During my first couple of winters on San Juan Island, I couldn't understand why darkness kept gathering inside my head. At times even trivial problems and setbacks made my life feel almost hopeless. I was never  suicidal, but if the grim reaper had walked into my library, on some evenings I'd have offered him a comfy chair and a brandy.

Luckily, a friend recognized what was going on and, with light therapy, exercise, vitamin D and meditation, winter depression is now little more than a nuisance. But the darkness did leave me a gift: the ability to think more dispassionately about death. And on reflection, the distinction between life and death doesn't seem as simple as it once did.

People who do data processing are familiar with a concept called fuzzy logic. They use it to make sense out of things that don't fall into neat categories. Is an apple with a bite out of it still an apple? Perhaps so, but at some point, as it is being eaten, the apple ceases to be an apple. Fuzzy logic provides a system to estimate how much appleness exists at any point in the transition; so if your challenge is to report how many apples there are in a room where people are eating apples, fuzzy logic can help you come up with an answer.

Applying fuzzy logic to human life, one might define a 100% live human being as a self-aware creature, capable of locomotion, taking care of its basic needs, rational thought, and understanding and communicating abstract ideas. Using that definition, a new-born baby would score fairly low for humanness, but most will progress to perfect, or near-perfect scores within a few years.

At the other end of life, the humanizing process starts to reverse itself, and we start shedding those human characteristics, often one by one.

Franchised “retirement communities” apply their own brand of fuzzy logic to the aging marketplace, promising to take care of us in the most appropriate surroundings as we go from a time when our needs are primarily for golfing and bridge partners until, at the end, the time when we need a safe environment where our physical creature can survive, while our essential humanity –  ability to understand, communicate and care for ourselves – fades away.

A couple of thousand years ago, the Stoic Philosopher Seneca, contemplated his own impending suicide and proclaimed: “A wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.”

I choose to believe that a wise man will keep living until he can't truly be alive. If we linger on the fact that the light is fading, we squander the light that remains.

Hope is the light in our lives and fear the darkness. The statement, “Where there's life, there's hope,” raises the question: “Does life continue after all hope is gone?”  Some people radiate hope, others are so afraid of losing it, they they are afraid to use it.

I recently found a great on-street parking space while visiting Northwest Portland. It's right in front of where I was staying and there is no meter or time limit. It's a parking space of such amazing quality and convenience that most mortals will not find such a place in a lifetime. Once I possessed it, my inclination was to not move my car during the whole visit, because if I used the car, I'd lose this incredible space. I actually walked, in the rain, to a couple of places I might have been inclined to drive to because I was afraid of losing my great parking space. For all the good it did me, my car might as well have been impounded.

My own fear in life is not that death will come and take me; it's that I'll park my hopes and aspirations somewhere safe and comfortable until it's too late to set them out on a new adventure.

At funerals I find that my emotions correspond to the amount of life the guest of honor still had when death came. When someone filled with life and hope dies, a light goes out of our lives. But there is only relief when a heart stops beating inside a body whose humanity had long since departed.

My own hope is that when the final words are spoken over my ashes, my loved ones will be able to follow Dr. Seuss's advice: “Don't cry because it's over,” he said. “Smile because it happened.”